I think I am in love with Dorian from Dragon Age: Inquisition. Which puts me in a worse-than-usual fix. No woman ever stood a chance with Dorian from Dragon Age. And he’s a fictional character in an entirely made-up game universe. Fucksticks.

Enormous and immediate apologies to Wendy Cope for that, but when you descend to stealing someone else’s love poetry to express how you’re feeling about a videogame character, you know you’re in trouble. Dragon Age: Inquisition, released at Christmas for PS4, Xbox One and PC, is rapidly gaining a reputation among fangirls everywhere not so much for its richly imagined game world and its enjoyable battle mechanics but for its romance and sex elements.

Yes, there is sex. You don’t see everything, you’re not controlling the character while they’re shagging, but you can, as it were, get yourself into a position where some of the characters want to have sex with you. And then you can be left in very little doubt that that is indeed what’s happened. Dorian, for example (who is a gay character, hence the many-layered impossibility of my love) strips off to adopt a rather Kim-Kardashian-esque pose displaying his, um, assets. Then there’s a character called Iron Bull who is a Qunari (that means he has horns). If you choose to pursue a relationship with him – which you can do playing either sex – it all gets distinctly BDSM, including a scene in which you discuss safe words.

I find all of this marvellously hopeful, in several ways. Dragon Age is well-known as being progressive and forward-thinking in its gender and sexual politics; for one thing, you’re as likely to come across a monument to a female hero as a male one while journeying across the land in search of Fade Rifts to close. As one does. But they’ve managed to create a sort of feminist, gender-blind utopia in the sexuality of the game by the simple expedient of, for the most part, not varying “how the sex is treated” whether you’re playing a woman or a man, an elf, a dwarf or a human. Just “not being treated differently” is, in fact, a treat; a few brief hours in a world where sexism just doesn’t exist.

I wonder also if part of what’s lovely about it for me is that, even though you can play Dragon Age as a female character, you’ll always be doing the romancing in a “male style”. That is: no one ever hits on you without you having made yourself obviously open to that, no one makes sleazy insinuations about how your sexual relationships got you that job as Inquisitor, no one comments on your sexual attractiveness if you’re not actually, you know, boning them. Of course, it’s a pretty idealised version of the “male role” in sexual encounters too, since hardly anyone ever laughs in your face for flirting with them; they tend to be into you if they’re not actually celibate or totally not-oriented-your-way and if they happen not to be attracted to you they mostly seem more sorrowful about it and disappointed in themselves than anything else.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dorian and his... ‘assets’

Looking ahead, it seems pretty clear that people are inevitably going to use the kind of virtual or augmented reality technology I discussed last month to make porn. Well, since the first person ever scratched an image on to a piece of reindeer bone, people have been using all available technologies to make porn. Prostitution’s been going on for years in Second Life and as well-rendered characters become easier to create, and motion-sensing technology becomes more advanced, it’s only going to get easier.

Indie developer Robert Yang has already made a short game for Windows and the LeapMotion controller entitled Hurt Me Plenty. It’s a motion-controlled game about “consent, kink, and spanking the hell out of this dude”.

I am tremendously cheered by this, to be honest, and not just because of the feminist possibilities of gender-bending interactive erotica. Porn exists. It’s not going away. It’s very popular. And while it’s pretty easy to find out whether the people who grew the bananas you’re eating (actual bananas, mind out of the gutter please) were treated well and paid fairly for their work, there’s yet to be a Fairtrade or ethical production stamp for pornography.

In the absence of a simple, agreed way to find out whether people in live-action porn were beaten up, given drugs, had their drugs withheld, were lied to or coerced into appearing on those oh-so-easy-to-Google movies, virtual reality might mean we finally get some certifiably ethical porn. And if you figure out how to make that VR technology work with Dorian from Dragon Age, call me.