#They should not have let David Gaider or the other writers on Dragon Age Inquisition go | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

spiralatlas · 7 years ago

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PAX Australia 2017 Day 3

There are no notes for Day 2 because I spent it socialising a little and sleeping a lot.

Queer Coded: A History of LGBTQIA+ Gaming

David Gaider Q&A

Brian Fairbanks Talks about Addressing Accessibility Through Game Design

Misc: I spent a chunk of the day in the diversity lounge which was fun. I met some great people at the Gender Diverse card game, and got to the semi finals of the Xena Nintendo 64 Fighting Game Tournament (there were only three rounds, but given how much I suck at fighting games this was still a happy surprise, and a sign of what a random button masher the game is)

The gender neutral toilets near the diversity lounge were very well done, unlike GCAP the original signs weren't visible and "with stalls/urinals" was in small letters like an afterthought.

I didn't break anything on Day 3 but did break a mug the next morning. Also the cinema in the Crown Casino is surprisingly inaccessible.

Despite the various mishaps I had a great time and will definitely come again next time we can afford it.

Queer Coded: A History of LGBTQIA+ Gaming

I missed the second half of this to see David Gaider, feeling very annoyed at the programmer.

Anny Sims @ChattyAnny on twitter (I was too slow to get the others!) Keely Thirkell Hayley Williams Soap Pejovic

Most queer characters are just queer coded, with plausible deniability. "It's up to you".Tendency for queer characters to be villains. Indie games tend to be more queer friendly than AAA games.

Lesbians: First known queer character in games: 1986 Moonmist had side-character who was a lesbian murderer.

Other notable lesbian characters:

KOTOR 2003, Juhani, first queer Star Wars character

Gone Home 2013

Dragon Age Inquisition Sera (I thought Sam Traynor from Mass Effect 3 came first?)

Tracer from Overwatch 2016

Trans characters:

1988 Birdo from Super Mario Brothers 2 "A male who believes he is female"

Lots of others but all terrible. Jokes and villains. Trans women seen as threat. Poison from Final Fight 1989, "so you can hit a woman".

Krem DAI 2014 trans man, You can't go "Ok, cool".

Hainly Adams MEA 2017 trans woman. Tells you her deadname, this was patched.

Horizon: Zero Dawn 2017 trans man

Dream Daddy 2017 trans man. One throw away line about wearing a binder, had to be clarified by writers. Non binary people and cosplayers wear binders too!

How do you make it clear they're trans without them implausibly outing themselves or just having it be word of god?

Gay men:

1993 fmv Dracula Unleashed has speaking role

Tended to be background characters, jokes and villains again. No m/m relationships shown onscreen.

Dreamfall: the Longest Journey 2006 (not made super clear until 2015)

Steve Cortez Mass Effect 3 2012

Dorian DAI 2014

Dorian knew exactly what his sexuality was. Coming of age narratives get boring.

Bi Characters (no picture because they're invisible):

1993 Ultima 7 part 2 bi character propositions character regardless of gender.

"Slutty bisexuals". A lot of characters are playersexual and it never comes up outside the relationship.

Zevran DAO 2009

Borderlands 2009

Fable 2004 let player be bi, Fable 2 2008 added bi PCs

Playersexual:

Only queer in the context that they will date players of both genders, but you don't see that unless you play as both.

Dragon Age 2 2011, Anders only mentions his ex-boyfriend if you play as a male PC

Fallout 4 2015. Did have background queer characters.

Stardew Valley 2016

Non Binary:

1995 Chrono Trigger villain

Often robots, aliens or other non human

Frisk Undertale 2015

Life is Strange 2015

Zer0 Borderlands 2 2012

Turing Read Only Memories

Some games let you have gender neutral pronouns.

David Gaider Q&A

1999 Working on Balder's Gate 2, didn't talk about his sexuality at work. Figured he would always be writing stories for straight people.

He was shocked to hear Jade Empire was having same sex romance. Got to be lead writer on DAO after that. "So I can put same sex romances in, right?". More economical to have bi romances, but he would have been happier having some gay characters.

Feeling iffy about playersexuality after DA2, he asked for 2 straight, 2 bi, 2 gay for DAI. "Minority content" is weighed via the percentage of those who play it and those who appreciate it. Eg 5% play dwarves but most see it as a positive thing to be able to do.

Most of his time was spent on the actual plot but Dorian was the most personal writing.

He was targeted by Gamergate but it doesn't compare to, for example, how much Jennifer Helper was targeted.

10 years on Dragon Age was enough, his head would explode if he had to write another story about templars and mages.

How did you get the job: His story is very specific. He was managing a hotel and a comic book artist in his spare time. A friend was a character artist at Bioware but Gaider wasn't really aware of the specifics. Bioware told their employees "If you know anyone who does game related writing let us know", the friend gave them Gaider's LARP rule book without asking. Got a call, gave the stories he wrote in highschool, got offered a job. He said no, it didn't pay enough, but then he got fired from the hotel. It felt like a sign.

Who do you think will take the romance torch from Bioware: he’s not sure they're giving it up? EA treats romance fans as a reliable audience who don't need to be advertised to, even though it's why a lot of people play in his experience (though obviously those are the kinds of fans he will tend to meet). There is an underserved audience.

Most proud of: Lots of stuff he's not proud of. Wishes he'd been more involved in community discussions early on. Proud that the team tackled issues as they started arising. Proud of the company for standing by them. Most proud of Dragon Age 2 despite the mixed response. They had very little time to create it. It’s like a very big first draft. They had a plan but didn't get to compare notes once things were written, so he had to trust the team would stick to plan as much as they could despite things being cut on the fly. Team said they were happy in a post-game survey, didn't feel he was too dictatorial.

What does your writing look like, a screenplay? A cutscene does. But it’s generally structured like a tree that expands and then contracts back to the core path before expanding again. Flow charts.

Favourite relationship in a game? Morden in Mass Effect. Cried more than in a movie. Tali was his space girlfriend. Of the ones he's worked on, Morrigan will always be closest. She represents Dragon Age to him. Joyous time working with Claudia Black, first celebrity he'd worked with. Flemeth was originally Arabic, but that actress couldn't do it so they got Kate Mulgrew. They stopped looking for an Arabic actress for Morrigan and looked for someone who matched Kate Mulgrew. Claudia Black's audition tape was her reading Smack That like a beat poet. Gaider was very nervous, he'd never spoken to any actor before. First rule he was told was don't compare them to another celebrity, so naturally he said "I had Helena Bonham Carter in mind when I wrote Morrigan". Claudia Black said "So you're saying I'm a cheap Helena Bonham Carter ;D". She would say "Does he want me to do it more like Helena?" during recording.

Has being so closely associated with diversity had downsides? He may be gay but he's still white and a dude. He feels like it's all he talks about conventions sometimes. Teams need to sit down and look at what they've made. Lot of things made individually without concern for the bigger picture eg only 15% speaking roles in DAI were female until they stopped and looked at it and fixed it.

"We didn't think about it" is no longer a defense. He wants to help with that, but we should be helping other marginalised voices get into the industry and amplifying their voices.

Wishes it could just be expected and we didn't have to discuss it.

He likes dating sim mechanics in the context of a larger story. But he does like the idea of romance not being as tertiary as it's been in Bioware games, romance as part of the adventure eg a romantic adventure. He's not really interested in social sims or day to day relationships. "My idea of a spicy relationship is to have my life threatened."

Why do you think most AAA companies try to avoid discussions of lgbt stuff, why is it taking so long? Because it's Pandora's Box. There is more being added casually. But if they do nothing they get lumped in with the rest of the industry. As soon as they do anything there are 2 sides: 1. why are you doing this, you're politicising your game. 2. Why aren't you doing more, whatever you did is wrong and not good enough.

Not that flawed attempts should be above criticism. But by mostly focusing criticism on the games that did anything rather than nothing, people have increased the feeling that it's Pandoras box. He understands that it feels like those developers might listen to criticism but the dynamic is sending the wrong lesson.

My question: How do you think inclusion of non binary player characters can work with including gay and lesbian love interests instead of just having playsexuality? “We've thought about it”. He defined playersexual for audience, like Shroedinger's sexuality. He doesn't like it when the only way to have something show up is to have the character talk about it. eg asexual: character would have to sit you down and explain what asexuality is. Is unsexy as a feature. Explaining nuances of sexuality is off putting. If there was more nuance across the industry that would mean no one game has to do everything. Any one game can have only so much within it.

(This doesn't actually answer my question. I discussed it with my husband afterwards and even he didn't understand what I was asking, so I may have garbled it in my nervousness)

Are some choices "canon"? One of the features of Mass Effect and Dragon Age was the continuity of choices. No "canon" but there is a default. A lot of people feel like they have to play the whole series to get the full experience, was off putting, and he found the Keep a nightmare as a writer.

They had editors keeping track of which choices were incompatible. And that was just the third game. "Can you imagine for a fourth game? Phew! Not my problem :D"

Have you thought about the morals of gamifying romance, saying what people want to hear to get sex? Dragon Age didn't work that way, sex was not at the end. Some characters in DAI had no sex scenes, sex is optional for Dorian's romance. It's a game, everything is gamified, you can't simulate actual relationships. For proper reactivity you’d have to mark every response and keep track of inconsistency, but that’s too much work. Same with polyamory: too many variables!

Maybe get away from the approval system? Pay more attention to overall choices in major quests etc instead of individual lines.

Bi characters in DAI were bi from the start. Not the first thing that comes up during character creation eg Dorian started out as "the good Tevinter". Helps avoid too many assumptions based on sexuality. But once characters started solidifying they would think about who worked for what sexualities. There's no set way to write someone "as" bi, but the writer can have them talk about relevant things in other scenes. Sera's writer is a straight dude, he didn't want to write About The Lesbian Experience, and got lesbians in the company to check out what he was writing.

Have relationships gotten more or less complicated? In Balder's gate 2 there was a single sequence of romance scenes which you could get kicked off. Dragon Age had approval. If it gets complicated but the player can't see it or understand how reactions relate to their previous actions it just seems random or predetermined. Unless they say "I am angry at you because of X", but noone says that.

Brian Fairbanks Talks about Addressing Accessibility Through Game Design

lostandhound1 on twitter

His notes.

He's not blind himself, and while he obviously cares a lot about accessibility had an unfortunate tendency to treat disabled people as a separate, if respected, "Other" to himself and the audience, even though I was right there in a bright red mobility scooter. He advocated person first language, "a person with blindness" etc, but not all disabled people like it and it shouldn't be presented as unambiguous best practice. I'm building up the energy to talk to him about it.

He's a sound designer.

Audio games: designed for people with a vision disability.

Audio game jam: the games tended to be about blindness as a bad thing. It felt victimising.

How can we make people feel powerful?

He was inspired by his dog's amazing sense of smell. The mechanic is that you follow an invisible trail using sound cues, a humming noise that gets louder and quieter.

Sighted people struggle with extracting information from sound. The game is more difficult for sighted people.

He had to add fruit on the ground as an accessibility measure for sighted people.

All music is diegetic: happening inside the world of the game, eg characters are singing.

There's a lack of much budget for audio games, since they're never going to make much money.

In 30 years current 30-something gamers will need accessible games.

Accessibility tends to be added as an afterthought or accident.

For example Pokemon has unique sounds for materials, collisions, monsters that accidentally make it accessible.

Sony reader: US only

Microsoft narrator: good but hard to use as a developer

EA: Proactively adding blind accessibility

Fighting games are often in stereo, blind players can play and even win tournaments.

Demand more from your games.

Developers: find a consultant. Address accessibility early.

It's about empathy. People with disability deserve the same stories to take part in as everyone else.

gameaccessibilityguidelines.com

daisyalesoundworks

binaural sound is going to make a big difference

audiogames.net: where blind gamers go to play games. They're supportive if you ask for advice and feedback.

People don't mind if you don't do immersive, game specific voices and just rely on the screenreader

Sound designers need more love to make VR accessible.

Braille games?? He doesn't know much about it.

Curb cut effect examples: curb cuts for wheelchairs but also useful for prams etc. Subtitles. Think about short term problems that benefit from accessibility as well eg the screen is broken, there's sunlight on the screen etc.

Sounds of a blind person navigating their desktop. To me it sounds like a mangled garble of little bursts of cut off computer speech, here’s a description of what’s going on.

#Conventions #pax 2017 #pax #panels #sexuality #accessibility #social justice

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narrative-arts · 8 years ago

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Fae’s narrative arts thingy for Uni that’s being posted on the group blog so the lecturers know how much f*ckin work I put in this thing: Ver 0.15

Whoo, me first:

So I’ll be talking about the Dragon Age games by BioWare and their comics published by Dark Horse Comics.

To help you understand the connection between the comics and the games, you’ll need to know a bit about how these games work first.

Dragon age: Origins & Awakening are role-playing video games, while Dragon Age 2 & Dragon Age: Inquisition are seen as Action role-playing games.

I don’t know why they added the ‘Action’ part to the last two games

oh well

In the Dragon Age games, you are the main character and you get to create a player-controlled protagonist whom you can customise by choosing what race, gender and class you wanna them to be.

*cough cough* Except in Dragon Age 2. Where you can only be human and choose your class and gender. *cough cough*

The races you can choose from are Human, Dwarf & Elf, with Qunari becoming an option in DA:Inquisition. The classes you can choose from are Warrior, Mage or Rogue.

Now, the Dragon Age games are well known and loved/hated for the moral choices they force you as the player to make. These choices each affect the story & world of Dragon Age in a small or large way.

An example of this would be how in the first game, you are given the choice of who will rule the country of ‘Ferelden’: You’re friendly loveable companion, Alistair or the previous Queen of Ferelden, Anora.

Choices like these are scattered all over the Dragon Age games, meaning that your playthrough will be different to someone else; creating a unique experience each time.

phew

Now that we’ve got the run down out of the way, we can actually look at the comics.

The Dragon age Comics do their best to stay away from the events of the games. Either by using characters that don’t appear in the games, ’Dragon Age: Magekiller’, creating prequels to the games’Dragon Age: Knight Errant’ or just keep the story line away from the events of the game.

I will be looking at the comics in ‘Dragon Age Library Edition Volume 1’

Which are made up of ‘Dragon Age: The Silent Grove’, ‘Dragon Age: Those Who Speak’ and ‘Dragon Age: Until We Sleep’ all stuck in one book.

Funny enough, the player-controlled protagonist you makes and plays as in games, you know as the main character, is not in any of these comics. This makes a lot of sense considering the massive level personalisation the player has over their character. The player character from the first game isn’t even mentioned in the comics, so we don’t know what gender, class or race they are.

The comics are told from a different POV from the games by having the main character in the comics ‘The Silent Grove’, ‘Those Who Speak’ and ‘Until We Sleep’ be King Alistair from the first game.

Which is funny for me cause I distinctly remember having him executed in the first game…

*Pause*

Alistair’s two companions in the comics are Isabela, a pirate raider, and Varric Tethras, a merchant prince of Kirkwall. Isabela and Varric are pervious companions of the player character, Hawk in Dragon Age 2.

Which is also funny for me cause I distinctly remember betraying Isabela and handing her over to Arishok…

*Pause*

Varric’s still around, Varric’s cool.

The point I was making is that the comics can be very different from your personal playthrough of the games.

This three-part comic series was co-written by Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider and Alexander Freed.These comic have their own cannon, often referred to as ‘Biowares’s Cannon’ by fans. David Gaider, in an interview, was asked about the canonicity of the novels and comics. His answer was a followed:

"The two prequel novels are canon-- there is nothing for them to conflict with.

And it is fine to assume that, if your particularly playthrough matches up with the events depicted in Asunder or the comics, those events occurred in the way they're portrayed and will be treated as such in future games. If your particular playthrough does not, then those events either happened differently or not at all. In a game we have the luxury of that kind of variability. In either case, you'll only see how it works once DA3 comes out".

*Pause*

Yeah, I’m not reading that out.

His reply can basically be summed up as, if what happens in the novels or comics matches up with your playthrough, then it happened. If they don’t match up, then the events either happened differently or not at all. The games have a level of variability that you can’t really get in the novels and comics.

Now, we can finally start looking at the questions

Whoop

What value do the comics fulfil that the game doesn’t?

One of the unique things about the comics is that each book in the series is narrated by one of the main characters; ‘The Silent Grove’ by Alistair, ‘Those who Speak’ by Isabela and ‘Until we Sleep’ by Varric.

This adds a nice personal touch to each book and gives the reader a chance to get to know the characters better. The internal thoughts let the characters sense of humour and personal motivations shine through.

For example, in ‘Those who Speak’, Isabela’s compares the current situation of being in the country Tevinter to her time under the city Kirkwall, in the game Dragon Age 2. Not only does this add a feeling of dread to this new country from her chilling description of her time there, but this also gives those who have played the game a better idea of how to feel about this new place. A nice connection from the game to the comic is made and the current events are given a personal meaning to the character.

A pretty cool thing about the Library edition is that the writers and artists sometimes add comments on the side of the pages. These comments can be from the writers about the characters and how they are to written. From the artists about how parts of artwork were drawn and what they mean to the artist. And even about their views on the canonicity and previous actions of the characters.

For instance, in chapter 4 of ‘The Silent Grove’ writer David Gaider commend saying ‘In my mind, this Alistair is the one who did the Dark Ritual in Dragon Age: Origins’. The dark ritual is another important, story changing decisions that you don’t get see the full effects of till Dragon Age: Inquisition.

One thing the comics could do that the games could not, was show the characters backstories properly. The games are told from the point of view of your character, so if you as the player want to know more about a particular companion, example Isabela, you need to go up to her and ask; whether or not she tells you the truth can depend on your dialogue options, your current level of friendship or if that’s something she simply just doesn’t want to share. In the seconded comic ‘Those Who Speak’ we learn a great deal about the character Isabela and her past, more so in this comic then in the games all together I would say. The comics do an amazing job of showing Isabela’s past and how she became the woman she is currently. If the games had tried to do this, I’m very sure it would have failed or at least not felt the same.

They would of either had to get Isabela to example what happen to the player character through dialogue or the player character would have needed to be there living it with her, and then you kinda lose the point.

Let’s move on the next question.

Do the comic’s stand on their own?

The comic’s go out of their way to inform the viewer of any information they need to know, information that they would have known if they’d played the games.

Any important information about the characters that cannot be shown in flash backs is explained through dialogue:

For instants the character Sten shows up in the second comic, previous comrade of Alistair, he is a character from the first game. The comic explains these details by having Varric who doesn’t know this info about Alistair and Sten, ask them how they know each other. There by, the writers use Varric to educate the views through natural dialogue. Old fans get a nice cameo from a cool character and new fans get the needed information to continue following the story happily.

Another way to give the viewer necessary information about the characters is through their narration.

This page has Alistair explaining a bit about Isabela and Varric, and through this narration, we find out the Isabela is an old acquaintance of Alistair, Isabela is a pirate, thief and knows Antiva. Varric is a Dwarf, a Merchant, Barkeep/Spymaster and is a travelling companion of Isabela. All this information you would have been known if you’d of played the seconded game.

Finally, on the first page of the first comic, there is a brief explanation of where in the Dragon Age timeline this story is taking place. The brief also tells the reader a bit about Alistair’s role as the newly crowned king of Ferelden.

On one hand, the comic’s do make an effort to explain details and keep a distance from the games; however, on the other hand, there are lots of referents to the other games and little details that would go over the head of viewers who hasn’t played them. They reuse well-known characters from the games so I feel that to fully appreciate these comics; you should at least play one of the games.

In conclusion to the main question on my part, I think the Dragon Age comics nicely add the Dragon Age universe, they allow the reader to see this massive game franchise from a different POV to their own and we learn new background details about characters we won’t know if we just played the games. I still think that the comics would be enjoyable to read without the playing games; heck maybe even reading the comics first would encourage readers to play the games afterwards, but to have the full experience; I would recommend playing the games.

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