Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience.
Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you lots of choices. It’s up to you whether yougo heroic, woke or genocidal
It did this despite being criticised as ‘woke’ for its various inclusive options. In Baldur’s Gate 3, your character can be gay or trans, have heterochromia, vitiligo, and be of almost any race. For that matter, it can be a dragon-human offspring, an elf or a dwarf too.
Complaining about there being options you don’t have to take in a game like this just makes you look ridiculous. As a gay man myself, I like that when my fireball-flinging sorcerer returns from enabling a heroic prison break he can get a smooch from his ethically dubious vampire boyfriend.
If a genre is about giving players choice – and the fun of the game is having agency to change an imaginary world – more choice is a good thing. Baldur’s Gate 3 introduces you to an immensely likeable barbarian on the run from a literal devil – and then gives you the option to decapitate her, and carry around her head for the rest of the game, should you so choose. You have the option of saving a camp of beleaguered refugees on the run from war – or siding with the murderous cult that’s pursuing them.
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