Interesting Links for 13-01-2015

[andrewducker]

• Finally, a guide to successfully interrogating terrorists
  (tags: terrorism interrogation psychology )
• We have experienced anarchy like this before. We should not over-react to it
  (tags: liberal anarchy terrorism violence law politics )
• £300 for a job reference is the latest outrage in the exploitation of interns
  (tags: work OhForFucksSake

Comments

[despotliz]

I can't find the post I was looking for to leave in this comment, which is one from David Gaider talking about how he goes about writing a character for a video game, and it had a whole bunch of flow charts and diagrams in and it was surprising to see just how much of the process is driven by budget and the total number of lines they can afford to have in the game. This post also goes into it a bit although without the diagrams. So I suspect part of the answer to why you can't play as a male or female protagonist is it would add a surprising amount to the budget and for most game developers this is not a high enough priority - even given the choice less than 20% of games played Mass Effect 3 as a female Shepherd, and maybe they don't think it's worth the cost to make content for that 20% when they can spend half the money and keep the 80% happy.

(Those 80% are weird and wrong though, because female Shepherd is THE BEST.)

[andrewducker]

She certainly is!

[ext_2864067]

Femshep is far superior, certainly

[octopoid_horror]

Fallout: New Vegas handles diverse sexuality very well, without it involving player romance (although you can get shagged by a rather assertive robot, if that's your thing)

It also has a bisexual character who isn't portrayed as a sex-hungry slut, which is nice.

Mass Effect chat: since Bioware for some reason didn't allow for human/Krogan romance, it's still pretty cool that you can get together with Jaavik. Very awkwardly, admittedly.

It's also very neat that romance blossoms between two of your crew if you don't get involved with either of them.

[pashazade]

it's still pretty cool that you can get together with Jaavik. Very awkwardly, admittedly.

Do you mean after the party in Citadel? I woke up My Shep woke up with him and was terribly embarrassed - I'd been hoping she was hoping to rekindle things with Garrus. "Garrus! I am dancing awkwardly near you. Why do you not notice? We are both really good at shooting things. And now my heart is....fairly robust, actually. OOH, ALCOHOL!"

Dammit, now I need to go back to that half-finished playthrough of ME2.

[octopoid_horror]

Yep, that's it.

I was a one-Turian woman all the way through Mass Effect 2 & 3, because Garrus is a dreamboat. Also his totally awkward seduction made it all worthwhile. I have feelings about Garrus. ALL THE FEELINGS.

It's pretty awesome that you can mess things up with some of the "romance" too. If you approach Jack for sex earlier on when she's angry rather than romance later, she won't speak to you afterwards and it's just a one-off, and you can even end the game if you foolishly attempt to get things together with Morinth.

[octopoid_horror]

Also, Citadel is a great demonstration of why choices and characterisation matter in games. The whole point of Citadel is that who your Shepard is, who their friends are and what you choose to do really matters because half the DLC is pretty much just about those relationships and (since it came out after ME3 and blatantly works better as a coda than where it's meant to sit chronologically) getting some kind of happy but a shade bittersweet closure on Shepard & co.

If you were just a floating hand carrying a gun who made no meaningful narrative choices, the DLC wouldn't be nearly as good as it was.

I absolutely loved that two different players could experience the party completely differently, and every romance option leads to a different, equally cute, date.

[pashazade]

Citadel is probably the greatest piece of fan service ever made. It's how to do fan-service. It's a love-letter to the characters, to the players and to the game. (And contains some damn fine action gameplay). I did play it in the middle of my first playthrough, and knowing that my people were all off to fight the Reapers (and Shepherd did not think that many of them would survive*) made it gloriously poignant.

Mass Effect 3 is the only game that has ever made me cry.

-I am the very model of a Scientist....

*fade to black*"

[octopoid_horror]

Agreed.

I was also Somewhat Emotional at the end of events on Tuchanka, during the goodbyes before the final assault on the beacon, and at the end of Citadel when you're on the way to the Normandy.

I played Citadel about a week after completing ME3 and it worked perfectly as a coda, whether you took it as a flashback to happy times or as a "and they lived happily ever after". Hot sex with weird aliens and drunken parties in someone else's apartment are Why We Fight!

I tried starting a new playthrough of the trilogy as a renegade (I'd been all paragon, all the way through the trilogy) but I just couldn't do it. I couldn't be a bastard to Wrex, and it would get worse from there on.

It's always seemed really strange, looking at screenshots or watching gameplay videos because I imagine Shepard as looking like, well my Shepard. It just looks wrong if he/she is different to that.

[pashazade]

I was a one-Turian woman all the way through Mass Effect 2 & 3, because Garrus is a dreamboat. Also his totally awkward seduction made it all worthwhile. I have feelings about Garrus. ALL THE FEELINGS.

ALL THE FEELINGS. I was going to romance Garrus in ME2 anyway (I'd wanted to in the first game) but the awkward seduction made it so worthwhile. Not to mention "I had reach but she had....flexibility"

And Oh God! - Mordin's sex advice.

[octopoid_horror]

Garrus was also the least creepy romance by far. Everyone else in ME2 whether Shepard was male or female had a whole lot of awkward going along with it.

The parting dialogue with him at the finale of ME3 and the date you go on in Citadel were great too.

Also and most importantly he's Garrus.

I like to think that my Shepard and Garrus had galaxy-spanning adventures with Grunt as their wayward proxy son <3

[andrewducker]

Oh, and I do wonder how much the game itself needs to change to allow for options in the PC. Some games, not at all (Dark Souls has different voices for male and female charactes, but other than that doesn't seem to care at all what gender you are). Other games have different responses from some characters - for relationships in Dragon Age/Mass Effect, and a couple of characters in Divinity:Original Sin have a preference for talking to characters of a particular gender.

[ext_2864067]

I think that depends very heavily on how narrative-heavy the game is. Dark Souls...isn't really. Most military shooters (although you run into the problem of trying to imitate the real world) are pretty sexless.

You start to run into these issues, I think, when the world's inhabitants interact with you in an in-depth way more than is necessary to influence the direction in which you wave your sword or gun.

[octopoid_horror]

Call of Duty goes to all the effort of having a female member of the military in an FPS which is a rare enough thing, but then messes it all up by having her end up as a damsel in distress.

One of the early Medal of Honor games does have you play as a female Russian sniper for a portion though.

[khoth]

The gender in Dark Souls 2 has so little noticeable effect that people can go for days after accidentally having a sex change without even noticing (it's hard to tell what's under all the armour)