Your Hottest Video Game Girlfriends

  

Let's talk ladies, specifically digital ladies. This is one of those lists that wouldn't even be possible when I first got into video games, even 10 years ago it would have been incredibly short. We've come a ways, I'm not willing to say a long ways just yet because there's this huge road ahead even if the distance traveled so far seems long because there's all this other...yanno what enough waxing poetic. This is about awesome digital ladies you can hang with in video game land and right now, the world needs escapism. Seriously, reality has gone nucking futs--go play some games.

Liara T'Soni -- Mass Effect

Like the picture? It's a desktop wallpaper--just sayin'

That's Doctor Liara T'Soni, hunnie! Okay, she's not that kind of doctor, but she is the doctorate holding kind. I think it's something to do with ancient archeology or communications since she goes full Shadowbroker in Mass Effect 2. She evolves from being an unsure academic to a confident, galaxy saving badass in the course of three games and a couple DLCs. There are other ladies in the Mass Effect series that can make space seem not so vast and cold (Specialist Traynor and Kelly Chambers) but they're light years behind Liara. Aside from being one of the most powerful biotic squad members, she's integral to the story and Commander Shepard's character development. There's also a very real possibility she's the smartest person in the game by a wide margin and she'll explain so many things in a velvety voice that gives silk over glass competition in smoothness.

Rating -- total wife material (even though she's going to live 900 more years after you die)

Piper Wright -- Fallout 4

Did I mention girl's got style?

Bethesda did a lot of fun, creative things in Fallout 4 that they'd hinted at doing in Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim. One of the fun things was making one-size-fits-all romances by utilizing nicknames and easy pronoun swapping in the scripts. That means every romance option is available to both genders and it'll be seamless every time! Everyone knows, when it comes to girlfriends, there's like and there's love. I like Curie and Cait, but I love Piper. She's a reporter, a big sister raising a kid sister after they were orphaned, and she has a beautiful mix of self-deprecating humor, ego, and altruism. She's kind of goofy in vulnerable moments in the most endearing way possible, and how refreshing is that in a game that takes place after nuclear Armageddon? She also has her own thing going on, mostly looking into the mayor of Diamond City as being a possible Institute collaborator and while she's helping you on your journey to find your missing son, she does continue her own work as a reporter, which sets her above most NPCs in complexity of character. Speaking of her newspaper, she's a talented writer. There are several issues of Publick Occurrences to collect throughout the game, and I suggest you actually read them.

Rating -- total wife material (especially if you could get her to quitting smoking...not that everything in the Commonwealth isn't a carcinogen)

Chloe Price -- Life is Strange

Probably not going to prom

Life is Strange is a departure from the big guns, big cars, big explosions, big swords games in every sense. No space marines here, just high school, a photography hobby, and time alteration super powers...okay, so that ones a big deal. There's a mystery, time travel, survival (both high school drama and literal life/death kinds) all while Max is trying to figure out who she even is and what is going on with her teenage angst. Enter Chloe Price. Do you remember that first time you met someone as a young queerling girl and she's the coolest fucking person and you can't tell if she's actually into girls or if you want her to be so badly that your mind convinces you she must be because that would be the only explanation for why she's so freaking cool? That's Chloe and it turns out she's into Max, but in that laid back, older girl, dyed blue hair, wild child sort of way. She comes with a slew of her own problems, an old truck, an over developed sense of adventure, and energy, lots and lots of energy. Yes, I'm describing a manic pixie dream girl, but why shouldn't lesbians get one too? If you missed out on the teenage smitten stage of pining for a cool older girl, here's your chance to find out what it feels like to be a sidekick wishing to be a love interest for a punk rock princess.

Rating -- first love (...and second and third and really as many times as you want since you can turn back time at will)

Sera -- Dragon Age: Inquisition

She's full of these technically-true-isms

There's a hole in the sky. Demons are attacking peasants and livestock. Mages and Templars refuse to get along. An ancient evil is trying to remake the world. What you need is a crazy girlfriend that has next to no clue what's actually going on! So maybe she's never getting a Fulbright, or graduating college, or...okay, she's probably going to be a huge liability on your bar trivia team, but that's not why you love her! Sera's strength isn't in her brains, it's in her sense of humor, straightforward approach to everything, and bizarre, but defined, moral code. Sera is afraid of magic, likes tall women, solves most of her problems with arrows, and creates chaos for shits and giggles, making her a wild ride, in more ways than one if you play your cards right. It's hard to figure how she would fit in with something called the Inquisition and someone called the Inquisitor, but maybe that's a good thing. A girlfriend that likes pranks, jokes, and a clear, if someone basic, grasp of the situation can be helpful for a woman trying her best to save the world. There's nothing quite like the crazy ones, am I right?

Rating -- long term girlfriend or wild fling (that depends on your capacity for shenanigans)

Honorable Mentions

Not every game builds a full romance for you, but there are several games that offer at least some kind of girlfriend option if you're willing to do some of the work yourself or don't mind brevity.

Your Sims Girlfriend -- The Sims

Come on, we all did it. The Sims is basically an elaborate dollhouse and for little gay girls, that's going to mean little Sim girlfriends getting together and doing a lot of interior decorating, pet collecting, and eating grilled cheese sandwiches. The quality of your Sim girlfriends may have varied and some may have died in cooking fires or drowned in swimming pools.

Random Villager -- Fable 2 and/or 3

Want to marry a random village woman? What about a noblewoman? A shopkeeper? A prostitute? Knock yourself out! Want them to be in any way discriminate from other random NPCs? Tough luck. Most of their personalities will be broken down into a two to five word description, but you can date, marry, and get lucky in Albion in the most technical senses. Skyrim offers the same experience with better graphics, if the visual quality of your random NPC wife important to you.

Shaundi -- Saints Row 4

Mostly, the "romance" in Saints Row 4 is done directly to make fun of Mass Effect. The whole game is designed to lampoon basically every video game franchise, popular movie, and TV show they can get their hands on. The strange little blip of a thing with Shaundi on the ship (not fun Shaundi obviously since she only exists in the simulation and our memories) is surprisingly sweet in comparison to the obvious joke "romances" with the other gang members. There's a single cute conversation, implied sex, and a ton of hanging out and blowing stuff up together and that's a kind of relationship, isn't it?

Bioware must have a whole "rendering hot butts" development team

There are a ton of Bioware in game girlfriends I could have written up: Silk Fox, Juhani, Leliana, Merrill, Isabela, Peebee, Samantha Traynor, Kelly Chambers, Vetra, Suvi, Avela, Lembda Avesta, and Lana Beniko. But honestly, it'd get repetitive for some of them and time consuming for the SWTOR ones. Feel free to mention anything I missed in the comments or give love to your favorite digital paramour!

Lestopian Future

I've made no secret about the fact that I'm a girl gamer. Ever since I was a little girl and my sister and I got a Super Nintendo for Christmas, I've loved video games. I'm also not going to deny that I spent far more time than any sane person should playing World of Warcraft when I was in high school; I didn't have many friends and school work came easy to me, so escapism seemed like a good use of my time. One thing I've noticed over the past fifteen years or so of being a girl gamer (way back to when I was 6) is that the world of gaming is slowly evolving to start including more and more populations who formerly went ignored in favor of appealing to the straight, white male demographic. Being a lesbian, I've been thrilled that some games, even though they're still a small minority, have decided I'm worth appealing to. It's time to take a look at the gay-gamer-girl options I'm happy exist.

Bioware (a Canadian based game developer--go figure they're into equality) is a shining beacon of hope for stories and diversity in a world of video game studios who are still hurling themselves at the straight white males of the world. Their two primary series that have gone above and beyond in appealing to gay girls are Dragon Age and Mass Effect. More than just gay girls, these series appeal to women, gay men, bisexuals, and other ethnicities as well. They recent came under fire for some of the choices made in Dragon Age II, specifically the many gay options in the game, and dealt with said criticism from the straight white male population with remarkable flare and eloquence. This isn't to say they have a perfect track record in diversity options, as they seem to want to flee from or put an Astrix next to the gay and lesbian options in games. Mass Effect 1 had a "mono gendered" romance option, which was to say all members of this society were "female" but then immediately removed this character as an option in Mass Effect 2 really only offering hetero options again.

If you have to have just one gender, isn't this a good argument for women only?

The Mass Effect series really has brought a lot of new, interesting, and diverse options to the table when it comes to the audience appealed to. They represent handicapped people well with a pilot who has Osteogenesis ably voiced by Seth Green, African Americans are nicely represented by Captain Anderson voiced by Keith David, and the aforementioned lesbian romance option Liara T'soni. I think in general Bioware has gone the direction of diversifying their appeal to women by including romance options in their role playing games. I may not know much about men, but it would seem loving romance wasn't necessarily intended for them. I'm going to be 100% honest here, even if it ruins some of my cool cred, but I have the dopiest girl-crush on Liara knowing full well she's a fictional character in a video game. I applaud Bioware's boldness in including her, even though she's technically "mono gendered" and all but vanishes in Mass Effect 2 without purchasing a downloadable content pack. I felt like her inclusion, along with the ability to create a female protagonist who can romance her within the game, was a wonderful step forward in appealing to lesbian gamers.

Sure she's a religious zealot, but with red hair like that, I'll get past it.

Bioware really doubled down on their appeal to gay gamers of both genders in the Dragon Age series. Romance options within the first game included one female/female and one male/male in addition to the other hetero choices. Considering the homophobia within the gamer community and the fetishizing of lesbians by straight males, I thought the inclusion of Zevran as a male/male romance option was downright revolutionary of Bioware in a mainstream, highly distributed game. To quote Morgan Webb, "If you don't like gay elf sex, don't have gay elf sex." I love that they did it and defended it tooth and nail when the inevitable attacks came rolling in from the straight male gaming population who felt threatened by a gay male option. The lesbian option, who I again have an enormous girl crush on, is Leliana. The reason she comes in second, despite having the fucking sexiest French accent, is that she's entirely fanatical about the religion within the game, which is a barely veiled commentary on Christianity (specifically Catholicism of the Renaissance era). Not getting along with Christianity in general, the whole "good Christian...er Chantry" girl Leliana had a religious overtone I just couldn't ignore, even with the red hair and blue eyes.

In the age old question of pirates vs ninjas, I always pick pirates because of her.

In Dragon Age 2 (I won't be talking about the Awakening expansion pack because it was both awful and included nothing gay or straight, which was a HUGE mistake in my mind) Bioware really took things one step further and basically made every romance option available to both genders. This has to be the singularly best option they could have taken. Rather than telling the gamer that their options would be limited by artificial constructs within the game, the developers let the players decide who they wanted regardless of gender. Of course, this blew up the homophobic/sexist gamer world, but Bioware stuck by their guns, and said it was the right move, and they were right. In ironies of all ironies, my favored relationship in this game was with Isabella. It's ironic because I'm pretty vocal about my disinterest in bisexual women (and she's extremely overt in her bisexuality) mostly because I feel promiscuity with males leads to STDs which I'm terrified of (and there's little to no doubt Isabella likely had tons) yet something about the saucy, sarcastic, sexually-charged pirate captain really drew me to her despite all the flaws that would repulse me in real life. I guess I figured my character's herpes would only be a lifelong problem for the 40 hours of play time during the game. This isn't to discount Merrill, the other lesbian option, who has large green eyes and a soothing Irish accent. Surprise, surprise, most of the male gamers who played Dragon Age 2 didn't like Merrill's lack of enormous breasts and her facial tattoos or Isabelle's aggressive sexual posturing and liberated feminist views of female sexuality, which leads me to believe, these two characters were at least partially designed for gay-girl-gamers.

Jade Empire makes every little lesbian girl's dream come true: marrying a Ninja Princess.

When I first started passing around this idea of lesbians in games and how much I appreciated Bioware for Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I was told there were protean version of these things in their earlier games. Under advisement, I checked out Knights of the Old Republic, which apparently contained the holy grail of nerdery with lesbian Jedi. The game was fantastic on its own and held up well despite being 8 years old. The relationship was far more about feelings, involved nothing even implied sex-wise, and did indeed include two lesbian Jedi. Apparently Jade Empire, another Bioware game only slightly newer, continued along this path of open options, and included the staple for the Dragon Age series of having a female character open to both genders. The gameplay itself was on the monotonous and irritating side and leaned heavily on the idea that all American gamers aren't into Asian culture, but the romance of Silk Fox aka Princess Sun Lian was remarkably forward thinking and deep considering the game came out in 2005. Seeing the evolution of the lesbian storyline option in Bioware's games really made me appreciate exactly how far they've come.

There is of course The Sims series, which allows for gay, straight, lesbian, and bisexuality at every level with the utmost customization (I also played far too much Sims 2 in high school). But this is less remarkable as the design of the game is an electronic version of "playing house" that we all did as little girls and thus the target audience really feels like it was supposed to be for women. There's no winning, no losing, and no competition in the game, which gives it an entirely casual game feeling and the largest audience for casual games are the ladies. This feels less remarkable than Mass Effect (hybrid shooter) and Dragon Age (fantasy RPG) as those two genres of gaming are dominated by games for straight men. Still, the Sims series of games should be applauded for including equality when they were striving to make the most customizable game possible.

With how many Blood Elf men are gay, lesbianism seems almost like a necessity.

I did mention World of Warcraft earlier, and, as with the Sims, so much of the content is user created/alterable since it is an MMORPG with players from all over the world interacting, so gay and lesbian are two things that can and do exist in the game; however, this isn't something the developers really intended, nor is it something Blizzard has been all that tolerant of. In the early days of the game (released in November 2004) several gay themed guilds (male/male) were deleted by Blizzard simply for being gay themed. Considering I was probably one of a tiny handful of lesbians who played the game, lesbian themed guilds tended to be actually populated by straight men and they too suffered from deletion. In general, Blizzard's history with the gay community isn't very friendly, so while there are gay gamers who play and try to include gay content in World of Warcraft, it's generally not encouraged or supported by either Blizzard or the gaming populace within WOW. I've heard, but never actually experienced, that City of Heroes (a super hero themed MMORPG) is far more welcoming and tolerant of their gay community, but I can't say for certain that's true. Online gaming in general tends to be people by the immature, homophobic, and sexist young men of the world; this is a demographic shifting away from the stereotype of what a gamer is, but it's also the slowest to do so. I won't even talk about what goes on with Xbox Live, but let's just say, being a gay or woman there is not recommended.

The charge for equality in gaming is really slow and kind of has all its hope right now resting on Bioware. Gay and lesbian gamers are an audience worth having though, and I think Bioware is wise to appeal to us as we have little else pointed in our direction. We're a little more than 10% of the population and we tend to have more disposable income per-capita than our straight counterparts; the gaming industry as a whole would be wise to put this together and start making a concerted effort in the direction of gaming equality.

In Sim-land there is no homophobia.