BioWare is again being questioned about the lack of same-sex love interests in the Mass Effect franchise. When 1UP writer Tracey John spoke with project lead Casey Hudson and BioWare head Ray Muzyka, she just wanted to know, in a game built so much around choice, why couldn't her female Shepard have a romance with the female quarian Tali'Zorah vas Neema. This is the paradox that studios like BioWare find themselves in: the more choices you give players, the higher expectations those players have that more and more diversity will be available as a choice.

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In a previous entry I talked about the way many games implement "moral choices" these days and how lackluster I generally find that implementation to be. One of the things Bioware has advertised about regarding Dragon Age is that their story will be much more nuanced and realistic, not pigeonholing players into these sock-puppets of emotions. While I'm no where near far along enough in the campaign to make a qualified statement on things, I wanted to break for a moment and explore my previous point a bit further using this game as an example.

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Via Kotaku, Demian Linn at Bitmob has a lengthy article going over the experience he discovered in his review copy of Dragon Age: Origins– specifically, the variations of sexual encounters a player can have in the game. Aside from the expected heterosexual encounters, there is also room for gay, lesbian and apparently even transgendered sex scenes.

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It seems that any game coming out these days touts "moral ambiguity" as a selling point. But is this mechanic worth the hype or just a failed caricature of human ethics that gives the illusion of choice but instead forces players into unrealistic and stereotyped paradigms?

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