It was late one night about a decade ago when I was lying in my bed staring at a screen, overcome with emotion and yet somehow numb. I pulled my blanket to my chest, hoping it would protect me, from these thoughts and feelings that kept flashing in my head, especially right now. My eyes were glued to the screen, "I Got You Babe" by Etta James was playing softly in the background.

Let 'em say that we are wrong

I don't care, with you I can't go wrong

Moments before, I had experienced something that I had never experienced to this extent in video games: I saw myself. It was as if someone had swapped the glass of my TV with a mirror to tell me: Look, Lea, that's you. It was a scene that was both heartbreaking and heartwarming, and life-changing for me personally: Ellie and Riley, the two protagonists from the DLC Left Behind of The Last of Us, had kissed.

I lay there, wide-eyed and staring, with goosebumps, thoughts spinning and on the verge of tears. No game before had done what Left Behind did so effortlessly: It represented me. This fateful moment happened at a time in my life when I had nowhere to turn to. My parents had split up, we had to move house and at the end of the day I was left hanging, with a searching mind that had been down so many paths but hadn't found the right one. My biggest obstacle was my sexual orientation: I knew early on that there was room in my heart only for women. But I had no guidance, I had no one to take me aside and tell me that it was perfectly okay not to be heterosexual.

And suddenly, there was an anchor

Video games were and are my main refuge. But especially in these fictional worlds, which meant everything to me back then, any romances, if they existed, were based on heteronormativity. The same thing that plagued me in real life, namely the lack of visibility of queer people, haunted me even in gaming. Until that one night when I was still awake at 2 a.m. against my mother's wishes and watched a Let's Play of Left Behind.

Suddenly there it was, this mental anchor that I had always sought but never found; a kind of confirmation that homosexuality must be so normal that it seems okay to depict it in a video game. My body responded with tears of relief, mixed with some fear, but also the reassurance of having a foot in the door: the door to who I am and what makes me, me.

Those who are not affected by this insecurity themselves sometimes have trouble understanding why representation of LGBTQIA+ in media is so important. Ellie became one of the most important people in my life from that day on; she is not even alive and is purely fictional, she has never exchanged a real word with me or looked me in the eye. And yet she entered my life at a crucial point. I know today that without The Last of Us and Left Behind, I wouldn't have been able to find myself.

Only 2 percent of games are inclusive

I'm not alone with a story like this: GLAAD, a non-profit organization that advocates for LGBTQIA+ rights, published the first study on the inclusion of people like me in video games in February 2024. According to the study, around 17 percent of gamers in the United States identify as LGBTQIA+. However, most games lack the representation of corresponding characters or storylines. According to the GLAAD report, such inclusive games make up only 2 percent of the total digital libraries of Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo.

The study also found that the Nintendo eShop has the lowest number of games with LGBTQIA+ content, at 50, followed by PlayStation with 90, Microsoft with 146 and Steam with 2,302 English games, with that number dropping to 1,506 when games with "adult-only sexual content" are filtered out. So for heterosexual cis people, it's very easy to find a game that reflects their interests - while for people like me, it's almost impossible.

"Are my feelings misguided?"

What The Last of Us is to me, the action-adventure series Legacy of Kain was to Jade-Kain Coffi, a technical artist who has been working in the industry in Hamburg for many years. Jade came out as trans at the beginning of the year. Her path to coming out was rocky, the goal sometimes seemed unattainable, and she still cries when she talks about it. Her anchor during all this time: Legacy of Kain, or rather the last title in the series: Defiance.

Defiance was the mirror in which Jade recognized herself. Although Legacy of Kain is already over two decades old and not a title worth mentioning in terms of LGBTQIA+ inclusion, these games and their two male protagonists were what Jade so desperately needed. "Neither Raziel nor Kain have a clear path throughout the five games, they are always unsure of what the right thing to do is, or always lose faith in what they think is right," says Jade. And that's exactly where she found herself. "As a trans woman, I understand this struggle that I experienced throughout my youth and in my twenties: Am I doing the right thing? Are my feelings misguided? Should I submit to my destiny? Is society correct in steering me in one particular direction?"

Tobias Graff is someone who fits into a similar narrative. He is the co-founder of Mooneye Studios and the CEO. The studio's flagship game is Lost Ember in which players slip into the skin of a she-wolf who was with a woman in her previous life. "There were a couple more or less offensive comments,“ recalls Tobias. He himself looks back fondly on the game Dragon Age, in which you could already meet homosexual characters years ago. "I remember it positively, but I also remember the online discussions and comments about it in a negative sense."

And then he simply did it himself

Circumstances, that have by no means stopped him from countering the rejection on his own; among other things, with Lost Ember and a special award called Colors of Indie. "Since 2022, we have been highlighting indie developers who pay special attention to diversity or are simply particularly diverse teams, and we try to promote them with the means available to us," says Tobias. He generally doesn't really seek out confrontation when he encounters hatred. "Most of the time I just try to ignore it, sometimes I respond to negative comments, but that rarely ends in constructive discussions." Tobias instead prefers to focus on the positive.

Jade handles this similarly. She says she mainly reacts with sadness when she encounters hostility. She doesn't understand why others think like that, act like that, exclude like that. She also finds it difficult to have direct conversations with them; there are only a few people you can pick up in a conversation and dissuade from their opinion. Jade simply prefers to take action herself: "I actively combat hatred and hostility by making games that represent my values and us as a community, celebrate diversity and unite us."

Both she and Tobias say in unison that the visibility of LGBTQIA+ not only contributes to normalization within society, but can also help those who, like me back then, are still sitting at home in a dark room waiting for a glimmer of hope. "The more normal it becomes to see the most diverse characters in games - be it in terms of gender identity, sexuality, skin color or anything else - the more normal it will hopefully become for everyone in their life," says Tobias. "It's especially important for young people to recognize: 'I'm not alone, there are others like me'."

Jade is following the same path as Tobias. She is a founding member of Positive Impact Games that also focuses on diversity; a female-led start-up, multicultural and as diverse as a society can be. "Escapism in the modern age comes in many forms, and video games are a medium that offer exactly that, but at the same time require players to participate rather than passively consume," says Jade. And that's exactly why video games are particularly well suited to taking people who identify as LGBTQIA+ by the hand and telling them that they are perfect just the way they are.

A happiness greater than anything else

The stories of Jade and Tobias are encouraging, although not yet representative of the entire gaming scene, but a step in the right direction to symbolize how things can work out differently. So that in future many more people like me can sit in their rooms, stare at a screen and finally discover themselves.

I've had Ellie tattooed on me some time ago. Every day, my left arm reminds me of that one moment ten years ago when I sat there and didn't know where this sudden reflection of my most inner feelings would lead me. I didn't come out of the closet until a few years later. But today I'm sitting here, in a new room where it's no longer just me sleeping alone.

Every day I wake up here next to the love of my life; a happiness so great that I couldn't describe it in words. The other day we played The Last of Us together. I cried a lot, out of joy and humility that I owe everything to this one game. And when I hear that there are people like Jade and Tobias, I have great hope that fates like mine will happen much more often in the future; that people will be allowed to find themselves because they feel seen, because someone gives them back the value that they themselves have lost, and because they are allowed to feel love - especially love for themselves.