"On the last day of tutoring, I asked my 15-year-old student if he knew that he had a chance to woo and win Bastila. “Really?” He thought he’d known everything about the game, but the dialogue option never registered as flirtation. His face, usually so focused with youthful liveliness, grew wary. He frowned and blinked. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about the fact that his beloved game would contain something so foreign. So adult. " Marie Mutsuki Mockett - what a name! - writes about KOTOR, Carth Onassi, and a little bit of magic.

"Even discussions of the ban are being locked. At the bottom of the thread "GLBT discrimination in forums?", community manager Sean Dahlberg wrote, "As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars. Thread closed."" How depressing: can you really hetero-normalise an online, social, MMO? Makes me a bit angry, and I'd have thought BioWare would have been more sensitive around this. Is this Lucasarts turning the screws?

"...the players are there for their character, not for your story. Your story is just the path for their characters, the medium through which they can play their persona. Once the GM realizes this, they should then realize that respecting the player and the character is paramount to their story. And it’s a surprisingly easy skill to master, because it really is as simple as recognizing what the players and characters want, what they came to do and then give it to them."

BioWare now have a blog. It looks like it's going to be full of good stuff about games and, especially, writing for them. Can't wait.

"An interesting article at Rock, Paper, Shotgun tackles BioWare's tackling of issues tackling modern society, tackling one of my Mass Effect plots in the process. I responded in the comments, and after looking at how much I yammered on, I figured it was worth posting here as a look inside how these things get into the game, and why some things that seem dumb get done." Patrick Weekes follows up the RPS post criticising his own plot elements with some frank self-criticism, and some interesting explanations; a reminder of how hard creating any kind of meaningful choice can be.

"I think, in these fleshed out circumstances, an RPG could be the most remarkable place for getting to grips with matters like abortion and euthanasia. I think _because_ they’re the sorts of subjects it’s completely pointless to talk about in the pub, because it inevitably descends into people entrenching themselves in their currently held position and then hurling stones at the other side, that the RPG would be a space in which the emphasis of thought and consideration would be squarely on you." John Walker on the problem with BioWare's attitude to morality, and some potential solutions.