Virtual Skin: The BioWare Effect

My waifu.

     A "waifu," in anime fan parlance, is a fictional character that fans feel romantic attached to.  Waifus are usually female, with male variants being referred to as "husbandos," which are generally not as common.  Ironic or not, a person's waifu is the subject of much adoration, usually expressed through massive expenditure on merchandise depicting said waifu's likeness.  This phenomenon is more common in Japan than the US (or so I've been told), but Americans have their own parasocial attractions to contend with.  There are many sociological reasons for the rise of waifu culture, the main one being increased male loneliness in the developed world.  As with everything under capitalism, different mediums have adapted to cater to the desires (but not the needs!)  of people who crave a waifu to love and adore.  What interests me, however, is how other parallel mediums have begun to cultivate their own versions of waifu culture.  As the title of this post suggests, the subculture surrounding modern Western CRPGs has developed a form of this which is partly grassroots and partly encouraged by character design.

    In Dragon Age: Origins, there are four different characters that you can have digital sex with, and a few more secret ones besides.  More accurately, if you make the right choices in dialogue and do things a character agrees with with them in your party, you will be rewarded with a scene of your avatar bumping uglies with said party member's character model.  These scenes have been derided as uncanny, freaky, and in poor taste, but regardless of their erotic value they represent a watershed moment for depictions of love in games.  Well, not quite--you can also have sex with characters in Mass Effect, complete with saccharine music and cringe-worthy dialogue.  This certainly wasn't the first time you could simulate sex in video games.  That honor goes to Custer's Revenge.  Rather, it is one of the first times that developers attempted to depict sexuality in a tasteful way, however loaded that term might be.

    The ability to have sex with your party members turned out to be a popular selling point.  This might be why Mass Effect 2 had a whopping twelve characters you could bang, all of whom with their own personalities and their own unique, albeit awkward, sex scene.  Interestingly, this also has an effect on the design of every character.  In CRPGs, party members have been surrogate friends, additional avenues for player choice, and meat shields depending on the genre and era, but since 2008 they have served an additional function as vehicles for sexual fantasy.  In some ways this is a natural progression--gamers are getting older, on average, and gaming itself is seen as more respectable, meaning that portraying sex between consenting adults no longer triggers the kind of moral panic it might have in, say, 1995.  As a result, developers now cater to a more diverse set of sexual tastes.

Masc4Masc.  No fats, no femmes.

    In the last decade, two simultaneous things have happened to video games.  They've gotten more female, and they've gotten gayer.  At the same time, audiences' hunger for in-game "romance" has only gotten more intense.   In the space of RPGs, this has altered the kinds of digital bodies available for consumption by mainstream audiences.  When every character represents a chance for a romantic encounter, writers and designers do their best to heighten their appeal.  In comparison to Origins, Dragon Age II's characters are model levels of hot, especially the party members.  Each one is also sexually fantastic in their own unique way.  We have the shy bottom, the brooding bisexual bad boy, the other brooding bisexual bad boy, the list goes on.  There's even a sexy bad girl, complete with dark skin which is certain to make her more exotic and appealing to the game's target audience.  Hooking up with them is also easier than ever.  Instead of paying attention to complicated dialogue trees, you can simply press a button in the top left corner in the dialogue wheel to "flirt" with them instead of giving a normal, sane response.  The resulting dialogue is awkward at best and downright creepy at worst.  Imagine your boss making suggestive comments about your junk while covered in blood and gore.  In fact, romance is so easy that players report accidentally stumbling into it despite their best efforts to ignore it.  A utopian vision if there ever was one.

My wife.

    While I am a known sexual deviant, I also want video games to mature as a medium, and I'm afraid that the BioWare-style roster of potential sexual partners is a developmental dead end.  Pillars of Eternity 2, which is the sequel to a self-proclaimed spiritual successor to the sequel to a game that billed itself as emulating the experience of playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, is an example of the worst effects of this trend.  While the characters overall aren't that interesting, their romance dialogue is some of the corniest in gaming excluding actual porn programmed in Flash.  As I watch romance become a staple of the RPG genre, I can't help but feel that there might be other kinds of character arcs we're missing out on, and other kinds of characters that fall outside the usual spectrum of desirability.  Not that the Internet doesn't know how to be horny for just about anything, but being horny all the time gets kind of boring.  I think it's especially problematic for a game's writing when I find myself approaching dialogue with a clear mechanical goal in mind, whether that be a sex scene or a loyalty mission.  Despite what our adolescent selves might want to believe, people just aren't that straightforward.

    So what is the remedy for this malaise?  To start with, I think the structure of RPG storytelling can afford to expand.  I'd like to see games make bolder choices about who gets to be in your party and when, and for more kinds of relationships to play out between the player and other characters.  I'd also like for pursuing romance to sometimes not be the best choice.  What I mean is that I'd like for a romantic relationship between characters to sometimes be a bad idea, not just for the player's chances at getting the best mechanical ending but also for the story.  Games in the past have made halting attempts at this, but they've been stymied by genre expectations and the marketing potential of having all of your characters being cute boys that will kiss you if you're nice to them.  To move forward, they may have to sidestep certain genres altogether and make space for the truly unexpected.