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| Show me on the doll where the dialog option wheel touched you. |
It's long. Like an episode of Breaking Bad long. But it covers a whole lot more than just sexuality and sexism and it branches outside the gaming industry to cover a few societal points of importance. It also has one of the best definitions of privilege I've ever heard. I encourage everyone to set aside 45 minutes or so and watch the whole thing, especially if you're a Bioware fan.
In Dragon Age 2, the option to have a romance storyline with any character was opened up to any gender. People freaked out more about the apparent "bisexuality" of the characters more than the insanely retreaded dungeon maps. First off, it wasn't bisexuality because the NPCs only respond to the protagonist, so if the protagonist was female and romanced the males, Fenris and Anders were straight or if you made your character male and romanced them, they were gay. And if you didn't romance a character, their sexuality wasn't even noted. There are two exceptions to this: Isabela who was defined as probably pansexual more than bisexual, and Anders having a single conversation point of initiating a flirtation with the protagonist. Isabela is an overly sexualized pirate porn star, so it was no surprise the straight male gaming population didn't have any problems with her being into everyone aside from some strange, prudish comments about her being too slutty, which struck me as an ironic and hilarious complaint coming from straight male gamers.
The Anders initiation of flirtation apparently scared the living shit out of a small portion of the straight male population who couldn't believe some guy in a game might make a really vague pass at them! For one thing, I've played through the game several times now, and the comment is so innocuous, I actually missed it until my most recent play through, and when I did finally notice it I was more irritated that there wasn't a "let him down easy" option. I mentioned this whole thing to Becky, who doesn't like the Dragon Age games because they talk too much. She prefers the Dead Island games where you spend most of your time smashing skulls with flaming shovels and all the conversations are short and lead to more smashing of skulls.
Her reaction:
"Aww, poor babies. That's just called life for women."
We had fun talking about the craziness of people being offended by a seriously unobtrusive (I didn't even notice it until play through #4) in a game with slavery, murder, blood splatters everywhere, and an elf child rape/murder serial killer. But her point here was something I hadn't even thought about. Getting hit on by people you aren't interested in is pretty much a normal state of being for women from the age of 12 or 13 until...well...death. In one video game, straight male gamers had to deal with one conversation in which they were very lightly hit on by someone they weren't interested in, and they flipped the fuck out.
Dragon Age 2 wasn't a very good video game and it's a little on the old side now, but the way it exposed straight male privilege was fairly amazing. The option to go through life and not be approached sexually by people you don't want to be approached by is something entirely unique to straight males. It's such an inborn privilege that straight males apparently cannot fathom a world in which they would have to deal with unwanted sexual advances. Losing this privilege even for a second, even to a per-programmed video game character, was so horrible they wanted an option to turn this feature off. Seriously, they asked for a toggle in the option menu to prevent that one line from Anders from occurring. Ironically, I imagine most of the women straight male gamers harass, especially online/xbox live/playstation network, would love a toggle to shut off the unwanted sexual advances perpetrated by straight male gamers.
It's one of those things where I didn't feel one shred of sympathy for the whining, possibly sexually confused young men who felt emotionally violated by a video game character making a benign pass at them. And I couldn't put my finger on exactly why I didn't give a shit about their pathetic plight until Becky pointed out how hypocritical their complaints were.
I, for one, am glad Bioware took the time to violate the privilege of straight male gamers. I wish they'd spent as much time on unique dungeon maps and timeline continuity as they did tweaking the noses of people who have never had their noses tweaked.
