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Mar. 4th, 2010 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusI've been wanting to review the game Dragon Age: Origins for awhile, now. It deserves a review. Every time I start, though, it gets too long. I've pared it down here, and it's still long.
First off, it's nice to see how far North American games have come in terms of narrative. I'd say that narrative and character development are probably better than half the novels I was expected to know at the master's level of English Lit.
Not too long ago, I was still despairing that we'd given up on storytelling in video games. Clearly, we haven't. It's coming back.
I could write volumes on that. Or on how well they did their research - there's references and in-jokes you're only going to get if you know your medieval history and literature. I have to respect a game that can reference the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order, or the Schism, or Chaucer's "Sir Thopas."
If I have a criticism of the game as a whole, it's that it's that these medieval characters speak like real people of the 21st century. Their conversations are clearly those of people coming post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Sexual Revolution, post-Second-Wave Feminism. And that's good, except that it jars painfully with the mail armour and castles and feudal hierarchies.
But if the worst you can complain about in a game is that the different realisms clash, well that's praising with faint damns.
Still, there are a few elements dear to my heart that deserve a closer look. The review is long - really an essay - and very spoilerful under the cut. Don't read it if you're planning on playing but haven't beaten it yet.
Homosexuality
I first heard about this game because it was all over the LGBT press. Seems the religious right had targeted the game for (you guessed it) promoting the gay agenda, in spite of its distinct lack of Spongebob and Tinky Winky. So our press countered by heaping praise on it.
Now, video games are one of those subjects that serious journalists don't feel the need to know anything about in order to report on them. As a rule, they do not play games - merely comment on them. I should've kept that in mind.
First off, there's no gay agenda here. In fact, there are no gay people in Dragon Age.
There are bisexuals, though, and they seem to be right out of the Basic Instinct guide to character design. They're like a montage from The Celluloid Closet. They play the only traditional roles allowed to queer characters in movies: the killer and the victim.
Among the killers, I count a repentant assassin (Leliana), and unrepentant assassin (Zevran), a cold-blooded and paranoid assassin (Marjolaine), and an axe-crazy psychotic (Branka).
Among the victims are Dairren and Iona in the Human Noble Origin (first gory deaths you see if you sleep with them), and Hespith (who gets the worst death in the game). I've heard that one of the novels adds an actual gay couple - who of course die by the end. And as the game allows you to kill all the ones on the murderer list, you can add them to this list as well.
Only the pirate queen Isabela escapes either category, though she is quite happy her husband's dead. After all, she inherits.
Plus, the writers seemed to have gone out of their way to make the bisexuals dangerous, sordid, and foreign.
All the ones with a character class are rogues. The two you can romance have accents, highlighting how different they are. Apparently, Thedas has a Sotadic Zone. The bisexual guy is an elf, and this webcomic explains why that was the safer option.
The rabid fans are quick to defend it on a case-by-case basis, saying that the sexuality of each character has nothing to do with the rest of their characterization, or that X is a sympathetic murderer, and thus a sympathetic character. And if you complain about them in a Wiki, expect to have your analysis erased.
There's a pattern here, though, and it's a very old and very established pattern of killers and victims. There's also no real break to that pattern. No apologia excuses that.
I also wonder how we got to this state where homosexuality is increasingly okay in media, but homosexuals aren't.
I can remember when gay people were okay, as long as nobody mentioned we have sex - or kiss, for that matter. Now it's become increasingly reversed. The sex act is okay, but we don't exist as people. And we certainly don't have a culture or a history.
I suspect it's a combination of old-school homophobia, the subtler homophobias of postmodernism, and YAOI/slash culture. Gay sex now exists to titillate heterosexuals, or comment on their sexuality or morals. Actual gay people would only serve as an unnecessary complication.
Wicca
The homophobia in the game was almost a game-breaker for me. I came close to walking away from it for that reason. One thing that saved it for me were the Pagan elements here, and how well they were used.
One of the many reasons I gave up on North American pop culture is that "religious allegory" is common, and in the West that means Christianity. Without fail.
Other religions can be portrayed, even sympathetically. But fictional worlds tend to follow Christian rules, afterlives are Christian, and religion serves to highlight Christian themes. Anime was nice because it defaulted to Buddhism or Shinto or even Taoism.
You can do the Christian allegory thing in Dragon Age. Your character can take on the sins of the world and die to destroy a Satanic figure, thus saving the human race.
But you can switch out that allegory at a critical point for another. In this version, it turns out that that Satan is actually a Pagan god corrupted by the Christian concept of sin. You can have a solar hero figure lay with a witch (named for a Celtic goddess) so that the Pagan god can be reborn. You eturn the world to an old god. It draws heavily on Neo-Pagan interpretations of myth.
It was strange seeing it. There aren't any good portrayals of Wicca onscreen, much less any allegory that speaks to us. Starting with the any-cheesier-and-they'd-spell-it-with-a-K The Craft, all portrayals have been atrocious. We're probably third after Islam and Voodoo for libelous onscreen portrayals that have nothing to do with the reality.
So it stunned me to see someone get it right.
Media is such a powerful mirror, and it's so important to catch an honest reflection. This is the first time I have seen that honest reflection for my religion - even briefly - in any mainstream fiction. That won me back.
Canada
BioWare is Canadian. All three writers on the game are Canadian, and not the usual transplanted-Canadians-living-in-LA that usually work on so many American productions. They live in Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal, and the company is based in Edmonton.
I've been talking about distorted mirrors. Canadians consume far more non-Canadian media than we consume our own. I sometimes explain gay history and culture to straight Canadians by saying it's a little like being Canadian. We're always looking through someone else's eyes, so we're usually invisible.
And when we do spot ourselves, we're distorted beyond recognition. After awhile, the distorted image twists how you think about yourself into something unhealthy.
For the first half of the game, there was nothing obviously Canadian. Then I hit the Dwarf kingdom.
And from the political allegory to poetry to the hockey jokes around gladiatorial bloodsport, it was pure Canada. No beavers or snow or Mounties or other things people outside Canada fixate on - more the politics and hockey and beer jokes we tend to think of as Canadian - so I doubt anyone outside the country would get it. But it's definitely there.
Sadly, the political allegory is a bit shallow. It's about our minority government, and it's a version of things drawn right out of the unimaginative analyses in the mainstream press.
They got the Liberal and Conservative attack ads perfect, though. They got a lot of things right, in fact. Like how the Dwarven city is a mentally-self-contained unit with a vast hinterland full of wildlife that the Dwarves only see as a place to stripmine. They got the half-forgotten war in Afghanistan right, too.
As I said, almost an essay. Sorry about that, but the game hit a lot of nerves, both good and bad.
And unlike the novels I read and review, it's safe to say very few people are looking at games that closely. Which is a shame, because there are more and more games out there deserving of a closer look.
First off, it's nice to see how far North American games have come in terms of narrative. I'd say that narrative and character development are probably better than half the novels I was expected to know at the master's level of English Lit.
Not too long ago, I was still despairing that we'd given up on storytelling in video games. Clearly, we haven't. It's coming back.
I could write volumes on that. Or on how well they did their research - there's references and in-jokes you're only going to get if you know your medieval history and literature. I have to respect a game that can reference the Monastic State of the Teutonic Order, or the Schism, or Chaucer's "Sir Thopas."
If I have a criticism of the game as a whole, it's that it's that these medieval characters speak like real people of the 21st century. Their conversations are clearly those of people coming post-Darwin, post-Freud, post-Sexual Revolution, post-Second-Wave Feminism. And that's good, except that it jars painfully with the mail armour and castles and feudal hierarchies.
But if the worst you can complain about in a game is that the different realisms clash, well that's praising with faint damns.
Still, there are a few elements dear to my heart that deserve a closer look. The review is long - really an essay - and very spoilerful under the cut. Don't read it if you're planning on playing but haven't beaten it yet.
Homosexuality
I first heard about this game because it was all over the LGBT press. Seems the religious right had targeted the game for (you guessed it) promoting the gay agenda, in spite of its distinct lack of Spongebob and Tinky Winky. So our press countered by heaping praise on it.
Now, video games are one of those subjects that serious journalists don't feel the need to know anything about in order to report on them. As a rule, they do not play games - merely comment on them. I should've kept that in mind.
First off, there's no gay agenda here. In fact, there are no gay people in Dragon Age.
There are bisexuals, though, and they seem to be right out of the Basic Instinct guide to character design. They're like a montage from The Celluloid Closet. They play the only traditional roles allowed to queer characters in movies: the killer and the victim.
Among the killers, I count a repentant assassin (Leliana), and unrepentant assassin (Zevran), a cold-blooded and paranoid assassin (Marjolaine), and an axe-crazy psychotic (Branka).
Among the victims are Dairren and Iona in the Human Noble Origin (first gory deaths you see if you sleep with them), and Hespith (who gets the worst death in the game). I've heard that one of the novels adds an actual gay couple - who of course die by the end. And as the game allows you to kill all the ones on the murderer list, you can add them to this list as well.
Only the pirate queen Isabela escapes either category, though she is quite happy her husband's dead. After all, she inherits.
Plus, the writers seemed to have gone out of their way to make the bisexuals dangerous, sordid, and foreign.
All the ones with a character class are rogues. The two you can romance have accents, highlighting how different they are. Apparently, Thedas has a Sotadic Zone. The bisexual guy is an elf, and this webcomic explains why that was the safer option.
The rabid fans are quick to defend it on a case-by-case basis, saying that the sexuality of each character has nothing to do with the rest of their characterization, or that X is a sympathetic murderer, and thus a sympathetic character. And if you complain about them in a Wiki, expect to have your analysis erased.
There's a pattern here, though, and it's a very old and very established pattern of killers and victims. There's also no real break to that pattern. No apologia excuses that.
I also wonder how we got to this state where homosexuality is increasingly okay in media, but homosexuals aren't.
I can remember when gay people were okay, as long as nobody mentioned we have sex - or kiss, for that matter. Now it's become increasingly reversed. The sex act is okay, but we don't exist as people. And we certainly don't have a culture or a history.
I suspect it's a combination of old-school homophobia, the subtler homophobias of postmodernism, and YAOI/slash culture. Gay sex now exists to titillate heterosexuals, or comment on their sexuality or morals. Actual gay people would only serve as an unnecessary complication.
Wicca
The homophobia in the game was almost a game-breaker for me. I came close to walking away from it for that reason. One thing that saved it for me were the Pagan elements here, and how well they were used.
One of the many reasons I gave up on North American pop culture is that "religious allegory" is common, and in the West that means Christianity. Without fail.
Other religions can be portrayed, even sympathetically. But fictional worlds tend to follow Christian rules, afterlives are Christian, and religion serves to highlight Christian themes. Anime was nice because it defaulted to Buddhism or Shinto or even Taoism.
You can do the Christian allegory thing in Dragon Age. Your character can take on the sins of the world and die to destroy a Satanic figure, thus saving the human race.
But you can switch out that allegory at a critical point for another. In this version, it turns out that that Satan is actually a Pagan god corrupted by the Christian concept of sin. You can have a solar hero figure lay with a witch (named for a Celtic goddess) so that the Pagan god can be reborn. You eturn the world to an old god. It draws heavily on Neo-Pagan interpretations of myth.
It was strange seeing it. There aren't any good portrayals of Wicca onscreen, much less any allegory that speaks to us. Starting with the any-cheesier-and-they'd-spell-it-with-a-K The Craft, all portrayals have been atrocious. We're probably third after Islam and Voodoo for libelous onscreen portrayals that have nothing to do with the reality.
So it stunned me to see someone get it right.
Media is such a powerful mirror, and it's so important to catch an honest reflection. This is the first time I have seen that honest reflection for my religion - even briefly - in any mainstream fiction. That won me back.
Canada
BioWare is Canadian. All three writers on the game are Canadian, and not the usual transplanted-Canadians-living-in-LA that usually work on so many American productions. They live in Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal, and the company is based in Edmonton.
I've been talking about distorted mirrors. Canadians consume far more non-Canadian media than we consume our own. I sometimes explain gay history and culture to straight Canadians by saying it's a little like being Canadian. We're always looking through someone else's eyes, so we're usually invisible.
And when we do spot ourselves, we're distorted beyond recognition. After awhile, the distorted image twists how you think about yourself into something unhealthy.
For the first half of the game, there was nothing obviously Canadian. Then I hit the Dwarf kingdom.
And from the political allegory to poetry to the hockey jokes around gladiatorial bloodsport, it was pure Canada. No beavers or snow or Mounties or other things people outside Canada fixate on - more the politics and hockey and beer jokes we tend to think of as Canadian - so I doubt anyone outside the country would get it. But it's definitely there.
Sadly, the political allegory is a bit shallow. It's about our minority government, and it's a version of things drawn right out of the unimaginative analyses in the mainstream press.
They got the Liberal and Conservative attack ads perfect, though. They got a lot of things right, in fact. Like how the Dwarven city is a mentally-self-contained unit with a vast hinterland full of wildlife that the Dwarves only see as a place to stripmine. They got the half-forgotten war in Afghanistan right, too.
As I said, almost an essay. Sorry about that, but the game hit a lot of nerves, both good and bad.
And unlike the novels I read and review, it's safe to say very few people are looking at games that closely. Which is a shame, because there are more and more games out there deserving of a closer look.