When we were putting together The Temple of Elemental Evil, we’d put together all kinds of ways you could get involved with nonplayer characters. We had a good-looking woman who a male character could get involved with. We also had a really horrible woman whose father would try to convince you to get married to her so he could get her out of the house. We also had some male characters for female characters. It was Tom Decker [producer/designer] who said, “Hey, we don’t have any male-male or female-female relationships.” And I said, well, write some up! And he did the male character who was a pirate on a ship and a female character who was working at a brothel against her will.

Atari made us take out the brothel, though, so we lost the lesbian relationship–and I though that was a sweeter relationship, because she didn’t want to be working there, and you got to rescue her. The pirate one was kind of sad, because the gay pirate had been kidnapped as a child and forced to work as a cabin boy. It’s a hard luck story, and you felt less like his rescuer and more like you won him from his master. It had a different vibe than the lesbian relationship, but in both you had to work to get them. I remember seeing some people on forums saying, “Hey, I didn’t see this in my game.” Well, you’re not going to see it unless you make it happen. There’s a lot of dialogue paths you have to go down before Bertram is offered to you. It’s no accident that you’re character is married to another man. I like that.

– Tim Cain in Matt Barton’s Honoring the Code

I feel like every single “positive” claim here needs to be deconstructed and really points to why we need an incredibly diverse set of game developers.