There has been a lot of controversy over video games and the gender/sexuality of various protagonists of major game series. I am here to say leave video games alone. If you want to identify as one gender or if you're attracted to one sex or the other (or both, or neither), that is your business, not mine. So you can do whatever you feel is best for yourself, but likewise, let the video game industry do what is best for itself, too. Game developers try to make games as immersive as possible, which means the player has to feel like they can put themselves in the game and ultimately into the shoes of the character they are playing as. If the main character of every game is an African American whose sex is male but identifies as female that is attracted to ripe fruit, then it will be impossible for the vast majority of gamers to immerse themselves in that game fully and put themselves in that character's shoes.

Most gamers, like me, are straight males. There are obviously a lot of exceptions, as the video game industry is growing and becoming more diverse, but the fact remains that the majority of the people who are going to buy video games are straight males. If you know anything at all about marketing, then you should know that you have to be familiar with and appease your target market. You will sell almost all of your products to your target market, so as a developer you have to make games and characters that will make people in your target market want to buy your game. There are games where you can choose your gender, sometimes even your race, and customize the way your character looks, too. Some examples of such games are "The Elder Scrolls," "Dragon Age" and "Pokemon."

Not a lot of games involve love interests, and even fewer have multiple options of characters you can form a relationship with. But there are exceptions to this, and games that provide lots of options for love interests almost always include character gender selection. Two great examples of this are "Fable III" and "Dragon Age: Inquisition." In "Fable III," you can choose your character's gender, and you can have as many spouses as there are cities in the game. In this game, you can marry men and women as a man or woman. Among the characters you can get married to, some are exclusively straight, some are exclusively homosexual, and some are bisexual. In "Dragon Age: Inquisition," you can play as a male or female human, elf, dwarf, or qunari (a race specific to the series), and there are several romance options, many of which are bisexual. There is even a minor character in the game that is transexual (a woman who identifies and acts like a man) and a successful warrior to boot! When the character you play as realizes this, he or she asks the transgender character about it, and another character makes it very clear that as far as anyone should be concerned that person is a man, and no one should say otherwise just because "it's harder for him to pee standing up."

I feel as though I have ranted sufficiently at this point, so to wrap things up, just because one popular game series features a male character, this doesn't mean that the entire video game franchise is sexist or discriminatory. You can't have the same character in every game for 30 years and in every game make that character male and then suddenly it's the exact same character but female - what difference does that make? Why should they change something that has been the same way for 30 years? There are plenty of games that provide the option to choose your character's gender and/or sexual preference, some games feature the same character in every game. If you don't like it, don't buy that game. That's the beauty of capitalism - if you don't like a product for whatever reason, then simply don't buy it.