I want to shoot him. Let me shoot him.

ESRB Warning: Any sense of choice is merely an illusion.

Welcome to Star Wars: The Old Republic. It has some great story-telling.

Meet Tyresius Lokai, a slimy rodent who I really want to kill. I think they did a masterful job with this guy. He's a serial scammer who has managed to piss off pretty much everyone. Bounty hunters are sent to go kill him. And off they set, guns ready, and hoping to catch the previous guy who failed to do the job. Well, we meet him, and guess what: he's been bought off. Sold his ship and now hangs out with sexy twi'lek babes, doing what anyone else would do if loaded with credits. He's not the first to get bought off, since Mr. Slimerat got pretty damn rich with his tricks.

Finally though, I have him. It's been a long chase, but his droid is dead and my gun is ready. He offers to buy me off, throwing me what I think was a box of credits. I'm immoral, but that doesn't mean I'm unethical. This guy is going down. Beside, he's annoying. Whoever wrote this quest chain did a masterful job of making me hate him. I refuse the offer and he sets dogs on me.

But he's out of time and space. His ship isn't ready to take off and my blaster is ready. Time to get paid.

By him.

Even if I really want to kill him, even if I have already rejected his offer in order to kill him, I cannot kill him. Nope. I am magically compelled to take him on as a companion. That makes perfect sense! Why wouldn't I suddenly drop all my hatred and take on a huge risk like that?

Of course the game won't let me break my story. I mean, their story. That's fine. But is this really the only possible way? Did no one suggest the option to shoot him and as part of my reward I get to hire (for free) a companion which is exactly the same as him? It felt like I'd been playing a racing game and suddenly they replaced the finish line with a wall.

Not happy.

I'm looking forward to the trial or f2p.

Passive Patricide

If Luke had just learned to heal Vader might have lived.
That's what happens when you don't learn to heal: your dad dies

-Iapetes

I'm stealing that.

-Klepsacovic

NPCs, it's okay to not be gay

Jonnie of MMO Melting Pot seems to be unhappy about the absolute heterosexuality of virtual worlds of Warcraft and Star Wars.
http://www.mmomeltingpot.com/2011/09/editorial-why-i-love-being-gay-in-wow/
Blogger and my laptop are disagreeing about how to add links, so I hope you don't mind a bit of copy-paste.

Let's try the usual disclaimers to start off: I'm not gay and I'm not homophobic. But despite being called a fag more than a few times, I clearly do not have an insider's perspective, so maybe I just "don't get it."

That said, who cares? I think we may be making too much of this. By we I don't mean myself, since I disagree with him, and I can't speak for you, the reader, so it appears that we was a terrible word choice.

Azeroth is a fantasy world. This is important is several ways.

First off, the cultures and views within it are not necessarily those of the creators. Second, these are not necessarily idealized cultures. In fact, I'd say that the portrayal of every major race in WoW has gotten progressively less rosy. All of the races have major flaws, with only the tauren, in my opinion, being able to truly say that the evil is isolated to one group, the Grimtotem. In other words, this isn't a perfect world, made so by the lack of homosexuality. Not much is said on it one way or another, beside "me not that kind of orc." It's not shunned or accepted, just not there at all.

Why should it be? From what I can tell of the science, homosexuality is not a choice, but a matter of brain chemistry. Yea, I'm trying to tip-toe there, because "brain condition" and "mental state" all make it sound like something is wrong. Maybe in Azeroth the genetics and brains just don't work out in such a way that homosexual behavior or desire exists. Is this so different from how there don't seem to be dark-skinned humans or white orcs? It's all just biochemistry and it would be strange to claim that an alien universe should work the same way as ours.

Of course it would be equally strange to claim that an alien universe shouldn't work the same way as ours, given the fact that we (useless we, once again) created it. The writers could have decided that the chemistry exists to create black humans and white orcs (they come in several colors already, what is one more?). But why would they? Do these things add to the universe? Do they make the stories any better?

Potentially, yes. It could be interesting to see how various sexual or romantic attractions could change the sub-plots in a game like WoW. Variety can spawn variety. Maybe the tendency to not read quests could be fixed by a bit of gayness. After all, nothing quite catches the attention like an unexpectedly bit of tauren uh, beef.

I'm going to leave that aside for now, since I don't thin I'm getting anywhere on that path. Instead, let's think about how there came to be a lack of homosexuality.

Maybe the writers just never even thought of it. This seems unlikely. So then we have to wonder, if it came up, where did it go? I'm picturing a committee sitting around working out some quest chains.
"Alright, dragons captured his friend and he wants us to go free him. Anything to add to that?"
"Why not make it his boyfriend?"
"Make them gay?"
"Yes."
"No."

Why not? Maybe they don't want to anger the people who would be angered by that sort of thing. Maybe it feels forced to them. These are things I could understand. WoW seems to be aimed at a very wide population. Some of that population includes people who think that rescuing a girlfriend is romantic and heartwarming, while rescuing a boyfriend means that Azeroth Jesus is crying. As for the second, when does a gay character appear? I mean, when is it a natural part of the story for someone to be gay, rather than being a forced "hey look guys, we added a gay character for you, aren't you happy yet?" It's the paralysis of not wanting to do something wrong, so doing nothing at all.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who has the most double-standards of all?
I'm trying to imagine if WoW had been made by a majority gay development team and they acted the same way, creating a world in which everyone is gay. Would I play this game and think "oh yea, sure, everyone is gay, so what? Just coincidence and dev habit, not like it matters." I doubt it. I'd probably think it was a little strange. I mean, an entire world in which everyone is gay? How obviously forced! So maybe the reverse is the same.

But that's silly. Let's face it: an entirely gay universe would need some other means of reproduction, meaning that homosexuality wouldn't be the same. In the real universe, homosexuality is not "normal", is is the exception, not the rule. It is unusual. But that doesn't mean it is wrong. Somehow this distinction fails to sink in for many people, that different is not wrong. But by the same token, not wrong doesn't mean typical.

Games could benefit from a bit more gayness, not because it is politically correct or polite, but because it would allow for more variety in story-telling. And that's the key, it should be for the story, it should add to it, rather than being forced in. If it is going to be forced in, then it is just as ridiculous as the crusades of homophobes, who might be all in favor of gay relationships in TOR, as long as they gave dark side points.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion.

P.S. Upon a second reading, I noticed this phrase "When a personal choice is singled out" Why would anyone ever choose to be gay? It sounds pretty stupid, if you ask me. Who in their right mind would choose to be hated and discriminated against? Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me. Maybe the underlying self isn't a choice.

On the nonexistent brightside:

There is some level of discontent over the lack of same-sex romance in swtor.  I offer this bright side: at least they don't give dark side points.  But I'd much prefer if they existed and were alignment-neural.  Wouldn't the moralistic outrage be fun to watch?  

In unrelated news, Internet won't be ready for over a week, so posting will be sporadic, based on my will to walk a mile or so to the campus wireless network.

Morality doesn't all win the same way

They have always connected the two which lead to players having to decide whether they want to roleplay or win the game; an interesting, but completely unfun decision.

- Nils commenting at Procrastination Amplification

Why is winning separate from roleplay? Or if you don't like that term, try choice of play or style of play. It doesn't make much sense. Would a Light character win the same way as a Dark character? Of course not. But beyond that, they'd define winning differently. For Palpatine it was dominance over the galaxy while for Luke it was freedom and protecting his friends.

Perhaps win isn't even the right word. Success. Goal completion. Different people have different goals. President Obama and Speaker Boener have a conflicting goal regarding the 2012 election. They have a shared goal in economic recovery, but their methods will be very different. So even for the same goal, the same winning condition, we see significantly different methods.

The win condition should not be a single absolute in a game with morality or other types of choice, but should instead be based on how the player plays. This could be done in a sandbox way, by allowing greedy players to get rich and murderous players to kill while altruistic players protect everyone. But sometimes people like their credit roll or victory screen. At the least it confirms that they've done what they thought they had, which in the specific case of "kill everyone" can be difficult to determine if the victims move around a lot.

Let's try the example of the Civilization series. There are definite winning conditions, all of which give a win (duh), but in different ways. The key part is that you win by playing well in the way you choose to play. Science victories come from technological progress while cultural victories come from cultural gain. You wouldn't get a conquest victory from either method, but instead from a different way: killing everyone.

Applying this to a gear-centric, or even just gear-using, MMO is not as easy. If you're +3 Light and your decisions tend to keep you there and there is a nice +4 Light cloak, the game would have to somehow not cause you to want the +4 Light cloak. Otherwise there is incentive to play away from the character's personality in return for reward, which is often not much fun.

The different Shades (Light-Dark) of gear could boost stats or behaviors related to actions which cause that Shade. For example, maybe a player does a little too much theft to be +4 Light, so the +3 Light cloak helps with theft, but less than a +2, and much less than a -4 Dark. But this carries many problems. For one, there are multiple reasons for a Shade and not all of them are stats to be boosted. Maybe a player has a murder but no theft, so the +3 Light cloak with added theft is useless.

Light-Dark power costs could be one source, with a Light Side and a Dark Side energy pool, each supplemented by gear. A +4 Light player would have little to gain from a +3 cloak that mixes mostly Light with a little Dark, while the +3 Light player would not want to lose the bit of Dark energy, and the flexibility, from going to a +4 Light cloak. Unfortunately this solution lends itself heavily toward gear/stat-obsession, but even worse, is really damn boring.

P.S. Yes, this is tagged Star Wars Galaxies. That's the tag I have and I'm sticking with it, search engines be damned.

I was a nail in the coffin, but WoW was the hammer

A long while back I tried out SWG. I never got around to posting, or finishing, my thoughts on it. I played after NGE or whatever that was called, so I wasn't getting the supposedly better earlier version. But it was still pretty damn fun. Cities had player populations rather than loads of NPCs who give one quest and nothing ever again. And players had cities. The economy was massive, far beyond what I could easily perceive or comprehend. That's a double-edged sword, since once you're in, it's full of wonder and possibility, but a new player looks at it and wonders, "so, wtf do I do?"

I had a lot of fun when I played it for those two weeks. I even considered ever so slightly leaving WoW for it. But how can one leave WoW? You really cannot. It is always there, waiting, dominating. Well, until now (or a few months ago), for whatever reasons.

If I hadn't played WoW before, I think I'd have stuck with SWG. But I didn't. Instead I made a trial and was gone in two weeks. Another non-player. Another nail in the coffin. But WoW was the hammer.

It makes me a little sad to hear that SWG is closing, but I can't say what I actually lose from it. Maybe the evidence that that sort of game can work.