Renowned RPG-maker BioWare will allow Commander Shepard, protagonist in the third and purportedly final instalment of the sci-fi-themed Mass Effect saga, to engage in gay male romances. It will be a first for the series.
GayGamer-a website written by and for gay gamers-picked up on a tweet from Casey Hudson, the franchise's executive producer, that reads: "Happy to confirm #ME3 supports wider options for love interests incl. same-sex for m&f chars, reactive to how you interact w/them in-game."
Interpreted, we can take this to mean that the upcoming Mass Effect 3 will include gay male and lesbian relationships between Commander Shepard-who can be male or female, according to player preference-and other characters, and that these relationships will be initiated based on choices players make during dialogue sequences.
The Edmonton-based studio has included gay relationships in several of its previous RPGs, including the original Mass Effect and its fantasy-oriented Dragon Age franchise. These games, which provide a wide variety of dialogue options when engaged in conversation with non-player characters, occasionally allow the player to select questions or responses that are flirtatious in nature. As the game progresses, players have the opportunity to pursue or cease their sexual advances with these characters. Sometimes-but not always-relationships will be consummated with a brief scene showing the player's character in bed caressing and kissing the courted character.
Predictably, such scenes have generated backlash from some fans and social conservatives, many of whom, it turns out, don't even play the games. Sexual content in the original Mass Effect-which included a lesbian love scene-resulted in an infamous Fox News story that condemned the game as pornography, as well as a blog post from writer Kevin McCullough who claimed that it would take just a simple tweak for players to have the ability to "sodomize" the character of their choosing. (Both stories contained false information and ultimately resulted in regret and apologies from those involved.)
Liberal-minded gamers, meanwhile, have generally applauded BioWare's efforts to provide more inclusive romance options. However, the precedent of offering homosexual relationships in some games has led to criticisms of other BioWare games that don't include same-sex couplings. Mass Effect 2 didn't offer gay relationships (though, it's worth noting, players could flirt with characters of the same gender), which forced the studio into a defensive position, explaining that different games have different needs and different character focus. But that didn't stop some from speculating that BioWare had been forced into adhering to more "mainstream" notions concerning sexuality thanks to its new owner, Electronic Arts.
BioWare had been openly discussing the subject of homosexuality in its games as recently as last December, when, on BioWare's online forums, senior writer David Gaider responded to fans criticising the studio's support of same-sex relationships with the following argument:
"So long as romances of any kind are optional and need to be actively pursued by the player in order to be experienced, they simply don't have a leg to stand on. Advocating that nobody should be able to have content you don't intend to personally use is largely pointless-outside of a vague notion that such efforts should go towards other things, instead. Personally, it's not a lot of effort to include them. The resources we can devote to a minority of players isn't great, but I imagine to those players it's quite worth it... and I would hope that some folks could be sensitive enough to be happy for those players, at the very least out of the selfish notion that they may one day end up in the minority of some content issue and receive the same consideration if nothing else."
Mass Effect 3 is slated to launch in the first quarter of 2012.