I just read through the entire thread here, and so some of the things I wanted to respond to appeared on relative early pages, but I still want to respond to the, so I will.
It seems strange to me that one would say that a "small minority" plays through the romances. Yes, I saw the reference to Priestly's comments, but he did not actually gave any figures, and so it's difficult to assess what he considers "a small minority". However, if you listen to David Gaider's lecture in GDC about "Sex in Video Games" (located here:
http://gdcvault.com/...96/Sex-in-Video ), he actually does give numbers, and although they are partial, they certainly can give at least a vague idea. Mr. Gaider says there that (and I quote): "we have figures about the people who actually attempted the gay romances. The figure that gets thrown around is 'oh, that's like 2% of the players'. At best, 10%, 'cause that's the commonly held idea, that 10% of the population is gay. It varied according to the character, but it got as high as 24%. you can draw two facts from that: either that 24% of our audience is gay, in which case we've attracted a lot of gay fans, or not everyone who plays the gay romance is themselves gay." (starts at 16:44 on the link I mentioned before).
Now, I do not have any stats on the percentage of players who played through opposite-sex romances, but I think I wouldn't be making a dangerous wager by saying that the percentage is higher. Quite possibly much higher. But even if I ignore that speculation, and just stick to the number I do have, 24% (nearly a quarter of all players of the game!) is by no means a "small minority". It is a huge minority. In fact it is a higher percent than that of people who played a female Shepard (18% according to "The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3", chapter 4), and a much higher percent than that of people who chose to play ANY class in ME3 except for Soldier (11.02% of players chose to play as an infiltrator - the second most popular class, [there, there]). Should BioWare then abandon all classes for ME except for the Soldier (which was played by 64.59% of the players [there, there])? Not allow a female protagonist (after all, women are "only" 30% of Dragon Age players [the GDC lecture 16:32-16:45])?
Furthermore, I completely fail to understand who having an affect on someone who is in love with you would make you an "Uber God"? People who are in love quite obviously and understandably have different priorities and agenda than those who are not. This has less to do with the nature of the person with which you are in love with, so much as the very fact that you are IN LOVE. People who are in love would tend to put the welfare, opinions, safety, and even pleasure (not necessarily in a sexual way) of the person they love on a high priority. They would listen to their lovers more than they otherwise would, tend to agree with them more, try to impress them, protect them, and many other things. Quite often their perspective of their surroundings would change (for one, the world seems very different when you have no one to take care of other than yourself, than when you feel responsible to someone).
If a hardened Alistair is different than a non-hardened one, then why is it implausible that a companion in love would be different (and react differently) than the same companion who is not in love?
The claim that people who develop emotions toward "pixels" and "geometrical shapes" are somehow mentally unwell, is of course malicious, mendacious. hypocritical, and irrelevant. People develop emotions toward characters. It is as unintelligent to refer to the object of those emotions as "pixels" or "geometrical shape" as it is to refer to Mr. Darcy (for example) as "a non-existent figment of imagination", or (even less intelligently) "ink on paper". As anyone with just a little bit of sense knows (unless they are pretending not to have sense, because they think they can this way mock or denigrate people they do not like in that manner) it is not the "ink" or "pixel" that one feels for, but the entity, fictional though it is, that that bit of ink or cluster of pixels represent. And if that could have been considered a mental deficiency, then you have just confined virtually every book reader who has ever lived to a mental asylum. An asylum, by the way, to which I would gladly allow myself to be committed.
As a final note, I would add that I never understood the distinction some people make between "romance" and "story". In the context of fiction (including video games) romance IS a story. A story that is an integral part of the plot in any form of narrative art, for as long as there has been art (be it literature, poetry, painting, music, theatre or cinema), except, for some reason, video games. And because video games are such an exception, all that remains to say is - if you do not like romance stories, make use of the fact that in this one and only narrative art form, romance is optional, and skip it. Stop hating on those who like those stories.
Modifié par Kallimachus, 04 octobre 2013 - 06:47 .
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