A recent Kotaku report on a potential major overhaul of Anthem concluded on a very interesting and surprisingly understated note about a completely different game. Sources told the site that BioWare is still at work on Dragon Age 4, which we knew, and also that a new Mass Effect game is "in very early development" under the direction of Mike Gamble.

Gamble is a longtime BioWare producer who has previously worked on Mass Effect 2, 3, and Andromeda, and was a lead producer on Anthem. Mass Effect: Andromeda bombed badly, to the point that the entire series was reportedly put "on hiatus" in 2017. But BioWare has previously insisted that the series hasn't been abandoned: Gamble said in 2018 that "Mass Effect is certainly not dead," and earlier this year producer Mark Darrah said, "We're definitely not done with Mass Effect," a sentiment echoed by studio general manager Casey Hudson.

"Very early development" could mean a lot of things. It possible that BioWare has a team putting out some early concept sketches and storyboards; it's possible that Gamble ran into Hudson at the coffee machine and said, "Dude, we should do a new Mass Effect." One very oblique suggestion that Gamble could be leading a new Mass Effect team (or is at least available to take the job) came earlier this year: Rumors surfaced in May that he and Mark Darrah had moved to Dragon Age 4 but Gamble said on Twitter that the report was "incorrect," a point he repeated in June.

Whatever the situation, it's inevitable that we'll get a new Mass Effect sooner or later. It's a blockbuster series, and one stumble—even a big one—doesn't diminish the value of its name. But even if it's years off (and it is), it's kind of exciting to actually read that somebody, somewhere, is probably doing something to make it happen.

I've reached out to an EA rep about the report and will update if I receive any further information, which I clearly will not.

Austrian cosplayer Evelyn Blackwater put a lot of effort into this Tali outfit, even to the point of handprinting the fabric and putting a light connected to a microphone inside the helmet. There's a cable running from them around the back of the helmet to a battery, and you can see it in action on her Instagram. Here's a look inside.

This outfit won the first prize at ComicsCon Austria, and well-deserved too. For more pictures, including some behind-the-scenes pics of the sculpting and casting of the helmet and the work it took to get Tali's three-toed feet right, check out the Instagram she shares with her partner and fellow cosplayer Vincent Blackwater. It also features some shared cosplay, like this adorable Willow and Wilson from Don't Starve.

Back on this date in 2014, BioWare advertised the sexiest videogame accessory of all time: A Garrus Vakarian body pillow that you could, uhh, "calibrate to get the full night's rest you deserve!" Alas, this date in 2014, as it is today, was April Fool's Day, and the pillow existed only in the imaginations of quite possibly tens of thousands of disappointed Mass Effect fans. 

Somehow, it took BioWare a half-decade to recognize the obvious opportunity here, but finally, it has happened. 

The real-life Garrus Vakarian Body Pillow, available from Jinx, will set you back 30 bucks, and despite the name it's not actually a pillow at all but just a cover: You'll have to spring for the pillow separately and, as far as I can tell, somewhere else. The case measures 53x24 inches with a zipper closer, is made of "super comfortable brushed polyester," and features a full-color image of Garrus on both sides, one in portrait and the other in profile, for spooning or whatever. It's your pillow, you do you.

I'm a little disappointed that this is being billed on Jinx as a body pillow when it is clearly a body pillowcase, but I also have no doubt that an awful lot of Mass Effect fans will be happy to let the distinction slide if it means they can finally get Garrus in the sack. The body pillow covers are slated to start shipping the week of June 17.

In a studio profile on Polygon, Anthem's executive producer Mike Darrah and general manager Casey Hudson suggest that Bioware still has faith in the Mass Effect series after Andromeda underwhelmed fans in 2017. 

“We’re definitely not done with Mass Effect," says Darrah. "There’s a lot of stories to be told. We could pull on the threads we put down with Andromeda; we could pull on threads from Mass Effect 3. There’s a lot of interesting space to be explored.” 

“In my mind, it’s very much alive,” says Hudson. “I’m thinking all the time about things that I think will be great. It’s just a matter of getting back to it as soon as we can.”

'As soon as we can' might be a while. In addition to launching Anthem and supporting it as a living game, Bioware also appears to be working on a new Dragon Age game.

The report suggests that the Frostbite engine may have been partly responsible for Bioware's Andromeda struggles. RPG systems had to be constructed from scratch to support the kind of story-driven game Bioware is famous for. The studio has since invested in advanced performance capture technology for Anthem. The Andromeda project was also rebooted multiple times, after failed experiments involving procedurally generated planets. The bulk of the game that we played was apparently developed in an 18-month sprint.

Imagine a new Mass Effect game built with new technology and a less fraught production phase. It's one of our favourite series ever, and it deserves another shot.

It's easy to ignore the codex section when you start playing a Mass Effect game. You concentrate on the shooting and romancing and flying around space completing missions, and you gloss over that one button in the menu. At some point, though, you'll want to know what the deal is with the geth, or the Citadel Council, or the genophage. One of the things that makes the Mass Effect games special is how much detail is there waiting for you, and how much context it adds to the action. Mass Effect's history makes shooting a bunch of krogans feels like something that matters, rather than just another obstacle between you and the next mission complete screen. 

Eventually you feel the urge to look deeper. And that's when you find whole histories of human space exploration and alien contact, and beyond that histories for each of the alien species and their progenitors that go back thousands of years.

There's a lot to it. And there will be spoilers.

The history of the Mass Effect universe begins some time before 1,000,000,000 BCE—dates are given in the format of CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era)—when a species called the leviathans controls the galaxy. Observing a repeating cycle in which civilizations collapse after creating synthetic lifeforms that turn on their creators, the leviathans seek to break this cycle by, ironically, creating a synthetic intelligence. They call it the Catalyst. 

The Catalyst is intended to serve as a bridge between organic and artificial life, working to preserve organic species at any cost. The Catalyst, believing conflict to be inevitable, sees the best way of achieving this to be taking organic civilizations at their peak, shortly before they are responsible for their own downfalls, and absorbing their genetic material into new lifeforms that it can maintain forever. It preserves them, but only in the sense that it turns them into jam.

The Catalyst begins with its own creators, transforming them into the first reapers and beginning the war its creators had tried to avoid.

1,000,000,000 BCE 

A reaper called the Leviathan of Dis is defeated by the actual leviathans. In the long term, however, the leviathans fail. The reapers begin their cycle of accelerating cultural advancement by leaving mass effect technology lying around the galaxy for them to find, then absorbing those species once they become advanced enough. 

48,000 BCE

The protheans are the last in a long line of species to fall to the reapers. Unlike their predecessors, the protheans had learned of the reapers and begun to prepare for their arrival, though they were too late. Their preparations survive into the next cycle, however, in the form of the Crucible.

1900 BCE

Nuclear conflict devastates the krogan homeworld of Tuchanka, and the advanced society of the krogan devolves into one of warring clans in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

580 BCE

The asari, the first post-prothean race to encounter the mass effect relays and develop faster-than-light travel, discover Citadel Station.

500 BCE

The Citadel Council is formed after the asari are joined on Citadel Station by salarians, the two species working together to find and unite other civilizations. Contact is made with quarians, volus, hanar, and batarians.

1 CE

One of the Citadel Council's interplanetary expeditions encounters the rachni after opening a relay leading to systems controlled by their hive mind. The Rachni Wars begin.

300 CE

The rachni are declared extinct after being defeated by the krogan, who have been genetically uplifted by salarians specifically to combat them. As a reward for their efforts the fast-breeding krogan are given rachni worlds and several planets in Citadel space to settle.

693 CE

Beelo Gurji, a salarian agent working for the Citadel Council, is accused of using civilians as bait during an espionage operation. Rather than being punished Gurji is promoted, becoming the first Spectre. The Spectres are given greater freedom than other agents and are intended in part to keep an eye on krogan expansion.

700 CE

Krogans found a colony on the asari world of Lusia. They refuse to depart, so Spectres launch a strike against them. The krogan retaliate, and the Krogan Rebellions begin. First contact is made with turians, who join the war against the krogan.

710 CE

Turians release the genophage, a bioweapon developed by salarian scientists, which causes a genetic mutation in krogans that reduces the viability of their pregnancies. The effect is devastating.

800 CE

The long-term effect of declining krogan populations brings an informal end to their threat. Their role at the center of the Citadel military is taken by the turians.

1400 CE

Widespread industrialization on the drell homeworld of Rakhana leads to environmental collapse.

1600 CE

The servants of the reapers called "collectors" are seen in the Terminus Systems, but these reports are dismissed by the Citadel Council as rumors and the existence of the collectors as a myth.

1895 CE

The technologically advanced quarians discover that their robotic servants, the geth, have achieved sentience. Fearing revolt, the quarians begin destroying the geth, which leads to the very revolution they feared. 

1980 CE

An asari named Aria T'Loak takes over Omega station and becomes known as the Pirate Queen of Omega.

2000 CE

First contact is made between drell and hanar, who begin evacuating the drell from their dying homeworld. Those drell who survive form a symbiotic relationship with the hanar, which they call the Compact.

2069 CE

Human beings begin to settle Earth's moon, building Armstrong Outpost.

2148 CE

Using information found in prothean ruins on Mars, humans discover that Charon, previously believed to be a moon of Pluto, is actually a mass relay. They travel through it to Arcturus.

2156 CE

Children in Singapore who were accidentally exposed to element zero begin displaying telekinetic abilities. At least, some of them do. Others merely develop cancer.

2157 CE

While activating a mass relay, human explorers are attacked by turians because, to prevent a repeat of the Rachni Wars, the opening of new relays is prohibited. What humans call the First Contact War begins. Turians call it 'the Relay 314 Incident'.

2163 CE

Members of the four-eyed batarian species discover the remains of a gigantic, once-living starship called the Leviathan of Dis—a reaper.

2165 CE

Humankind's Systems Alliance becomes an associate member of the Citadel Council.

2171 CE

A member of human-first paramilitary organization Cerberus assassinates Pope Clement XVI using poisoned rosary beads. He is replaced with a pope more agreeable to Cerberus ideals.

2176 CE

The Andromeda Initiative, a collaboration between multiple species who plan to send Ark ships to settle the Andromeda galaxy, is founded. Though it will be a one-way trip, their long-term plan is to open a route between the two galaxies.

2183 CE - Start date of Mass Effect

Humans and turians collaborate to create a craft called the SSV Normandy to be captained by the first human Spectre, Commander Shepard. Rogue Spectre Saren Arterius leads an attack on the Citadel on behalf of the reapers and is repulsed. A month later, Mass Effect 2 begins with the destruction of the Normandy and the loss of Shepard.

2185 CE - Main events of Mass Effect 2

Cerberus succeeds in reviving Commander Shepard after two years of effort. The first wave of the Andromeda Initiative departs to settle a new galaxy, having accelerated their plans in response to the reaper threat.

2186 CE - Start date of Mass Effect 3

Reapers invade through batarian space, eventually reaching Earth. Shepard attempts to use the prothean device called the Crucible to defeat them permanently.

2744 CE

In the Heleus cluster of the Andromeda galaxy, first contact occurs between the kett and angarans. The kett appear peaceful at first, but then kidnap angaran leaders and sow discord between angaran worlds.

2819 CE - Start date of Mass Effect: Andromeda

Three of the Andromeda Initiative's Ark ships arrive in the Heleus cluster and are attacked by clouds of dark energy called the Scourge.

N7 Day is once again upon us, and you'd probably be forgiven for thinking that it's lost a little of its luster over the years. It's been more than six years since the Mass Effect trilogy wrapped up, after all, and Mass Effect: Andromeda's most lasting impact was forcing the closure of BioWare Montreal. But BioWare isn't trying to slip away from it quietly. 

I think it's telling that the video focuses primarily on the Shepard series: There's a group shot of the Andromeda gang but it passes quickly, and the up-close focus is on familiar faces like Garrus, Mordin, Thane, and Legion—and of course the Normandy and the Citadel are in there too. It's an implicit acknowledgment, in case anyone needed it, that Andromeda was a stumble: Not an ET-magnitude disaster, but probably not where BioWare and EA plan to pin the future of the series either. 

And clearly (and happily), the series does have a future. The promise of a glimpse into it is maybe a little oversold (I don't think the Xbox One X enhancements count) but Casey Hudson "dreaming about what the next great Mass Effect game will be" while taking a slurp from an "I Should Go" mug is not the sort of thing a studio does when it's trying to get people to think about something else.   

If you've still got Mass Effect 3 installed, N7 Day is also a good opportunity to check out some significant new mods that have just been released. We've got got some thoughts on BioWare's best and worst companions that you might find interesting—unsurprisingly, the Mass Effect crew dominates the list. 

It's a little funny how much we've come to expect dance emotes in 2018. Obviously /dance doesn't top our lists of demands like 4K support or unlocked framerates, but it's honestly hard to imagine an MMO without a diligently programmed jig. It's a tradition at this point, and one that's expanded beyond massively multiplayer games to practically everything with avatars and a chat box. It's just part of the culture, at this point: if you see a Night Elf, you can bet they'll know the "Billie Jean" dance.

So we decided to tell a brief history of the dance emote in PC gaming, recorded through the power of 11 gifs. Considering that most of the world's teens communicate exclusively through Fortnite tangos in 2018, I imagine that we've only scratched the surface of video game dancing tech. But that just goes to show how deeply /dance has absorbed into gaming.

Everquest - 1999

Everquest was ground zero for the modern MMO, and also the /dance /dance revolution. If Sony Online Entertainment wasn't the company responsible for first letting our avatars dance with each other, they're at least in the picture. Enjoy the above gif, of a squat Froglok raging against the primitive engine to get down. It's a far cry from the smooth pop, lock, and drops of the Fortnite generation, but we had to start somewhere.

Star Wars Galaxies - 2003

Star Wars Galaxies will always be remembered as one of the great missed opportunities in the history of video games. But it did enable our Han Solo-surrogates to air guitar. That alone probably forgives for the whole NGE debacle, right?

World of Warcraft - 2004

This was my first experience with a /dance emote. Blizzard, in their constant efforts to make sure you never took the Warcraft universe too seriously, programmed unique dance animations for every race, and every gender, in Azeroth. More specifically, they made it so you could do the macarena if you were playing a female human mage. Shout out to the Night Elf lady samba, too. That thing alone probably earned the game its T rating.

Runescape - 2004

You gotta hand it to Jagex. The British company was permanently hamstrung by an engine that needed to work in a browser window, and the programmers still managed to will a chintzy jig from the low-res knights and mages of Gielinor after a patch in 2004.

Lord of the Rings Online - 2007

In 2007 I breathlessly installed my free trial of Lord of the Rings Online and emerged dewy-eyed into Middle-Earth to find some of the absolute worst dance emotes I've ever seen. I don't know if it was the engine, or the relative solemnity of the Tolkien fiction, but Turbine gave us a truly morose, joyless waltz. It actually kinda won me over; it's like they fed all the elves in Rivendell some ketamine-spiked lembas. 

Mass Effect - 2007

I get that this might be stretching the definition of a dance emote, but honestly, no documentation of the history of video game dancing would be complete without a mention of Commander Shepard's terrible, extremely self-conscious moves in the Milky Way's neon clubs. The animation became a meme almost instantly, and Bioware leaned all the way in to the joke in Mass Effect 3's epilogue DLC, where Shepard once again looks like a goober in front of all his friends.  

League of Legends - 2009

League of Legends made the community-driven MOBA genre the biggest in the world. Where everyone was once trying to ape WoW and strike it big with an MMO, League kicked off the MOBA boom and inspired a wave of imitators. So it was only natural for it to keep the forms of expression MMOs had popularized and bake them into the MOBA, too. Every one of LoL's champions has a unique dance, and Riot eventually added an entire emote system with purchasable icons.

Final Fantasy 14 - 2010

Of course Square Enix would load up its characters with more dance emotes than anyone could ever possibly need. To this day, I don't think an MMORPG has touched Final Fantasy 14 as far as modular dancefloor potential goes. And honestly, that's why we play these games in the first place.

Destiny - 2014

Bungie got itself embroiled in a stupid controversy when it tried to sell emotes for real money, but thankfully, the catalogue of tangos the company put together was pretty solid. I can't hate a game that attempts to be so deathly serious, while also letting you drop your candy-colored robot-man to his knees for the "Hotline Bling" dance.

The Elder Scrolls Online - 2014

This might be the only game on this list that adds a few funny curveballs to the traditional MMO /dance formula. For instance, if you decide to indulge in some tipple during your journey through Elder Scrolls Online, your character will give you awesome, catatonic-white-guy-at-the-club moves when you instruct them to get down. They look so confident! Just like you do after enough vodka-cranberries at a wedding reception.

Fortnite - 2017

Perhaps the first time video game emotes have gone truly mainstream; Fortnite's ridiculous popularity means that the game's dances have been replicated on basketball courts, soccer pitches, and football fields constantly over the past six months. The dances themselves are adopted directly from the sort of Vine-ready memes that pass through YouTube (looking at you Backpack Kid), which has actually caused Chance The Rapper to petition Epic to offer some sort of financial kickpack to the choreographers who come up with the jigs themselves.

Monster Hunter: World - 2018

Monster Hunter made its long-awaited debut on PC this year with World, and quickly revealed itself as a franchise that's far goofier and more self-aware than its ornery reputation. I mean, just look at that player bust a move while hauling around one of those ridiculous, character model-dwarfing swords.

There's one particular photo of Jennifer Pryer as Liara T'Soni from Mass Effect that gets reposted on Reddit pretty regularly. It's appeared repeatedly on r/gaming and r/masseffect with titles like "Liara cosplay! Her eyes make the whole thing" or "Jaw-dropping Mass Effect Cosplay" over the last four years. It is an impressive shot, but it's a photo taken from a makeup test depicting her first attempt at the scalp-crests, while wearing an N7 t-shirt rather than one of the full costumes for the character she'd finish making later, and without the darker lips the Asari have in the games—as commenters are always eager to point out.

Though it's earned thousands of upvotes for the people who post it without crediting her, Pryer seems a little embarrassed by the photo. She recently posted a more accurate version herself "to save my nerd cred". It features Liara's armor, a newer version of the headpiece, which is made from foam latex rather than regular latex and painted inside a plaster cast to make a wearable slip mold (you can watch a video of it here—yes, the hair tentacles move), and of course, lipstick that will prevent people in the comments from saying "well, actually" at her. 

Professional photographer Lark Visuals also took some recent pictures of Pryer in the latest version of her Asari makeup, which apparently takes her three or fours to put on before a convention appearance or photo shoot. It paid off when BioWare tweeted it, quoting Liara's line from Mass Effect 3, "Well, I suppose I did just write your name in the stars." Which is nice.

Pryer's also cosplayed as Ciri from The Witcher 3, a Qunari Inquisitor from Dragon Age: Inquisition, and both the vampire Serana and a thief in the Nightingale armor from Skyrim. You can check those out on her Instagram.

All the way back in 2012 we were talking about installing a texture pack mod to replay the early Mass Effect games, only with slightly prettier versions of our bro, Garrus. Tireless modders have continued their work over the years and the latest versions of those textures have been compiled into an update for the ALOT mod (it stands for A Lot Of Textures). More than 300 textures have been added, all of which balance remaining as close as possible to the original aesthetic while making the graphics look as swish as possible on modern monitors. 

If you're in the mood for a replay, or you missed these classics the first time, check out Nexusmods to download the texture packs.

Thanks, DSOG.

In 1992 Microprose released Rex Nebular & the Cosmic Gender Bender, an adventure game set on a world where a "gender war" had killed off all the men. The remaining women separated themselves from the rest of the galaxy, hid their planet, and perpetuated their species thanks to the Gender Bender, a device that instantly but non-permanently transformed women into men and vice versa. What does the game do with that setup and the questions it raises? It makes jokes about how men leave the toilet seat up and women don't know what torque wrenches are.

We've come a long way since then. In 2007's Mass Effect the Asari are a monogender alien species coded as women, and they don't hide themselves away refusing to learn how wrenches work. On the surface they seem like stereotypical blue space babes, but they're also a matriarchal society that plays a central role in the politics of the series. One of the Asari, Liara T'Soni, is a potential love interest for the player-character regardless of their gender—which, at the time, was controversial. Imperfect as they were, Mass Effect and its sequels felt like they were dealing with gender and sexuality in a way that's much more common to science fiction outside of games.

If your space opera novel about aliens gives them three genders readers accept it, because of course alien societies would have different ideas about sex. By the same token in cyberpunk novels where people can have laser eyes it's easier for readers to accept gender transitioning as commonplace. When we think about the future we do so by taking modern norms and simply pushing them a bit, and that includes our modern ideas about sexuality and gender.

How soon is now? 

Extreme Meatpunks Forever is many things. It's a contender for best videogame name ever for starters. It's also an episodic visual novel about friends on the run in the Hellzone, which happens to include an Atari-style arcade action game where those characters climb into mechs that look like skinless monsters to fight fascists. Creator Heather Robertson (who also worked on Genderwrecked) describes it like this: "Extreme Meatpunks Forever is a serialized visual novel/mech brawler about four gay disasters beating up neonazis in giant robots made of meat."

Three episodes into the series, its heroes the Sundown Meatpunks are sleeping rough, missing their home, squabbling with each other, and shopping for protein bars in a convenience store called Blood Station where the clerk has static for a face. There's plenty of surrealness at play, but there's truth in it as well.

"It's about growing up queer in a small town," explains Robertson, "about feeling at odds with your own body, about feeling broken and trying to make a community with other broken people. Sure it may be a game about body horror giant robots and cosmic mysteries and post-reality hellscapes, but all the emotions in the game are very real—things that either I or someone very close to me have experienced."

Each of the Meatpunks has an alter ego they embody when they climb into their mech, when they become the raw and bleeding version of themselves who has to fight back. Lianna becomes Crash Queen, Cass becomes All Or Nothing, Sam becomes Roots Among Ash, and Brad becomes Ultra Brad. (We all know someone like Brad, I think.) Having mechs is one of the things that unites them. The other is, as Robertson puts it, that they are all "queer disasters". 

"Science fiction is an interpretation of the present, through the lens of the future," Robertson says. "When a science fiction book talks about minority groups in the future, or specifically avoids talking about minority groups, it's a political statement. 'You will be/you will not be allowed into the future.' The first category, of largely avoiding queer issues, may even come from a good place: that the author wants to include people like them in the future but isn't quite sure how to do more good than harm so they leave it as a side issue. Representation in science fiction isn't just about who can see themselves in a fantasy. It's about who can see themselves in the future."

In an interview with The Paris Review five years back, sometimes science-fiction author Warren Ellis made the case that the genre has always been more of a way of saying things about the time it's written in than about predicting the future. "Science fiction is social fiction", he said. "That’s the line from Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the politically committed writers of the sixties and seventies. It's about using speculation as a tool with which to examine the contemporary condition."

I get the impression Heather Robertson's ideas about science fiction are similar. Her story of queer outcasts being hassled by fascists and failed by the police is a contemporary story dramatized by being pushed ahead of us in time. "If science fiction is an interpretation of the present through the lens of the future," she says, "it only makes sense that people take it as a chance to stake their claim on the future, and to say: 'I may not make it here, but someone like me will.' Queerness is unstoppable. It is resilient, unkillable. The future is made of love."

Do androids dream of electric sex? 

Subserial Network is a game about a future where humans are long gone, and androids called synthetics who have personalities based on those lost humans try to build a society of their own, inspired by what's left of humanity—which is mainly the internet as it existed in the 1990s. You play a synthetic and see the world through web browsers, email and chat clients, even a music player reminiscent of WinAmp.

It's your job to sift through the digital creations of synthetics, their fanfic pages and proto-blogs, hunting for those who deviate. Some synthetics have begun modifying themselves, adding serial ports so they can interface in new ways, which is seen as a threat by others.

It's a story about the future, but as with all of these games there are parallels to modern concerns. "I think pursuing a highly stigmatised body modification because there’s a very firm idea of the sacredness of the body and what that body is supposed to do is just a good story in itself," says director Sophia Park, who was also responsible for Localhost. "But look, it’s happening every day. When people online are talking shop about the idiosyncrasies of their vaginas based on the manufacturer and the inherent quirks therein, it feels pretty cyber. I think being aware that there are people living that life right now, let alone the past, you know, fifty years, or whatever, is pretty cool."

In some ways it's a very personal game. "I directed the project and led the story, yeah? And the ideas first came once I started pursuing sexual reassignment surgery. And most of the game was written after I actually did it. So. It’s not about that, but it is? But it’s not. But it is." Park says that she doesn't want players to see Subserial Network as "a trans game" but as a game about characters you can find a common ground with rather than feeling excluded by your differences. "We try to take the metaphor and mess it around, recontextualize each and every element of our life experiences until it’s in a space where you don’t feel that. You feel like you can relate. And then you can understand your trans friends better, even if you don’t know why you do."

One of the Geocities-looking web pages in Subserial Network contains an interview with a synthetic who, in an attempt to understand what it means to be human, has been experimenting with sex. There's humor to it, an android with reconfigurable limbs trying to figure out what all these bits do, but also a sense that maybe by going beyond what someone with more traditional human parts could do they're actually discovering useful things about themselves. 

"In Subserial Network, we extrapolate some of our experiences into a world where your entire body can be reconfigured, where you can live, entirely, online, and where you for some reason are asked to be what you just aren’t. And I think within that premise you can explain or explore a lot of things that you might feel you presently can’t," says Park. She hopes that, in doing so, people can reach "resolution, conclusion, understanding, empathy" without necessarily feeling like her game is simply making a statement about a group of people and nothing more.

In one of Subserial Network's most affecting moments, a synthetic describes finding an old magazine with a photo of the human she was based on inside it. There's a face there that she recognizes as her own, but it belongs to someone separated from her by years, someone she both is and isn't. It's haunting, even divorced of subtext.

When Park describes science fiction she talks about how it focuses on 'the new thing', "a technology or a scientific concept that is elaborately explained and the story hinges on the changes this new thing inflicts on the world. It’s a thing you’ll see in, like, Black Mirror episodes or what have you. There’s always a new thing—and the new thing has narrative consequences, and it influences the worldbuilding, and it recontextualizes narratives and genres and maybe lets us understand something better today.

"Science fiction shares a lot with horror—the new thing is instead abject, and it’s terrifying, and no one explains it. It points backwards, and society has to reconvene after the new thing is put away. But these two things are often related. Are trans people more horror or science fiction? People tend to act like we are some abject thing, or some new science experiment that redefines gender and human society. But the new thing is just the new thing, right?"

This big broken machine 

The Red Strings Club is probably the best game I've played all year. It's three cyberpunk stories surgically attached as if by a back-alley street doc: one about a hacker, one about a bartender, and one about an android who bio-sculpts cybernetic implants. Together these three characters have the potential to bring down a corporation planning to brainwash the world by doing away with sadness, but also potentially eradicating free will and the motivation to improve our lives and those of others. The Red Strings Club interrogates the ideas we have about unhappiness (like, is it really a motivation for creativity or is that a myth we use to justify how unfairly society rewards artists?), and also questions the smaller ways we're responsible for manipulating people's emotions every day.

At the same time, The Red Strings Club presents queerness as an ordinary part of its near-future setting. Two of the main characters are gay and in a loving relationship together, and one of the secondary cast is a transgender woman. The android character is genderless and that's used as a vehicle for asking questions about the concept and its value. As Jordi de Paco, director, writer, and programmer at indie studio Deconstructeam explains, these themes weren't an intentional addition.

"Because we ourselves on the development team define ourselves as queer I just created the characters as my environment, like my friends and the kind of lives we lead", he says. "In Gods Will Be Watching, our previous game, I kind of I wasn't that aware I could do other stuff with videogames. I was just making what videogames do, with a white male protagonist and their friends. With The Red Strings Club I wanted to make more personal stuff. Suddenly, it came out naturally. The characters came out gay and they have different gender identities because it's my actual environment. I don't live in a space opera but I do live in this kind of context."

Even though The Red Strings Club developed its themes naturally, it's not been any less immune to criticism from the kind of people who use the word "forced" to describe any representation of characters different to them (which seems like every single person who uses the word "forced" on the internet). On the whole, de Paco was pleased by the response to their game. On the whole.

"With The Red Strings Club the big majority of feedback is really good and they're thankful the game made them feel things," he says, "and it happened that the bad feedback of The Red Strings Club feels like good feedback too. It's basically a lot of people complaining about it being 'a game full of fat chicks and faggots' and having 'a political agenda' and trying to 'force them through their throats' and everything."

Another response was less expected. Waypoint published an article critical of the way The Red Strings Club depicted one of its characters—who had an unhealthy obsession with a transgender woman—using her 'deadname', the name she no longer goes by. "We didn't feel like it was healthy criticism," he says, "like, 'Hey, guys, be careful with this because some people may be having conflicted emotions', we are really open to that kind of feedback. We have reasons to want to depict the reality of deadnaming in the game, we explained that on a follow-up article on Waypoint, but we were called 'cheap' and 'gross' and we 'sabotaged our vision'. It felt too harsh for us since that was not intentional at all. I understand that intention is not everything that counts, but being called out because of transphobia feels really, really tough, especially for us."

In spite of that, de Paco says he wouldn't change anything about his game if he was to make it over today. "I prefer to make it this way, because after experiencing putting a game out there with not that much that's personal in it and making something that's personal, I don't think I'd want to go back to making regular games. I really enjoy the way you can connect with the audience. Even the harsh feedback is something that makes you grow personally and it's interesting to expose yourself. I think that it's something that we have to offer that big companies don't have, so why limit that kind of potential we have? We really can explore these kind of experiences. If we cannot compete with big companies in technical issues maybe we can compete in feelings and being flawed and kinky or whatever we want to be."

Love in the time of rad sickness 

Fallout 2 was the first game to depict same-sex marriage, and some of the later Fallout games embraced a similarly forward-thinking attitude. Fallout: New Vegas in particular included characters from a spectrum of sexualities, including Veronica, Arcade, Whiskey Rose, and Christine. And then there was the Think Tank, from the Old World Blues expansion.

Writer Chris Avellone, who worked on both Fallout 2 and New Vegas, explains. "In terms of game stories and sexuality, when we were doing Fallout: New Vegas—Old World Blues, the twisted view of sexuality of the Think Tank Brains was intended as symptomatic of their psychological problems—but it was repressing them that was causing at least two of them serious emotional issues." Those characters were brains floating in jars, a homage to old school B-movies, who had over many years grown disdainful of biology and forgotten much about how it worked. Their ideas about sex were idiosyncratic, to say the least.

"One of them was obsessed and aroused by the biology of the human form—she was turned on by a character blinking, yawning, chewing, etcetera—even though the others found the human form repulsive, to put it lightly. And another was a chronic masturbator, which he hid from the others. The player can champion both so they don't feel ashamed of these feelings anymore during the end sequence—and they'll side with the player if the player helps them." The message was plain. As Avellone puts it, "it's OK to be you, just don’t hurt anyone while you're being you."

Avellone also worked on the 2017 version of Prey, a game that let players choose the sex of its amnesiac protagonist, Morgan Yu. Whether you explore Talos Space Station as a man or a woman, when you meet fellow crew member Mikhaila Ilyushin you discover she had a relationship with Morgan in the past, which you've since forgotten. 

Initially, Morgan had been conceived of as a man, and as Avellone says, "I suggested that Morgan, as a result of what’s happening on Talos and the disconnects and being unaware of his previous connections to others, could have his condition highlighted by being unaware of his past relationships with others". When the decision was made to allow Morgan to be played as a woman, they decided not to alter Mikhaila's role as your ex. "I think we simply asked, 'why would we?' So we didn't and left it in. Ultimately, we felt it was the relationship in the context of Morgan's condition that was important, not Morgan's gender."

Avellone's been in the videogame industry for a long time, with credits going back as far as 1996. Back then, he says, "sexuality in games was something of a taboo", something he believes is changing. As he puts it, "there’s been a shift in games over time to portray sexuality in games and show the range of sexuality in the game space."

And that's a positive trend. Like all of these developers, Avellone sees value in the genre's ability normalize things, to say that if we're going to accept interstellar travel and robots we may as well accept gay and transgender people. He brings up Iain M. Banks' novels in the Culture series as an example. "While one could argue that the way those subjects are treated in the books are sideline subjects, I think it gains a certain strength in that it's 'simply the way it is,' so much so there’s no reason to underscore it or exaggerate it because it’s simply the norm in the galactic society Banks created."

And although none of these developers think predicting the future is science fiction's main job, Park does give a shout-out to Mass Effect's vision of the 22nd century. "One thing Mass Effect did really well was in the casual bisexuality of the trilogy", she says. "I think that’s what the future looks like; everyone’s a little more fluid on the Kinsey scale, the determinative social role of human sexuality collapses, but the original architecture more or less stays up."

Whether it's acting as a weathervane for what's to come or drawing back a curtain on an aspect of the present, science fiction can use its distance from our lives to open us up to ideas we may not have considered, including ideas about gender and sexuality. Whether they're videogames, books, movies, or TV shows, our stories about the future could stand to be a bit ahead of their time.

The first three episodes of Extreme Meatpunks Forever are available on itch.io, as is Genderwrecked. Subserial Network is currently available to Humble Monthly subscribers. The Red Strings Club is on everything.