Some games and game marketing materials embrace this approach wholeheartedly, not just in cinematics but in playable game elements too. In film, the theory of the male gaze nicely covers the propensity for cinematography to assume, almost unconsciously, a straight male viewer.
It assumes your character's sexuality for you, before you've gotten to play them - straight man, or woman not averse to having sex with other women - and it also makes a big assumption about what you as a player desire to view and consent for your avatar to do. In Funcom's conspiracy-led MMO, The Secret World, players in the Dragon faction will experience the same sexually charged opening scenario with a female partner, whether they want it or not. There's a wider issue here about what games assume their players want. Unsurprisingly, this has attracted some ridicule.
And thus: a gay home world, a segregated community available only to high-level paying players. We'll put them all in one easily accessible place. We'll do that through DLC so it doesn't impact on the existing world. We need to put gay character options in the game. You can see the well-meaning thought processes involved in trying to fix this narrow issue.
And the compromise is Makeb, the gay planet, available only via download – and the only place in the galaxy where relationships can be formed with NPCs of the same gender. Immediately, the team announced that it would be updating its romantic content, but early in January, the game's executive producer, Jeff Hickman warned that this was going to be a complex process, and hinted that compromises would be necessary.
The developers created ten male characters and ten female characters, a nicely symmetrical field of potential romantic interest.īut for some reason, the nature of those relationships was limited to heterosexual interaction only – an odd decision from a studio that has featured same-sex relationships in its Mass Effect and Dragon Age titles. For Bioware, this journey began when the company made love an option in its massively multiplayer game, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Some classes (such as the Smuggler and the Imperial Agent) have one or two other companions that could also have the same feelings, which leads to jealousy with some companions, and more exciting story lines.Īll of the original romance options are limited to opposite-gendered characters, but same-gender romance options were released in Rise of the Hutt Cartel and all-gender romance options were added in Forged Alliances and Shadow of Revan, as well as Knights of the Fallen Empire, some of which can be continued.Makeb, the gay planet, is the sort of problem that comes about when a series of perfectly reasonable decisions takes a development team to a very weird place. If the player makes the decision to encourage those feelings, the companion will become a little more open to the player, and the potential for marriage becomes greater as the player levels up and gets closer to level 50.Īll classes have at least one male and one female companion that has the potential to become attracted to the player of the opposite sex. Because all companion characters have personal speaking missions that appear after certain points in a character's story, there is sometimes the potential for some of them to become attracted to the character.