Mass Effect, or how I came to appreciate the difference between a male and female's orgasm

So, I finished Mass Effect.

This post will have lots of spoilers. I don’t normally warn but this game is new enough to actually matter if I spoil anything. You have been warned!

I went through the game on normal difficulty, got to level 43, maxxed out paragon, had very little renegade, and everyone but Kaidan lived. It’s time to start over on new game plus and play through on difficult or insane and max out to level 60.

I had only a few problems with the game. But this is a function of something that seems to happen in almost all science fiction. It ends with a sloppy orgasm as performed by a first time lover. I wish I was clever.

Orgasm? Yes, orgasm. Metaphor with me.

Writers often do this in different ways. Game makers are starting to catch up to this sort of thing. It’s fascinating to watch. Movies aren’t really prone to this sort of thing, but movies based on books often have to approach it. I’m sure there is a real term for it but I’m going to go with orgasms. There are two kinds, with a third looking far off in the distance. Male Orgasm, Female Orgasm, and Tantric Love. Extremes will be taken.

The fiction with a male orgasm you could also call two grunts and a squirt. Lewd, eh?

It’s these games that spend a lot of time fumbling about with the zipper and the bra. They don’t seem to really get what’s going on but they know it’ll be great once it starts. You could also call this drunk sex. Your character fumbles around, gets the clothes off, gets on top, gives two grunts and is done. Mass Effect did this a bit. However, like it’s name, it took a hell of a long time to get the clothes off. Once they were off, however, it was over quick.

For instance, my drunken antics confused the poor blue girl in this game. Despite never actually speaking with Ashley after rescuing her in the first mission, the blue girl thought I was in love with her. Further, like a drunken person, I could talk anyone out of some of the most insane things. Wrex finds a cure for his whole race’s genetic disease and I talk him down by giving him a pat on the back and tell him it’s cool bro.

Sweet, he says. And the biggest bad ass lizard guy in the world puts his gun away and is cool with it. Then, back to the Blue girl (liara?), I ask her some personal questions like some suave badass and up until that point, I had never spoken to her. I was fumbling around like an idiot looking for the spot where Liara could unhook her one-piece archaeologist suit. But she tells me that, “All the promiscuous blue lady legends aren’t true. But I’ll sleep with you right now and it’s like the universe coming to exist inside your body.”

“Well cool, sure, let’s do it.” I say. I mean, why not. Apparently she had been waiting and thinking about this for ages after my two sentences to her. And then you get to the denouement. Like a retard, you drive your moon buggy into a warp drive and blast off across the universe to take out a scorpion pied piper and his crazy band of rats. After blasting at the crazy band of rats with my shotgun for what seems like an eternity, all my frat guy brothers crowd in to cheer me on. “YEAH! DO IT!” I hear them call.

And I let it out, all my precious two grunts building up in the excitement of a 3 second high only to begin the game 10 minutes later to max out the character.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anything is wrong with that, but maybe it’s time to find some way to bring deeper satisfaction to the gameroom.

The female orgasm is long, deep, and comes along in waves. It is a satisfaction that men can only dream of. To date, I don’t know that any game has really managed to create this sensation. If they have, I have yet to play them. Sure, there are games that leave you feeling satisfied, but is it a satisfaction that is lasting? Or, is it just the satisfaction brought about by a male orgasm? That is a difficult call.

And then there’s tantric sex. I think this kind of sex is reserved for the MMO. It just keeps going and while it may take quite a while to build up to orgasm, once you do, it’ll feel great…but not orgasm great, just great enough to keep the tantic motions going. Eventually you’ll get bored and, as was pointed out to me on Twitter, you’ll ask Sting to just get off and go home. But during the build up to that, you’ll have some truly wonderful feelings.

To complete this metaphor, let’s think about types of games.

As gamers seem to be a promiscuous lot in the game room, there are several non-unique types that show up. The action gamers are the frat dudes of the gameroom. Quick, surrounded by thousands of others like them, played in a crowd, these games aren’t about the build up to orgasm so much as they are about how many orgasms you can have from as many partners as possible. The RPG flirts with tantric sex but in the end, they’re just nerdy little shut-ins who learned that foreplay is nice because they probably won’t last too long once the real action starts. The hipster games like Braid or Blueberry Garden are our experimental phase. What happens if I have an orgasm in a different place than usual? I might have asked myself. It’s fun for a while but you begin to miss the pristine shine of the college age frat boys that are action games. The puzzle game is just a drawn out weekend one-night stand. You might achieve something, but in the long run all you really did is get to know someone well enough to make it to three grunts and a squirt.

Lewd, but useful. I doubt I’d ever actually talk about games this way but if I did, I think maybe more people would get it.