Renegade Sex: Compulsory Sexuality and Charmed Magic Circles in the Mass Effect series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines portrayals of sexuality in video games, particularly in terms of the increasing inclusion of queer and non-normative sexuality. This increasing diversity of representations remains rife with problems, however, ranging from the privileging of female queer identity over male queer identity in much of the Mass Effect series, to the “gay button” issue of having queer content only accessible through player effort to locate it. In order to examine both this progress and its problems, this article primarily uses close readings of game texts including the Mass Effect series, supplemented by key existing critical work on in-game sexuality (Consalvo, 2003; Shaw, 2009; Greer, 2013). The article begins with an application of Adrienne Rich’s concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” to game worlds and examines the privileging of certain sexual activities and identities in games using Gayle S. Rubin’s concept of the “charmed circle”. Both of these concepts are applied to games more generally, and then to the work of game development studio BioWare particularly with a focus on their Mass Effect series. This article concludes with a consideration of some work by independent developers that both expand and critique the hierarchies of sex and what the mainstream game development community could learn from these projects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".