The media furor surrounding Mass Effect's sex scene has long since died down, and I am not writing this to stir that particular pot. Rather, it occurs to me that a game like Mass Effect might be described as an effective remedy to some of the stereotypical problems with sex on screen. Namely, those ideas that men are always the instigator of sex, that women are merely objects for the men on screen and the men in the audience, with their passivity and one-dimensionality and inevitable surrender. I am not suggesting that all women in film or television are like this, what I am suggesting is that women in videogames can be quite directly the opposite. In Mass Effect, there are a number of opportunities for addressing this stereotype quite directly, without actually subverting the ostensible science-fiction drama.
Some familiarity with Mass Effect is assumed here, but hopefully not so much that this article will not make sense to a non-player. The player occupies a character called Shepard. Shepard can be made either male or female, and cosmetically customized with sophisticated tools. As part of a 30+ hour game experience, Shepard can engage in a romance sub-plot which is the main focus here, but is not the main focus of the game. Instead, Shepard is an elite soldier that is tasked with nothing short of saving the galaxy.
Firstly, a Shepard of either gender will have ample opportunity to engage in flirtatious conversation with either Kaiden Alenko (for female Shepards) or Ashley Williams (for male Shepards) who are both human. Liara T’Soni is the blue-skinned Asari which is a gender neutral race, though ‘she’ looks decidedly female by human standards. Liara is available for romance by either gender Shepard, effectively allowing (at least visually) a lesbian encounter. To begin with, the player/character must initiate conversation between missions. The first conversations are of a general nature, a commander reassuring a shaken juniour squad member. After this first encounter, the player must pursue the next story-based mission. Once that is complete, new dialog options will appear in either Alenko or Williams’ interactions, and can be pursued to build rapport. Liara joins the team after a rescue mission, and can be pursued simultaneously for several steps with either of the two human interests. The player is forced to choose, however, after completing an action mission. Both love interests confront Shepard and demand a choice be made. If the player tries to play down the middle path, the human interest will break off the relationship and the romance will continue with Liara.
Late in the game, a significant mission causes Shepard to have to choose between Alenko and Williams. One will accompany Shepard in an assault, the other will lead a diversionary team. Either choice will be further complicated when Shepard is forced to choose to save one, and leave the other behind to ensure a nuclear bomb goes off to destroy the enemy base they are assaulting. In my first playthrough, I had been pursuing Williams in the romance thread, so making the choice to save her was narratively satisfying, bittersweet as it was. One can imagine an even more emotive possibility: a game that engineers the death of the romantic interest regardless of the player’s choice.
After this mission, if the romantic interest is still alive, he or she will comfort Shepard after the death of the un-rescued team member. There is little to do here but play out the scene, which is interrupted just before a kiss by Joker’s intercom call. En route to the final action mission, whichever love interest whose dialog trees have been followed through to conclusion will accompany Shepard to the captain’s quarters and an intimate cut-scene will be played, completing the romance sub-plot.
The actual sexual encounter included in Mass Effect is the non-interactive cinematic conclusion to a long chain of conversations, punctuated by action missions where the characters in question work together. The missions are dangerous, the characters are all capable military soldiers or similar agents. The progress of the romantic subplot is one of many subplots in the game, and cannot be advanced at the will of the player. As described, one must pursue other activities in order to activate the next set of conversations, and the sexual encounter can only occur at the end of the game, just before the final mission against Saren. However, it was sorely misrepresented in the media. First by conservative American blogger Kevin McCollough, then again by Fox News.
It's called "Mass Effect" and it allows its players - universally male no doubt - to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to "engage" and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game "persons" hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.
…
And because of the digital chip age in which we live - "Mass Effect" can be customized to sodomize whatever, whoever, however, the game player wishes.
With it's "over the net" capabilities virtual orgasmic rape is just the push of a button away. (McCollough 2008)
These wild accusations are, of course, patently false and paint an interesting picture of assumptions on the part of conservative media. Firstly they (still) assume that all game players are male and approximately fifteen years old. The author obviously did not actually see the sex scene, or any other part of the game before writing this post, but instead used it as leverage to proclaim a conservative political agenda. The article was entitled ‘The Sex-Box Race for President,’ and was ostensibly a call for then presidential candidates to campaign for greater government control over the kind of filth he imagined Mass Effect to contain.
Further to this, Fox News presented a piece on the game along similar lines. The captions at the bottom of the screen labels the story ‘SE”XBOX”? New video game features full digital character nudity’ which in and of itself is false, as the cut scene does not display frontal nudity of any of the characters at any time. (Fox News 2008) Cooper Lawrence, the psychology expert, also alludes to ‘all the research’ that says not only is violence desensitizing, but so is the sexual content of these media. In one fell move, she conflates an enormously contentious field of research into a forgone conclusion, and includes the sexual content which is rarely mentioned in such media/violence research. (Presumably Cooper refers to such controversial research as (Anderson 2003) and (Anderson 2004) though she never makes this clear. See (Unsworth, Devilly and Ward 2007) for notes on the controversy.) The panel discussion that follows immediately brings the discussion of videogames back to the Princess Enchanted Brides for the panellist’s six year old daughter, rather than discuss videogames as a pastime for mature players. Lawrence, earlier in the segment, claims that players are teenagers, ‘not their dads’ despite our most recent survey data to the contrary. (Brand 2007)
Both sources make the association between the sex scene on screen with the objectification of women, suggesting that Mass Effect was responsible for perpetuating the role of women as submissive sexual objects which exist solely for the pleasure of the male player/character. “If a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male plays such a game in which the women DO submit without choice, are made to appear as Barbie streetwalkers, and perform whatever act can be imagined…” (McCollough 2008) This non-sequiter demonstrates the difficult road ahead of videogames as a maturing medium, a road that other media have travelled before.
The true nature of the women in Mass Effect is anything but sex object. The procedural nature of a videogame actually emphasizes the active, constructive and cooperative nature of the female characters. Assuming a male Shepard for a moment, half of his team is female, and he calls upon the very capable soldier Ashley, the brilliant scientist Tali and the powerful biotic Liara to perform materially beneficial tasks throughout the game. They are quite literally the opposite of passive, rather they are active agents that bring their special skills to bear to make up for the shortcomings of whatever class of Shepard the player has chosen. (A biotic adept Shepard would benefit greatly from the pure soldier in Ashley, for example.)
The game structure of Mass Effect causes each of the team members to be directly 'useful' to the player in a way that characters in a film or novel are not. The player of a game has a task to complete, challenges to overcome, and each of the characters Shepard recruits are like tools which perform certain tasks. So on the one hand, all the characters, male or female, can be seen as being 'used' by the player, in order to achieve a goal. This is a mechanic-centric interpretation, and is probably more common in videogame theory than the alternative narrative-centric understanding. In the narrative, it is Shepard who is seeking to save humanity, the galaxy, and stop Saren from enacting his plans, who needs a team of other individuals to help him/her.
This is not so far from what the player needs, but the fiction gives us greater detail about who the team members are, and contextualises their own personal needs and motivations for helping Shepard. Yes, each character will eventually do exactly what the player wants, but only because the fiction explains to the player what those characters are capable of. The player cannot make the characters do anything that the fiction has not already enabled. This makes the women on the team hardly submissive, in a narrative sense, because they will only do what is 'in character' for each. In a mechanical sense, they are 'submissive' because they are but tools in the game mechanics. But if reading into the mechanics, one must ignore the gender, or even the supposed sentience of the 'tool' because that is all narrative fiction.
In this way, Mass Effect creates female characters who have much more to offer than sex. They have real, material skills that the player and Shepard realises and leverages in their battle against Saren. They are not simply along for the ride, to satisfy the carnal urges of the main character. Without the women, neither the story, nor the mechanics of the game, would work.
There is simply no evidence that supports the accusations these media pundits make. Furthermore, as described above, none of the characters will submit to Shepard’s advances if he is courting two of them simultaneously. This is hardly bending to every whim of the male protagonist (nevermind that the male characters operate the same way for a female Shepard).
Mass Effect is an example of a videogame made for adults. It is not ‘adult’ in the way ‘adult movies’ are, constantly filled with nothing but explicit sex. Rather, it is a complicated story with political themes, existential and humanitarian overtones, and adult characters who, after spending time together, become romantically involved. The summary point of this discussion is that there remains a very hard kernel of resistance to and distrust of videogames. So deep does this current run that the media agencies are willing to make obviously incorrect claims in order to paint videogames as the corrupting influence these media outlets imagine them to be. This comes at the cost of acknowledging the strides towards equality between sexes that a game like Mass Effect is capable of presenting.
Anderson, Craig A. “An update on the effects of playing violent video games.” Journal of Adolescence (Academic Press) 27 (2004): 113-122.
Brand, Jeffery. Interactive Australia 2007: facts about the Australian computer and video game industry. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Bond University, Bond University, 2007.
Unsworth, Gabrielle, Grant J. Devilly, and Tony Ward. “The effect of playing violent video games on adolescents: Should parents be quaking in their boots?” Journal of Psychology, Crime & Law (Routledge) 13, no. 4 (August 2007): 383-394.
Mass Effect on Romance and Sex
Some familiarity with Mass Effect is assumed here, but hopefully not so much that this article will not make sense to a non-player. The player occupies a character called Shepard. Shepard can be made either male or female, and cosmetically customized with sophisticated tools. As part of a 30+ hour game experience, Shepard can engage in a romance sub-plot which is the main focus here, but is not the main focus of the game. Instead, Shepard is an elite soldier that is tasked with nothing short of saving the galaxy.
Firstly, a Shepard of either gender will have ample opportunity to engage in flirtatious conversation with either Kaiden Alenko (for female Shepards) or Ashley Williams (for male Shepards) who are both human. Liara T’Soni is the blue-skinned Asari which is a gender neutral race, though ‘she’ looks decidedly female by human standards. Liara is available for romance by either gender Shepard, effectively allowing (at least visually) a lesbian encounter. To begin with, the player/character must initiate conversation between missions. The first conversations are of a general nature, a commander reassuring a shaken juniour squad member. After this first encounter, the player must pursue the next story-based mission. Once that is complete, new dialog options will appear in either Alenko or Williams’ interactions, and can be pursued to build rapport. Liara joins the team after a rescue mission, and can be pursued simultaneously for several steps with either of the two human interests. The player is forced to choose, however, after completing an action mission. Both love interests confront Shepard and demand a choice be made. If the player tries to play down the middle path, the human interest will break off the relationship and the romance will continue with Liara.
Late in the game, a significant mission causes Shepard to have to choose between Alenko and Williams. One will accompany Shepard in an assault, the other will lead a diversionary team. Either choice will be further complicated when Shepard is forced to choose to save one, and leave the other behind to ensure a nuclear bomb goes off to destroy the enemy base they are assaulting. In my first playthrough, I had been pursuing Williams in the romance thread, so making the choice to save her was narratively satisfying, bittersweet as it was. One can imagine an even more emotive possibility: a game that engineers the death of the romantic interest regardless of the player’s choice.
After this mission, if the romantic interest is still alive, he or she will comfort Shepard after the death of the un-rescued team member. There is little to do here but play out the scene, which is interrupted just before a kiss by Joker’s intercom call. En route to the final action mission, whichever love interest whose dialog trees have been followed through to conclusion will accompany Shepard to the captain’s quarters and an intimate cut-scene will be played, completing the romance sub-plot.
The actual sexual encounter included in Mass Effect is the non-interactive cinematic conclusion to a long chain of conversations, punctuated by action missions where the characters in question work together. The missions are dangerous, the characters are all capable military soldiers or similar agents. The progress of the romantic subplot is one of many subplots in the game, and cannot be advanced at the will of the player. As described, one must pursue other activities in order to activate the next set of conversations, and the sexual encounter can only occur at the end of the game, just before the final mission against Saren. However, it was sorely misrepresented in the media. First by conservative American blogger Kevin McCollough, then again by Fox News.
These wild accusations are, of course, patently false and paint an interesting picture of assumptions on the part of conservative media. Firstly they (still) assume that all game players are male and approximately fifteen years old. The author obviously did not actually see the sex scene, or any other part of the game before writing this post, but instead used it as leverage to proclaim a conservative political agenda. The article was entitled ‘The Sex-Box Race for President,’ and was ostensibly a call for then presidential candidates to campaign for greater government control over the kind of filth he imagined Mass Effect to contain.
Further to this, Fox News presented a piece on the game along similar lines. The captions at the bottom of the screen labels the story ‘SE”XBOX”? New video game features full digital character nudity’ which in and of itself is false, as the cut scene does not display frontal nudity of any of the characters at any time. (Fox News 2008) Cooper Lawrence, the psychology expert, also alludes to ‘all the research’ that says not only is violence desensitizing, but so is the sexual content of these media. In one fell move, she conflates an enormously contentious field of research into a forgone conclusion, and includes the sexual content which is rarely mentioned in such media/violence research. (Presumably Cooper refers to such controversial research as (Anderson 2003) and (Anderson 2004) though she never makes this clear. See (Unsworth, Devilly and Ward 2007) for notes on the controversy.) The panel discussion that follows immediately brings the discussion of videogames back to the Princess Enchanted Brides for the panellist’s six year old daughter, rather than discuss videogames as a pastime for mature players. Lawrence, earlier in the segment, claims that players are teenagers, ‘not their dads’ despite our most recent survey data to the contrary. (Brand 2007)
Both sources make the association between the sex scene on screen with the objectification of women, suggesting that Mass Effect was responsible for perpetuating the role of women as submissive sexual objects which exist solely for the pleasure of the male player/character. “If a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male plays such a game in which the women DO submit without choice, are made to appear as Barbie streetwalkers, and perform whatever act can be imagined…” (McCollough 2008) This non-sequiter demonstrates the difficult road ahead of videogames as a maturing medium, a road that other media have travelled before.
The true nature of the women in Mass Effect is anything but sex object. The procedural nature of a videogame actually emphasizes the active, constructive and cooperative nature of the female characters. Assuming a male Shepard for a moment, half of his team is female, and he calls upon the very capable soldier Ashley, the brilliant scientist Tali and the powerful biotic Liara to perform materially beneficial tasks throughout the game. They are quite literally the opposite of passive, rather they are active agents that bring their special skills to bear to make up for the shortcomings of whatever class of Shepard the player has chosen. (A biotic adept Shepard would benefit greatly from the pure soldier in Ashley, for example.)
The game structure of Mass Effect causes each of the team members to be directly 'useful' to the player in a way that characters in a film or novel are not. The player of a game has a task to complete, challenges to overcome, and each of the characters Shepard recruits are like tools which perform certain tasks. So on the one hand, all the characters, male or female, can be seen as being 'used' by the player, in order to achieve a goal. This is a mechanic-centric interpretation, and is probably more common in videogame theory than the alternative narrative-centric understanding. In the narrative, it is Shepard who is seeking to save humanity, the galaxy, and stop Saren from enacting his plans, who needs a team of other individuals to help him/her.
This is not so far from what the player needs, but the fiction gives us greater detail about who the team members are, and contextualises their own personal needs and motivations for helping Shepard. Yes, each character will eventually do exactly what the player wants, but only because the fiction explains to the player what those characters are capable of. The player cannot make the characters do anything that the fiction has not already enabled. This makes the women on the team hardly submissive, in a narrative sense, because they will only do what is 'in character' for each. In a mechanical sense, they are 'submissive' because they are but tools in the game mechanics. But if reading into the mechanics, one must ignore the gender, or even the supposed sentience of the 'tool' because that is all narrative fiction.
In this way, Mass Effect creates female characters who have much more to offer than sex. They have real, material skills that the player and Shepard realises and leverages in their battle against Saren. They are not simply along for the ride, to satisfy the carnal urges of the main character. Without the women, neither the story, nor the mechanics of the game, would work.
There is simply no evidence that supports the accusations these media pundits make. Furthermore, as described above, none of the characters will submit to Shepard’s advances if he is courting two of them simultaneously. This is hardly bending to every whim of the male protagonist (nevermind that the male characters operate the same way for a female Shepard).
Mass Effect is an example of a videogame made for adults. It is not ‘adult’ in the way ‘adult movies’ are, constantly filled with nothing but explicit sex. Rather, it is a complicated story with political themes, existential and humanitarian overtones, and adult characters who, after spending time together, become romantically involved. The summary point of this discussion is that there remains a very hard kernel of resistance to and distrust of videogames. So deep does this current run that the media agencies are willing to make obviously incorrect claims in order to paint videogames as the corrupting influence these media outlets imagine them to be. This comes at the cost of acknowledging the strides towards equality between sexes that a game like Mass Effect is capable of presenting.
Anderson, Craig A. “An update on the effects of playing violent video games.” Journal of Adolescence (Academic Press) 27 (2004): 113-122.
Brand, Jeffery. Interactive Australia 2007: facts about the Australian computer and video game industry. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Bond University, Bond University, 2007.
Unsworth, Gabrielle, Grant J. Devilly, and Tony Ward. “The effect of playing violent video games on adolescents: Should parents be quaking in their boots?” Journal of Psychology, Crime & Law (Routledge) 13, no. 4 (August 2007): 383-394.