I’m about half-way into my Great 2008 Game Catch-up, which means I’ve reached Mass Effect, which I know is strictly speaking a 2007 release, but I’ve been avoiding up till now because I have a phobia about weird teeth - too big, too matte, too white, too gappy - in games, and I felt strongly (and rightly) that this would trigger it.
There’s lots to say about it, of course, precious little of which hasn’t been said already. I am rather impressed with its ability to crash in frequent and deeply symbolic ways. Getting trapped in the pause menu felt like some big fat ludic meta-gag, and the way the lighting dropped out when I first boarded the Normandy as captain, meaning I was left blundering in the dark at the moment when I was supposed to be assuming command, was borderline poetry.

If there was one bit of the game I was expecting not to surprise me, though, it was the sex bit, seeing as I’d seen a dozen videos and read a hundred news reports and blog rants. But, jeepers! No wonder everyone was so exercised by it. It happens so early on! It’s so amazingly perfunctory! You get - or at least I got - precisely no choice in it! She read my fortune badly, I said ‘is that it?’, or something else which I had never considered could serve as a come-on, and within seconds, we’re hard at it. Yet again, in a game that’s supposed to be all about choice, all about exploring moral depth, I’m giving a complex, nuanced palette of options about whether or not to sign an autograph, and no autonomy whatsoever when it comes to life’s little trifles, like fighting and fucking. Give it ten years and people are going to be suing for virtual rape when game designers force sexual encounters on player-made avatars, mark my words. Acutally, give it five.

That isn’t really what surprised me, though. What surprised me was that I expected to be annoyed by the anondyne cop-out of what’s actually shown, of the blue hand banging inelegantly against the wall. Games with mature ratings (or even 12s from the capable-of-understanding-context-and-presentation BBFC) ought to be able to find more honest and more natural ways of showing what happens when a man and a space consort love each other very much. But what I discovered, of course, is that that’s not what’s happening, because with me in the room are my new best friends Urdnot Wrex and Tali’Zorah nar Rayya. Are orgies more or less stressful with people you barely know, I wonder? Will we, by the 22nd century, have evolved beyond the need for a white wine spritzer and some awkward small talk to kick things off? So of course Bioware don’t dare pan below the wrist. Who knows what’s happening down there? Do krogans have that carapace all over, do you think? Do quarians even have mouths? Is Shepherd using his d-pad commands - pull back, pull back! focus your assaults here! - to co-ordinate it all? What would have happened if I’d unlocked Intimidate before I went in?

I spend a lot of time arguing for more sex in more games; it’s downright perverse that games don’t reflect something which is such a key component of the human condition. It’s probably for the best, though, if we don’t start with non-consensual inter-species gang-bangs. Especially if they’ve got those freaky teeth.