Sexual Politics in The Witcher 2

So I’m planning to keep on writing about The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for two reasons. First, I question the productivity of having all writers everywhere write about a single game/book/movie for a few weeks before quickly and permanently moving on to something newer. Second, I’m a freelancer, and I don’t get review copies all that often. So when I do get one, I show my appreciation by being thorough both in my experience with the work and in my analysis of it.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about just how questionable the game’s sexual politics get toward the end there.

There are male mages in The Witcher 2, but all of them are minor villains—sexless area bosses who serve mostly to add some fireballs and such to important battles. Female magic-users are a different matter, uniformly attractive and, almost without exception, sexually available to Geralt.

When I say that they are uniformly attractive, by the way, I mean it: many of their animations, both for spell-casting and for flirtation or sex, are identical.

Come to think of it, most women in The Witcher 2 are uniform in that way, drawing from a handful of body-types and a somewhat shallow pool of movements. One sex scene late in the game (the one with that sexy spy sort of a sorceress) is little more than a palette swap of an earlier encounter with a recently rescued she-elf. The only action unique to the late-game sequence involves said sorceress slapping Geralt on the ass before diving into bed with him. Which marks her as—empowered?

In any case, the universal hotness and promiscuity of sorceresses seems innocuous enough—even if somewhat at odds with the “mature” or “grown-up” intent of the Witcher series—and certainly an improvement over the prudish, game-long courtships typical of Bioware fare.

That is, until the third act. Oh my, the third act. Men and women both get killed, but undeniably, the women fare far worse. Sorceresses are pretty much exclusively the ones to be shackled and imprisoned, beaten and tortured, and on and on and on. One unfortunate character (the only authoritative and socially ascendant lesbian in the game, incidentally) gets blinded with a spoon.

In a game replete with choices and divergent paths, that rather grisly spoon-blinding business is inexplicably mandatory. And for God’s sake, it happens while Geralt is standing there watching. Geralt, whom the game has taken such lengths to establish as a man allergic to injustice—and who refuses to kill a war criminal literally seconds later—does not give the player the option to intervene and stop a then-defenseless sorceress from having her eyes gouged out. That’s bizarre, not to mention wildly incongruous.

My sneaking suspicion is that CD Projekt RED simply wanted to heighten the stakes of the plot and the grittiness of the world as the game drew to a close, and that the above was simply the most direct route to that destination. But that idea is more than a little upsetting. As Film Crit Hulk pointed out in the context of Arkham City, misogyny and violence against women are all-too-common go-tos for readymade videogame grit.

But whatever their reason, the game’s last few sections contain a hugely disproportionate amount of horrific and not-quite-necessary violence inflicted on attractive and partially interchangeable women. That’s a shame in a game that can and often does do considerably better.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile, ” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

The Perversity of the Successes of The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is a surreal mash-up of the original Legend of Zelda, a roguelike, and Smash TV, in roughly that order. It’s also a reflection of the collective fears of Christian fundamentalists, and of everyone else’s collective fears of Christian fundamentalism. And it’s also a shooter where the bullets are a child’s tears. In short, it’s an Edmund McMillen game.

McMillen is the designer of Super Meat Boy, Gish, and more than 20 other (mostly free) games, including Coil, Time Fcuk, Aether, and Grey-Matter. But nothing he’s done previously–no, not even 2008’s Cunt--is quite as bonkers as The Binding of Isaac.

Visually, this latest game is preoccupied with a small number of disgusting things: blood, poo, and bodies that are falling apart, or that were never put together correctly in the first place. It’s gross, and it’s dark, and it’s stuff that kids shouldn’t have to confront–and yet at the same time, it’s exactly the kind of stuff that tends to fascinate kids, and particularly kids in bad situations.

Add to that the random generation, with its constant cycle of adaptation, learning, and skin-of-your-teeth near-failure (usually followed by actual failure, and getting booted back to the beginning), and it all starts to gel: Isaac’s world is morbid in the way that kids can be morbid, and cruel in the way that kids can be cruel.

And I know, bodily fluids and difficult video games are Edmund McMillen’s bread and butter. None of that is new to him, and so none of it is in this particular game purely for thematic effect. But McMillen’s obsessions are more cohesive than they might at first appear, and so accidentally or not, the terrifying world of The Binding of Isaac makes a sick kind of sense.

 
Surreal and Sacred Things

When I said that the game was surreal, by the way, I used the term advisedly. Blood, poo, and dead-or-messed-up bodies are not just obsessions that morbid children and Edmund McMillen have in common. They are also what surrealist painter Salvador Dali described as the three central themes of his work, and the three physical substances most closely tied to the sacred.Strange though it may seem, there’s an illustrious history in art of trying to process the sacred in a dreamlike way, and ending up with the piles of primal, indeterminate bodily stuff that define Isaac’s imaginary world.

The Binding of Isaac is nothing if not obsessed with the sacred, and with people’s batshit-crazy reactions to what they consider sacred. It would be a shame to spoil anything specific, but suffice to say that Issac plays on the (totally imagined) connection between Dungeons and Dragonsand Satanic cults, and on the (unfortunately not-so-imagined) tendency of unbalanced people to hurt others on assumed instructions from God.

To understand how that relates to the action in The Binding of Isaac, you have to know the Biblical story from which the game takes its name: Abraham hears the voice of God, which demands a blood sacrifice in the form of his first-born son, Isaac. Abraham is both ready and willing to do as he’s told, until at the last possible moment, God informs him that he has been punk’d.

It’s a truly bizarre test of faith. Existentialists like Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre have spilled a whole lot of ink trying, and failing, to puzzle out just what Abraham’s actions meant, ethically and theologically. But whatever the story is supposed to teach us, we can certainly agree that, if someone were to follow in Abraham’s footsteps today, that person would very rightly be considered nuts.

So in McMillen’s version, it’s Isaac’s mother who hears (or thinks she hears) the voice of God, commanding her to kill her son. The game takes place in the imaginary world to which Isaac escapes while awaiting his fate. Like I said, people: dark stuff.

 
Escapism and Empowerment

Now, Isaac is hardly the first kid to escape into a videogame–I know I’ve done it once or twice–and the scenario makes me wonder: Why do we want to escape to worlds where everything is trying to kill us?  Is it that mastering that kind of danger against all odds makes us feel capable? I did feel pretty powerful when I (finally, finally) defeated Isaac’s final boss.

Indeed, the sick joke at the heart of the game is that even Isaac’s central tears-as-bullets ability, pathetic as it is, represents an empowerment fantasy. Little kids cry to make the monsters go away. Isaac’s tears actually do make the monsters go away. Especially once he’s found the laser tears upgrade.

Come to think of it, there’s a second sick joke in the way that, after a few hours of playing, you stop noticing the game’s pitch-black themes. You’re just playing to win, blood and poo be damned, and religion and child abuse are the furthest things from your mind. What’s on your mind is making your character über, and finding all the secret items, and unlocking the alternate characters. You know, video game stuff.

Videogames tend to dull our sensitivity to generic, photorealistic depictions of violence, and we might think that’s because intellectually undemanding kinds of killing–killing that makes the player feel like a badass, or the Chosen One, or both–are not all that affecting. But The Binding of Isaac shows that we can become equally numb to abstracted, deeply personal (frankly more interesting) depictions of violence. Even a damaged, traumatized protagonist is really just a ship for us to upgrade and take into battle.

That’s The Binding of Isaac in a nutshell. The fact that I can turn a blind eye to the game’s darkness, and just enjoy the mechanics and the design–that’s a big part of what compels me to keep playing. But ironically, it’s also the darkest thing about the game. What’s sick isn’t that Edmund McMillen made a game about religious fanatics, child abuse, and murder. What’s sick is that he made that game this much fun.

Choice without Choice: Sex and DLC in Mass Effect 2

About a year ago, I wrote a couple of posts about sex and coupling in Mass Effect 2. Part One dealt with the game’s strange approach to monogamy, and Part Two was an attempt to catalog all of the romantic options available to Shepards both gay and straight. I had intended to write a Part Three after playing the much-ballyhooed “Lair of the Shadow Broker” add-on, which promised to address at least some of the plot issues that had been bothering me.

But I made a mistake: After playing “Lair of the Shadow Broker,” I played another Mass Effect 2 add-on called “Arrival,” a tacked-on, poorly written solo mission that commits what I consider a cardinal sin for any non-linear game: It forces the player-character to walk into a very obvious trap, makes it clear that the player-character (somehow) does not see the trap coming, and then tries to leverage that unavoidable mistake into the story as a hard-won lesson.

It’s not like watching the hero of a horror movie open a door that has a killer behind it. It’s more like having a book you’re reading sprout wings and start pounding itself repeatedly against a window pane. It’s  a guarantied way to make the protagonist look like a gullible, unrelatable simpleton, and to instantly derail a long-form narrative with the cheapest of cheap ploys.

After playing that little gem, I promptly uninstalled the game and stopped thinking about it for a while.

In fairness, “Lair of the Shadow Broker” is not nearly so maddening. It provides some well-paced action movie dialogue, it throws in some well-placed set-pieces, and it fleshes out several of the game’s core characters. It even (minor spoiler) introduces a new alien race to the Mass Effect universe, and provides a reasonably plausible explanation for why we’re just now hearing about said species.

But does it make Shepard’s relationship to Liara any more clear, or compelling, or for that matter, intelligible? The short answer is that yes, it sort of does, but at the expense of player agency. The longer answer will contain lots more spoilers.

You see, there was this great moment where Liara confronted me about romancing Tali, and I thought yes! this is what I came for! The issue was being addressed. It was just a quick exchange, but hey, it was something. I pressed on, and I think there was a car chase or something, and I kissed Liara during a boss fight, and it was all lovely, because I thought that it was leading to a big decision: Liara or Tali?

But the decision, when it came, was no decision at all. While I could tell Liara that I was going to stick with Tali,  I couldn’t tell Tali that I was going back to Liara, for the simple and probably budget-driven reason that the DLC pack didn’t contain any new conversations with Tali. If I wanted to be with Liara, I had to lie to Tali–or more accurately, I had to simply not discuss the matter.

Or in other words, if I’d wanted to be with Liara, then I would have had to stay in the same state of frustrated indecision that had bothered me in the core game, and that the DLC was supposed to resolve.

As it happened, I got to act out the one romantic path that interested me most. But critically, I didn’t choose it. I simply went with the one and only plot-line that BioWare had actually written. So I suppose that this series on sex in Mass Effect 2 now ends on an inessential, half-hearted note. Strangely appropriate.

Tracy Morgan Is Not the Point

Let’s be clear about something: Tracy Morgan’s “choice of words” is not the issue, and what is “in [his] heart” is none of my concern. What is in the guy’s heart does not matter to me, and unless you know him personally, it should not matter to you.

What matters is that the actual ideas he was expressing–that gay children’s sexuality should be met with condemnation or even violence, and that the victims of bullying deserve to be bullied because they are not “tough” enough–these are things that people actually do think.

Some people do spurn or disown their gay kids, and some gay kids do become the victims of violence, and some parents of gay kids do turn a blind eye to that violence, or even participate in it. All of these things happen. It matters that these things happen.

It does not matter what is in Tracy Morgan’s heart. It does not matter whether he really meant the hateful things he said. What matters is that he said them, and that he seemed to mean them to everyone listening. As Kurt Vonnegut would have it, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

It does matter that Tracy Morgan is seeking to make amends. But this shouldn’t be about him, or about whether his fans have polite society’s permission to remain his fans. This should be about the things that he said, which at the time he seemed to mean, and which some people do actually think, even if Tracy Morgan does not happen to be one of those people.

We tend to let teachable moments such as this one pass us by. We tend to insist on apologies that–heartfelt or not–do very little to address the larger issues at work, and then we tend to ask, did this famous guy apologize well enough? And if he did, by some measure or another, then we tend to move on. And so nothing all that useful generally happens.

Nothing useful happened when Michael Richards said a bunch of racist crap at The Comedy Store, for example. And so far, nothing useful has happened as a result of The Great Tracy Morgan Kerfuffle.

And for that matter: Nothing useful happened when Chris Brown beat his girlfriend to within an inch of her life. Nothing useful happened when Michael Vick tortured and killed dogs for fun and profit. We didn’t have a serious discussion about domestic abuse, or about animal abuse, or about the corrosive nature of celebrity.

What we need right now is a serious discussion about gay rights, and about the prejudice and indifference and cruelty holding gay rights back. What we need is to say that, yes, Tracy Morgan should be ashamed of the things he said–but that far more importantly, everyone who really thinks those things should be ashamed. Everyone who thinks those things is wrong. The people in question, whether or not they are celebrities, should stop thinking those inhumane, immoral, shameful things. That’s the point.

If we allow this to be entirely about Tracy Morgan, then we’ve seriously missed the point. Again.

We’re Not Objective

If you’re not sure what The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was about, this is what it was about:

No, not the bit about turtles--though for the record, I agree.

There seems to have been some confusion as to whether Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the rest of the Daily Show folks are subtly saying that we should all vote Democrat, or very clearly saying exactly what the fuck they’re saying–namely, that our country is not on the brink of devolving into a socialist/fascist/communist/theocratic dystopia, and that our news media spend about 99% of their time callously exploiting (and creating) people’s fears, rather than trying to keep the political process honest. That’s not a partisan position. It’s just reasonable.

Which is not to say that Jon Stewart has no political ideology. Everyone has opinions, and everyone is biased. If our news organizations would stop worrying about appearing objective, and instead use that energy to be intelligent and accurate, then perhaps they could do some worthwhile work.

Look at it this way: If NPR really were an objective news organization–and they clearly think that they are, since they banned their employees from attending the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, lest they should appear biased–then Juan Williams’ opinions about Muslims (or anything else) would not be grounds for termination. As long as Williams did his job well–as long as he did objective reporting–his opinions would not matter in the least, right? Or are we are arguing that a good journalist must have no personal biases? Because in that case, there has never been, nor will there ever be, such a thing as a good journalist.

The whole idea of objective reporting is misleading. Having an opinion is not bad reporting. Having an unsupported opinion is bad reporting, just as unsupported facts are not factual. We have replaced the burden of proof (which supports honest argument) with a pretense to objectivity (which fosters dishonesty, demagoguery, and equivocation).

Hence all this idiotic hang-wringing about Jon Stewart’s ideological position. NPR asks, “Is it a political rally? Is it comedy?” It’s both. That’s how satire works. Case closed.

To ask whether the rally supports or opposes Obama–or the Tea Party, or Glenn Beck, or whoever one thinks it supports or opposes–is to miss the point entirely. The rally did not espouse a party affiliation, nor did it aspire to milquetoast opinionlessness. The point was specifically to show that an awful lot of people would like to be addressed as rational adults rather than frightened, malleable, exceptionally stupid children.

When most of the people with platforms purport to have no opinions, only the most extreme and incendiary caricatures of political thought (the very loudest opinions) get any airtime. When everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but is also required to support it, then we can have a variety of viewpoints and a substantive debate between them.

Jon Stewart isn’t trying to tell you how to vote tomorrow. He’s just reminding you that, when voters can recognize bullshit, Democracy is much healthier. So here’s my small contribution to that noble goal: Whenever a news organization claims to be objective, that news organization is lying to you, or else to themselves. Yes, any news organization. Yes, that includes the one that you personally like and/or with whom you personally agree. It can be surprisingly hard to inform oneself, but we can start by contumaciously ignoring sources of deliberate misinformation and self-congratulatory, intellectually dishonest pseudo-objectivity.

Your Opponent Is Not Your Enemy

Bill Maher frustrates the hell out of me. He’s clearly smart, he’s often funny, and his show allows other smart and/or funny people the opportunity to have lengthy discussions about important things. But he’s also infinitely smug, and Real Time–when it isn’t hosting some of the best political discussions on television–takes far too many detours into lazy, self-satisfied, Jay Leno-style late night pablum. That kind of bad writing reduces the overall quality of the show considerably, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict or weaken the substantive discussion for which I tune in.

This kind of crap does, though: “When it comes to voting,” Maher said on October 1, “you’ve got to grow up and realize that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.” In this analogy, Democrats are the “disappointing friend,” and Republicans are the “deadly enemy.”

Maher’s statement struck me as inflammatory partisan bullshit, probably because it is, in fact, inflammatory partisan bullshit. But to be fair, I heard Bill Maher say that only a few hours after hearing Jon Stewart say that we really, really need be wary of precisely that sort of idiocy.

There’s a difference between disagreeing with people–like newscasters on Fox News that I think are incorrect in their analysis of the day’s events–and people that threaten to kill you for putting a cartoon image of Mohammad in a bear suit. And that’s a line that we too often forget.

Our system genuinely allows for peaceable exchanges of power, Stewart reminds us on NPR’s Fresh Air. Even if [INSERT POLITICIAN YOU REALLY DON'T LIKE] comes to power,

we’ll be fine. You know, we had a Civil War. Just–we’re not that fragile. And I think we always have to remember that people can be opponents, but not enemies. And there are enemies in the world. We just need the news media to help us delineate, and I think that’s where the failing is: That the culture of corruption that exists in the media doesn’t allow us to delineate between enemies and opponents, and that’s where we sort of fall into trouble.

Or to put it as succinctly as possible: Al-Qaeda is my enemy, and Glenn Beck is my opponent, and seriously, there’s a difference.

And it’s a very real difference, and obscuring it is an historically situated political strategy that, according to Rick Perlstein, Richard Nixon helped to pioneer between 1966 and 1972. It is not an inevitable consequence of human nature, or of the political process, but rather a matter of “using the angers, anxieties, and resentments” of the day to unite voters against a common, essentially imagined enemy.

When Republicans suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America’s enemies, as he had come to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.

Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way–that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland (Scribner, 2009): xii.

The imagined conflict between the forces of light and those of darkness (with light defined as whatever I think, and darkness defined as whatever I don’t) has come to dominate the American political landscape, to the extreme detriment of the nation’s public discourse. We actually forget that someone who wants to kill us belongs to a different category than someone with whom we disagree about the role of government in regulating commerce.

And I get it: A world composed entirely of absolutes would be much easier to sort out than our own messy, complicated one. But we have a responsibility to live in the real world, because we’re adults, and growing up isn’t about realizing “that there’s a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy,” as Bill Maher said the other night. Growing up is about realizing that the person with whom you disagree is not necessarily an enemy, let alone a deadly one.

There really are deadly enemies in the world, and we’ll be in no position to confront them if we waste all of our time and energy squabbling with one another along cynically delineated partisan lines.

Sleeping with a Trope: Sex and Character in Mass Effect 2

I want to be as clear as possible about two things. First: Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

Second: I come to praise BioWare, not to bury them. As I said in my previous post, very few game designers are tackling the issue of sex at all, let alone well. Even if it sounds like I’m beating up on the Mass Effect games–and even if I am, in fact, beating up on the Mass Effect games–it’s only because BioWare’s huge, branching narratives have so much as-yet-unrealized potential, as far as sex, love, and coupling in video games. If these games did not contain the seed of something truly remarkable, then there would be no reason to complain. That said, there are currently plenty of reasons to complain.

For example: If you want to play a gay male Shepard, then you’re out of luck. The necessary material simply isn’t in the game. If you want to play a lesbian Shepard, then you do have some options–none of them particularly satisfying, and none of them coequal with the romances available to heterosexual Shepards. The lesbian options are:

1. A series of weirdly silent booty-calls.
2. Celibacy, by your own choice.
3. Celibacy, by the choice of your love-object.
4. Death.

As BioWare explains it, the game lacks meatier queer options because they, the designers, “still view it as… if you’re picturing a PG-13 action movie. That’s how we’re trying to design it.” Which is pragmatic. PG13 action moves are a known quantity. They sell. Their tropes are familiar to besuited studio execs and deep-pocketed teenagers alike.

But an action-RPG is not a PG13 action movie, because PG13 action movies (1) are linear and static rather than branching and elastic, and (2) last around two hours rather than twenty. In a BioWare game, there’s room for a lot more variance. The queer stuff could be in there without any of your more homophobic customers seeing it, or even knowing that it’s available.

And also, it’s bad enough that games have ratings of their own, courtesy of the ESRB. Do we really need to drag another ratings board–the MPAA, those perpetually offended cultural dinosaurs–into this discussion? As soon as you conceive your project as “a PG13 action movie,” and start subtracting content in order to meet those parameters, you’ve surrendered creative control to a small, fussy group of unelected officials. Your profit margin is held at knife-point.

Well, you know, ratings boards seem to say, if you were to shorten the female orgasm in this scene, then we wouldn’t have to make it illegal for minors to see your film, and then maybe your film could actually make some money. Not that we’re telling you to change the content of your film or anything.

Self-censorship under duress is still censorship. In a way, it’s the very worst kind of censorship, because it demonstrates that otherwise worthwhile artists are really and truly interpolated–that expression is less free than we might like to think, because Tipper Gore and Jack Valenti are the ones who actually decide what does and does not make the cut. It’s a feedback loop of cowardly omissions, and it’s really not a cycle that BioWare should be perpetuating. They themselves have set the proverbial bar much higher than that.

All of that being said, what are would-be queer Shepards actually missing? What are the core romantic possibilities in Mass Effect 2? Since my primary Shepard is male, I will exclude those who are unattainable to him (Jacob Taylor, Garrus Vakarian, and Thane Krios) from this discussion. I have yet to experience those arcs for myself, and I don’t want to judge the content of a video game solely by YouTube clips of someone else playing it.

So, with that qualification, let’s get to it:

Samara and Morinth are a mother and daughter who are visually identical, but morally opposite, and their roles as potential lovers reflect this dichotomy. A romance with the morally upright mother results the aforementioned courtly rebuff: “Another time, another life.” A romance with the morally corrupt daughter–who is an “Ardat-Yakshi,” essentially a cross between a sociopath and a succubus–furnishes Shepard with the aforementioned violent death.

Miranda Lawson is a Bond girl. I thought I was the best, Shepard, but I’m nothing compared to you. Let’s have sex somewhere other than a bedroom.

Jack‘s romantic storyline is a rescue fantasy. She’s been through a lot, but Shepard can save her, if only he will (1) take on her emotional baggage, and then (2) proceed to a tender sex-while-crying sequence. Casual sex will not save her, but then again, neither will friendship; only four parts listening to one part sexing will do the job.

Tali’Zora vas Normandy née Neema is the most interesting of the bunch, for my money. Tali is a quarian–that is, a member of a species whose immune systems are too weak to allow for survival outside of their homeworld, and who therefore wear full-body “environmental suits” in order to protect themselves from infection. This means that Tali is essentially wearing a veil–which, along with her “sexy accent,” sets off every Orientalism alarm in my theory-addled brain. It also means that, if a human and a quarian are to have sex, they must first take some precautions.

But strangely enough, the player cannot offer any material assistance on that front. You can only say that you’re willing to wait for her, which isn’t actually a sacrifice; the way the game is structured, you can’t consummate any full-on romance until just before your final mission, so you’d be waiting regardless. Your contribution, were you allowed to make one, could have been a simple one: Buy such-and-such an herb, which you can only get from such-and-such a store, or on such-and-such a planet. Even something as cursory as that would have gone a long way toward making the affair feel like a loving relationship between equals, rather than a conquest. As it stands, waiting for Tali has a slightly sexist subtext–namely, that making sex safe is a woman’s responsibility, and that a man has only to keep it zipped up while she, the woman, makes the necessary (and somewhat mysterious) preparations.

Indeed, the other problem is that, whereas Tali approaches sex like a person–she is nervous, she has to worry about the effect it will have on her body, she makes jokes to hide her discomfort–Shepard can only approach sex like the flawless, untouchable Übermensch that he is. He can be a kindly superhero; he can be patient as well as unstoppable. But in the end, his sexuality is the bluntest of all possible instruments: It humbles Miranda, it redeems Jack, and it lures Tali out of her shell, not to mention her veil.

BioWare has gone out of their way to complicate Shepard’s moral behavior, but simultaneously, they have made his sexual behavior straightforward to the point of being Messianic. His gun can err, but his penis cannot. Even if Shepard makes a bad sexual choice–sleeping with Jack too soon, sleeping with Morinth at all–he still has sex like a leading man, all swagger and wink and quip.

Maybe there won’t be a really good sex scene in a video game until a video game allows its hero to have disappointing sex, or awkward sex, or in other words, bad sex. Of course, such an event would be well outside the vocabulary of a PG13 action movie–which, honestly, could only be a good thing for the Mass Effect series, and for video games as a medium.

Asari Monogamy: Sex and Immersion in Mass Effect 2

Every BioWare game since Baldur’s Gate II has included at least one “romance” story path, wherein the player-character can have sex with a non-player character. I don’t think I’m stepping on anyone’s toes by pointing out that a lot of the romance material has been pretty embarrassing.

Then again, there has yet to be really good sex scene in any video game. I’m not talking about pornography–there’s plenty of that, thank you very much–but rather a scene that contains sex, and is also relevant to the themes, plot, or characters of the game. Neither, then, am I talking about the James Cameron-style non-sex scene from the first Mass Effect game. It’s not exactly a sex scene, because there are no sex-acts in it, and it’s not really a good scene in any case, because it has nothing much to do with any of the characters involved. The spaceman must sleep with some spacelady before the two share a final, impossible mission, and that’s all there is to it; the genre demands PG13 nookie, significance be damned.

Since Mass Effect 2 improves upon its predecessor in so many ways, I was excited to see where the game would go as far as romance. Now that I know, my feelings are very mixed. There are plenty of missteps, but they are missteps in uncharted territory. Other games simply aren’t going there, so it’s worth considering BioWare’s latest, slightly less awkward foray into gamic courtship. Spoilers will most assuredly follow.

For those of you who haven’t played Mass Effect (and who don’t mind the aforementioned spoilers), the series stars one Commander Shepard, a starship captain (either male or female, depending upon the player’s preference). The series forms an enormous, branching narrative in which the known universe and its inhabitants are shaped by player choice. In the first game, a male Shepard can choose one of two sexual partners: Ashley Williams, a xenophobic action girl, or Liara T’Soni, a green-skinned space babe who, like the catlike noble savages in Avatar, happens to be blue. A female Shepard can also sleep with Liara, or can choose instead a walking, talking plywood plank by the name of Kaiden Alenko.

Now: If one’s Shepard schtupped Liara in the original Mass Effect, then Mass Effect 2 will contain this strange reunion:

We learn that Liara has hardened–that she has attained notoriety, and perhaps even infamy. Then there is that kiss (around 0:53 in the above video), one of the strangest kisses in the long and checkered history of kissing, and then we move on, almost as if the kiss has never happened. One kiss–with eyes wide open, for goodness’ sake–and the topic is abruptly closed. Clearly, Liara still cares for Shepard. But are they a couple? Does she expect fidelity? What would it mean if she did?

In a way, that uncertainty is a beautiful storytelling device. I’m supposed to be a human who is in love with an alien, during humanity’s first generation of interstellar travel, right? So how better to put me in that role than to make me radically unsure of the customs involved? What are this alien woman’s expectations? Am I cheating on her if I sleep with some other alien, whose customs I don’t really know either? Or rather, from my lover’s point of view, am I hung up on quaint, provincial human bullshit that has no place on Illium?

At the same time, though, the whole situation is the result of bad writing. I have no idea if Liara wants to be with me, I have no idea whether being with her would actually preclude sleeping with someone else, and (this is key) I don’t have the option to ask. Shepard cannot discuss the issue of monogamy with Liara, nor with any of his other potential lovers, at any point in the game. No one pulls away from an embrace and says, “Don’t you have a bond-mate waiting for you?” Never can Shepard himself pull away and say, “We can’t do this, because I could never hurt Liara.”

Even if I bring my new lover to meet the old one, even if my new lover witnesses Liara kissing me, the topic somehow manages never to come up. And this is a game in which the characters talk and talk and talk, a game in which one of the two major moral paths–the Paragon path–consists largely of resolving tricky situations with words rather than deeds.

I can only speak to my own experience here, but that lack of context pulled me right out of the game. My Shepard wouldn’t cheat–he’s just not that kind of guy–so how can I know what he would do, and thus what I should do, without knowing where he stands with his old lover? I almost felt as though I’d run into a bug in the game, and that I should wait for a patch before proceeding. Yet it was no bug, the Internet told me. An upcoming chunk of DLC might provide a more complete picture (or not), but I wasn’t about to wait around for that, and so proceed I did.

In my next post, I’ll put Asari monogamy aside for the moment, and cover Shepard’s other romantic prospects in Mass Effect 2.

Do You Support the Homosexual Agenda, Whatever the Fuck That Is?

A few weeks ago, I received a mass email from Eugene Delgaudio, who is apparently the president of some very important organization or something. “Dear fellow American,” Delgaudio began,

The Radical Homosexuals claim you and other pro-family Americans actually now support same-sex marriage, special job preferences for homosexuals and promotion of the homosexual lifestyle in schools.

Is it true? What do you say?

As one might guess, these lines serve as a the preamble to a tirade against Radical Homosexuals, The Homosexual Lobby, and Leftist Thought Control. And as one might also guess, all of these frightening terms go tantalizingly undefined throughout the proceedings, as does their comforting, besieged antithesis, Pro-Family values.

Putting aside that spooky, enigmatic language, the argument at hand seems to be that an organized cadre of gay people, relying on the indulgence of an increasingly secular United States, wants to (1) create anti-discrimination laws (possibly modeled after Affirmative Action) for gay employees and job applicants, (2) secure marriage and adoption rights for gay couples nationwide, and (3) include gay sex in public schools’ sexual education programs. As one might assume, these nefarious goals threaten to undermine Pro-Family values, or something.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I disagree strongly with the idea that gay marriage somehow undermines traditional marriage, or that gay adoption is somehow bad for children. There is very little reliable, empirical evidence to suggest (much less prove) the innate superiority of heterosexual coupling when it comes to raising children, and there is in fact some recent and well-publicized evidence to the contrary.

Further, the whole idea of “teaching gay sex” is a bit confusing. We can reasonably and usefully say that vaginal intercourse (of the sort that involves a penis rather than a sex toy) is a straight sex-act, insofar as gay couples are physically incapable of performing it. There are, however, no gay sex-acts–no sex-acts that only gay couples can perform, or that are intrinsically different when performed by gay couples (or by dozens of people at once, for that matter). There is no significant physiological difference, for example, between a man performing oral sex on a man, and a woman performing oral sex on a man. If children and adolescents are to understand the mechanics of sex, then they will inevitably have to understand that, with one notable exception, no sex-act is inherently any gayer than any other.

And as for affirmative action, I would argue that discriminatory hiring practices are bad, and that frivolous lawsuits are also bad, and that we need to work to eliminate both. None of which has the slightest thing to do with family values, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.

All of that being said, I’m not going to brush off the so-called Pro-Family values argument just because it feels a tad antique and silly. Immediately dismissing something because it’s traditional is exactly as absurd as immediately accepting something because it’s traditional. I’m not interested in doing away with the wisdom of previous generations, any more than I’m interested in assuming that everything previous generations thought or did was wise. (The Sermon on the Mount? Exceptionally wise. The Children’s Crusade? Surreally unwise).

So, what is the actual argument against gay marriage, and so on?

I’m sure you’ve been wondering just what the American Morality Survey contains. In short, the American Morality Survey is a perfect example of why polls are, generally speaking, bullshit–and further, of how concepts like family and morality can become buzz-words, devoid of descriptive and ethical content. It is a Rosetta Stone of disingenuous, fear-mongering misinformation. It is an immensely instructive object lesson in the mass production of useless data, and wherever one stands on the issue of gay rights, one has a vested interest in recognizing this sort of demagoguery when one sees it.

Here are the poll’s five questions, with some comments on each. Keep in mind that, on the survey form, “No” is selected by default for each of these.

1. Should homosexuals receive special job rights and force businesses, schools, churches and even daycares to hire and advance homosexuals or face prosecution and multimillion-dollar lawsuits?

As I have said earlier, the goal of Affirmative Action is to eliminate discrimination, not to promote it. If the latter happens, then the specific policy in question has failed, but that does not invalidate the idea itself. In its strange phrasing, this question disavows the fact that straight people currently receive “special job rights,” in the same way that so many arguments against Affirmative Action disavow white male privilege.

2. Do you support the use of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to fund homosexual “art”, so called AIDS-awareness programs and homosexual research grants that are frequently funneled to political advocacy?

Buried deep in that diatribe is the kernel of a half-decent point: Some AIDS charities do still frame AIDS as a gay disease, and that is a grave mistake. But if the government is going to fund any art (a separate issue), then it is more or less inevitable that some of the artists will be gay, and that some of the art will be activist in nature. And as for research grants being used to advocate a particular political ideology, that problem is hardly limited to any one branch of research, or to any one political project. Any research grant that says “Prove that heterosexual marriage is the best thing for children,” or “prove that heterosexual marriage is not the best thing for children,” rather than “let’s figure out the actual effect of heterosexual marriage on children” is bad research, plain and simple.

3. Should homosexuality be promoted in school as a healthy lifestyle choice, while information about the life threatening consequences are ignored?

Are there really sex education course that do not mention sexually transmitted infections? And for that matter, are there sexually transmitted infections that are transmitted through homosexual sex-acts, but not through heterosexual sex-acts? And for that matter, is there even such a thing as a homosexual sex-act?

4. Do you support same-sex “marriage” for homosexuals or “marriage-like” rights, like homosexuals being able to adopt children and raise them in their “lifestyle”?

The main issue here is the “condescending tone” and “seething, prejudicial contempt” implied by the “frivolous quotation marks.” No one is actually being quoted here, you’ll note.

5. Should the U.S. Supreme Court overturn traditional marriage between one man and one woman?

Again, this language is biased in the extreme: We’re overturning traditional marriage, not granting equal rights. And since the Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue, to grant queer Americans the right to marry would not be to “overturn” anything, legally speaking.

So, fellow American, my answer to all of these questions is: That’s a really stupid question, designed to flatter me if I agree with the person who wrote the question, and trap me into a compromising position if I do not. Which is really the answer to almost every question in almost every poll, if we’re being honest.