Bisexual romance heats up Dragon Age II

Homophobic (or at least stridently heteronormative) fans of Bioware's Dragon Age II are upset at the game's omnisexual characters, which offer players romantic dalliances regardless of their avatars' sex. After a player requested a "no homosexuality" option, one of the game's writers let him down firmly but gently. The real problem, of course, is that the romances are played out in game-engine CGI, summed up by QT3's Malcolm Tucker as "cringe-inducing gamer-stigmatizing Uncanny Valley evoking boner-annihilators."

• [Anonymous]

  I am, as always, totally baffled as to what the issue is. Want to play your Hawke (female or male) straight as an arrow? /Don’t hit on the party members of the same gender./ It’s not difficult – the romance dialogue is all denoted with a great big heart. And then your poor virgin eyes will be safe from the image of two virtual male characters touching where they eat. The horror. It’s not like anyone hits on the PC without encouragement….well, except Isabela, but she hits on basically everything.

  (And with reference to the Uncanny Valley – at least this time my character doesn’t appear to grow two feet any time she kisses someone, or accidentally merge their upper torsos.)

• [Clumpy]

  Wait… so is every character in the game bisexual? Allowing the player to CHOOSE their sexuality seems to go against one of the central tenets of sexual preference – that it’s a personal attribute which CAN’T be chosen. Or is preference merely one attribute of a character which the player can roleplay?

  • [Raj77]

    I can’t tell if you’re being disingenuous, but the player selects (or role-plays, to be more precise) their character’s sexuality in the same way that they select and role-play their character’s sex, skin colour and dress sense.

• [pecoto]

  I think the fault here is the game system. In Fallout New Vegas there are multiple homosexual non player characters both lesbians and homosexuals….and you can have your own character declared in the game as bisexual or homosexual by choosing to. I have not heard a single complaint about the homosexual content in the game…probably because players can explore that content or not through their own conscious choices.

  In Dragonage you make conversation decisions based on vague descriptors like “hostile” or “friendly”…..and then have the next scene be a sex scene with another character of the same sex without a conscious decision by the player to do so. So it’s like “Surprise! You thought you were going to be smarmy and schmooze this merchant into having lower prices, but instead they’re having relations with you inside their tent.” So players feel that they accidentally engaged in homosexual activity in the game….they did not MEAN too, but there it is. I don’t think it’s so much that the option exists….but that it can be sprung out somewhat unpredictably, and not necessarily predictably.

  • [Kragshot]

    That’s not quite correct. In your conversation indicator, as long as a heart doesn’t show up, then you will not have any romantic interaction with any of the NPCs in DA2. The safe no-romance option is always the “olive branch” in conversations, not the “heart.”

  • [Anonymous]

    There were complaints, actually. One of the developers even said to these people that you had to pick the “Confirmed Bachelor” perk to see all this content, which was clearly marked as gay. Then he had to say that the perk’s descriptive image, one man massaging another man with a heart symbol in a thought bubble, would be construed by most people as being just a little fruity. So they did get complaints, but you really had to go out of your way to find the gay and be willfully ignorant.

    I wonder if Fallout NV was part of the reasons this was done. New Vegas had characters written specifically to be gay, though, and even characters who you wouldn’t find out were gay unless you put a fair bit of effort in to finding out more about them. As Mark Temporis said above, the options in Dragon Age are designed with heterosexual norms about what’s sexy. It just seems a little lazy. But then, if they did make gay-specific content, they might run into the Fallout NV problem: there’s a character gay male PCs can romance to get their gear repaired to a high standard pretty much for free. I have no doubt in my mind that there are a lot of minmaxers going gay for pay. Makes me wonder if players would willing go through some sexually degrading acts just to get extra items or special abilities, like being treated as a pet or made to go naked in public(this would probably work better in an MMO). Morrowind sort of played with that with Uncle Crassius.

• [Rob]

  ” For that matter, what would the term be for sex between a human, elf, dwarf, or qunari?”

  Rishathra

  • [Anonymous]

    +10 internet points for you, my friend. Just steer clear of the Kzin in the corner. Believe me.

• [Culturedropout]

  Yay bisexuals in games. It’s almost like… I dunno… they’re starting to catch up to the _real world_ or something! Why do people care so much whether someone is an “innie” or an “outie” when it comes to sex? I’ve had relationships (and sex) with a number of both genders in my life, and it really comes down to personality, intelligence, sense of humor, and so on, much more than whether they have dangly bits or not. I was pleasantly surprised when I found you could be bisexual in “Fable”. Now I’m going to have to check out this new game too. Phobes need to grow up.

• [Anonymous]

  It’s just an extension of the greater zeitgeist’s frustration with the heavy recycling of… well, everything in dragon age 2. Maps, mobs, we can forgive that. Recycling romances too? In the name of saving money, no less?

  No. Just no. Bioware’s worst effort. Just because it’s new and has voice actors, does not make it good.

• [Anonymous]

  If this is an open, sandbox style game, why are homophobes upset? Bang whoever you want. The game’s not forcing them to be gay.

  Having gay forced upon you in a game is when you die in a FPS and somebody teabags your corpse while the kids on vent shout “heteronormative” insults. Yeah. Or something like that.

  • [MertvayaRuka]

    “Having gay forced upon you in a game is when you die in a FPS and somebody teabags your corpse while the kids on vent shout “heteronormative” insults. Yeah. Or something like that.”

    That’s exactly the whiner’s problem. In his mind homosexual=wrong/shameful so while it is all right and even expected to be used as an insult to “losers”, it is a horrible slur against HIM if it’s even implied that his toon is gay or might be attractive to gay NPCs.

• [sdaris]

  Huh? Cyber character sexuality? Is this the 21st century? Tards. Evolve. Now.

• [Chentzilla]

  “Boner annihilator” means you had a boner in the first place, right?

  • [Anonymous]

    Hah hah hah. Somewhat ironic, isn’t it?

• [Anonymous]

  I wish they had dumped all romances and bromances and just concentrated on making the game good. On the other hand, it does give the devs something to be correct about when they go out on damage control.

  More of a story is that EA is removing the right to activate the game or access payed-for DLC if you say something their mods don’t like on their forums.

  Also, game installs SecuROM programs without revealing it in the EULA.

• [Yamara]

  Makes me want to code an omnisexual mod for Baldur’s Gate.

  No, hang on. That was done ten years ago.

  Phobes are very backward people.

• [Oskar]

  The thing that disturbed me about the gay romances in Dragon Age II was that both of the guys you could romance were complete psychopaths. The ladies were both lovely and eminently romanceable, so it was almost certain that no matter what gender you played as, you were gonna get it on with one (or both) of the female companions.

  Honestly, I just wish they’d made Alistair bisexual in the first game. Dude looks like a Harlequin romance cover. In fact, I’m pretty sure that is the reason they made all the characters bisexual, it was a bummer that you couldn’t romance him or Morrigan if you had chosen the wrong gender in the beginning.

• [x-expat]

  The OP came back to edit his original post, basically reiterating the same whines as before:

  “The whole point of the argument relies on the central point that straight male gamers make up a overwhelming majority of players. As I said before, I estimate that the number is around 80% (this includes straight males gamers who plays a females). Now if my numbers are at all wrong (that in reality the split is 60-40-10 (male, female, gay), then consider this post to be null and void, I’ve wasted your time (No doubt some of you already feel that way).”

  Yes, he is wasting time because 90% of statistics are made up on the spot. Or maybe 98%. I made it up. Let’s see some hard numbers (ba-dump-ching!), Bastal, aka Mr. Straight Male Gamer!

  “The idea of privilege is ridiculous. The “privilege” always lies with the majority because if your goal is to make a game that will be liked by as many fans possible, then it makes sense to focus on that largest group. Why should one fan’s enjoyment be more important than five others? It’d more accurate to call “privilege” the idea that some minority group gets special preference for political points. If you really want to be all-inclusive, then I don’t see why homosexuals should get special preference while leaving other minority groups out.”

  So basically, “If all minorities can’t be included, then no minorities can.” One of the base arguments of the internet.

  Sigh.

• [Anonymous]

  Zevran was ok because it was a blonde Antonio Banderas essentially. What guy “wouldn’t”? ;)

• [Anonymous]

  http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110314/#n2147

  I would suspect that some people might not appreciate Dragon Age 2 so much because of the fact that from how some people describe it, you almost have to engage in the gay male relationship or else certain parts of the game can’t be advanced. That certainly seems unfair to force a homosexual relationship in order to progress the gameline, and so in that regard I could be sympathetic.

  • [Lt. Col. w00t]

    RIVAL POINTS ARE NOT BAD!

    Sorry. Just because they’re denoted by the color red does not make them bad. Rivalry doesn’t indicate ‘I hate you’ in DA2, it’s just the TYPE of friendship.

    If you want Anders to heal it IS BETTER to be rivals with him. You can still be rivals and have man-on-man love.

    • [Anonymous]

      And what if you don’t want him to heal? You shouldn’t be forced to have certain relationships with certain people just to progress in the game the way you’d want to progress in the game, and yet that seems to be the case with Dragon Age 2.

• [antigenx]

  I say, “who cares?” If the homophobes don’t want to see man-on-man relationships in the game, they can simply choose not to romance another male character. It seems pretty simple to me. I find it amusing because in theory it would take a game developer (slightly) more effort to force characters to have a specified sexual preference (and thus the in-game choices limited by it), than to have an open game where you can do what you want. Lets be realistic here, what are people seeing? A little kiss, a bare chest, a slight humpy-humpy motion maybe? Is that really worth getting up in arms over? Now, if its a question of parents not wanting their children to see *any sex at all* then they should have the option to PG13 the game and remove all sexual references or not buy the game because the label clearly states strong sexuality as one of the warnings.

  The sex is not the real issue, its the intimacy. That’s what really weirds the ‘phobes out. Men aren’t allowed to express deep affection for each other!

  Choosing to make your character have a homo relationship in the game and then complaining about it is like driving your car into a wall and then complaining the wall was there, when you clearly saw it coming.

  • [Anonymous]

    I agree on everything you said except the PG-13 option. If developers have to make both a mature and PG version of a game(changing the swearing in ME2, removing the sex from Fable), why have a rating system at all? It’s a little like what happened to broadcast television. They made all these rules so that broadcast TV would be acceptable to the masses, with censors standing over every creator’s shoulders stifling them, and then they added a rating system on top of that.

    I don’t care if some shows are kid-friendly and some aren’t. I grew up watching the Simpsons and thought it would be acceptable for my daughter(who’s four)… then I saw Itchy and Scratchy sadistically disembowel each other. Parents need to be familiar with the content. Some swearing and some depictions of intimacy shouldnt have to be cut out of a game that’s violent and geared towards teens and adults.

    We give a pass to violence that we don’t give sex and that sort of goofiness gets worse we surrender choice for someone else’s idea of what PG-13 should be. Anybody else notice how two girls kissing on Buffy was controversial but decapitating vampires onscreen raised very little fuss? Same with Simpsons and Bart’s swearing vs the cartoon cat and mouse violently murdering each other. Romance options for any sexuality will dominate the discussion of this game, not echoes of our culture wars in how the Qunari are dealt with or the moral implication of that thing in Act III that other players will know what I’m talking about.

    • [emmdeeaych]

      The regulations on broadcast television content exist because the airwaves, whether you like it or not, enter your property. You can;t stop them, so they are regulated to help ensure generally palatable material is all that is broadcast, with some greater flexibility after 11pm.

      Video games, otoh, enter your property at your own discretion, entirely.

• [gwailo_joe]

  You can be gay in video games these days? Well, I never. . .how progressive!

  Whilst my generation was playing games, I was looking at porn.

  Game on!

• [Anonymous]

  World of Warcraft: male gamers playing male characters and then spending hundreds-if-not-thousands of hours following around and looking at the uber-muscled ass of their specially-designed ever-so-manly sword-bearer.
  For some reason, they question other guys who play female characters, AND they also object to that first item. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
  Just saying.

• [semiotix]

  Oh, man, I wish I were homophobic just so I could immediately rebrand myself “stridently heteronormative.”

  (On the other hand, “cringe-inducing… boner annihilator” probably isn’t too far from the mark.)

• [g-clef]

  but…but…you could be homosexual in Dragon Age I also. Did this guy just ignore Zevran in DA:O?

• [aelfscine]

  First, like g-clef says, they must have just missed Zevran completely in the first game.

  Second, I suspect this is really about dude-on-dude stuff. Both Mass Effects made it quite possible for girl-on-girl action and no one complained one bit (or at least, if they did, there certainly wasn’t any huge movement against it). But all the men in Mass Effect are straight, no exceptions. So there’s no argument being made here about ‘homosexuality’ as a whole, it’s just people that think seeing two guys kissing is gross. That’s pretty much all the indignation, right there: ‘Ewwwwwww!’

  The porn industry and Mass Effect learned long ago that men are totally fine with homosexuality, as long as no men are involved. I laud Dragon Age for pushing at the boundaries a bit, but am not surprised they’re getting pushed back at.

  • [Chevan]

    No, there was quite a large controversy about the lesbian scenes in the months leading up to the release of the first Mass Effect game.

• [EdCS]

  It’s weird that half of bioware makes a stand with Dragon Age II and (rightly) includes homosexual options, and the other half limits Mass Effect 2 to only heterosexual options.

• [Felton / Moderator]

  The real problem, of course, is that the romances are played out in game-engine CGI, summed up by QT3′s Malcolm Tucker as “cringe-inducing gamer-stigmatizing Uncanny Valley evoking boner-annihilators.”

  I agree, and I move that they film live-action cut scenes with porn stars dressed as the characters.

• [Anonymous]

  Are these bisexual characters or actually omnisexual characters? Not that it really matters, but omnisexual is pretty damn vague. Are these characters kipping with darkspawn and animals as well as people? For that matter, what would the term be for sex between a human, elf, dwarf, or qunari? Cue rule 34 on a 3-way between Morrigan, Sten, and a familiar. <_>

  Have these people played any of Bioware’s previous games? Zevran and Leliana (I guess this is OK since it’s lesbian) routinely hit on you as male or female characters and inter-species intercourse is hardly conservative, which is a big theme of both DA:O and MEI&II. I guess I shouldn’t expect homophobic gamers to be rational in their criticism or choices.

• [Umbriel]

  I’m what a lot of the regulars here would consider “stridently heteronormative”, but like #17 above I’m fairly baffled by the controversy — are the same people troubled by the fact that they can play a sociopathic killer if they want to go around attacking everyone on sight?

  What I _do_ find offputting in games (and movies and fiction, for that matter), is when historical settings are overly PC sanitized — black or asian characters face no racial discrimination; women are accepted as equals in the workplace and on the battlefield; etc. That’s fine for mythical or futuristic settings, but to me it ruins the feel of a historical setting much the way it would to encounter SS-Standartenführer Shlomo Rabinowitz in some future Castle Wolfenstein sequel.

• [Anonymous]

  I suspect the biggest issue is that one character will come on you very obviously in the course of the game whether you are playing a male or a female character and there is no way to let him down without seriously pissing him off. As my roommate (from who i have the info? said “God help you if you do not want to have gay sex with this one guy.”
  This makes it less of an option and more of an “in your face” thing.

  That said there is still no real reason to get upset at this.

• [Johnny Fronthole]

  We seem to be ignoring the real issue here – people are having “romances” in an RPG video game. Just when the stigma attached to being a gamer nerd was almost gone.

  • [penguinchris]

    I’m sure some people do take it too seriously, but in general I think you’re over-thinking this.

    In Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas there are several opportunities to seduce people and to take them to bed – it’s generally a way of getting something else that you want but you could presumably do it just for fun.

    I played as a female in both games (I usually choose a female in games if there’s a choice) and had sex with both men and women in both games (to advance the plot and get things I needed – it should be pointed out that there *are* other ways of getting these things, though).

    And you know what? It’s fun to “role play” (e.g. the RP in RPG) a female character seducing other female characters, and I’m sure others enjoy role playing a male character and seducing other male characters (which as far as I know is possible in the Fallout games). You don’t have to take virtual romances seriously, like you’re implying, to have fun with them.

    That said, obviously some Dragon Age fans *are* taking it a bit too seriously :)

• [Mark Temporis]

  The romance options were very obviously written without female input.

  Your choices as a (straight) guy: cute naive evil elf chick, wild sexy pirate girl.

  As a (straight) gal: dark and moody psycho wizard, dark and moody psycho fighter, dark and moody godbag archer.

• [Lobster]

  Yeah, the “no homo” option is going way overboard.

  That said, people do have sexualities and I do find it a bit odd that so many characters that end up in the player’s party just happen to be bisexual (and never simply homosexual). Not every party animal character needs to be bi because they love sex THAT MUCH. Sure, Isabela might be bi or gay. She also might be straight. To say otherwise is to imply it’s a choice.

  BioWare ought to pick a character’s sexuality in service to THAT character. Not out of consideration for who the player might want to bone.

• [shadowfirebird]

  “heteronormative”??!

  ROFL. Love that.

• [Felton / Moderator]

  From David Gaider’s response (the first link):

  And if there is any doubt why such an opinion might be met with hostility, it has to do with privilege. You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.

  Well spoke!

• [Anonymous]

  As a queer gamer dude, it makes me quietly, terribly happy to have the option. It also makes me happy to see one of the game’s creators so eloquently support a more multifaceted world. Damn those sexy tortured mages, always breaking my heart!

• [sterling]

  A long as they don’t have any elf on dwarf action I’m okay with it. Those damn elves!

  • [Anonymous]

    Who’d like a beard ride?

    • [Gilbert Wham]

      Damn you. Actual beer came out of my nose. It really hurts.

• [TheCrawNotTheCraw]

  ‘”cringe-inducing gamer-stigmatizing Uncanny Valley evoking boner-annihilators.”‘

  Damn…wish I had written that. Laugh.Out.Loud.

• [Rob]

  Who wants a chinless neckbeard wizard psycho making passes at them, gay or not?