From the Black Isle Studios Board

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Here's rather a long editorial by Dave Gaider on the romances in BGII (will people ever stop arguing about this) and women in gaming, taken from the Black Isle Studios message board.

Dave Gaider: We've received a lot of feedback on the romances in the game...some of it has been surprising, but all of it is useful.

I do take issue with a few things you said, though.

1) 'My Lady' is appropriate for the genre and the ideal of courtly love. If you saw anything else there, then you were looking for it.

2) I'm not making excuses. As I've said, it would have been great if we could have included more romances, period, including more romances for female players.

I don't apologize for Anomen, either. I am proud of the work I did on his story. The only thing I would change, if I could, would be his verbal responses once the romance starts...but that couldn't be done at the time, so that's not much of a regret.

I suspect Anomen's gotten a worse rap simply because he's the sole choice for female PC's, but then I'm sure some people just don't like him, period, and that's nothing new. Lot's of people loathed Jaheira, too, as I recall...and there were even Anti-Jaheira boards out there. Personally, I'd rather that kind of reaction to a character than none at all.

Anomen's a character who starts off naive, unintentionally rude and a bit needy...but sexist? I think Haer'Dalis is far more sexist when it comes down to it, and his language more flowery than Anomen's to boot, but hey that's just a designer talking.

3) I find your accusations of sexism, both against me personally and against the company I work for to be a bit specious.

You must have really hated Planescape: Torment. I mean, despite it being a classic game with a great story, they didn't even give you the option of being female, never mind include a romance for female characters.

Icewind Dale...hmmm...good game, but no romances at all, there, or even party interaction.

Let's see...I played Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX. Once again, male protaganists throughout.

You could play a female role in Daggerfall, but we won't even go into what you'd find in just about every inn.

There are a few games that do it about right (Fallout and Fallout 2 come to mind, though I wouldn't call those romances), but here we are being kicked for trying to be inclusive.

Could we have done more? Yes, obviously. And as I said in my last post on this issue, I look forward to the day when female gamers will be a given. Right now this isn't the case, though, and I fail to see how my saying so makes me a sexist. I said the ratio of male to female gamers is something like 10 to 1...a big gap...and hopefully by encouraging women to play that will narrow. But does encouraging women to play have to mean exactly 50% of everything right off the bat? That'd be ideal, sure (and I wouldn't mind it at all), but is this the requirement? Oh...and make sure that what you do offer is bland and politically correct enough so that nobody could possibly dislike it or be able to read anything into it, right?

I mean, had we chosen Haer'Dalis instead of Anomen, as you suggest, absolutely everything would have been better, right? Everyone would be happy with the one romance, everyone would just adore Haer'Dalis because, of course, everyone enjoys the same things, right? Right?

And then you say that a woman 'obviously' wouldn't be able to get ahead at a company like Bioware. Are you aware that the Director of Art in BG2 was Marcia Tofer, a woman?

I'd like to see more women in the gaming industry. I'd like to see more women specifically in design and QA. I'm not alone...and while I suspect that it's not so much an assumption of inequality as it is a lack of interest in the field on the part of most qualified women , your willingness to alienate people who would otherwise be the biggest supporters of your cause doesn't bode well for the future. I can only hope that yours is an isolated case.

I've probably talked too much about this issue, such as it is...and this is probably the last time I'll respond to it (even if people claim later that I haven't). I hope you read this and take it in the spirit with which it was meant.