Divine Divinity contains an unmarked quest for finding the main city's brothel, and rewards a large amount of XP for employing services therein. To be sure, I have played my fair number of games that contain romantic interludes, or the plain ol' bumpin' of uglies. I am in my thirties and have been playing video games since the middle of the 1980s, and this is the first time I've ever seen the existence of sex, as an event unto itself, so explicitly and practically addressed in my pixels. Knowing all of this, and knowing how the Fable franchise prides itself on a choices-and-consequences approach, I was still surprised further to discover that the bed in a player's house can be interacted with-and on interacting, the options are "sleep" and "sex." Sleep has essentially an alarm clock option, and sex can be chosen in the protected or unprotected varieties. The game was telling me, bluntly, in no euphemistic or uncertain terms, which of the characters I was interacting with were straight or gay-and, by extension, letting me know up front which men and women were considered to be in the dating pool for my character. I knew, offhandedly, before I started playing that this was considered a "mature RPG." And yet I was surprised (pleasantly so, but still taken aback for a moment) to find that among the character attributes for nearly every adult NPC in the game, there is a sexual preference qualifier. And yet, it has challenged me in a most unexpected way.
I tried other games as a distraction but none of them actually satisfied my craving, no more than a bag full of carrot sticks actually satisfies a craving for a bag of chips.Įveryone on Twitter gave helpful, thoughtful suggestions for what I should try, and in the end I ignored every last one of them and got sucked into a marathon six-hour session of Fable III.įable III isn't exactly challenging, as far as game play, story, or game design go.
What I really wanted to play was Mass Effect 3, and that's physically impossible for another six months. After an hour of Bastion and an hour of Chrono Cross I cast about for something new, feeling at odds. I had an unexpected amount of video game time to fill, this past weekend.