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So why not let players set their sexuality in the same way that they are allowed to set their gender (as Obsidian allows you to do in Fallout: New Vegas)? Why not write strong homosexual characters who are designed to be homosexual from the moment they are conceived? Certainly, this doesn’t have to run counter to the marketing message that is being pushed on the cover and in the pre-release game trailers. In fact, many gamers do choose to play female characters, even if the marketing wizards would have you believe that only men need apply. If you look at the box art for Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2, it’s very clear that they are pushing the image of the strong warrior male and all that that implies: These games are for men who want to play as men and enact violence on aliens or demons.īut, as we all know, you can play as a woman in these games. But this didn’t stop them from including the option to play female characters. VorpalBunny’s article states that Gaider sees economics as the reason why gay characters have yet to be featured in a BioWare game.
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The writers can’t win by making the main character straight, and they can’t win by making the main character bisexual…but the elephant in the room is that the writers at BioWare have yet to design a game where the main character is gay. By trying to make everyone happy, in a way they have made no one happy. And perhaps if you ignore the fact that the nobility of Thedas has a decidedly heterosexual impulse, where women must produce heirs in order to continue the family line and cement alliances, you might be able to come to that conclusion.īut that hand-wavy explanation absolves any responsibility that Gaider and his fellow writers might have had as the designers of this world. Maybe Thedas is a society where identity politics are much more progressive than the ones found in our world - even if transgendered characters were treated very poorly in Dragon Age: Origins.
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It’s been argued that the ambivalence toward the politics of sexual identity points to a fictional world that simply has a different view on sexuality. But the unintended consequence of that compromise is that sexuality is suddenly rendered invisible by the game, which adds a wrinkle to the gender and sexual politics presented therein. It’s true that by allowing main characters of either gender to pursue a romance with all of the companions solves the problem found in Dragon Age: Origins. It’s at this point where it becomes clear that what BioWare and David Gaider, BioWare's lead writer for the Dragon Age series, felt was a fair compromise led to a different set of problems they may not have considered. Instead, I wanted to take a brief look at the negative response that Dragon Age 2 ’s romances have received from both straight and gay gamers.īen Kuchara of Ars Technica sums up the story, explaining that a straight gamer was offended by the fact that male companions would suddenly hit on him without any encouragement on his part while a gay gamer found it offensive that the male companions were shallowly depicted as stereotypically sex-crazed and needy. VorpalBunny from GayGamer posted a rather in depth review of the romance options and the representation of sexuality, and I don’t want to repeat his points. That way, no matter the main character's gender or preferred sexual orientation, he or she would be able to enter a relationship with any companion of his or her choosing. A hacked game allowing for a lesbian relationship in Mass Effect 2ĭragon Age 2 solves this problem in a rather direct manner by making all the companions in the game seemingly bisexual.