Tuesday, 08 December 2009

• Dragon Age Gay Love Scene Ruffles Feathers

  
  

  
  Note: Second link contains content flagged by YouTube community for mature content.
  
  It's oft been said "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye." In the case of video games, perhaps the phrase should be amended to "it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye...or a man romances an male elf."
  
  Dragon Age: Origins has caught a lot of attention recently for more than just being a well-made game. As a recent New York Times article by Dave Itzkoff notes, there has been a lot of chit-chat and, more often than not, negative reaction to a particular scene in the game. Apparently, as a male character in the game, you can choose to have a romantic encounter with another male character, an elf by the name of Zevran. As Itzkoff explains, "To prompt the sequence — which is far more chaste than scenes in 'Brokeback Mountain' — the player must accept an invitation from Zevran to his tent and prompt him with a few lines of innuendo-laden dialogue. ('I was raised to take my pleasures where they could be found,' Zevran says after the rendezvous.)"
  
  You can imagine which groups might see this as a threat to common decency and which might find this laudable. Itzkoff quotes condemnations from Websites WND.com (a conservative E-publication) and Gawker, while highlighting praise from sites like GayGamer.net for a move towards equality. As for BioWare, the studio that produced the game, they seem to be walking down a diplomatic line, claiming to have no social agenda in including a gay love scene in their game, saying they seek not to shock or make a stance on gay relations, but merely to award the player the choice to play the game and advance the story as he or she sees fit.
  
  The choice of a gay rendezvous does not, in fact, proclude the user from heterosexual or lesbian encounters; if anything is to be attacked by detractors, it is BioWare's decision to make romantic encounters an option in the first place. At the same time, though, such an attack is realistically an attack on realism. Sex and love are a fact of life, and if you don't want want to witness the homosexuality (a small part of the game, in effect), don't play, and furthermore, keep your religion out of the discussion.
  
  What do you think of BioWare's decision to include a gay love scene in the new Dragon Age game? 
  

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