Strange Goings-on Over at Bioware

>Q: What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

>A: Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games... I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life.

>Q: If you could tell developers of games to make sure to put one thing in games to appeal to a broader audience which includes women, what would that one thing be?

>A: A fast-forward button. Games almost always include a way to "button through" dialogue without paying attention, because they understand that some players don't enjoy listening to dialogue and they don't want to stop their fun. Yet they persist in practically coming into your living room and forcing you to play through the combats even if you're a player who only enjoys the dialogue.

I don't think having a military background makes Shepard any less likely to be gay. We're actually working on a coming-out storyline in Mass Effect 3. You can choose to have Shepard be the one confirming his sexual identity. If not, it will be one of your crew. It's an entire chapter in the game based around how people respond and react to it, and it will be up to you to reason and educate the members of your crew who are prejudiced against homosexuality.

We've put a ton of work into these sequences. I highly recommend having a homosexual Shepard in ME3, but even if you don't, you won't be left out - even straight Shepards will accidentally observe an intimate homosexual encounter aboard the Normandy, though obviously you'll have much more fun with a gay Shepard. I think there will be four to six different possible gay relationships, and I'm pushing the animation team to give them all a unique lovemaking scene.

When writing Dragon Age 2 we weren't aiming to make another generic boring fantasy that you expect was written by some old white guy. That kind of writing is just out of touch with most people nowadays. What we really wanted to create was a story that'd be an instant sensation, like the works of Rowling and Meyer. The kinds of stories that bridge all demographics in their appeal.