It's dangerously close to saying: this is all that video games can be. It goes: this is just what video games are like.
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There is a common response when gamers or critics argue that this situation is problematic. The problem, again, is the assumptions made about precisely what players want to experience through their avatars - the assumption that certain kinds of lived experience aren't important enough to represent or offer for their world. It seems strange to be giving a company credit for making a pay-to-gay planet, an ostracised world of same-gender romance, but to be fair to SW:TOR, a nicely equal gender split of romanceable characters is not a bad place to start. As a storytelling technique it's a very powerful tool, but it's also easy to accidentally break immersion (and really annoy a player) by forcing them into paths they wouldn't want to take - as LA Noire proves.īioware did manage to do better than most. Experiencing your character doing something you wouldn't choose them to do can be profoundly jarring and disconcerting, something that Bioshock used to great effect. Watching something isn't the same as playing something players psychologically identify with their avatars, their characters, often very closely. In games the problem is more pronounced than in cinema, because of the nature of player interaction. And it's the assumption that the man in question is straight, cis, white. It's the overwhelming majority of silent Everyman protagonists being male, not because they need to be male but because that's the default. It's even Samus from Metroid taking off her armour, relying for her shock value on the assumption that the person watching is male. It's every female zombie in Dead Rising wearing a bikini. This is dialogue options for romance with female characters that assume you, the player, are both sexually attracted to women and happy to see sexualised content in game. This is bigger than just gaze: this is a straight male hand at the controller, in front of the screen. Some games and game marketing materials embrace this approach wholeheartedly, not just in cinematics but in playable game elements too. In film, the theory of the male gaze nicely covers the propensity for cinematography to assume, almost unconsciously, a straight male viewer. It assumes your character's sexuality for you, before you've gotten to play them - straight man, or woman not averse to having sex with other women - and it also makes a big assumption about what you as a player desire to view and consent for your avatar to do. In Funcom's conspiracy-led MMO, The Secret World, players in the Dragon faction will experience the same sexually charged opening scenario with a female partner, whether they want it or not. There's a wider issue here about what games assume their players want. Unsurprisingly, this has attracted some ridicule. And thus: a gay home world, a segregated community available only to high-level paying players. We'll put them all in one easily accessible place. We'll do that through DLC so it doesn't impact on the existing world. We need to put gay character options in the game.
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You can see the well-meaning thought processes involved in trying to fix this narrow issue. And the compromise is Makeb, the gay planet, available only via download – and the only place in the galaxy where relationships can be formed with NPCs of the same gender. Immediately, the team announced that it would be updating its romantic content, but early in January, the game's executive producer, Jeff Hickman warned that this was going to be a complex process, and hinted that compromises would be necessary. The developers created ten male characters and ten female characters, a nicely symmetrical field of potential romantic interest.īut for some reason, the nature of those relationships was limited to heterosexual interaction only – an odd decision from a studio that has featured same-sex relationships in its Mass Effect and Dragon Age titles. For Bioware, this journey began when the company made love an option in its massively multiplayer game, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
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Makeb, the gay planet, is the sort of problem that comes about when a series of perfectly reasonable decisions takes a development team to a very weird place.