A Simple Tip On Not Writing Yourself Into a Corner

A little while ago Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic added gay characters and romance story lines to their game.

The reception was a bit mixed. You see, the gay content was confined to one world only; to new content only. Phrases like "gay ghetto" were used. Why should gay content only be confined to one planet?

The answer - or at least part of the answer - is that it's a pretty big task to go through all the existing romance lines in an open world game or MMORPG to verify whether they work in a homosexual as well as a heterosexual context. It's an even bigger task, verging on the completely impractical, to track down the original voice talent or sound-alikes and rerecord new lines. On top of that, going back and making sure the code checks each existing interaction for gender and plays the right line back would be a major effort. And of course, if you miss even one spot, you make everything seem shoddy and you undermine basically the whole point of having dialogue.

There's a way to avoid that, however, a way for the writer to be the hero when the decision is made to include gay content even though everything was based on an assumption of heterosexuality previously:

When you write romance lines for an open world game or MMO, write them gender neutral.

Instead of "hey pretty girl" write "hey good looking". Instead of "you're the man for me" write "you're the one for me." It's actually not that hard. And really, in real life most people don't include specific gender references in most of their speech anyhow.

Then, when it's suddenly decided that since it's 2013 we better have some gay content in the game you can inform the rest of the team that all existing characters who have romance lines are already "gay ready". It will make things a lot easier for a lot of people on the dev team and you will seem like you have your shit together.

That's how it happened on Bully. When I first brought up the idea of letting Jimmy mack on guys as well as girls the whole romance thing was very low priority and no one cared; we were trying to make a the game work on a much more fundamental level and stressing about the deadlines we were busting.

Later, near the end of the project when the flirting and making out stuff was in and things were more or less under control I brought up gay romance again. This time people felt it was too complicated and too late in the project and everything was already recorded - we were trying to bring it home, not add stuff. It's not that there were any objection to the idea itself, it was just a schedule and mental fatigue thing near the end of a hard dev cycle.

So when I told them that it wasn't complicated - that a bunch of the male peds had romance dialogue already and that Jimmy's existing dialogue would work without exception; all we had to do was tag these male characters as romancable and we were good to go - it got added in short order.

It worked out pretty well.