b1odeuwedd

[b1odeuwedd]

I’ve created the first two pages of my design document. Huzzah!

At the moment, I’m swamped with writing projects, so doing this has been hard between all of those. However, I’m finding time anyway, and it helps that my project is light on heavy commitments like art; I can write fast, and most of the information I’m putting in is also in my journal entries, so I can just pull from those. At this point, the points in the outline are my main areas of discussion, but as I go I might add on more examples, lenses, and information from other people. That Shawn Allen talk that I found last time was unbelievably helpful;  it shaped my project in the way that I wanted and needed to shape it.

Speaking of, the continuation of my take on his bullet points:

Give your player character (or character in general, for this project) their own worldview One of the things that I love about Fenris is that his opinions on the world around him are very strong, very black-and-white, and biased by his backstory. So are Anders’. You learn their experiences, and thus learn the way different parts of the world treat people, through their arguments and what they say to the main character Hawke. Not only does this do away with the “marginalized characters as apolitical shells or 1-dimensional beacons of purity” stereotypes by writers too afraid to make their characters political, it also gives a non-flavortext lore lesson to the player. It also fleshes out the characters and makes them more like actual people. People have opinions! Even if they consider themselves apolitical, they have opinions, they react to the world around them. So should characters.

The need for more than 2 One of the reasons some character writers opt for the apolitical shell or the beacon of purity type of marginalized character is that there are only one or two characters of that type in the entire game. It causes the character to be seen more as a token than a person, which marginalized people have to deal with enough. Having more than two black characters, for example, gives you more room to make them different types of people.

Not from Allen, but I wanted to write out this section because it’s in my head. Listen & hire The best way to learn how to write representatively is to listen to the types of people you want to represent, and hire them to work on writing teams. Nobody knows better the experiences of latinx people, or gay people, or trans people, than those people themselves. It’s hard enough for marginalized people to get jobs because of industry discrimination, and people of more than just privileged backgrounds can bring a lot of insight and experiences to a written world.

[b1odeuwedd]

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024133/Breaking-Marginalized-Character-Narrative-Molds

Last time on Emma’s Adventures in her Final Project, Mattie gave me the advice to make a character design document on how to make a representative marginalized character that can help you understand your game world’s issues and complexities. To do that, she showed me the GDC vault, which has a couple of free videos out of about eighty thousand that you can’t access unless you pay. Combing through was extremely frustrating until I found a really great talk by Shawn Allen on how to write marginalized characters.

He raised very good points that I started to jot down and organize for my final project, which I think I’m just going to structure as, like, a booklet? Or a boring PDF with images in it, maybe. Fenris is still going to be my main example throughout, but I might do what Allen did and bring in characters from other media as well. For now, I’m going to use some of his slides and write some passages to paste into my final project:

“End White Cis Men as the Default” Defaultism is talked about in a lot of game circles as the practice of using a straight cis white man as the default, everyman type of main character. Because the game industry is full of straight cis white men, it seems reasonable to dev teams dominated by that type of person. However, it can be very alienating to basically any other type of person – especially marginalized people, who rarely get to see AAA games featuring a character that is like them. It also leaves out a lot of room for complexity, as marginalized people see the world differently from those who are basically the pinnacle of privilege. If you’re designing the main character of your game, consider breaking the mold and making them a person of color, LGBTQ+, or disabled. If you aren’t one of these identities, bring people onto the writing team who are. The best way to learn is to interact with people and listen to their experiences.

Be Specific, Detailed, and Deliberate One of the techniques talked about by Allen and also used by the director Guillermo del Toro is to make a one-page biography for every character. Doing this can help you step back and compare and contrast the viewpoints of your cast. Speaking of viewpoints: trying to make the “safe choice” of writing all marginalized characters as apolitical, two-dimensional beacons of purity is not only boring, but takes away the character’s agency. They become a shell for the player to do with as they like. Instead, try thinking about realistic opinions about the world around them that the character could have, given their situation. This can help the player learn more about the world’s lore in an interesting way. How? Because their opinions can be biased. They can contradict those of other characters, and if you show them having conversations about the state of the world, you can learn about it from different perspectives and thus get a more nuanced view of its history.

For example, Fenris is a former slave in Tevinter, a nation in which mages are in power and sacrifice slaves, of which they have many, in blood magic rituals to musclefuck their way to the top of the social ladder. Anders, on the other hand, is a mage who was oppressed for most of his life by a religious institution that has a tight hold on continents that Fenris isn’t from… but the player is. Their experiences make them unable to agree on the topic of mage rights, and you thus get multiple perspectives on the issues and differences between Thedosian nations.

More to come: the rest next week, plus the format of the document!

[b1odeuwedd]

How do the character Fenris and his interactions help us understand how oppression is depicted in Thedas and other fantasy settings?

I’ve been playing a lot of Dragon Age 2 recently, and while doing so, I got AN IDEA! For the final, I think I’m going to do a Fenris Informational Zine, as an attempt at an answer to my question. Still haven’t figured out how exactly to make a zine, but we’re getting there.

Anyway, for research from the Dragon Age wiki, which is scattered and disorganized:

Unless 100% friendship or rivalry, Hawke who sided with the mages meets Fenris in the Gallows courtyard:

If Hawke has any (0-100%) amount of friendship or less than 50% rivalry (1-49%) or exactly 100% rivalry with Fenris, he can still be convinced to join the party at this point. If Hawke chooses any reply other than "Join me" or has more than or equal to 50% and less than 100% rivalry with him (50-99%), Fenris rejects Hawke. Later, he shows up with a group of city guards inside the Gallows and Hawke has to kill him.

The math in DA2 is so specific. Anyway, it’s odd because while the requirements for him to rejoin seem to be really specific, it came across more to me that getting him to leave the party completely is much harder to do. That contrasts with the way he’s written, which is as a no-second-chances type of person.

I also learned more about his time as a slave: the lyrium marking ritual that Danarius performed on him got rid of his memories. Memory-loss magic is something that does not happen a lot in Thedas; I can’t think of anything that uses it other than perhaps turning somebody Tranquil. This keys us into some of the things Magisters are willing to do, though, letting us learn more about Tevinter’s culture – especially the culture of magic.

Speaking of Tevinter, there’s a lot to be said for the fact that the rest of the world hasn’t gathered their military forces to outlaw slavery there yet. Thinking on that.

I made a relationship chart, though! Forgot to bring it with me because it was made via post-its, but I’ll take a pic next time and post it here.

Either way, next week I’m going to nail down a format for my final prototype and also do more delving into the social construction of race; or maybe break down Thedas politics by nation.

[b1odeuwedd]

How do the character Fenris and his interactions help us understand how oppression is depicted in Thedas and other fantasy settings?

Fenris represents a crossroads at the very center of Thedas’s complex social structure. He showcases struggles between nations, between races, and between magic users and non-magic users all in one character. Ultimately I still have no idea how I’m going to structure the final prototype, but for research I’m looking for his original design process. Still no luck on that, nor on finding the way actual, current AAA game designers make characters. Especially Bioware, but honestly, any studio. The most I’ve been able to find is this guide, which only has one paragraph about character design and is more vague advice than anything else.

https://80.lv/articles/world-and-character-building-in-aaa-games-and-indie-games/

I’ve started to look more deeply into Fenris and Anders or Merrill interactions, and watched a video of all of Fenris’s cut or rare lines. So far this is helping me get more angled view on his character beyond just a ruthless and traumatized ex-slave. Some thoughts: -Quick to reject pity, possibly out of embarrassment over being infantilized or fear of quick trust -Cautious in every endeavor except for murder. He probably thinks it’s the best answer, the most thorough one, because Danarius is always still shadowing him unless he’s dead. -Antisocial, but not misanthropic. This one is a bit harder to figure out unless you listen to a lot of his dialogue, but he’s got very thick walls around almost everyone unless you’re someone who treats him with respect without pitying him. He doesn’t hate everyone; he’s cautious and disillusioned, and very, very distrustful. It’s more complicated than “hate”. Respect is Fenris’s highest tier of favor, and hard to win. -His two types of relationships with Hawke I need to go in further, but I’m interested to see how exactly you come about both of them as a player. -His writing is a lot more stable than Anders’s and Merrill’s. Especially Anders. -He has a complicated and negative relationship with the past. He does not deem it as important as Merrill does. -His relationship with Sebastian and Isabela is a lot more positive than with Anders and Merrill. Sebastian is gentle and positive, and tries to get Fenris to give himself more credit, and he actually partially convinces him to think a bit about the Maker in a less-than-negative way. -He’s incredibly loyal.

Next week: I’m going to catalogue a relationship chart of some sort, centered on Fenris. Research will include banter, cutscenes and dialogue. Not including Hawke in this, though; that’s a project for another week.

[b1odeuwedd]

I’ve been having trouble with coming up with a new question for my prototype. It’s hard to phrase a character study as a question, and there are a lot of angles I want to study, so it’s been difficult to find a specific question to answer. Some thoughts, the bolded one I’m expanding on today: -How Fenris’s interactions with other characters reveals more about the elves -How Hawke’s agency intersects with Fenris’s agency -How this establishes a power dynamic through mechanics -How the world is projected through the lens of the Fenris romance versus the Fenris rivalry; how knowing Fenris reveals more about the world and what not knowing him causes you to miss out on.

In general, I think Fenris is an interesting character lens on Thedas’s politics. But the topic of his own agency raises a lot of questions. In RPGs, players generally have a lot of control over what happens in the main plotline as well as the environment and sidequests. Because he’s not only a former slave but was sexually abused, his agency has a different context than the other characters. However, Hawke’s interactions with him mechanically don’t reflect that; the decision to sell him back into slavery does not contribute to the plot, and instead establishes a power dynamic between Hawke and Fenris that can be –– from a larger mechanical scope –– unhealthy. Hawke doesn’t dangle this over his head in game and in character, but the fact that it is an option even if you romance him puts the player in a high position of power over him.

On the other hand, though, this power dynamic exists in RPGs no matter what. You can romance any character you want, and control their bodies in combat. So the way playable mechanics intersect with in-game storylines is interesting; how much does it matter when the characters don’t know – does it matter more or less? I still haven’t had time to play the game in-depth again, so next entry will probably be a deeper analysis of those mechanics themselves.

[b1odeuwedd]

I’m considering narrowing down my question to analyzing the ways that different types of oppression dynamics are represented in Dragon Age 2 –– focusing on the elves and the mages and their interactions with the player and each other. Fenris, Anders, and Merrill are three very different characters who have fairly intense interactions with each other, especially considering the fact that they’re: -A POC-coded enslaved elf with a volatile personality who ends up acting prejudiced against other characters – Dalish elves and mages – because of his own experiences in slavery to a mage and how he sees Merrill using her freedom. -A human mage who has been abused for most of his time in the Circle, where he was brought against his will and decides to commit a terrorist act to prove his point by starting a war. Did I mention that he’s also an abomination (there’s a spirit of justice inside of him that’s slowly corrupting both of them because spirits must exist outside of human rage)? -A Dalish elven blood mage who wants to learn more about her heritage by essentially investing in a cursed mirror.

I don’t have a new article for this because it’s mostly an analysis of character interactions. I also need more time to chew on the last article about using elves as other, since it’s very long and scientific. More on that later, though.

Merrill and Fenris quarrel a lot. According to Fenris, Merrill is wasting the freedom that he never had in an attempt to restore a lost cause:

Fenris: I don’t want your pity. Merrill: Are you talking to me? Fenris: You said you were sorry about the ritual I endured. Keep your sorrow. Merrill: I only meant— Fenris: You have all the freedom none of our kind enjoy, and you throw it away. On what? Merrill: Our people need to reclaim their heritage. Fenris: A heritage of defeat? To what end? Merrill: Would you truly turn your back on your own history? There’s so much we don’t know… Fenris: It’s not my history. It’s simply history.

There’s no right answer to this argument. Both characters are justified in their points, but I wonder what the dynamic would be like if Merrill was brown-coded instead of Fenris. (Or both – Fenris not being the only brown elf you know in the game.) Fenris doesn’t have the time or the energy to think on philosophy and history, but it’s been Merrill’s entire life. At the same time, Merrill is doing something extremely dangerous for the sake of learning. Where do you draw the line? Blood magic is also universally hated and distrusted in the Dragon Age universe due to the fact that it can be easily used to summon demons; the only people with a different opinion are Solas – secretly an ancient elven god in a culture that owned slaves but he freed them – and Merrill. But I think Fenris and Merrill’s interactions are an interesting and well-thought-out part of the game’s representation; they are presented with no right answer. There are varying levels of respect in regards to Fenris especially, as his physical, emotional and sexual abuse are splayed across the screen for the player to see. But his character is layered and opinionated and complex, he isn’t a stereotype. More on Fenris and Anders next time, probably.

[b1odeuwedd]

My question remains the same, because I’m pretty confident in it: how do you depict oppression in a fantasy setting? Last entry, I went in depth about the mages as represented in Dragon Age 2, and the imaginary truth to the oppressing side’s message of “the oppressors are evil terrorists.”

One of the staples of fantasy worlds, especially those existing post-Tolkien and post-D&D, is the existence of fantasy races.

But the conflict that is focused on more in Origins and Inquisition is the subjugation of elves. This is an extremely complicated matter in the game, as elves existed long ago as a powerful ancient society ruled by a pantheon of gods that owned slaves (which you don’t actually learn unless you romance the secret ancient elven god who wants to commit genocide again by tearing down the veil and destroying the world). Every elf was immortal and had innate magic, the latter being a feat that only some are born with in the modern Thedosian universe.

But according to known Thedosian history, humans from the nation of Tevinter invaded the ancient elven society of Elvhenan and committed both genocide and mass slavery on the elves living there. From breeding with humans (in a way that is implied to be largely forced) the elves lost their immortality and their innate magic, and lived in slavery for many years all over. Eventually, slavery was outlawed everywhere except for Tevinter, but elves were still forced into ghettos after that. Some branched off and went into the wilds in clans called the Dalish, committed to restoring Elven history. The story of the elves is supposed to mirror Jewish and Indigenous history of oppression, but most elves are portrayed with skinny, European-looking features, leaving a disconnect. They’re also highly fetishized and considered “beautiful” by humans.

I’m reading up on this article, which goes into using elves as “other”: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412012454224

It talks about the word race used in fantasy settings, how its arbitrary nature is reflected in the way race is presented in settings like Thedas. But elves, especially post-Tolkien, tend to be viewed as these thin, dainty little creatures with pointed noses and big eyes, regardless of their skin color or point of origin. So these being the fetishized “othered” creatures and the way they are supposed to mirror real life seems a bit biased.

The only elf we meet with the features of a person of color – a non-European nose and darker skin – is Fenris in Dragon Age II, a slave from Tevinter who was sexually abused by his master Danarius. Cropping up during the scene in which you meet Danarius – who continues to make sexual comments at Fenris after it’s been established what he did – is the option to actually sell Fenris back into slavery. Yet Hawke, the main character, can actually do this and continue to play the game and reach a good ending regardless of consequences. This being the biggest elven representation of people of color comes across as exploitative to some, including the author in the last article I linked from last entry. The point of view in that article is that the continued humiliation by Danarius is unnecessary and contributes to exploiting him for the viewer’s angst and shock value. So where do you draw the line between respectfully and voyeuristically depicting abuse? It’s hard to say, and I’ll work on Fenris and the elves in more detail next entry because I don’t have a lot of time this week, but it needs deeper exploration of the complexities of the subject.

[b1odeuwedd]

My question remains about the nuances of using analogies for real-life oppression in video games, focusing on Dragon Age as a lens but bringing in other games and media as well. I’ve been thinking a lot about what exactly counts as an analogy, though, and I’ve realized it’s probably better to talk about depicting oppression at all in games because there’s more to work with in that case.

I’ve spent the week slowly unpacking this lengthy Wordpress article about the issues of oppression in Dragon Age. It’s a good read and gave me a lot of insight in a lot of different areas I hadn’t thought about during my many playthroughs of this game.

https://goodbyeowaretomysparetime.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/a-very-in-depth-analysis-of-dragon-ages-oppression-metaphors-boy-this-one-is-gonna-bring-in-the-readers/

First, I have to talk about the mages. The struggle between the universe’s church and mages is one of the core backbone topics of the Dragon Age world – not the whole world, though, and I’ll touch on that later. Mages are people born with magical energy and the ability to manifest it through spells. It sounds pretty awesome if you’re looking at it from a real-life standpoint, but a complication comes up in relation to the universe’s demons. Demons come from the Fade, or the “spirit world” if you will – a metaphysical, parallel space behind the Veil which separates the real world from it. If they aren’t trained to hone their power, mages can become very easily susceptible to being possessed by demons and becoming “abominations”. Thus, the Chantry – fantasy Christian church worshipping the Christ/Joan of Arc hybrid Andraste – started a program of sorts to keep mages in control. This program is called the Circle. Each Circle tower houses a number of mages and Chantry magic-suppressors called Templars are assigned to guard the circles, while specialized mages train them to control their magic without becoming possessed.

The problem, as we learn in Dragon Age 2 when we meet the character Anders, is that Circles are extremely abusive spaces. In the Circle that Anders escaped from, they essentially kept them as prisoners, beat them, tore them away from their families as children without letting them say goodbye or go outside. It sounds awful when he describes it, but then the game gives us some sort of botched “both sides” argument by having every mage you meet either turn into an abomination or commit mass murder in some other fashion. Anders blows up a church with all of the priests and churchgoers still inside – did I mention he has a spirit of justice inside him that could become a demon if he gets too angry?

The mage leader in DA2, the most outspoken voice against the templars and the Chantry, turns into some sort of giant demon abomination and attempts to kill the protagonist no matter what decisions you make.

I liked the way the article worded it: “The two most outspoken champions of justice for mages, Orsino and Anders, both end up representing the worst of what mages can become.” It’s an unnecessary argument, especially for people who have been abused for most of their lives – you’re going to tell us that they’re just as bad as the abusers? Anders could have been a great representation of an activist taking power back for himself, but the writers decided to instead have him commit a terrorist act.

I’ll dive into elves next entry, because that’s a lot to talk about – same article, but I’ll look up & add another angle to it as well.

[b1odeuwedd]

My first idea so far is the question of how to go about social analogies in RPGs. It’s a bit of a two-parter: first, analyzing the use of non-white cultures in fantasy settings; and second, the sticky situation of creating analogies of real-life oppression.

It was hard to figure out the best game to use as a lens for this question, but eventually, I realized that Dragon Age: Inquisition – a topic of heavy debate by fans over the years of its existence – would actually be perfect for this. Mages – innate magic users – are considered volatile and dangerous, even subhuman in some areas of the fantasy world of Thedas. At the same time, elves are still portrayed as the Tolkien-like lithe, skinny, European-featured people, but have been heavily oppressed in ways that are obviously analogous to the struggles of both Native American and Jewish people –– forced to leave their homeland as well as being enslaved and forced into ghettos. The fan discourse often goes along the lines of “should you write social analogies into your game at all, and if so, how should you go about it?” The general consensus is, of course, “not like this.” Thus, Dragon Age is a good example of a faulty attempt to write parallels of real instances of oppression into a setting. I found this article on Tor on minority settings in RPGs:

https://www.tor.com/2015/04/27/why-minority-settings-in-rpgs-matter/

It provides good insight on the false equivalency of Western and white to normal or default, which is a good baseline to what I want to delve into for this project. The foundation of fantasy representation is essential to understand before the more difficult topics are brought up.

But when they are, there are a lot of games (and other media for games to learn from) that represent varying angles on the issue. Breath of the Wild, for example, received criticism for its Gerudo people, while Avatar: The Last Airbender – not a video game, but can be learned from – is often considered a positive fantasy representation of Asian cultures.

Dragon Age also has a huge variety of parallel and original cultures, from Tevinter to the Qunari to the Dalish – not to mention the ancient versus modern elves. That’s why it’ll be a great game to use as a comparison to many others made by different studios; most of the detailed thinkpieces are about the mages, but there are a good number of articles about just about every facet of Thedas.