Jocelyn Beyer
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Playing with Consent: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Representations of Race, Rape, and Colonialism in BioWare’s Dragon Age by Jocelyn Beyer A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Digital Humanities - Anthropology Digital Humanities University of Alberta © Jocelyn Beyer, 2019 Abstract In this thesis I analyse BioWare’s Dragon Age series of video games using a modified autoethnographic method and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to explore how rape and consent are represented within the games. I find that the player embodies three roles throughout the games in relation to sexual assault – victim, justice, and rapist – and I dedicate a chapter to exploring each in detail. I analyse the games using my own experiences to explore how the player is an embodied subject with an orientation. I also explore the idea that video games are a form of virtual tourism, and that some in-game relationships available to the player are similar to sex and romance tourism. ii Acknowledgements Writing a thesis is hard and awful, though that could just be the coffee and sleep deprivation talking, and I could not have done it without the help of a large group of people. Thank you to my supervisor, Kathleen Lowrey, for all of your help and advice from the very beginning of my grad school journey to the very last days of the writing process. I would also like to thank Astrid Ensslin for all of your hard work and dedication getting this thesis written and ready to go. Thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my research. I should also thank Sean Gouglas for getting me into this mess in the first place. “Apply to HUCO” he said, “it’ll be fun” he said. Just because it was fun, and I learned a lot and I am very proud of all of the wonderful things I have accomplished since beginning this program doesn’t mean that I am happy about it. Thank you to all of my professors who guided me through numerous classes and conferences, specifically Mo Engel, Harvey Quamen, and Geoffrey Rockwell. It was an honor to learn from you. Thank you to my HUCO cohort and all of the wonderful people I had the privilege to learn beside throughout this process. I was inspired by your awesomeness. Meeting all of you was one of the most valuable experiences of this journey and I will treasure the friendships that I have made along the way. Thank you to Anna Borynec, Andrea Budac, Kenzie Gordon, David Holmes, Erik Johnson, Ian Morrison, Jesse Luyendyk, Maren Wilson, Grady Zielke, and Paul Zimmerman for your support and sage advice throughout the years. I was especially lucky to work with Evgeniya Kuznetsova, Kaitlyn Ensley, Robert Budac, and Zachary Palmer on countless iterations of chapter outlines and drafts, as well as generally figuring out what this thesis was actually going to be about. I would never have finished this program much less my thesis without the love and support of my friends and family. Thank you to my partner, Cory Rewcastle, for all of your support and generally making sure I did not transform into a sad cave troll or die of caffeine withdrawal. And thank you to my mom, Bev Park, for your love and support and food. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank all of those people who I have met at social gatherings and parties who made the mistake of asking me what I study. I know that you iii did not really want a lesson about sexual assault in video games, but that is what you always got. Your patience and polite questions helped me work out my arguments and concerns in this thesis, even if you didn’t know it at the time. Thank you for listening. I would like to end with a sincere apology to my long-suffering companions, Stormagedeon Dark Lord of All and Seven of Nine. Stormy and Seven have suffered for years as I have ignored them while doing readings for class or wrote essays long into the night. This thesis made them very sad because they were so often forced away from the keyboard or shooed off of the comfy article they were sitting on, but now they have me completely to themselves. More or less. iv Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Summary of Methodology .................................................................................................................... 7 The Dragon Age Series ......................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter Summary ................................................................................................................................. 9 Chapter One: Approaching Rape in a Fantasy RPG with Virtual Autoethnography ................... 12 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 12 Fantasy Role-Playing Games .............................................................................................................. 13 Game Rules and Mechanics ................................................................................................................ 15 Game Worlds ...................................................................................................................................... 18 The Player ........................................................................................................................................... 20 Characters ........................................................................................................................................... 22 Rape Theory ............................................................................................................................................ 24 Sexual Assault in Video Games .......................................................................................................... 28 Methodology ........................................................................................................................................... 30 Autoethnography ................................................................................................................................. 32 Studying Up ........................................................................................................................................ 33 Ethnography of the Digital .................................................................................................................. 34 My Methodology ................................................................................................................................ 35 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 38 Chapter Two: Player Embodiment, Orientations, and Playing the Victim ................................... 39 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 39 Dragon Age: Origins .......................................................................................................................... 40 Case Study One: A Wedding Interrupted ............................................................................................... 43 Introducing Orientations ......................................................................................................................... 46 Origins and Orientation ....................................................................................................................... 51 Orientations and Embodiment ............................................................................................................ 53 Rape as an Embodied Experience ....................................................................................................... 54 Rape in Cyberspace and Cahill ........................................................................................................... 56 v Applying My Method ............................................................................................................................. 57 Protagonist to Game World................................................................................................................. 57 Player to Avatar .................................................................................................................................. 59 Player to Game World......................................................................................................................... 61 Player to Mechanics ............................................................................................................................ 62 Developer to Game World .................................................................................................................. 63 Discussion ..............................................................................................................................................