Whilst perusing a few articles we came across a snippet over at Gamasutra where they're interviewing gaming great David Perry (founder of Shiny Entertainment) about what he's been up to on his year off. Now although the article is fairly interesting, the bit that got us all agitated was when David was talking about the release of the Matrix title Enter the Matrix.
According to Perry they had problems with the title because of its lesbian kiss. It seems the ESRB weren't overly thrilled with the idea of the kiss appearing. Perry says he got around this by saying the Matrix scene was actually "two computers kissing" - "and the ESRB bought it".
We immediately saw a similarity between this and the recent elimination of the "lesbian" content in Mass Effect by stating the women involved aren't women, they're 'mono-sexual aliens'. So rendering lesbians invisible by stating they aren't women is no biggy if it will get your game published. This is the age old problem of lesbians either being rendered invisible, predatory, single (and thus having no-one to be 'lesbian' with) or pandering to the male gaze. Of course if you happen to be a computer generated mono-sexual alien, you're OK.
