If you’re female and anything like me, you played Baldur’s Gate 2 as a male. Not because you usually would – given a choice my avatars are pretty much always female or asexual. It’s just that in the dawn-days of the modern CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 2 had the insanely cool idea of letting the player character romance a few of the NPC’s – and if you played as female, your options immediately sucked. Guys got Jaheira and Viconia, powerful women with opinions and personality and a chase worth having (they also got that whiny elf bint, but who ever picked her?).  Women got one lousy egomaniac Paladin, whose entire romance arc consisted of being his mother.

No wonder female gamers at the time ripped BioWare a new one, before running off to reroll as male, or mod male romance objects you didn’t want to throttle after ten seconds. And no wonder Bioware went to such lengths to fix it for the game’s spiritual successor, Dragon Age: Origins.

In retrospect I don’t think what spawned Anomen was that BioWare was actually clueless about what women want in a romantic interest. More probably, I suspect that in those early days, the whole idea of being able to romance a NPC was such far-out new shit that in their excitement, they never stopped to think what kind of statement their single male romancable character actually made.  The lessons learned from BG2 are obvious in Mass Effect, where the male love interest is a much more three-dimensional figure – but even Mass Effect was still conservative, with it’s carefully carefully enforced monogamic ideal and equally careful avoidance of male homosexuality (kissing girls, however, are fine). Still, both pushed the barriers of what until then had been expected social NPC interaction. Obviously, I was curious about how Dragon Age built on it.

From here on, there’s going to be spoilers. You’ve been warned.

The main additions to BioWare’s NPC romance kit in Dragon Age are bisexual and non-monogamous options. Two of the four romance objects won’t care about your character’s plumbing, and come with an extensive romantic history that will come up in the course of the game as both idle banter between NPC’s and plot twists. The hetero options are still quite conservative and virginal, but happily the inexperience stems logically from their histories, not a lame “well I never met the right person, but ur so speshul so now I found wub and lets make babies!” -copout. It’s fun that they’ve given the shy, avoidant virgin role to their leading man Alistair, who needs some serious romancing until he’ll even kiss your girl. It’s cool that even after the standoffish Morrigan gets naked, she is nothing less than practical in demanding to know if you’re still going to carry on with the fluffy bard bint  as well – either is fine by her, but she wants to know now, so as not to waste her time on shared property. Leliana mixes the frilly bard girl thing with sexually active bi spy-stuff – a bit heavy on the underlining, but enough to make her gushing over shoes and cute nugs tolerable. Pretty much all the romancable NPC’s manage to be charming creatures in some way – even the outrageously overdone Latin lover elf who flirts ferociously and confidently with anything that has a pulse.

For most purposes it’s that character, Zevran, who is the case study for BioWare’s NPC-romancing advances. First there’s the extremely natural take on bisexuality and polyamory, whichwould have made earlier games blush. Then there’s the animation – say what you will about DAO’s dated graphics engine in other areas, but you can’t fault the expressiveness of the characters’ faces and postures (except in the obligatory sex scenes, and the less said about those, the better). Third comes the dialogue, professionally voiced and scripted by some obscene genius who together produce somethign fantasy-authentic enough it took me a full 24 hours of play since first encountering Zevran to realise the “Antivan” accent is actually garden variety Italian. The end result character is overdone, gratuitously so, and would annoy the snot out of any female player with half a self-esteem … if it weren’t for the fourth thing, that both the NPC and the game script agree that all power lies with the player character. But only some of the time.

What BioWare has always known is that the true key to powerful game experiences is taking control away from the player – forcing them to accept, experience and appreciate things they didn’t actually want to happen. It’s harder than you’d think. Basic code demands that game events, romantic or otherwise, are initiated by the player filling certain conditions. This means that the player in effect has complete control over the game – events can be initiated or not, simply by filling or not filling those conditions. The NPC has only as much power as the script gives them, and the player knows this – and even the points where the script does allow NPC’s power can be danced around with saves and reloads, if you want to. The only way to really take control away from the player is to give them no desirable outcome – just an option that sucks less than the rest. And doing that entertainingly, that’s the brass ring.

This is why it’s so incredibly cool how the Zevran romance plays out. Traditional videogame romances invariably build to a meaningful emotional relationship. It’s wonderfully shocking that Zevran blows that off with actual irritation: “I’ll take my pleasures where I find them, but my friend – I’m an assassin and the son of a whore. What do I know about love?”. The player can keep up with the casual sex if they choose, but with that single exchange, it’s made obvious that there is nothing more to be had here. And this carries on, with exactly one exception:  if the player character elects to die at the end, the player will be told that while Zevran eventually assassinates his way to leadership of the Antivan Crows, he never takes another lover. (Technically the scene with Zev’s ex could be mentioned too – but since at 100% approval he’ll defend you even if you told him to keep his gay hands off, it’s more of a loyalty than a romance feature).

In the CRPG world of “must reward the player effort with equal player gains”, this impresses the living snot out of me. This takes balls: luring a player into exploring the romance story angle, then smacking them down by have a mere NPC say thanks, but it meant nothing.

This is ultimately the thing that makes the DAO romances: there is simply no way to ‘win’ certain scenarios. In fact, there is no way to win a lot of scenarios – when Alistair calls you out about killing Isolde or Connor, at most you can minimise the hit you take from his anger. When Leliana freaks out about you flirting around, at most you can fluster her into leaving you alone.  No matter what you do, Zevran will never make a committed noise, and whatever you do, Morrigan will eventually leave. Alistair will man up, quit whining and what’s needed – but all that goes out the window if you don’t give him Loghain’s head on a pike. This is what ultimately gives all four legitimacy as romance objects. They will not conform to the player’s dominance as initiator and controller of game events. Sometimes, they’ll say no. Sometimes they’ll walk up to you, and make demands – or just plain walk away.

And this is what I’d love to see explored further in BioWare’s next iteration of the NPC romance. Characters whose name features on the movie poster exactly as big as yours does – because if it doesn’t, why would they be worth your time?

Morrigan, aka The Bitchy One. Dragon Age excels at characters that you love, or love to hate, or occasionally both.

So I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Origins. Obsessing over it, you might say – I’m still nowhere near finishing it, though I’m playing at a pace that saw me finish The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion in about two weeks. Partly that’s because the game is just plain huge. But it’s also because I keep getting sidetracked into just chatting with my fellow adventurers, rather than killing Darkspawn. While at it, I realised something. I’m doing that, lavishing time on the NPC’s, because several times now those AI-controlled character simulations have conned me into thinking of them as real people.

In fact, I’ve been having an easier time treating them as ‘real’ than I generally do with the characters roleplayed by actual, (virtually) present human beings in the MMO’s I mostly play.

Let me underscore that. For the past few years, most of my CRPG’ing has been MMO roleplay in World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online or City of Heroes. In settings where each character you meet is the avatar of another human being, you’d think I’d be having the “I’m playing with real people” experience in buckets and spades. Not so. In patently out-of-character interactions like PUGs and raids, it’s easy to remember other players are people. In roleplay, though, the uncanny valley looms huge and unbridgeable. It’s rare to ever, even for a moment, forget that I’m dealing with amateur representations of made up people, controlled by unpracticed storytellers just trying to muddle along – or worse, not even storytelling at all but just “roleplaying” and “immersing” (which seems to be code for “having teen romances with everything that has a pulse” or “arguing over trivial crap because conflict is interesting”).

Basically, the vast majority of roleplayers fail to produce a credible imitation of humanity. Real live MMO-playing humans actually fail an intuitive Turing test – but somehow in Dragon Age’s, precoded and simulated NPC’s don’t. To me, that’s cool (also rather depressing, as MMO roleplay goes, but definitely more cool). Why do AI-controlled constructs convince me of their authenticity as ‘real’ people, why do roleplay characters directly controlled by bonafide human beings fail?

My instinct is that it has to be down to the art of storytelling. Dragon Age is a carefully tailored, story-driven single player experience, where the characters fit seamlessly into the narrative and serve to build up the experience as a whole – the characters and the world feed each other, producing an illusion of realness. MMO’s on the other hand are basically a graphical interface disguising the fact that everything under it is really a loot-lottery fuelled Skinner box. Dragon Age i’s a professionally orchestrated feat of storytelling, carefully designed to engage me emotionally, not just on a hand/eye-coordination level. MMO designers, even the fabled Blizzard, don’t make that effort. They don’t make money by delivering an emotional experience: what they capitalise on is delivering ever larger Skinner box cycles to keep their players shelling out that 12€ a month to complete their latest set bonus.

That leaves narrative content in MMO’s largely down to what amateur roleplayers can produce – and that just can’t compete. First, because amateur roleplayers simply don’t have the control over their story’s environment that BioWare does, and so have vastly less tools to deliver a compelling experience. There simply is no allpowerful author capable of orchestrating the show.  But they also poison the well voluntarily, because storytelling is a skill and an art, and the vast majority of MMO roleplaying groups gratuitously cripple it. They simply forbid any demand for quality, and ban any form of educational feedback that isn’t positive and encouraging. They offer no incentive to provide good story, and make it outright difficult for rookie storytellers to learn.

People who have never roleplayed online wonder how Stephanie Meyer’s horrifficly bad Twilight came about. Those who do MMO-roleplay, have a depressingly good idea. When the rule is that players must suspend disbelief and give the benefit of doubt to storytellers less skilled, wish fulfillment and self-therapy tend to bubble to the surface. Not all “natural leaders who just need a chance to shine” are played by RL insecure people, not all people starved for RL romance will play their idealised form of the opposite sex for daydream closure – but enough do for it to be a cliche. And that’s fine, it really is, as therapy. As storytelling? There’s the rub. A good storyteller’s goal is to entertain and move their audience - your average wish-fulfillment roleplayer’s goal is to entertain and move themselves. The audience comes as an afterthought,  if it gets a thought at all.

This, I think, is why especially immersively played roleplay characters do worse than scripted AI simulations at mimicing humanity. They engage the player’s emotions, rather than the audience’s – and because they fail to provoke human response, they fail to appear human at all.

Storytellers are liars and manipulators, but it’s the art of manipulating the audience, not oneself. Until roleplayers learn that, I suspect they’ll forever fail the Turing test.