BROOKE GLADSTONE: There are many things you can do easily inside the world of a video game that you can't do easily in real life. Swordfighting falls into this category. So does flying, saving princesses, and now -- marrying your same-sex partner! Gay characters are getting together, and according to the scripts in certain games, living happily ever after. Meanwhile, in the real world-- well, you know. Clive Thompson wrote about gay marriage in video games for Slate, and he joins me now. Clive, welcome back to the show.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Good to be back.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tell me about the first game that you wrote about in your piece: Atari's The Temple of Elemental Evil.

CLIVE THOMPSON: This is a Dungeons and Dragons game; it's actually a video game version of a very popular Dungeons and Dragons game from a while back, and what you do is, you take your band of adventurers, you go off and you, you slay various monsters. You complete various tasks, and then about halfway through the game, you run into a pirate village where you run into a character called Bertram. Bertram tells you that he is a slave to another character. If you can take your party and go and beat that character in battle, Bertram will promise to marry one of the male members of your party, so-- if you beat the guy, you come back, and Bertram will wed whichever of the male characters you want, and they live happily ever after.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But you don't have to marry him if you don't want to.

CLIVE THOMPSON:No. No, you don't. You don't have to, and in fact it was kind of funny. Every once in a while a, a gamer will play a difficult game -this is, this is actually quite a difficult game - to make it easier for their friends, they'll write up a little guide of hints - you know - a walkthrough - here's what to do at-- So I was reading the various walkthroughs that had been written by these teenagers, and it was very funny when they got to this point - they were like - well you're not going to believe this but-- [LAUGHTER] there's a guy who offers to marry you - and they're, you know, you don't have to marry him, you know. It, it was very much like a Seinfeld -- not that there's anything wrong with that-- [LAUGHTER] but you know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:What about Sims II-- this is the new version that's going to be released later this year. It's a very mainstream game, and gay marriage will be permitted.

CLIVE THOMPSON: I've speculated in my piece that maybe there'll be some sort of angry reaction to this, but I've had some people write to me and email and say well, you know, the Sims for a long time has had - certainly had the ability to have same sex characters get romantically interested, and in one of the expansion packs called Hot Date, there was an option for marrying in that one. Now this is a Sims II is going to be a very, very big re-release of the game, so we may see something, but on the other hand, we may find that the game audience is more tolerant than I might expect.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, as you said, gay marriage in games may be new but there have always been gay and lesbian characters.

CLIVE THOMPSON:That's right. If you go back even quite a bit, to some of the really old games that you'd see on those, I guess what seemed kind of old-fashioned now, Nintendo systems, there were characters that would sort of read as gay or I guess, you know, could set your gaydar ringing. In one fighting game called Street Fighter there was a character called Guile, and he had a very close relationship with his Army buddy, Charlie, and pretty much everyone that played that game 10 years ago when it first hit the arcades, I was in there, and everyone was like yeah, I think this is a gay couple, basically.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: An "ambiguously gay" duo?

CLIVE THOMPSON: Yeah, well you know it was the Army, so "don't ask, don't tell."

BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] And wasn't there a character that vanquished his enemies by bludgeoning them with his rear end?

CLIVE THOMPSON:Yeah. That was another character, and again, a Japanese game. He would grab characters with his-- with his, with his butt and swing them around and attack them and-- several, several commentators online have said, you know, I don't really want to go down that road all the way, but you know, there might be something happening there.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So a lot of these gay or, or gay-ish characters hail from Japanese video games where, where you say the gender lines are blurred. What do you mean?

CLIVE THOMPSON: Japanese pop culture definitely has -- the sexuality is a lot more open in general, and you see that bleed over into a type of character that's known as bashonin -- I think I'm pronouncing that right; I'm not sure --and that, that's a type of a character that you see in a lot of Japanese games that are very popular. It, it's a male character -they're very buff; they're very strong, but they have very long, willowy hair and often very soft features, so they really read as typically masculine in one way, but also very feminine in another. And this is a very, very common thing to see.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:It seemed that for a long time the female characters seemed to fulfill a fantasy for the male players rather than serve as avatars for female gamers themselves. They had these enormous breasts, and they were there to hit on the straight players and to basically ornament the situation. How do the gay characters fit into this equation? Are they there and represented realistically so that gay players can identify with them, or are they serving some other purpose?

CLIVE THOMPSON: Well, definitely a lot of the gay characters in games so far have been pretty campy -playing with hyper-masculinity or femininity, and in that sense, if you talk to a lot of gay gamers, they'll tell you well, you know, this stuff is sort of essentially very early phase - almost the way, you know, early gay characters in Hollywood, you could go back decades and decades before they came out --you'd have these very coded characters. And so in some senses, you know, you could say that even though games have advanced to the point where there's actually gay marriage, which is kind of amazing, the bulk of the characters are still, if they're coded as gay, are almost like, you know, still 40 years in the past compared to Hollywood, and they haven't really been integrated. So in a sense, you know, what's happening with games is that all these different evolutions that we've seen of gay characters in TV or in movies are all happening kind of at the same time in a way that doesn't entirely mix with games.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:And yet, it seems the games have leapt a little ahead of the controversy that's dominating the headlines. Is sex the only area in which game politics is particularly liberal, or are live and let live social mores standard in worlds created by video games?

CLIVE THOMPSON: That's a really good question. I would say that in general, most games tend to have a kind of a more - kind of libertarian point of view, because a lot of game makers are part of the high tech West Coast. You know, one example of that is the Sims which the designer will write, made into a, a wonderfully open-ended game. You can do almost anything you want in there. Some of the games have actually kind of conservative economics, though. In a lot of simulation games, you'll see the idea that taxes are just universally bad. You know, raise taxes -- everyone will leave the city that you're building or everyone will flee-- [LAUGHTER] so it's a strange mix. You often get sort of conservative economics with very liberal, even libertarian social culture.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: In other words, the games reflect the politics of their makers.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Yeah, to a certain extent, they do.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Clive, thanks very much.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Good to be here.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Clive Thompson's piece, The Game of Life, appeared on Slate.com.