With the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition coming up soon, I thought I’d take a moment to have a look at a complicated issue, one which I know I’m not all that well-versed in but I’d like to bring some awareness to; sexuality and gender in video-games.
The reason I’m a bit miffed over Inquisition’s advertising of one of it’s characters- Dorian, a mage from the Tevinter Imperium- as BioWare’s “first fully gay party member” is due to the desperate air the whole thing seems to have about it, and the fact that it’s a lie.
If you’ve played many of BioWare games you’ll know that they’ve had a few homosexual and bisexual characters in the past. Quite a ways back in Knight of the Old Republic they had Juhani, a party member who could only be romanced by a female player character- ergo why BioWare are lying when they say Dorian is their first fully gay party member. As recent as Mass Effect 3 they had Steve Cortez and Samantha Traynor, both homosexual characters who could be romanced, even if they weren’t fully fledged party members- regardless, they were well fleshed out and played important roles in the game.
Plenty of people have included bisexual characters in their games. Usually the trend is to make female characters bisexual, but there have been examples otherwise. In Dragon Age 2 all the romance options could be romanced by either gender, but frankly that rendered the whole thing moot; there was no difference in the romance plots, save for Anders who I’ll get to later, which meant that really your avatar was a placeholder. It was a scheme to attempt to appear to be nice and equal, but it fell fairly flat.
The reason I mention Anders is that in Dragon Age 2 he was the only character whose backstory changed depending on whether or not you played a male or female and romanced him. I found it odd that they felt the need to make a distinction between his homosexual and heterosexual origins. My problem was that if they’d gone to the trouble of changing things depending on his sexual preference, why not simply chose one? Anders wasn’t homosexual, bisexual or heterosexual. He was a strange amalgamation of all three caused by BioWare’s lack of decisiveness and their attempts to appear to embrace sexual equality while not rocking the boat.
And that problem comes back around with the example of Dorian. The fact that they have pushed this as a selling point for the game renders the attempt at appearing fair and equal moot. The fact that they’re lying doesn’t do them any favours as well. Do they want to sell Inqusition? Yes, of course. Do they need to lie to do it?
Don’t get me wrong; I like BioWare’s games and I will be buying Inqusition, because I hope it’s a good game and I hope it has actual characters with defined backstories and actual emotions and preferences. I don’t like the way that BioWare have gone about with marketing elements but unfortunately they aren’t the only ones to do something like this.
I won’t pretend to be an expert in the field of gender and sexual equality, especially not in video games. I simply wanted to bring this up because it irks me to see things like this happen. I’d prefer it if developers put characters into games, regardless of sexuality, because they developed them well and decided they were actual necessary to the game, not for publicity purposes.
I bring up gender equality because I don’t know the answer to a certain question; have there been any transgendered and agendered characters in games? Big games, in particular, because I know indie developers usually push the boat out. If anyone knows of any AAA examples, let me know, because I’ve played a lot of games and I really can’t think of any.