The Music of Dragon Age, And What It Actually Says

Come in! Have a seat, and let's talk about music. Specifically, the music of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which is beautiful and fun and lovely and very helpful, and which is also heavily recycled and manages to undermine the game it is meant to support in tons of small and large ways.

This conversation has BIG FAT SPOILERS for basically everything that ever happens in the Dragon Age series, across all games to date.

(It is also a very long post with a whole pile of embedded video. Fair warning.) 

The Age of the Dragons, Part III: The Epic of Ser Cullen

I said on Twitter, as I played through Dragon Age: Inquisition, that I was developing a theory.

The best representative of the player, I mused, isn't actually the Inquisitor, the player character. The best representative of the player is, in fact, their advisor Cullen.

And now I will try to explain.

The rest of this post contains big fat unmarked spoilers about basically every game BioWare has released since 2007. You have been warned.

The Age of the Dragons, part II: The Tragedie of Kirkwalle

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

In my 9th grade English class, we read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  Nearly every public school freshman class in the United States does this, still, and has done for decades.  It's an educational rite of passage: turn 14, read about two horny Elizabethan teenagers and how they died.

At the time, I hated reading Romeo and Juliet.  I resented everything about it and only began to change my mind when Shakespeare in Love was released a few years later.  With the full force of ironic detachment that only a teenager can muster, I knew that it was "stupid."

But my English teacher was a wise woman.*  I remember very little of the details of her class, half a lifetime later, but I remember her teaching the prologue.  The tension, she explained, came from knowing that the story would end badly.  The core of the tragedy was in the audience understanding as the play unfolded that disaster could be averted, but having foreknowledge that it wouldn't be.  The story, from the outset, was a tale of doom, and in that knowledge lay its art and its power.

Romeo and Juliet and I eventually came to a truce, and while it's still not among my favorites, I respect it for what it is.  But in 10th grade English, a scant few months later, I took to Macbeth immediately and have remained a fan of the art of the Tragedy ever since.

"Maybe it's not as simple as you imagine..."

The typical model of a video game -- and particularly, a BioWare video game -- is to collect your allies, fight your enemies, and save the world.  These stories might have nuance in the details, but ultimately their shape is unambiguous and Romantic.  They're all variations on the hero's journey, and the player character is front and center to the story.  He or she is the lynchpin of all that happens in the game world, and his or her actions and skills can guarantee a positive outcome for The Good Guys.

Players went in to Dragon Age 2 expecting the arc of Star Wars and instead got handed something out of Sophocles.  Saving the world, after all, is par for the course.  No wonder so many were disappointed with what they got. 

"I'm not interested in stories.  I came to hear the truth."

"What makes you think I know the truth?"

"Don't lie to me!  You knew her even before she became the Champion!"

"Even if I did, I don't know where she is now."

"Do you have any idea what's at stake here?"

"Let me guess: your precious Chantry's fallen to pieces and put the entire world on the brink of war.  And you need the one person who could help you put it back together."

"The Champion was at the heart of it when it all began.  If you can't point me to her, tell me everything you know."

"You aren't worried I'll just make it up as I go?"

"Not. At. All."

"Then you'll need to hear the whole story..."

 

The events in Kirkwall leading up to the beginning of the Mage-Templar war centered around Carias Hawke.  She was quick with her wit and quicker with her daggers.  She was ruddier than her dark-haired sister Bethany, but anyone could tell they were sisters at a glance.  She tried to help apostate mages like her sister as best she could.  With all of her family lost to her, over time, she found unexpected comfort and love in the arms of a fugitive warrior elf from the Tevinter Imperium.  Although she knew him for seven years, she never did really understand what drove Anders -- once a close friend -- to recklessness, madness, and disaster.  Despite being deeply betrayed, she could not make herself betray in turn and so she chose to let Anders live, sending him away with the unspoken promise of a knife between the ribs if he should ever dare to show his face again.

The events in Kirkwall leading up to the beginning of the Mage-Templar war centered around Owen Hawke.  He was even-tempered, if prone to sarcasm, and though he was always willing to use his magical talents he, like his late sister, spent a lifetime carefully (if ultimately unsuccessfully) avoiding Templar attention.  In looks, he favored his brother Carver.  With all of his family lost to him, over time, he found his way into a torrid, passionate relationship with a fellow apostate and runaway Grey Warden.  He always knew what danger lurked within Anders but felt that maybe, if he didn't poke at it, they could avoid recklessness, madness, and disaster.  Despite a zealous, selfish, and destructive betrayal, he wouldn't turn on the man he loved.  With no small measure of worry, he chose -- for a while -- to accept his lover's apparently sincere desire to remain in his life, and after the fight at the Gallows they disappeared into the wilds together.

The modern BioWare RPGs are, in a critical way, always about your story.  The initial approach to one is the story the player has chosen to tell, for whatever reason: moral self-insertion; a pre-written, pre-determined RP approach to a character; the fine art of just picking things in the moment because you don't give a damn.  It's an individual story, and the first playthrough becomes the story that the player tells about the events of the game.  (This is true of both the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, to date.)

The first story is my story.  Carias (which sounds better than it's spelled) Hawke is my canon Hawke, and when Dragon Age 3 inevitably rolls around the events of her life are the tale I will import and carry forward.  Hers is the story I have chosen to tell, and the game supported and encouraged my telling it.

The second story feels closer to being the story.  Owen, through his outsider status as a mage and his relationship with Anders, uncovered huge swaths of motivation, narrative, and foreshadowing to which Carias was not privy.  His was the second story I chose to tell, and the game not only supported and encouraged my telling it, but embraced it.

The key to reconciling these two different stories -- full arrays of different choices -- against each other and the fixed nature of the plot is through the mechanic of after-the-fact narration.  It's interesting, seeing where the "Eye of God" viewpoint falls in Dragon Age 2.  The story the player chooses to tell always meets some of the same goalposts, and while Varric's narration of events has a few tweaks, it's fundamentally immutable.

Indeed, for all that the player controls Hawke, in a meaningful sense the player is better represented by Varric.  His presence as narrator -- and a potentially unreliable one, as far as both Cassandra and the player are concerned -- echoes and underlines the entire concept of the player making choices in what is ultimately a forced linear tragic narrative.  "Here's how it really happened," the player says, and no one can particularly gainsay it because the ultimate sequence of events is still the same: Hawke came to Kirkwall in 9:30, in some way knew these 7 or 8 individuals, and in 9:37 was present when Anders destroyed the Chantry.  Cassandra may stop Varric in moments of true absurdity but otherwise, she believes the story he has to tell about Hawke, no matter how it unfolds.

A brief diversion: one theory of visual arts (in particular, film) holds that the viewer's participation is a necessary part of creating meaning, including narrative meaning.  The director and team who assemble a movie can give visual and aural depictions to their hearts' content, but true meaning comes from the viewer's foreknowledge and ability to make connections.  For example, a shot in which the camera pans through a poor, downtrodden city neighborhood relies on the viewer's knowledge of urban poverty, or at least common cultural symbols of urban poverty, in order to work.  Viewers with different backgrounds will create sightly different interpretations of such a shot and the film of which it is a part.

In the game, the player's participation in creation of meaning is more concrete, but in the same vein.  Essentially, we at the keyboard or holding the controller are standing in the wings, feeding Varric his lines for Cassandra.  The narrative on-screen is fixed: Hawke will always find the Thaig in the Deep Roads, Quentin will always kill Leandra, and Anders will always explode the Chantry.  But much of the why is up to the player's interpretation and manipulation of the text.

"A last toast, then: to the fallen."

The stories of both Carias and Owen Hawke are arguably tragedies, in the classic sense.  Only one of them gives all of the necessary markers along the way such that the player can see the shape of the story, understand its tragic nature, spot the oncoming disaster before it comes, and realize that Hawke in fact is not the center of the bigger tale.

The game more or less works no matter how one chooses to assemble its pieces.  Any combination of friendship and rivalry, any combination of party members taken adventuring, and any Hawke class or set of skills -- all will add up to a total story.  The player takes control of this Fereldan refugee and fills in the blanks however s/he likes, and it flows.

But rather than punishing the player for not making the "right" choices, Dragon Age 2 uses something of a carrot rather than a stick approach to authorial intent.   The game rewards certain choices by adding layers of character background and motivation to certain stories and certain party combinations.  My Hawke never knew that eventually, Fenris and Isabela could start a relationship -- and my other Hawke only found out by chance.  My Hawke missed out on some of Anders's political passion, but my other Hawke found his lover's manifestos lying all over the house during the years they lived together in Hightown.  My Hawke relied on Fenris to help her negotiate tricky moments with the Qunari; my other Hawke convinced Isabela to give the tome back.

I didn't feel shortchanged, at all, the first time I played through the game.  (Or the second, which immediately echoed the first, with nearly identical choices but with a better understanding of how it all worked and eye to foreshadowing.  Owen's game was number three.)  I never regretted the decision to roll a female character, to play a class other than mage, or to avoid the Anders romance.  I like that story, and that Hawke, and stand by the impulse to make it "my" canon.  But that "other" Hawke -- the mage who had to deal with Carver, who lost Bethany, who chose Anders -- seemed to get the full story, in the shape of so much dialogue I might never have known was in the game.  And while the game never forces a single direction on the player's character, when playing the "real" canon story, the "right" story, there's a feeling to be had that one has fallen very smoothly into the story that the game wants to tell.**

"There's power in stories, though. That's all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine."

The fun part is, no player would ever be able to discover the difference -- to hear all of the details of the story -- without playing through the game at least twice.  Usually when we say a game has "replay value," we aren't talking about the strictly scripted, generally linear, straight-narrative games.  After all: their skills are easy to master and we know how their stories go.  Why revisit?

To me, the reasons to revisit Dragon Age 2 (beyond the same "old friend" reasons I revisit favorite books and movies) seem obvious: because this time, your concept of context is well enough honed to hear the prologue.  Varric's words can no longer slide through your consciousness and back out: when he describes the state of the Chantry and the Circles, when he intimates doom for Hawke's sibling on the Deep Roads, when he convinces Cassandra "if Hawke had only known..."  In all of these moments, Varric, our narrator, is helping us create the tragic arc.

Foreshadowing, after all, is a particular kind of thrilling agony when the player (viewer, reader) does, in fact, know what's going to happen as the story unfolds.***  And sometimes, it's the core of the entire thing.  And so we find ourselves winding back to Shakespeare and to Aristotle, back to stories that advertise up-front that there is no winning solution to be had.

"I removed the chance of compromise, because there is no compromise."

The true story of Dragon Age 2, especially when thought of as the middle chapter of a story that began with Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening, is the tragedy of Anders and the Chantry.  Hawke is a lens for understanding the story, rather than an end unto him- or herself.  Such a construction directly contradicts nearly everything players have been led to expect from 20-30 years' worth of tradition and history in the western RPG.

Subverting expectations and deliberately playing with tropes is tricky, and Dragon Age 2 paid a price for its efforts.  Close to a year after its initial release, player and critic opinions still stare each other down from across a mile wide, love-it-or-hate-it canyon.

In the end, perhaps it doesn't matter.  Dragon Age 2 was exactly the right game, but it seems to have landed in the wrong franchise, or at the wrong time, or with the wrong marketing.  BioWare's official position as they unofficially talk about Dragon Age 3 seems to be that they're willing to be carried at least in part by the tide shouting that this tragedy was a misstep.  The internet clamors for the combat-focused, exploration-driven, skill-and-inventory driven classic party-based RPG that Dragon Age: Origins was heir to.   DA2 instead brought a city full of companions to life and mainly gave the player's avatar a reason to be a witness to the inevitable bubbling over of violence that began the Mage-Templar War.

That war could yet destroy Thedas, and so whatever avatar takes center stage in the final installment of the trilogy will, I'm sure, be out to save the world.  No doubt he or she will briefly meet survivors of both the Fifth Blight and the Battle of Kirkwall.  And I suspect that he or she will find Thedas to be salvageable, and so help create a brave new world.

And stepping forth upon a new and mysterious shore, with all the problems of the world untangled?  That one's for the Comedies.

***

For further reading on the telling of tragedies in video games: Line Hollis, Four Types of Videogame Tragedy.  And for excellent further reading on Hawke and the Heroine's Journey, see here, on Flutiebear's tumblr.

* Mrs. Lucy Myers, of Belmont High School. To whom I owe rather a lot, not least of which is thanks for putting up with 14-year-old me.

**The Mass Effect franchise does this even more strongly than the Dragon Age franchise does.  Although Shepard can make a limited variety of choices along the way, particularly in the area of romance, certain decisions (Liara) have less friction against the rest of the text in ME / ME2 than others do.

***Leandra's cheerful, happy talk early in Act II of finding a suitor is pretty much yell-at-the-computer heartbreaking on a second go.

On Choosing a Role

[This is all straight-up personal blathering about me playing Dragon Age games, talking it through to myself in more than 140 characters.]

One of the things I'm really noticing this week, while adventuring (and occasionally struggling) through Dragon Age: Origins, is to just what a high degree subconscious and indirect cues affect my perception of a game.

The first time I tried DA:O, I played a female city elf.  That's a character who has it pretty bad, all things considered: the city elves are a thoroughly disenfranchised, oppressed, despised people who live in a literal ghetto.  The origin story basically involves attempting to rescue a cousin from rape and on the way out giving a whole bunch of oppressors a sword to the face because they're there, among other things.

On that first run of the game, I made it to the battle of Ostagar, then got turned around twice somehow trying to get to the tower and light the beacon -- so really, not very far at all.  The entirety of my opinion on the game was based on the origin chapter, and my take was that Ferelden was a perilously grim and serious world, and that the Warden was a cynical, jaded, sarcastic person.  The Warden, in that game, stood in the gutter under the totem pole of society's hierarchy and had nothing to lose, but everything to gain.

I didn't feel like exploring the city elf story again this time, because I already had, and woodland elves never really were my sort of thing.  Neither are magic users, and I didn't feel like being a dwarf, so I rolled a human.  The only origin for non-mage humans, though, is Human Noble.  I also had some indecision, some mouse jitter, and a rather large glass of wine while I was customizing my would-be Warden in the character creator, and as a result some of her physical attributes are not what I ordinarily would have chosen.  Basically,  her eyes are enormous.

The end result is a character I did not expect: I now have a Disney-eyed deposed heir to a minor throne, who grew up in a full life of privilege and plenty, comfort and love.  This Warden, while still "me" in a sense as all my characters are, is a me of decades long gone.  She's the me I would have thought at 14 that I'd want to be -- young and idealistic, but trying oh so very hard to do the right thing in the world.

As a result of the character's backstory and appearance, I've realized I'm actually playing a much shallower game than my first pass.  This Warden is straight out of a fairy tale, and she knows it -- and she believes the world actually works that way.  I the player actually found myself squirming in mild embarassment in my chair last night (thank goodness the spouse was too immersed in multiplayer assassinating to notice) when I realized how very juvenile I felt my approach to the whole game becoming.

So juvenile.  Because I had every intention of deliberately avoiding the Alistair romance.  I know in advance, thanks to years of spoilers floating around, what the Warden's options are going to be, to stamp out the Blight.  I had a feel for what would be the right thing to do, in this game, and when I played the sequel first I told it that's what had happened.  Maybe the Warden and Zevran could have one really good before-the-world-ends romp, just for fun.

But then this Warden happened.  And something possessed me and honest to god now I'm playing fanfiction or something, I don't even know, but all those dialogue options came up at the bottom of the screen and my hand picked "hey let's go make out and be in love like teenagers" and now my brain is getting drunk in the corner out of disgust while Alistair and the Warden make puppy eyes at each other.  And they're such dorks, and I'm such a softie, that now I know I don't have it in me to make the "right" choice anymore, and Wynne was right to give her lecture, and I was all, "No, mom, I know what I'm doing" and *headdesk*.

I barged into Ferelden and felt like The Doctor: just this once, everybody lives!

I think some of it's a reaction to external factors.  I've been thinking about Mass Effect 3 and discussing it with a lot of other gamers lately, and I expect that game to be nothing but a wall of impossible choices, destruction, really upsetting character deaths, and sacrifices for the good of the many.  (In fact, the game cannot be nearly as tragic and joyless as I imagine it will be, because no-one would play it.  Still: grim.)  Somehow I'm not only choosing to spend March immersed in that drama, I'm also looking forward to it.  So some part of my spirit is rebelling.  Like a little child, I'm throwing a massive tantrum and declaring that this time, the hero gets the prince and that everyone lives happily ever after.  (Except the bad people.  Naturally.)

The end result, though, is that I'm playing a totally different game than I thought I was -- and a totally different game than the one I thought I'd use to set up Dragon Age 2.  DA2, to me, is more like the way the me-of-today perceives the world.  Hawke is a person who has been through some traumatizing events, surrounded by some likewise damaged people.  She and her friends have all come to each other as a family of choice, after losing their blood families, and they make their way through life in this big strange city together, knowing the others are out there.  They have each other's backs, even the crabby ones. 

That's the game I played.

The Warden has a different cast around her.  They're loyal to her, more or less, or at least becoming that way, but their backgrounds are not like hers.  Every one of them, except maybe Leliana, is in some way an outcast from mainstream society: Sten the qunari, Alistair the bastard, Wynne the circle mage, Morrigan the apostate, Shale the golem, Zevran the elf fleeing his failure...

But this Warden is of a noble house.  True, her family died around her due to backstabbing, disloyalty, greed, and politics -- but the lives of the nobility were always thus.  Her personal tragedy is still the mainstream story of her society.  In short, she has buckets of privilege.  And although she may be camping in the woods with a gang of misfits for now, the arc of her story has her heading back to power and privilege later.

That's the game I seem to be playing.


The reason I think it's worth playing is because when my husband sat down and spent dozens of hours on Dragon Age: Origins, he saw the story of a young man: a circle mage who had to bear the gift and curse of magical talent and who met a pretty red-haired Orlesian bard he couldn't resist.  Another friend sat down with the game and found the story of a dwarf, who had to manage culture and politics and found the Wardens as an unexpected refuge.  And then of course there's the city elf whose story I didn't finish: she would have been constantly in an uphill fight, with her gender and her race aligned against her, until earning enough respect to lead the fight against the darkspawn in the end.

So very many different games...

There are still a lot of things I don't like about Dragon Age: Origins in the realm of its mechanics and design.  And I think as an experience, I actually still like Dragon Age 2 better.  Its characters feel more real, its city feels more navigable, and since I really didn't buy the game for its dungeon delving I couldn't care less that all mines have the same floor plan.  But finding out what kind of story I choose to tell, and how that story and I both change at whim, has been a really interesting experience.

(And now I know that some part of me, deep inside, never did let go of that Disney upbringing.)

The evolution of the RPG... and me.

A year or two ago, I (rather infamously) drew my line in the sand: I do not like party-based games, I declared, and never had.

Following this assertion (brought on at that moment by disliking Dragon Age: Origins), I've played both Mass Effect games, am currently in the midst of Chrono Cross, and just devoured the entirety of Dragon Age 2 in a few days.  And yet in many ways I stand by my original statement -- so what's changed?

I'll be honest, lady rogue Hawke pretty much always took Fenris, Varric, and Merrill, by the middle of Act II.

I'll admit that in part, I've changed.  Though I've been loving games and digital worlds since I was a kid, my consumption of various game types has really ramped up in the last three years and I've been exposed to, and learned patience for, some kinds of game design that I hadn't gained wide experience with before.  Game appreciation, like film appreciation, is tied to a sense of time and place, and an understanding of the history of the art.  My sense of history is still developing.

Crucially, though, the games themselves have also been evolving.  The difference in feel between Dragon Age: Origins, which hearkens back to an older era of games, and Dragon Age 2, which feels very modern, really crystallizes that evolution for me.  Thanks in large part (though not solely) to BioWare's recent design choices, I've been able to narrow down a bit what it is I actually hate about party based gaming.

In a word?  Micromanagement.

For some people, this is fun. I will never truly understand those people.

For me, the joy of playing has never been in the numbers, the tactics, or the methodical min/max situation.  I am fundamentally a lazy gamer: I don't want to control a hundred things at once.  I'm willing to be responsible for one character and for her tactics, skills, attributes, gear, inventory, and personality.  I tend to gravitate toward one character type and I tend to play that type the same way across games.* I like passive skills and quick kills, and I prefer not having to overthink every single character placement or tactical choice.

If I'm playing a game where character development is the focus -- in broad strokes, the RPG genre -- then what I want is to take control of my avatar and to understand and master her personality and talents.  I don't want to be responsible for controlling others.  It's a selfish impulse ("don't be dead weight I have to drag around") but also a self-protective one ("I just can't manage both of us correctly at once; you'll get short shrift").

My aversion to having to worry what others are up to has led to some downright comical contortions. During my EverQuest II years, I was three solid months into the game and level 28 (back when it was much less solo-friendly)  before I ever joined a group.  The folks I grouped with were all in the same guild and I joined up with them a few days later.  That's how I eventually discovered the pleasure of watching a plan laid and executed with a minimum of communication.  Everyone knew their roles: tanks took the hits, healers healed, chanters controlled crowds, and DPS damaged things.  Sure, for special bosses or raid zones (or one memorable five-Fury group) we discussed strategy at greater length, but each character always knew her role because each was controlled by an autonomous being somewhere, an individual man or woman at a keyboard just like me.

Some of those raid strategies worked better than others. Running a new x2 zone on Test, June '05.

When handed Divinity II and Dragon Age: Origins in the same week, I gravitated to the former because I could simply strike out into the world as I pleased, without worrying about what others wanted, needed, or thought of me.  I've been bored, in the past, with having to make the rounds among companions and crew to check in on each and every one of them and their personal needs.

I've been thinking about the "why" a great deal over the past week.  I think it's because for a long time, in many of the games I played, companion characters' personal needs either felt mechanical, pointless, or kind of unhinged.  That's a personal assertion, and not necessarily a quality-of-games one; it has to do with my own particular wiring.  As much as I hate to admit it, because I'm a book-lover through and through and an imaginative one at that, I think what's actually hooking me into this new RPG era is the voice-over work.

When I play a game like Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross, everyone sort of sounds the same.  Yes, I imagine characters speaking differently, with different cadences, accents, and mannerisms, but in the end every voice is still, on some level, mine.  I can't give other characters inflection that I can't imagine and active as my imagination is, in a text-only world my interpretations might run counter to the scene's intent.

In fact, I'm running into this fairly often in Dragon Age: Origins, which I'm now giving another try.**  With an unvoiced Grey Warden, it's up to me to guess whether a comment she can make is sarcastic or genuine, and whether that comment is made jokingly or earnestly.  As a result, other characters' responses are not necessarily what I expect or what I'm aiming for.  I've run into some disapproval situations that I didn't see coming, because I didn't realize the Warden was going to be perceived as confrontational rather than as politely direct.  (Also because Morrigan disapproves of roughly everything.)

And when Morrigan disapproves, she lights you on fire. It's just her way.

Having companions find their voices has upended the way I view these NPCs in my games.  It's an emotional connection to the narrative and its world that isn't a new concept, but that makes me personally care a great deal more.  Even in a silent protagonist, fundamentally single-player game like Fallout: New Vegas, companion voices make me feel differently and realign my priorities.  I want to earn Boone's respect, not his easily-granted disgust.  Hearing Arcade move from self-effacing sarcasm to honesty over time makes me feel trustworthy.  Disappointing Veronica makes me feel like I've kicked a puppy.  And actually getting to hear Christine talk and explain, after she had been rather violently robbed of her voice, is deeply satisfying.

The recent BioWare titles (the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises) have done a rather extraordinary job of surrounding me with characters I care about.  Between advancements in game tech and a strong investment in decent writing, I'm able to immerse myself in the illusion that my [Hawke / Shepard / Warden] is surrounded by other people, as real as my intervention has made the PC, with their own voices, stories, and personalities.  And they can control themselves.

Should I be so inclined I could order Garrus which baddies to shoot and when, but I never have to.  (I choose not to play on difficulty settings where that level of tactics would be required.)  I can take control of Isabela or Aveline, or issue direct commands to them, but I don't have to.  Without very much intervention (adding health potions to their tactics), Fenris knows how to watch my back and stupid Anders knows how to heal the party as needed.  Varric doesn't need me to issue a complex set of numbers and commands in order to seriously own that crossbow.

The ability and choice for the player character to have intimate and meaningful one-on-one conversations with non-player-characters has reframed the way I relate to a game.  If I need to make a complex or consequential decision in Chrono Cross, I look at a guide, or I talk it over with a friend (i.e. the spouse) who has played the game before and can give me non-spoiler guidance.  But when I need to make a complex or consequential decision in a game like Dragon Age 2, I have Hawke talk to her friends.  They become her guides and, by extension, mine.  Does Aveline disapprove of a choice?  She must have a reason and it's worth asking her before I act.

I'm used to NPC companions either feeling burdensome or feeling invisible -- for all that I liked, say, Lucca and Frog in Chrono Trigger, taking their turns in combat just meant me moving through one list of all options, and switching party members roughly meant switching combat tactic options and not much else.  That both game design and I have reached a stage where player companions feel almost like MMO buddies has been revelatory.  For the first time, when given the choice I care more about my companions' quests, evolution, and goodwill than I do about exploring every corner of the world (though I still do) or about the main story (which always comes around again in due time).

I haven't always particularly enjoyed characters' quests (bite me, Anders) or supported their loyalty missions (you too, Zaeed).  But as this year in gaming starts to wind down, I'm realizing that now, the companion quests are the ones I want to appear more often.  I enjoy making it a point to wander around the Normandy, or around Kirkwall, or around the campfire.  Fenris, Anders, Aveline, Varric, Isabela, Merrill -- their stories, their trust and forgiveness (or betrayal), are what was important to me in Dragon Age 2.  And as I look toward 2012 and Mass Effect 3, I know that Shepard can stare down the Reaper threat, but what I really want is to be sure that Garrus, Liara, Wrex, and Tali will trust her and stand by her side while she does.

Until then, back to Chrono Cross, where Kid is Australian and Poshul is desperately annoying -- but everyone is as silent as Serge. 

*For the record, that type is rogue / thief / assassin, heavy on the stealth and dual-wield or, in a futuristic setting like ME, on sniper tactics.  Sneak-and-stab or sneak-and-shoot: if they see me coming I'm doing it wrong.

**Because seriously, I want to see if I can find out why [DA:O character who appears at the end of DA2 with Cassandra] shows up then and there, 6-7 years after the events of DA:O.  Context: I needs it.

~~~~~~~~~~

And for more discussion on party-based gaming, that happened to come up while I was in the middle of this personal meditation, see Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Horde on The Future of the Computer Role-Playing Game.

Punch Anders in the Face, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Bomb.

I'm playing Dragon Age II, as everyone who follows me on Twitter will have heard a thousand times in the last week.  At the point of this writing I'm in the middle of Act III, with a female rogue Hawke.  Spoilers for 2/3 of the game (and predictions about the remaining events) follow.

Because this is a BioWare game, Hawke picks up a number of companions along her way.  And because this is a BioWare game, those companions are strongly-written individuals, with their own stories, characteristics, personalities, and lives.  Despite my low-level general dislike of party-based gaming even now (which is a longer post that I've started writing but put on the back burner because this post was more urgent), Hawke's companions are the entire reason I'm playing DAII.  I love them, they are fantastic, and I want to spend more time with them.

Especially Fenris who, while always brooding, doesn't always look quite that murderous.

Bethany, Aveline, Varric, Merrill, Anders, Fenris, and Isabela -- these are the seven characters whose story this game is here to tell.  (I'm aware that if I had any DLC, there'd be more.)  And dropped into the middle of their lives, the thread connecting them all and drawing them and their stories together, is Hawke.

I like to think of myself as a generally decent person, with a healthy amount of self-respect.  I'm a constant work in progress (who isn't?), but I'm a reasonably well-adjusted adult and I make a point of surrounding myself with non-toxic people: with good friends.  Sure, some of us don't call as often as we'd like, and I've got some friends who have opinions I disagree with, or who have made choices I don't like.  But generally, we're respectful of each other, we trust each other, and we don't use or lie to each other.

This Hawke (blue-eyed red-haired Miriam), like my Shepard before her and my Courier and Lone Wanderer before them, is an extension of me.  She looks quite a bit like me, she shares my preferences and tastes, and she shares my moral compass.  That's how I like to play an RPG of this sort.  When Varric and Merrill are good friends to Hawke, I then feel that they are good friends.  This is by design; especially on a first playthrough, we're often meant to put ourselves, the players, in the hero's shoes.

So when Aveline, flustered, comes to Hawke for help with her love life, I feel like I'm helping a (hapless) friend.  When Varric good-naturedly gives Hawke shit just because he can, I feel like I'm joking around with a friend.  When Merrill bares her soul to Hawke, I feel like I have been trusted by a friend.  When Fenris walks around town wearing Hawke's crest on his belt, I feel a little more gushy than "just friend" ( <3 ).

Which means when after two acts -- seven story years -- of friendship, Anders lies to Hawke and uses her?  I get angry with the betrayals of a "friend."

Anders wants to justify himself.

Through the first two acts of DAII, I kept working toward friendship with Anders because, overall, I agreed with him.  Mages really do get the short end of the stick in the society of the Dragon Age games, and it's a big problem.  Knight-Commander Meredith in particular is a power-hungry ass and a liar and I'd like her deposed promptly, possibly even at the point of my dagger if that's what it takes.  There are enormous problems of inequal rights and prejudice all over Thedas and I'll even concede that, despite my strong personal preferences, solving them might require violent tactics rather than diplomacy.  And I'm always good for fighting injustice.

I had no strong reason to be rivals with Anders.  Our means were different but our goals, overall, the same.  I could set aside his overbearing righteousness with an internal eye-roll, pick witty dialogue, and have us continue along our mutual goal of "kill ALL the monsters!"  And of course, one of my biggest issues as a gamer is the deep-seated need for everyone to like me.  Nearly always. 

So I was inclined to give Anders a chance, despite his flaws and quirks.  He's a prominent NPC and a party member: surely I'm meant to cut him some slack?

Demonic posession is kind of a big personality quirk, IMHO.

I managed benign disintrest with Anders until reaching his Act III quest, "Justice," at which point I instantly developed an overwhelming desire to punch him in the face.  Twice.  The quest is nothing short of infuriating.  By the point in the game at which Anders asks you to go gather some ingredients for him, the game has made sure that Hawke knows (1) there hasn't been a known way to separate a demon and host without killing them, and (2) dwarves and Qunari both make, steal, or have gunpowder / explosives.

And so, Anders sends Hawke forth to collect saltpeter and sulfur for him, assuming:

• That she is too stupid to know what these ingredients are
• That she is too stupid to know what these ingredients do
• That she will trust whatever it is Anders tells her
• That she doesn't actually need to know what she's up to, because Anders said so
• That she'll be fine with this gaping and suspicious hole in knowledge
• That she won't actually put together the ninety million clues surrounding this request
• That his cause is so righteous that it's all right to hurt everyone and everything else for it...
• ...including the people he supposedly wants most to help.

I can get behind a lot of suspicious behavior, in a game.  But a supposed friend lying to me in order to go make a (potentially suicide) bomb and blow the shit out of people whose fight this isn't?  I don't think so, friend.

I stewed over this for quite a while.  My first concern came from a game mechanics perspective: helping Anders, or indeed aiding magi in general, make it challenging to maximize friendship with Fenris.  Having chosen the Fenris romance, and choosing to believe that the character has a better nature that Hawke can appeal to, I find I need to be very careful in what order I choose to help people.  And so at first I'd framed the problem as, "How can I be sure to do everything I need to with Fenris first, so that then I can do what I need to for Anders?"

After sleeping on that for a night, though, I finally realized the solution: to hell with Anders.  If a real friend of mine in the flesh-and-blood world pulled the sort of shenanigans he's up to, I'd be unable to remain close to that person.  Our relationship would strain and although I might feel wistful for the loss of what once was, I wouldn't feel guilt about cutting ties.  So why I have been letting my pixellated avatar be guilted or bullied into giving support that I wouldn't give?  If Hawke is modeled after my gut and my ethics, why on earth would I let her put up with this?

For all that I've always needed to maximize the number of NPCs who like or respect my PC, I've never particularly needed the bad guys to like me.  Why would I?  They're terrible people and I'm perfectly comfortable being morally opposed to them.  The Legion, the Reapers -- their disapproval is a point of pride.  And for all that I try to avoid conflict and remain friendly in the real world, there are some people out there whose approval I've never sought.  If the racists and homophobes of the world ever start singing my praises, I'll have a serious and urgent need to re-examine the course of my life.

What Dragon Age II has done for me is that it has allowed me to bring that last, formerly missing piece of my personal moral core with me into my characters.  You know what?  I don't need Anders to like me!  I don't need to help him.  And if he's making a series of poor choices that harm Miriam Hawke's life and her other relationships?  He can go to hell.

For all that I raged and agonized about Kate Shepard's inability to keep both Jack and Miranda loyal in Mass Effect 2, I appreciate that it happened.  Sometimes, when you're surrounded by people with different priorities, you do find yourself in conflict, and there's not a soul on earth powerful enough to resolve every single conflict among his or her peers just through the force of good will alone.  Companions might choose a (metaphorical) hill to die on that ends a friendship, or co-workers might join cause for a common goal even if they hate you.  That's how the real world works.  And if I'm looking for mature nuance in my game writing (which I am), I have to be able to acknowledge that there are some hurts that my heroes just can't fix.

I've avoided spoilers regarding the rest of the game, but I'm pretty convinced at this point that Anders is going to blow the shit out of a major part of Kirkwall with or without Hawke's help.  As a result, innocent people are going to die -- a lot of them.

Knowing that, and knowing that Anders is so set on his path that he won't even tell Hawke the truth, to let her give him aid freely or not at all?  He can well and truly go to hell.  Blackmail is no mark of friendship, and I'm over it.  Anders has cured me of one small portion of the ego of the gamer, and brought me to a more mature approach toward my characters as a consequence.

I'll still create characters who are essentially me and play as if I were there, because that's half the fun.  But I the player have the self-respect not to take abuse or cavort with assholes, and now I've realized: Hawke does too.

I'm choosing against friendship and I'm choosing against helping, and those go against my grain. 30 years of RPGs have taught me to accept every quest and seek every approval, and 30 years of female socialization have taught me to be careful when and how I make waves.

But 30 years of moral judgement have also taught me right from wrong.  Anders is wrong, and feeling that I can and should tell him so is surprisingly satisfying.  I just wish there were a "punch in the face" animation to go with.

Beyond the Girl Gamer 3.1: Box it Up

Beyond the Girl Gamer: Introduction | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 2.1 | 2.2
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[This post is very image-heavy and so much of it is behind a jump.]

The discussion so far, over the last six months or so, has focused on what we see inside games: how the characters, both player and non-player, are designed; how the characters comport themselves; how the scenery of the narrative world is arranged for the male gaze; that the scenery of the world is, in fact, arranged; and how so many of the game worlds we visit use the same tropes to tell the same stories with the same kind of gender problems built into them.

The umbrella of "games, gaming, and gamer culture," though, goes well beyond the in-game, narrative, digital worlds.  Arguably, the biggest and most persistent problems we face aren't in the text, but rather, are wrapped around it.  And so we reach the third bucket of this series: marketing.

We've looked at the existence of the Chainmail Bikini trope before (1.2), but the problems of female characters in game marketing are bigger than, well, boobs.  Broken down, we're presented with two major areas of concern: the invisibility of non-sexualized female characters in marketing art, and the over-visibility of minor female characters just for the sex appeal.

A huge number of games do this.  After thinking of some on my own, I put the question to Twitter and received another few dozen suggestions in the first hour.  Sadly, there's no shortage of examples.

Unpopular Opinions

I know I have a contrarian streak, but I never go in to a game thinking on purpose, "I plan to hate this because everyone else likes it."  Indeed, I like a number of obscenely popular games (Bioshock, Portal, and the Fallout titles among them).

But then a day comes when everyone is writing about World of Warcraft.

Yeah, people.  You go and enjoy that, I guess.  I'll be over here with games that didn't piss me off in every possible dimension.  Seriously: I disliked the art, the camera motion, the controls, the UI, and the community.  That right there is a pretty big set of turn-offs.  I'll never be sitting around saying that just because I don't like something, it must suck -- but it sure sucked for me.

In fact, other than a smattering of Diablo II back in the day, I don't think I've ever particularly enjoyed a Blizzard title.  Blasphemy, right?  It gets worse.

I've written before about me and party-based games.  So also in the Annals of Unpopular Opinions, I didn't enjoy Dragon Age, and really I'm not that big on playing sci-fi environments either, so the Mass Effect titles didn't do it for me.  And while I'm going all Andy Rooney and crapping on everyone's parade, I'll mention that exactly two -- 2 -- Japanese RPGs in all of gaming history have really appealed to me, and both were titles I was able to play on the DS: The World Ends With You and the re-release of Chrono Trigger.  I have yet to be able to make it through more than an hour or two of any other JRPG, including each and every Final Fantasy game.  I was unable to avoid observing FF13 being played in our home (only one living room, after all, and it doubles as my office / PC gaming location), and I was also unable to avoid mocking it.  Constantly.  That thing is beyond ridiculous.

While I'm ranting, I may as well point out that due to time / money / parental restrictions back in the day, I never played a Metroid or Mega Man title.  And that I suck at racing games and loathe PvP titles.

*phew*

This has been Your Critic's adventure as a Cantankerous Old Coot.  On deck after the holidays: thoughts about the Uncharted series, thoughts on the Syberia series, and an episode in which I realize partway through The Longest Journey that *this* is the game I remember playing but was unable to identify.  Happy Thanksgiving y'all. :)

The RPG and Me

Despite my uneven record with RPGs, I've recently installed and started two 2009 releases on my shiny new PC: Dragon Age: Origins and Divinity II: Ego Draconis.  And my conclusion is this:

No, seriously, I really hate party-based gaming.

I'll admit that I had an irrational love for Divine Divinity.  It was, and remains, one of the worst names ever given to a game.  But oh, what fun!  I'd never have picked up this isometric Diablo II look-alike on my own, but in July 2003 I had a brand-new gaming-capable desktop for the first time in seven years (sound familiar?) and a friend brought DivDiv for me as a gift.  I installed it at something like 9:00 p.m. and became vaguely conscious, some time later, that I was both thirsty and needed to pee, and also that it was after dawn.

That summer I was unemployed and transitory, between college and grad school, so I had some time on my hands.  I must have poured at least a hundred hours into DivDiv and I still can't say why except, and this is important, that it was fun.  The story was fairly derivative, the translation errors (Larian is a European studio) were occasionally painful, and the mechanics were simple... but I loved it.  The game had hooked me and I was bound to see it through to the end, and to replay it on occasion as the years went on.

All the games I've loved through the years have hooked me in that fashion.  I've played and enjoyed games that didn't, but anything on my Top 10 or even Top 20 list has generally made me completely lose track of time at least once.  So it's an experience I welcome.

Dragon Age had piles of rave reviews behind it.  I managed to end up with a free (gifted) copy and looked forward to playing a for-really-MODERN game on my new machine.  So I sat down to play.  Went with a City Elf, Female.

I'll give them credit for writing; I liked her origin story.  And I'll give them credit for graphics; the world is gorgeous and a couple of the male characters around were indeed attractive and fun enough that I wanted to play until I got to a romance stage.  But something just didn't click.  Nothing hooked me.  And so I put in a few 30 - 90 minute sessions out of obligation, and haven't been back since.  I'm maybe five hours into the game but every time I see that icon I think, "I could, or..." and end up firing up EQ2 or Fallout 3 or Solitaire.

But then, last weekend, I managed finally to get my hands on Divinity II.  It's far less well-loved, and to many it suffered from the ill-timed comparison to Dragon Age, as both were RPGs released near each other.  But to me, Divinity II is massively more entertaining.  I wandered, slightly disoriented, for a few minutes but then old memory and gamer instinct (thank goodness for the standardization of WASD) took right over and I was in a game I'd loved seven years ago... only better.  I'm old enough now to tear myself away at bedtime rather than staying up until dawn (being married helps with this), but I got cranky doing it.  I want to keep playing!

The only way I've been able to describe why I love Fallout 3 but not Mass Effect, why I'll play Divinity II but not Dragon Age is this: I seriously hate party-based games.  I play a rogue, a thief, an assassin, or even a warrior -- but I play alone.  Summoned creatures and NPC allies are too much trouble.  They get themselves killed, they blunder in the way, and they need controlling.  I'd rather strategize on my own time.  Whether that strategy is to stealth-and-snipe (how I played Bioshock or Fallout 3) or to hack-and-slash (the easiest and occasionally most entertaining way to play, well, anything), I like doing it my way and not accounting for others.

The odd counter to this is that I enjoy time spent in an MMORPG.  Admittedly, I spend more time solo than grouped, but I like grouping and I used to enjoy raiding.  I think it's because players in an MMO (theoretically) do their own thinking, and I don't control any character but my own.  And I never play pet-summoning or charming classes.

So Mass Effect 3 will be a game for my spouse only, and that's cool.  I'll be Kratos, going solo, in God of War 3 and we'll both be happier for it.