Khrushchev in love

I’m also annoyed when video game creators feel that it is necessary to compel players to enter into heterosexual relationships in the game. I haven’t played the game the blogger linked to above is reviewing, but I’ve played plenty where this is the case. Two fairly recent entries to the list include the extensively moddable Morrowind and Oblivion, both of which only include, as optional quests, those which establish heterosexual relationships, a couple of which allow your character to play matchmaker. The first mod made for Morrowind which allows the character to enter into relationships with NPCs (and the number of social mods for this game is really surprisingly high, given that it is not an online game) included only heterosexual relationships (though the author was, at least at some point, planning on adding support for homosexual relationships – this has taken long enough that another modder modded the original mod toward this end), even though that actually takes more work on the programmer’s part, since he or she has to base an NPC’s response on the PC’s gender, rather than ignoring it entirely (though a more interesting solution would include programming preferences into individual NPCs).

What’s weird is that this is a fairly recent phenomenon. The first game I played in which I was aware of having to choose a PC’s gender was one of the later entries in the Ultima series, and the only in-game relationships possible were with prostitutes, both male and female, and the programmers specifically added support, evidenced by different responses based on a PC’s gender relative to that of the prostitute, for homosexual relationships, and this was back in 1990! It seems to me strange that, as tolerance for homosexuality has increased, video game makers have seen fit to write code which enforces compulsory heterosexuality rather than simply leave all options open or, like their predecessors, add code which supports in-game homosexual relationships, which is the easier route code-wise.