EDMONTON, Canada – When your stated mission is to “to create, deliver, and evolve the most emotionally engaging games in the world,” I guess you can’t afford to make offhand comments about one of your games becoming “totally softcore space porn.”
(Because, you know, porn simply isn’t allowed to be emotionally engaging, Angie Rowntree’s Gone notwithstanding.)
This appears to be the lesson learned by BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn, who got a little cheeky on Twitter in promoting his company’s forthcoming title “Mass Effect: Andromeda.”
Flynn tweeted about how the game’s ratings changed from “partial nudity” to “full nudity,” prompting an exchange with a fan who imagined her husband looking at her in disgust and asking, “Is this space porn?”
Flynn responded with “Yes, it’s totally softcore space porn” — and the internet went completely nuts, as the internet is wont to do at every opportunity, for some reason.
They say “the internet is for porn,” but these days I’m thinking it’s more for faux outrage. Whether the manufactured indignation du jour involves someone sitting incorrectly on White House furniture or Cinnabon-authored RIP tweets of questionable taste, modern netizens seem constantly poised to freak out over just about anything.
Setting aside for a moment the question of how outraged people should or shouldn’t be over any individual controversy, gamers getting upset about an offhand, tongue-in-cheek comment from a game developer about his company’s new game being “softcore space porn” strikes me as just about the dumbest form of hubbub conceivable.
To begin with, it’s quite clear the point of Mass Effect: Andromeda is not to deliver its users softcore pornographic content. If this were the plan, then the game would represent the least efficient means to publish softcore porn ever devised, considering the budget for the game likely dwarfs that of every softcore porn feature ever made. To wit, the second edition of Mass Effect, reportedly the lowest-budget title in the series, is still estimated to have cost $2.7 million. (Figures for Andromeda’s production cost don’t appear to be available yet).
While descriptions of Andromeda make clear sex and romance play a larger part in this edition of the game than in previous titles (or can play a larger part, given how much of the game’s progress rests in the hands of the individual player) , it’s equally clear BioWare hasn’t “pornified” its game but expanded the romantic interactions available to the characters beyond the quite limited reach found in the earlier games.
“We’ve built on it [from the trilogy],” Andromeda’s creative director told Game Informer. “We had a strong foundation for how [romance] was working. For me, typically in the trilogy it was a bit formulaic. You’d talk to them and then get to that one point in the game where there was no going back and romance was going to happen. That’s not real life. There should be some people who just want to hop in the sack immediately. There should people who are interested in a long-term relationship. There are people who aren’t interested in romance at all.”
In other words, BioWare hasn’t made sex and romance in the game more like porn; they’ve simply endeavored to make it more like real life.
Wait a minute… Now I’m the one who is outraged!
A video game in which the producers are striving to make romance and sex work more like they do in real life? No wonder gamers are pissed off. Now we won’t be able to get laid in cyberspace, either.
Thanks a lot BioWare. Maybe next you can invent a basketball game in which my character can’t dunk.
