How?s this for virtual reality? Even as President Bush tries to squash gay marriage with the Constitution, same-sex unions are beginning to crop up in video games. Recently, Atari released The Temple of Elemental Evil, a computer game based with nerdish precision on the actual dice-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons rules. It has the requisite elf magic and fighting orcs—but it also has a gay wedding, as Matthew D. Barton described in his (rather stunned) online review of the game. Barton brought his scrappy band of adventurers into a town where they met a slave character named Bertram. He explained that if Barton could defeat Bertram?s master in battle, Bertram would repay him by marrying one of the male members of his group. Barton duly won Bertram?s freedom and watched as two male characters were cheerfully wed.

"A portrait is displayed with two men embraced, and the narrator levelly explains that you and Bertram were married and lived, as they say, happily ever after," he wrote. And Elemental Evil isn?t the only place where gamers can find gay romance. Players of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic discovered that while playing a female Jedi, they get hit on by another female Jedi. Later this year, virtual gay wedlock will hit the mainstream when The Sims 2, the long-awaited sequel to the most popular PC title of all time, allows marriages between same-sex Sims.

Video games have long allowed players to experiment with new and often taboo identities. In online games such as Everquest, almost half of the women characters are actually men—guys who prefer to cross-dress when they play. In the ?90s, Tomb Raider and its imitators were so popular that for several years, American teenage boys played almost exclusively as buxom, wasp-waisted women. But for young men, the bulk of these games? audience, experiencing life as an ass-kicking action chick is probably less threatening than adopting the role of a homosexual man. The new generation of gay-positive games presents an interesting test of how far role-playing can stretch. Will straight gamers want to play at being gay?