Can you tell us about one of your proudest moments working in game development?
When I was told that all of the romances in Dragon Age II were going to be available to both genders, I was a little nervous because I had never written (or read) romances for gay men before. I thought a lot about how to present the male-male romance for Anders and I received some nudges that it should be made to feel less important/less emotional than the heterosexual romance. But ultimately, I decided that love and passion were human universals and I was going to write the male-male romance as romantically as the female one. When the game came out, we got a letter from a fan, a young man who was coming to terms with the realization that he was gay. He said that he had never seen a gay romance portrayed positively, and he was terrified that he was never going to be able to fall in love or have a meaningful relationship with anyone. He was considering killing himself, he said, until he played the Anders romance – it was the first time he had seen anyone portray a gay relationship as genuinely romantic and loving, and now he was going to devote the rest of his life to finding that kind of passion (though hopefully not with a bipolar terrorist…) That was an amazing moment for me, because it showed that the characters we create in these games really do have a genuine effect on people, even if it’s just a few of them. Just because we’re making games, it doesn’t always has to be “just a game.”