Bioware and the Politics of "Nature"

It occurred to me recently that Bioware's role playing games give an interesting insight into American culture that may not be immediately apparent from the brief discussion of their creative choices about possible sexual orientations. In fact, the sexual orientation discussion is of such social potency that I think highlighting it (at least in the terms we talk about the issue in popular discourse) sort of obscures a broader and to me more interesting revelation there.

What I mean to say is that whether or not the male Col. Shepard in Mass Effect 2 can have a male partner, or whether or not the female Shepard can be romantically involved with Miranda (why is the most attractive woman always off limits for Bioware?), the question could reveal something about what makes a character a politically "safe" choice to be bisexual in a mass market game, but combined with the nature of the game it also reveals much about what Bioware thinks about "Nature"... and perhaps about where American culture places human agency. I say that because it occurs to me that no matter what choices you make, Miranda is never going to become romantically involved with a female Shepard (and, of course, male Shepard has no male options at all), suggesting that in that facet at least her character is completely stable. Are we to believe that Miranda, a hard-edged, swashbuckling heroine from the libertine future is an absolute 0 on the Kinsey Scale? In contemporary culture, I was under the impression that it was fashionable to imagine that nobody was strictly a 0, no matter what they said to the contrary (in fact, protestations to the contrary tend to make the score go up, right?).

So Bioware presents us with a sprawling, nonlinear RPG and a woman, Miranda, who is 100% straight no matter what you say to her or do for her. Does this mean that Bioware is suggesting that her sexuality is completely stable? And if her sexuality is stable - if she is just born completely straight with no power over it, and no environmental changes are going to alter that sexuality - to what extent is Bioware reflecting American attitudes about "nature" here? That is, in our culture have we fallen on the "nature" side of the nature vs. nurture debate?

And if we have, who wins the political argument over "human nature"? On the one hand, the political left would seem to win a victory for sexual orientation activism if we've settled on "born that way" as the cause of completely immutable sexual orientations. At the same time, the political right would seem to win a victory for a range of issues from law and order to education to foreign policy: if sexual orientation is "just so" and immutable, how many other qualities from criminality to aptitude are similarly immutable and not worth engaging?

What RPGs like Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age reflect for me though is a kind of fatalism that interacts with human agency in an interesting way that I think mirrors how American culture deals with destiny. In the modern RPG, from Mass Effect to World of Warcraft, there seems to be a kind of "punctuated equilibrium" - to borrow a term from evolutionary biology - wherein there is a field of possible realities anchored to a handful of absolutes.

I'll probably write another post about that...