Concerning sexuality and romances in video games...
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- Concerning sexuality and romances in video games...130 votes
- I want only heterosexual romances in my game, please no homosexual romances.9.23%
- I want only homosexual romances in my game, please no heterosexual romances.0.00%
- Only bisexual romances please. Set up every romancable NPC as bisexual.5.38%
- Tie the romancable NPCs sexuality to the main char's gender, i.e. if my main char is male then all male romancable NPCs will turn gay, all female ones hetero. If my main char is female then all male romancable NPCs will turn hetero, all female ones gay.2.31%
- I want an option at the beginning of the game, where I can turn on/off homo/bi/heterosexuality. I want three seperate checkboxes, one for each sexuality.6.15%
- I am fine with heterosexual and homo/bisexual romances, but there should be more heterosexual ones because after all there are more heterosexual players than homo/bisexual ones.19.23%
- There should be the same amount of homo/bi/heteorsexual romancable NPCs ingame.8.46%
- I want all sexualities to be included, hardcoded. I do not care for specific amounts of romancable NPCs of any sexuality.31.54%
- I want no romances to be included in the game.3.08%
- I simply do not care about romances.14.62%
Post edited by Tanthalas on
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Btw, i really love how sexuality and romance is made in witcher 2.
The issue of romances is a little bit more complicated then the above options suggest.
It is not an issue of number of characters, but of resources spend. With the amount of work needed for an AAA game today anything other then all bi is simply not feasable. The amount of resources needed for voice/story/animation means that romances must be as economical as possible, offering the most to the biggest portion of the players, even if that means that romanceable characters must be bisexual or have a fluent sexuality.
Sure a wide variety of options might sound nice but you have to keep in mind that, apart from being horribly expensive, this also increases the number of characters, leading to what I call ME2 syndrome, since all the characters in that game existed in their own little bubbles and only had a minimum interaction with each other/the enviroment outside each´s companions personal mission.
The same can be seen in BG. The many NPCs of BG1 hardly reacted to their enviroment or with each other, the fewer companions of BG2 offered much more in this regard.
IMO romances should be but one type of relationship you could have with your companions, and not the most common; RPGs should also provide friendly, adversarial, competitive, mentor-student relationships, and the like.
That also has the added effect of knowing exactly how many lovetalks need to be created, which prevents situations where you end up not finishing a romance because you played too quickly.
Hrm. Getting more and more ideas, here...
I don't think customizing romances entails that everything about the NPCs has become customizable. That's hyperbole. It just gives the player more options.
For example, in the British TV show "Torchwood" protagonist, Jack Harkness, is bisexual. In the original British version of the show (available online) Jack's sexual orientation is very clear due to romantic scenes with both men and women. In the American version of the same show (which aired in the U.S. and is available on Netflix) every romantic scene between Jack and another man was edited out, but some of the more subtle references were left in. This made these remaining references confusing so that some elements of the story didn't make any sense until I'd also seen the British version of the episodes.
The point is that even though I am straight I don't want to disrupt the intended direction of the original story, which will definitly happen if I start messing with major elements of characters' personalities, especially if I don't know which characters were altered. To get back to this poll, I think you may be right about the checklist option, but only if we are talking about new characters that are added to be gay or bisexual, since in the present vanilla game neither exists and alteration would be necessary for any to exist.
90 percent of dialogue written for any npc relating to the pc doesn't have to do with romance - it has to do with human compassion and friendship. Yet, 90 percent of what game devs write for npc character development is activated only upon activation of romance variables. I think that's crazy. If you don't want to hook up with them, they won't be your friend, confide in you, let you get to know them, help them with their unfinished business before joining you, and will just sit there in your party saying nothing because you're not a sexual match? Sorry, but I think that's really dumb.
The best written npc I've every played with was Berelinde's Gavin for the BG trilogy. Ninety percent of his character development and dialogue was common to both his female romantic partner, or to his male or female friend. The remaining ten percent of dialogue was centered around either a female who would eventually become his wife, or a female who would at least stay in a serious relationship with him. There were a few sub-dialogue tables for a female who slept with him and dumped him, or one who cheated on him. And none of those cut off the friendship dialogues. The only thing that would do that were a certain number of rudeness or indifference responses given by a PC of any gender.
The best gay romances I've had in games were ones that I made up for myself in my own head with male npc's who had no "romances" written for them at all. It was left up to the player's imagination.
I enjoyed a few romances specifically written for gay men - Nathaniel, Faren, and Zevran. Zevran had, if I recall correctly, a grand total of two sentences written for him that addressed the issue of male-on-male love. The rest was common to either gender, with only the pronouns changed. And Faren was also written for either gender - I have no idea how he plays as in love with a female Charname, but he had a couple of paragraphs written specifically addressing the problems inherent in having two men be in love with each other.
Trying to please everybody with a game romance invokes a myriad of writing problems. What I saw from the DA2 video that @Shandyr posted looked like a good effort, but I don't want to play DA2, because it looks like a bad game from everything I can read about it.
Yes, folks, as a gay man, what I am looking for is A GOOD GAME. I'm playing to pretend like I am a hero, and part of a band of heroes, who can use their superpowers to save a world that is worth saving, while loving each other of both genders, in FRIENDSHIP. You can leave sex completely up to my imagination, and if you create a handsome, interesting male character, my imagination will do the rest, thank you. Just make him willing to share his backstory completely with his FRIENDS, and leave sex out of it, and I will be just fine.
You know, your version of the "canon" does resonate with me very well. My only sad regret from being a gay man is that I cannot have biological children, because I think I might have made a very good father. And, both Aerie and Jaheira are female types with whom I could have very deep relationships in real life.
I would agree with you times ten about the emotional resonance potential of story of the Baldur's Gate Trilogy and its characters with many, many diffferent types of people, including us gay men.
Ha, now if only I could "marry" Aerie or Jaheira while having a sexual relationship with Ano. And I wish there were women in real life who might marry gay men for the benefits of that (understanding, smart, funny, compassionate, the perfect companion, absolutely devoted to the right woman) minus any sex, and who didn't care if he had occasional relations with other men, as long as he always came home to her.
You know what would be fun to imagine? Gay me marries Aerie, Ano impregnates her because he likes both me and her, Ano and I are combat buddies and best friends with occasional benefits, and I raise Aerie's and Ano's baby while the two of them go off and fight for the world together. Nobody but the three of us would ever know about the baby's true parentage. LOL, see what I mean about my imagination being my best friend and best story-writer?
I'm a bit old for cybersex, be it with an NPC or otherwise. Log on a computer to a game filled with demons and dragons to slay, and I'm supposed to get married and plow into a pile of pixels? Shackles are in real life for the former, and bars are for most of the latter.
And I'd play them all without a problem.
The thing with Ano and me, is that he is *exactly* my type. I mean, irrationally, moth to flame, that boy is going to *destroy* me and I know it, omg, I can't help myself, he's SO handsome and strong and muscular, those eyes, those lips, that beard.... AUGH! ..... ROFL, yeah, so, he's my type, okay, sue me.
I resonate precisely and hopelessly with his backstory, as well. I was raised by a drug-addicted, alcoholic mother with daddy issues and who expected me to be her salvation. That made me a man with permanent self-esteem issues and a flip-sided concurrent superiority-inferiority complex. See a connection? I don't think anybody can understand my beloved Ano as well as I do. Now, if only he would love me, my being a gay man and his being a straight man, and all that. As far as the almost universal dislike of the boy, or even hatred of him, from the community - that just makes me love him all the more fiercely - "You and me against the world, Ano, my love!"
ROFL. See, leave the good stuff to the player's imagination. All game devs have to do is to stop the ridiculous practice of making their game characters' willingness to share their backstories with *only* their sex partners. I think that that is *so* phony. Putting sex into games at all is questionable, in my opinion. If we're going to put sex into games, then we should at least make that just a bonus of some kind, not a prerequisite for enjoying the character. The original BG1 had it right. The original BG2 opened up good possibilities, but started down the path of getting it wrong.
Should we have sex in high fantasy video games? Well, judging by the number of people who like it, I guess the answer is yes, since there have been enough of them who have made sexual romance into a staple, defining feature of Bioware games and their corporate descendants. Should we have at least one gay sex relationship present in Bioware-descended games? Well, yes, if you're going to put sex in video games, it's important to include at least one representative sex scene for all the possible permutations, or else you will be causing emotional pain and exclusion to a significant minority of your potential market of players, as well as an arguable contribution to "evil" and "suffering" in your society.
The solution? In my opinion, the most morally responsible thing to do is to leave sex out of video games. If you're playing a game to play a sexual fantasy, you should be playing some kind of Sims-like adult game. Otherwise, all the content in a high-fantasy or sci-fi computer game should be accessible by all players of either gender relating to all npc's of either gender, and leave sex only peripherally hinted at, if at all. If you *must* include sex scenes in your game (honestly, would DA:O have sold significantly fewer copies if it had contained no sex scenes? Would the BG trilogy have sold fewer copies if it had had no baby with Aerie, and no two paragraph sex scenes, and if all the other Jaheira-Aerie-Ano dialogues had been for friends of either gender?), then, those sex scenes should be accessible by any gender combo, and you must write all dialogues with all possible pronoun gender combos.
I guess that this essay is leading me toward possibly aligning myself with one of the poll responses. If you *must* have sex in your video game, it should be as fairly as possibly accessible to all orientations. That means either a control slider, or an adjust-sexual-dialogues-and-scenes to either gender. So, perhaps the DA2 solution is the best one. But, the writing problems are still there. There have to be dialogue responses that express sexual interest or not. The DA2 "heart" might be a workable solution.
But I'm still not convinced that the best solution is not to leave blatant sexual situations out of computer high fantasy and sci-fi games. Is this whole conundrum really necessary?
Snark aside, few women like the idea of marrying a man who insists on extramarital affairs from the get-go. Especially if the reason is that he's too repulsed by her body to be intimate with her. Honestly, it comes off as wanting a fake marriage to look "normal" to society and feel better about yourself, because I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to marry a man you love instead.
I have nothing against games with some Bi/Homo romance. I simply choose to ignore them. Since they aren't frequent, I'm fine with it. But too much of this in a game will probably make me feel awkward. Thus, my primary option in this poll is to restrain their number.
My secondary choice would be to make romance optional, and be able to disable them. That's mainly because sometimes they are so incoherent... It feels out of the game. BGII was a game with pretty realistic romance, and hard to get. But to be honest MEII romance were more laughable then anything else.