I feel they could have done so much more with the Fable series than they have, though.

Bioware handles sexual orientation fairly well as well in their Dragon Age and Mass Effect series.

Really, sexual orientation has moved much more into the realm of an acceptable form of expression in games as a whole. It really is surprising the number of games available nowadays that support different ones. Heck, a game I love is Rogue Legacy, in which your character's sexuality is a random, uncontrollable element, and has no effect on the game other than to determine whether your character is in a same-sex or opposite-sex pairing upon finishing the game.

Gender expression is something it is much more difficult to find games that explore reasonably, though. Even Fable II will assign negative appearance and social status points to your character based on wearing clothing and hair styles associated with the opposite sex, and the game's insistence on bodybuilders for your character whether you play as male or female means that at high levels even a female character looks patently ridiculous in most of the cuter outfit choices.

If I were to describe a game that really, in my opinion, handles a character's gender expression the most fluidly, it would likely be Saints Row The Third, of all things. A game where your character's physical sex can be changed as simply as visiting a plastic surgeon at any time, and the game actually rewards you for playing a character who switches sex at least once through the campaign with an achievement for playing five hours as a male and as a female.

Melanie E.