‘Why I Had Sex With The Alien’

Game Set Watch columnist Chris Dahlen discussed the sexuality in Mass Effect on a weekend editorial on Gamasutra, called ‘Why I Had Sex With The Alien‘.

Count me in the camp of people who was disappointed by Mass Effect. I expected to be lured into a rich, alien world, and seduced by the exotic races and intricate politics that BioWare had crammed into the story.

But what I got was less a classic like Knights of the Old Republic and more like – well, you know when you start a cheap paperback and you just can’t put the damn thing down, and the writing’s sloppy and there are typos and the cover’s cheesy, but you just have to get to the end? And the end still doesn’t knock you out? I could go on about how the incredible hype and AAA-prestige that latches onto titles like this blinds critics and fans to the not-quite-awesome product that finally hits the stores.
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Didn’t that soft-core sex scene in the clip come on, you’ve seen it – take you back to late-night Cinemax? Did Emmanuelle ever make it into outer space? But that said, how much does it suck that they leaked this early? The gay relationships in Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire and that D & D game that nobody played, Temple of Elemental Gay Marriage, were all snookered in under the scenes. I beat KOTOR and didn’t even know that Juhani, one of the female characters, swung that way. (I was too busy trying to mack on Batista.)

Same goes for the boy-boy kiss in Bully. Or the easily-assumed homosexuality in Planescape: Torment (the Nameless One is a sensualist whose many identities swung from ridiculously lawful to brutally chaotic; who’s betting he didn’t plane-hop on the downlow somewhere down the line?). These encounters were like Easter eggs, and they were really only for the fans who actually wanted to hit on same-sex characters because if you weren’t flirting, then you wouldn’t get a prize.
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Or so I thought. The night before the last mission of the game, I was typing away at some space age keyboard thing when there’s a knock on my door. It was Liara. She wanted to come in and talk but clearly she wanted something more. She was lonely, she was nervous and well, don’t we all feel that way sometimes? Don’t we all need a little company? And I don’t need to tell you, she got it.

But look. That wasn’t my goal. It just happened. I didn’t get this game, choose that character and follow all those options just so I could say that I became a lesbian dad in space. I mean, how hard up would anyone be to play hours of a video game just for a cutscene? And I don’t even think it was as persuasive as some of the other romance subplots out there I mean, I could go on for pages about Annah in Planescape: Torment, and that just ends in a smooch. I’ve had whole relationships that didn’t last as long as the time we spent circling around each other. Sure, this was a lot more cinematic, but I never bought Liara’s attraction to me, I didn’t like how little conversation and build-up we had, I just didn’t buy the whole thing any more than I bought Mass Effect. Liara, like BioWare, promised me a (life-altering experience): I sure didn’t get that.