I've begun playing Mass Effect 2, which in most cases is a stunning visual accomplishment (though there are times when one can see, especially in the initial space battle, that shortcuts have been taken). It's a space-based RPG, for those not familiar with the series, and it has many of the elements of a traditional swords and sorcery type RPG, only blended in interesting ways with, I'd say, a first person shooter like Halo. It's produced by Bioware, the same company that produced the highly enjoyable RPG Dragon Age: Origins. And it's the fact that it was produced by Bioware that makes me wonder about a certain creative choice.
I tend to play through an RPG once (or mostly once), then search for guides on Google for how to do all the things I missed. For a game like Mass Effect or DA:O, the "things I've missed" category can be pretty large considering the sheer scope of possibilities within the game: the "field of play", so to speak, is large enough for thousands of unique trajectories through the game space. In reading through guides and other players' experiences in Mass Effect, I of course came across one or two Romance Guides (always popular topics in an RPG of this kind). There are a range of possible romantic interactions in the game but what struck me was which were available and which were not.
The first Mass Effect was surrounded (I'm not sure how seriously) by a banal controversy over a lesbian "sex" scene within the game. I say "sex" because it was really just two women kissing then rolling over, and I say "banal" because because the shock factor of seeing two women kiss wore off long, long ago. Nevertheless, controversy arose around such salacious content, or was generated by Bioware to boost sales. Following up on the success of such controversy, in the sequel one now has the possibility of two different lesbian relationships to choose from, along with a range of inter-species type couplings that may seem transgressive if we ever meet aliens but just seem sort of funny now.
What I wonder though, considering they doubled up on the saucy lesbian action, is what made Bioware choose not to include a male-male option? I wonder because such an option did exist in Dragon Age: Origins, which would seem to provide precedent. Though same-sex relationships were a point of interest in discussions of DA:O, I didn't get the impression that there was any of the overwrought controversy surrounding it. Further, the game seems to have been received well by the gaming market, belying a stereotype that the largely male gaming audience is necessarily averse to the presentation of such things, or that they require only fantastical lesbianism. So what could lead to the exclusion from Mass Effect 2 of any male-male option, even though the female-female options are expanded?
Perhaps the audiences for ME and DA:O don't overlap as much as I imagine. There may be a kind of barrier between the swords and sorcery crowd and the space-RPG/FPS crowd. That's not really something I can attest to, but one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps DA:O wasn't as bold as it seems at first glance. Sure, a male main character could become romantically involved with a male secondary character, Zevran... But I wonder if this isn't still a safe choice on some level. Zevran, an elf reminiscent of Raul Julia in the Addam's Family, seems like he could be seen as an effete and purposely woman-like character and thus "safe" for male romantic interaction. He's not typically masculine like Alistair, and he's not technically human. Could he occupy some non-human feminized space, which makes him less jarring as a bisexual character?
No comments:
Post a Comment