Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Of Sex and Dragons!

I was originally going to write a diatribe about how Dragon Age 2, over time, failed as a sequel. I’m getting close to the end now and it has become one of those games I have to force myself to keep playing, which is absolutely infuriating. I was going to write about why I was having so much trouble finishing it, how hard it’s been for me to make myself play it despite genuinely wanting to like it. I was frustrated at it, really frustrated at it. Then this shit had to go down.

The facile or offensive portrayal homosexuals in modern media, not just games but television and film as well, has long been a problem. If you went to liberal arts college you’ve probably had this debate a thousand times before while seated around a hookah drinking vodka and kool-aid, but recent events adjacent to Bioware have forced these issues out into the open. Now the entire public gets to think about the fact that they can be gay in a video game, and they get to think about just how this makes them feel. Bioware has, perhaps unwittingly, begun a dialogue about gays, gays in games, and how responsible developers are for the interpretation of their content, especially with regard to gender and sexuality.

The last bit is part of a larger dialogue on the interpretive nature of games. My choices within a game are not the choices you make within a game, and our experiences playing the games are fundamentally different. But normally this fundamental element of playing a video game is ignored during discussion, omitted for the sake of simplicity. There is content. That content exists, and it is assessed, usually as an unconditional experience which we are collectively exposed to. But when we discuss the romance options in Bioware’s games, or romance options in general, the discussion shifts from one of a menu of experiences offered to a discussion of the experiences themselves, of their capacity to reshape and reform a narrative and inform both your experience within the game and the manner in which you perceive yourself. The moment we talk about sticking it in other characters it’s no longer a discussion about how long it took you to make a choice, but instead a discussion of the choice itself and the way it impacted your experience.

The various players in the Bioware controversy (aside from David Gaider, who has done an excellent job of sticking to his guns) have done a great deal to illustrate this fact. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all assholes, from the sanctimonious straight man who think his sexual identity is being undermined because a gay man hit on him once to the purported homosexual who believes that a gay man with sexual agency is a demonization of homosexual culture which demands the elimination of the framework that might generate such a portrayal. They’re clearly people who haven’t lived and, given the state of the internet, they could be a pair of 13 year old virgins for all we know. They’re both protesting to things that any adult should’ve experienced by the time they’re twenty being put into a video game, and they’re both doing it with the candor that only a bigot can level against all those who might disagree with them. But through their ignorance they’ve brought to the forefront of the discussion of Dragon Age 2 an important fact, one I never would’ve expected to emerge from this game’s narrative on it’s own.

Our response to the elements within a game are more important than the elements themselves. Our response to being hit on is more important to the game itself than the fact that it’s there, or that one time a gay guy is going to hit on you when you’re in a Payless shoe store with your girlfriend and give you some kind-of-offensive tips on how to walk correctly in heels. Sorry, I got distracted there for a second. My point is that the experience of the game itself, of your response to these events, is what’s on discussion here and that’s one of the two outcomes of this dialogue. And that’s a pretty fucking amazing outcome. The discussion about homophobia has, by pure coincidence and thanks largely to the contributions of two absolute fuckwits, turned to a discussion of the fundamental nature of games. It’s turned in the direction it always should’ve been heading, although it’s still being guided by idiots. I doubt that this will herald a new era where the discussion of games is elevated, but it’s still nice to see it happen at all.

The other, and more obvious outcome that has emerged from all this is that we’re now discussing and considering the way that sexuality, specifically homosexuality, functions in games. Not in the “ugh” way that we had to during the Gay Gamer controversy, or the “everyone’s a fucking child” way that Mass Effect has brought up the issue repeatedly. Instead we’re now discussing our personal choices both in and out of the game. We’re talking about how we felt when Anders hit on us, how we responded. This is the first step in having a larger discussion about the importance of gay characters in games, about sexuality in games and how it needs to be elevated.

Sexuality is a tough thing to talk about it. The majority of us have been trained to see it as a taboo subject, and we’re horrified that discussing it will either offend the people around us or ensure that we never have it again. But it’s something we consider constantly, a critical factor in our daily lives that dominates, consciously or subconsciously, most of what we do. And it’s hard to illustrate your points about sexuality without sometimes either becoming graphic or making yourself or others uncomfortable. Or lowering the level of the discussion past the point of usefulness. Let’s not forget, for every eloquently filthy man like Dan Savage there is at least one other douchebag who wants to tell you about his scorecard.

Games have, to their detriment, made sexuality a trite thing when they mention it at all. There are exceptions to the rule of course, games like Bayonetta and the first Dragon Age, but the shadow of Duke Nukem still looms large over even the most sexually progressive games. Look at Mass Effect to see a great example of a group of perfectly intelligent writers who have decided to make sex the outcome of a series of awkward, stilted conversations. Baldur’s Gate did a better job with it years ago, for fuck’s sake. Sex is a goal in many games, not part of a relationship growing and flourishing. It’s something you get to do with that girl you’ve been chatting up the night before the big battle, not something the two of you deal with on a daily basis in weird ways.

Dragon Age 2 has shifted this paradigm completely. Depending on the way you unfold your relationships you can end up with a live in girlfriend for multiple years, and a relationship centered around maintaining your cohabitation. You can end up with a series of hookups with a borderline homeless pirate woman or a tryst with a needy bipolar mage. The relationships, and the nature of sex within those relationships, actually has some sense of the way sex functions in real life, seemingly bold new territory in this era of gaming. This alone makes the dialogue surrounding sex within the game more meaningful and allows it to flow more easily.

Dragon Age 2 certainly doesn’t get it completely right. I’m kind of pissed that all of the characters I could’ve had torrid homoerotic affairs with in the game were pretty annoying. I would’ve liked to fuck Varric and maybe have him move in. It would’ve given the framing narrative a nice additional layer of meaning, and it would’ve done a lot to dispel my preconceptions about dwarves in video games (pre-mature ejaculators). But it makes an honest attempt to portray human sexuality as a series of choices we engage in, both with the person we want to be with and the world surrounding them. And it shows that sex isn’t the endpoint of a relationship – it’s a part of it, often a beginning within it. Simply by recognizing this fact Dragon Age 2 has done a lot to elevate the nature of sexuality in games.

So I’d like to turn around the internet paradigm and celebrate the ignorant asshats who have come out delivering ultimatums on behalf of both straight and gay gamers. Because while they’re horrifyingly stupid people who genuinely make me frightened for the future of our culture they’ve shown through the discussion surrounding their various diatribes that the majority of people in our rarified community are open minded, intelligent human beings who want to talk about this sort of thing and expand the provisions within games for all lifestyles. And they’ve made me like Dragon Age 2 more. A lot more. I was thinking about taking a break from it and playing some more VVVVVVVVV this weekend. But after this article, I want to see how it all ends. Maybe I’ll get my shot with Varric after all.