Polly says her back hurts

Whenever Kaiden's in the party all the dialogue options should be "What the hell is he doing here?'" -stryker116 on PA forums

So I am back to rant more about Mass Effect. Not a long rant, but it has to happen. I just rescued Liara in the first major mission on "Hardcore" difficulty and already already I am back on a path to fail the romance plotline. Goddamn you Bioware, why did you make Kaiden such a whinney bitch. Seriously, I think they wrote this game with the idea that there would never be a straight female Sheperd because no one would ever like that stupid guy. So again, to gain the EXP for that plot line my options are to sleep with an loser or les-out all over the place. This probably doesn't make much sense because I am trying to play the game as I write this, I am angry at it again but i can't stop playing.

We walked arm in arm, But I didn't feel his touch

So Maggie Greene has an article over at Kotaku about sex in games and the maturity of the industry. Practically everyone, inlcuding myself, is guilty of ranting about sex in games, the need for the industry to grow up, put a stop to the boobs, blah blah blah. If you are not up to date on the current discussions online the article has links to the most recent relevant rants before it takes off. She makes one point about halfway through that I like (not suprising as I have argued this as well), mainly that right now we are stuck with mostly linear stories in games, so why not steal from movies until technology expands the possibilites with interactive media. Truely interative stories are certianly the utopia we seek, but it is going to be a while before technology and design can support it. As she notes, the ultimate solution to the problem of sex in games is better storytelling, although if you follow Ken Levine you will argue that what we need is better narrative in games and leave the telling to the world. Kyle has probably already skimmed it so about half of my readership doesn't need this post, but I thought of the above image and decided it needed creation.

Hello, I love you

I generally hate reading really long posts, so I am going to try and keep mine shorter from now on.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about sex in games from all sides of the war. I won’t recount these events as you are probably familiar with the “report” on Fox News and the backlash which is still running through the tubes. Now I have to admit I have not played Mass Effect myself, but I have seen the scene around online and it goes no further than your standard PG-13 side boob type love scene found in almost every movie. And that is exactly the problem. It is almost a challenge to find a movie without at least some sexual undertones, but the second there is any mention of sex within a game the whole world explodes. This is not only keeping the adult market from making some amazing Wii porn games, but also holding back the development of games about human interaction.

As I mentioned last time, the actions a player is allowed to perform in modern games are limited to shooting, climbing on boxes and other such physical, violent actions. Obviously there are some exceptions, but we still have games about things and not about people. While this may be due in large part to the people making games (nerdy young men mostly) and technical limitations (see my last post), I think our societies attitudes also play a large role. Unless a game developer pushes violence to the point where it is gross (I am looking at you Manhunt 2), they can get away with pretty much anything. This is because we as a society seem ok with violence in media. As seen by the lack of upset over No More Heroes in the US, it is OK to slice hundreds of people half, spewing blood everywhere. Just, please, don’t sleep with the love interest you have been courting for a good part of the game.

This means that as long as games are limited to the traditional violent actions they will not be shunned by retailers and the mass media, making it safer to continue on our current path of basically non-stop “action movie” games. The problem is that people don’t just kill one another, but we do fall in love and we do have sex. In fact I would think we do a lot more rolling in the hay than mass murdering. I am not saying that humans spend all their time either copulating or killing, but try and find me a sitcom where there isn’t a sex episode. We aren’t going to get people games, our dramas and our chick flicks, until we can at least talk about sex in a game. First, though, I think the industry will have to prove it can portray women in a mature manner, but that is a topic for another time.