On the eve of the biggest release since Lewinsky, nerds of all stripes seem to be sitting pretty. They’ve got a nice little web trend going (that whole 2.0 thing), Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica are back with a vengeance and–hang on, was that the sound of 6 million thumbs cracking?–Halo 3 comes out tonight.
That’s right, almost exactly five years after Halo: Combat Evolved was released to go along with the X-Box, the third and final game in the series by Bungie hits shelves at 12:01 Tuesday morning.
Much of the series’ massive popularity has to do with its online play, which is the kind of technology making a whole new generation of computer science majors rich, in theory. But while social interaction has crept into more and more technologies and online fora, some nerds stick to the good old-fashioned handing-down-of-smart-ideas-from-atop-an-ivory-tower method.
Take, for example, the professional queer studies majors over at the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who conducted this study.
Apparently, only about 1.1 percent of characters on scripted network shows are gay this season. That’s down from 1.5 percent in 2005. But cable seems to be picking up the slack, with 40 series regulars being attracted to their own gender–a 60 percent increase from last season.
So when will the nerds at GLAAD and the nerds at Bungie (and Ubisoft and Rockstar and EA, etc.) get together and start including each other. It’s probably safe to say there are few, if any gay characters in video games now, but it’d be nice to see GLAAD prove that.
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