On February 13, GLAAD released its first-ever GLAAD Gaming Report on “the state of LGBT inclusion in video games.” GLAAD is a media watchdog organization dedicated to tracking the representation and inclusion of queer people and storylines in U.S. media. Among other reports such as the Studio Responsibility Index and Advertising Visibility Index, since at least 2007, GLAAD has released an annual Where We Are on TV report tracking the amount and type of LGBTQ representation in U.S. television shows. Although there is inevitable subjectivity in the quantification of any category as fuzzy as “representation,” the Where We Are on TV report is traditionally comprehensive and well-documented. The inaugural GLAAD Gaming Report, on the other hand, is as shoddy and half-hearted an attempt at data science as I’ve ever seen. It should not be viewed as an authoritative source of information on the state of LGBT inclusion in video games, and the fact that it made it to publication in its current state should be a sign to GLAAD that they need to strongly review their internal policies on methodology before publishing on this topic again.
The headline findings of the GLAAD Gaming Report, breathlessly repeated by news organizations from Variety to The New York Times, are that 17% of gamers are LGBTQ, but only 2% of games contain LGBTQ storylines. These are headline-worthy claims. By contrast, a 2023 Gallup survey found that 7.2% of U.S. adults identified as LGBT, and the most recent Where We Are on TV Report found that 10.6% of series regular characters on primetime broadcast scripted television in the 2022-23 season were LGBTQ. In other words, according to the GLAAD Gaming Report, LGBT people are heavily over-represented in the population of gamers, but extremely under-represented in actual games, even in comparison to other forms of popular media.
But let’s break down how GLAAD arrived at those numbers. The GLAAD Gaming Report consists of two components: a survey of gamer preferences, habits, and trends, administered by Nielsen to 1,452 active PC and console gamers; and an analysis of the percentage of games with LGBTQ content, performed independently by GLAAD. The “17% of gamers are LGBTQ” number comes from the Nielsen survey. The “2% of games contain LGBTQ content” number comes from the independent GLAAD analysis.
The Nielsen Company is a market analytics firm best known for the Nielsen ratings, an audience metric that has been used by advertisers and TV executives for decades to determine how many people are watching particular television shows. There are methodological criticisms that can and have been made of Nielsen’s audience surveys, and the GLAAD Gaming Report completely lacks transparency on the work that Nielsen did for them. It contains no information on how survey participants were sourced, response rate, question design, or most of the other basic facts that are required in order to evaluate the reliability of a survey. That said, Nielsen has been around for a long time, has no obvious conflict of interest, and is generally competent at their job. Other than the lack of transparency, there’s no clear reason to doubt the validity of the Nielsen survey results.1 2
The independent GLAAD analysis, on the other hand, doesn’t even reach the level of “invalid.” It’s virtually meaningless. Here’s what the GLAAD report says about how their 2% number was reached:
For the purposes of this report, and to set a baseline against which future industry efforts can be measured, GLAAD quantified the number of available games with LGBTQ content against the total number of games presently available. We did this by identifying games on the major PC and console distribution platforms that are publicly tagged or listed as having LGBTQ content. As this report looks at the current gaming world, we focused on games that the average consumer looking for LGBTQ content could easily find in the console/platform stores when searching for LGBTQ tags.
GLAAD counted the number of games that have been tagged as having LGBTQ content as of November 2023 from Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, and Steam (PC). According to Microsoft, there were 146 console games available in the Xbox store that had LGBTQ content. PlayStation maintained a list that includes 90 games. The Nintendo Switch eShop listed 50 games with the tag LGBT. Steam’s LGBTQ+ tag returned 2302 games available in English (as of November 2023), but that number dropped to 1506 when games with “adult only sexual content” were filtered out.3
So when GLAAD says that “games with LGBTQ characters or storylines account for less than 2% of all games,” what they mean is that games that are publicly tagged or listed as LGBTQ account for less than 2% of all games currently available on a major digital platform.
This is a very different claim for at least one obvious reason: there’s no reason to think that all games with queer content are publicly tagged as such. There’s also some reason to think that some games without queer content (or without meaningful queer content) might be tagged as LGBTQ+. To my knowledge, none of the major digital games publishers have ever written up any kind of rigorous definition of what qualifies a game as “LGBTQ+” in their eyes. By offloading their definition of terms to multiple vague sources, GLAAD renders their sample pretty much meaningless. We don’t know how many LGBT games there are among the games tagged or not tagged LGBT, and we have no way of finding out.
But there are some (slightly) less obvious reasons that this statistic is meaningless that I’d like to dig into.
It doesn’t compare like to like
Steam’s game tags are user-generated. I have no idea who the Nintendo Switch game tags are set by, or even what the system looks like, because they are only available on the store when accessed via the console. (Go check the website for yourself right now: There are no content tags.) Microsoft and PlayStation also don’t have “tags” in the way the word is typically used. The sources that GLAAD used to count games “tagged” as LGBTQ on those platforms were curated lists—they don’t even claim to be comprehensive, because their purpose is to highlight content, not to search for it.
So it’s not even accurate, really, to say that GLAAD is counting the percentage of games that are publicly tagged as LGBTQ. What it’s actually counting is a nonsense number, achieved by adding together four numbers on four different platforms that each count four different things.
It doesn’t deduplicate data
Most video games are available on more than one platform. Hades, for instance, appears on both Microsoft and PlayStation’s curated lists of LGBT games. But what about Boyfriend Dungeon? It’s available on all four platforms, but while Steam and Microsoft both tag (or “tag”) it as LGBT, PlayStation didn’t include it on their curated list. So when GLAAD says that less than 2% of games are LGBT, is Boyfriend Dungeon part of the two percent? Is it part of the vast straight majority? Is it both, somehow?
GLAAD’s report doesn’t mention any method of resolving conflicts like this (or, indeed, describe the math of how they combined the individual platform statistics into the overall “less than 2%” number at all—did they even weight the average?) So I have to assume that according to GLAAD, yes, Boyfriend Dungeon is both one of the slim minority of LGBT games, and one of the 98% of games that contain no LGBT representation. Or, rather: Boyfriend Dungeon is both one of the 2% of games “tagged” as LGBT, and one of the 98% of games not “tagged” that way.
That is, of course, an absolutely absurd claim to make. GLAAD isn’t counting the number of games tagged as LGBT, or even the number of games “tagged” as LGBT; they’re counting the number of LGBT “tags.” That statistic is so far removed from telling us anything about the state of LGBT representation in games that it’s essentially negative information. If GLAAD’s report is a study of anything, it’s the state of LGBT labeling in video games.
It doesn’t measure the control group
In general, characters not explicitly stated, or at the very least heavily coded, to be queer are presumed by the audience to be straight and cisgender. There is therefore a sense in which counting even a movie like, say, Gravity, with no romance and only two characters, in a survey of queer representation in movies would make sense. Counting “movies with explicitly queer characters” against “movies without explicitly queer characters” results in a reasonable, if imprecise, measurement of queer representation in movies.
Games, however, are much more varied in subject and format than movies or TV. Not all games even have characters. Is Tetris an LGBT game? No. Is it a cishet game? Also no. It’s a blocks game. It’s also available on Steam. (199 results worth of available, in fact.) Alongside Minesweeper (129 results), Pac-Man (50 results), Bejeweled (35 results), and many other popular games that do not feature any person or thing that could be said to have a sexuality, and that very few people would expect or want to find queer representation in.4
Those games are all included in GLAAD’s 98% of games that don’t contain LGBT content. Which isn’t wrong, it’s just meaningless. In order to get a meaningful sense of LGBT representation in games, you would have to either limit the population to games with stories and/or characters (not possible to do via the platforms’ public search engines) or perform a similar count of games with overtly straight content (not possible to do via looking at tags, because nobody tags their game as “straight”).
It implicitly compares all-time data to recent data
GLAAD bills its report as the state of LGBT representation in gaming, which is to say, the present state of LGBT representation. But it includes games published in any year in its data, as long as those games are currently available. That’s not inherently bad study design; maybe we’re interested in the all-time population of games, or, as GLAAD claims in its report, we’re interested in the games that are currently easily accessible to gamers, regardless of when they were made.
But what it isn’t is a fair comparison to the Where We Are on TV report or the Studio Responsibility Index, both of which measure the LGBT representation that is newly published in their given mediums each year. GLAAD doesn’t count the LGBT representation in every movie available on Netflix, or every old TV show that you can find on Hulu. If they did, their findings would probably be a lot bleaker, because as it turns out, we have a lot more queer characters now than we used to. And yet, GLAAD explicitly compares those reports to the Gaming Report:
It is clear that the game industry lags far behind other media industries in terms of quantity of LGBTQ representation.The 2023 GLAAD Advertising Visibility Index showed that just “3% of all reviewed ads could be counted as including LGBTQ representation.” GLAAD’s 2023 Studio Responsibility Index found that 28.5% of films from the top 10 distributors in 2022 contained an LGBTQ character. For the 2022–23 season, GLAAD’s Where We Are on TV report found that 10.6% of series regulars on primetime scripted broadcast series were LGBTQ and in total, GLAAD counted 596 LGBTQ characters across primetime scripted broadcast, primetime scripted cable, and scripted streaming original series.
I don’t know how many LGBT games are currently easily available to consumers. I don’t know how many LGBT games have been made over all time. I don’t even know how many LGBT games were released in 2023. What I do know is that the GLAAD Gaming Report doesn’t contain the answers to any of those questions. As someone who has followed GLAAD’s media reporting for a long time, and who is very interested in the actual state of queer representation in video games, I hope that GLAAD takes this opportunity to re-examine its video game reporting. If another GLAAD Gaming Report is ever made, I hope it’s made by people who understand what they’re counting, and why.
- Some responses to the report have noted that Nielsen used a “boosted sample” of LGBT gamers. This does not mean that they specifically sought out a biased sample. Boosted samples are used in surveys to get more accurate information on the responses of a minority population. Nielsen used a standard sample to determine the percentage of gamers who were LGBT. Because the total number of LGBT respondents was too small to make meaningful statistical comparisons of their habits and preferences with straight respondents, Nielsen then sought out additional LGBT respondents to survey on those topics. ↩︎
- One grain of salt: Several news articles have claimed that the percentage of LGBT gamers has “grown” since 2020, when Nielsen reported that 10% of gamers were LGBT. But the 2020 survey, like the 2023 one, was not released publicly, and cannot be evaluated for basic things like margins of error, so it’s hard to know whether the percentage of LGBT gamers has actually grown, or Nielsen is just reporting variations in random noise. (Based on the sample size of the GLAAD survey, the margin of error is probably somewhere in the realm of +/- 2%, but without knowing the size of the boosted sample I really can’t say. The overall sample size of the 2020 survey does not seem to be publicly available.) ↩︎
- Why would you filter out games with sexual content? I don’t know, GLAAD doesn’t say. (They also don’t mention how they filtered out “adult only sexual content,” which is not an available tag on the Steam store. “Sexual Content” is! “Adult Only” is not!) Are we concerned about fetishization? Do porn games not count as games, or not count as representation? Does GLAAD think that all games with sexual content are porn games? Is Baldur’s Gate 3 any less LGBT representation than Coral Island? Do queer gamers not like porn? Feels like these would’ve been important ideas to discuss or at least mention in a supposed report on the state of LGBT representation in gaming! ↩︎
- These results come from limiting the Steam search to English-language games. Not all results for searching for Tetris actually are Tetris, of course, and I didn’t vet every result to see whether it had a story or characters. The results, rather, demonstrate a point: there are lots and lots of story-free games out there. ↩︎