In the video game adventures of Commander Shepard, being a gay man was neither a matter of biology nor choice.
It was a matter of programming. And the programming of Shepardâs first video game, 2007âs Mass Effect, made being gay impossible.
And then things changed. The programming changed. You can play Shepard as if he is a gay man in next monthâs Mass Effect 3
Why? The people who make the game wouldnât say itâs because they are advocates. Not quite. They have another reason.
âWe got feedback from players that they wanted more choice,â Ray Muzyka co-founder of Mass Effect studio BioWare told me during a recent interview. âWe respond to that feedback and try to make our games better based on what our players are asking for.â
Muzyka and his fellow BioWare founder Greg Zeschuk do not come off as activists or overtly progressive individuals. The games from their company, however, have become flashpoints for discussion about sex, gender and sexual orientation. Their Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, flagship titles from mega-publisher EA, are some of the only video game blockbusters that include straight or gay romance. But both men, a pair of physicians-turned-video-game hitmakers, discuss what outsiders may view as an overtly-liberal or progressive agenda as, well, more of a customer-service project or architectural choice.
âItâs surprising that people think itâs that big a deal,â Zeschuk said. âIf youâre creating this kind of content, itâs very natural to provide all the options. So thatâs always kind of funny.â
The kind of content BioWare makes is role-playing games. Theyâve been doing this for over a decade and theyâve routinely given players choice: about what weapons to wield, what fighting style to pick, what gender to be, what color of skin to have and, gradually, which kind of sexual orientation they might be.
(A female-âmonogenderedâ alien romance scene from Mass Effect 1
Outside the video game world, of course, the very idea of choosing oneâs gender or sexual orientation is controversial. Gay and transgender rightsâ activists have long argued that what some see as choice is really born identity. Not in video games. In video games, you can pick⊠but only if they let you. Only if the people who make video games who are essentially the gods of their worlds, let something be possible.
In Mass Effect 1 you could be straight. Or, you could sleep with a blue-skinned alien named Liara who was technically mono-gendered but appeared to be the kind of blue-skinned alien that would have been a lover to Captain Kirk on that spiritual predecessor to Mass Effectâs multi-cultural sci-fi drama, Star Trek
By Mass Effect 2, you could be gay, but only if you were female, a step either toward more progressive depictions of sexuality and/or one that stopped at the threshold of what a straight male player might find titillating.
In Mass Effect 3, out in early March, players who play as a male Commander Shepard can finally sleep with a male character. This follows on the enabling of straight, female-female and male-male romance options in BioWareâs recent Dragon Age series. (And, before that, in their Jade Empire game.) And it poses the question of whether the BioWare doctors must at some point feel that they are making a political statement with their games. After all, we live in a time when each State in the Unionâs vote on allowing or disallowing gay marriage is itself a political statement.
Here we have games whose god-like designers are actually implementing, at a more fundamental level, the ability for a gay identity to even exist in their world. And theyâre saying, finally, yes it can. Political statement?
âWeâre neutral,â Muzya says. â Itâs the playerâs choice. Itâs a role-playing game.â
(A male-female romance scene from
http://lastchance.cc/347350/keighley-sets-mass-effect-record-straight-or-tries-to%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
âThereâs something about the tonality and how we present it,â Zeschuk added. âWe donât kind of snicker and make fun of it. Itâs like a serious part of a serious game. The game itself obviously has humorous elements, but the actual relationships are dealt with in a mature and very adult way.â
Every time a feature is added to a game, it requires more work. That means that it is literally more laborious to create a virtual world that lets you be male or female. Itâs more work to let you sleep with one character, and even more work to let you fall for another. The economical game designer might skip a lot of this stuff, and even BioWare can feel that temptation, one Muzyka says, theyâve resisted.
âA few years ago there was a debate among the team members that, yeah thereâs more of an expectation to enable more content so, essentially, our games have to be bigger to enable these choices to occur,â Muzyka said. âYou have to have different paths. You have to have different playthroughs. It actually adds up. Itâs more expensive to do that.â (In this context, âexpensiveâ refers to developer effort, not cost to the players. The price of a game that lets you be gay or straight doesnât go up!)
The corners BioWare may have considered to cut are not being cut. Hence, among other things, a Commander Shepard who now might be a gay man.
âWe are doing it as a service to our fans, because we think itâs part of the expectation of a role-playing game,â Muzyka said. âItâs part of the expectation of a BioWare game because of the way our games have been for the last couple decades. Weâve had that kind of choice going way back to Baldurâs Gate back in the 90âs. Itâs been refined. We think itâs a good thing to offer players. Choice is always a nice thing, when it works. When itâs high-quality.â
BioWare today is, alongside Rockstar and a handful of other big-name game studios, an outlier. Most games, as violent as they are, remain sexless and void of talk or depiction of any sexual identity other than straight. The doctors know that puts them on the edge.
âI would say, our entire career, one of the frustrations has been not just in this but in all kinds of areas weâve been held to a really high standard,â Zeschuk said. âItâs always, âwe can totally innovate everything. We can do this. We can do that.â
âCanât we just make a game and youâll say whether itâs good or not? Why do we have to be the one carrying all of this weight?
âOn the other hand, we created that ourselves by stepping forward and saying this is what weâre going to do.â
And theyâre doing it, with what appears to be a muted agenda and a total lack of retreat.
