Elves and Empire

Vanessa Erat

Elves and Empire

Challenging Ludonarrative Colonialism and Othering in Dragon Age: Inquisition

MASTERARBEIT

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

Master of Arts

Studium: Masterstudium Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

Begutachter Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. René Reinhold Schallegger Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Klagenfurt, April 2018

Eidesstattliche Erklärung

Ich versichere an Eides statt, dass ich

- die eingereichte wissenschaftliche Arbeit selbstständig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Hilfsmittel benutzt habe, - die während des Arbeitsvorganges von dritter Seite erfahrene Unterstützung, einschließlich signifikanter Betreuungshinweise, vollständig offengelegt habe, - die Inhalte, die ich aus Werken Dritter oder eigenen Werken wortwörtlich oder sinngemäß übernommen habe, in geeigneter Form gekennzeichnet und den Ursprung der Information durch möglichst exakte Quellenangaben (z.B. in Fußnoten) ersichtlich gemacht habe, - die eingereichte wissenschaftliche Arbeit bisher weder im Inland noch im Ausland einer Prüfungsbehörde vorgelegt habe und - bei der Weitergabe jedes Exemplars (z.B. in gebundener, gedruckter oder digitaler Form) der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit sicherstelle, dass diese mit der eingereichten digitalen Version übereinstimmt.

Mir ist bekannt, dass die digitale Version der eingereichten wissenschaftlichen Arbeit zur Plagiatskontrolle herangezogen wird.

Ich bin mir bewusst, dass eine tatsachenwidrige Erklärung rechtliche Folgen haben wird.

Vanessa Erat, e.h. Klagenfurt, 5. April 2018 (Unterschrift)* (Ort, Datum)

*Bei der elektronischen Version ist es – aus datenschutzrechtlichen Gründen – nicht erforderlich, dass die eidesstattliche Erklärung unterschrieben wird. Sie soll mittels Kürzel „e.h.“, dieses ist dem Namen nachzustellen, elektronisch gezeichnet werden.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction ...... 1

2 Framework: Establishing a Common Ground ...... 5

2.1 A Word on Terminology ...... 5

2.2 Methodology ...... 6

2.3 Literature Review ...... 7

2.4 Introducing the Dragon Age Games ...... 15

Part I – Othering the Elves: Laying the Narrative Groundwork ...... 20

3 Colonization: The Ancient Elves and the Historical Elves of the Dales ...... 22

3.1 Conquest of Elvhenan ...... 23

3.2 Building an ‘Imperium’ on the Back of an Empire ...... 24

3.3 Relocation versus Homecoming ...... 25

3.4 Crusades and Displacement ...... 27

4 Custodians of the Old Ways: The Dalish Elves ...... 30

4.1 “Deeply rooted in nature”: Reviving the Noble Savage Trope ...... 31

4.2 “I imagine that’s a metaphor for … something”: Clan Culture ...... 32

5 Living under the Human Thumb: The City Elves ...... 38

5.1 Alienages: A Life in Segregation ...... 38

5.2 Rabbits and Knife Ears: Racial Slurs ...... 40

6 Settling the Frontier: Interpreting Tensions Through a Process of Colonization .... 41

6.1 In vs. Out: The Garrison Mentality of Canada Among Elves and Humans ...... 42

6.2 Old vs. New: The Imagined American West between the Dalish and the City Elves ...... 44

Part II – Playing the Elves: Engaging with the Colonial Sandbox ...... 46

7 Othering and Identity Tourism in the Player Character ...... 48

7.1 Elf Aesthetics ...... 50

7.2 Whitewashing the Avatar: Identity Tourism ...... 52

8 The Dialogue Wheel: Continuing Characterization alongside Moral Player Engagement ...... 54

8.1 Elf-Specific Dialogue Options and the Lack Thereof ...... 57

8.2 Perpetuating Stereotypes or Challenging Them ...... 62

9 (Re-)Colonizing Thedas: The Colonialist Nature of Open World Mechanics ...... 66

9.1 Inquisition Presence on the World Map: Our Chief Weapon is…the Land Grab .... 67

9.2 Looting: A Colonialist Reward System? ...... 70

10 An Elf at Court: Narrativization and Mechanization of Othering ...... 74

10.1 Perceptions and Reactions: Interacting with In-Game Racism ...... 76

10.2 The Elves of the Inquisition: Court Reactions to Sera and Solas ...... 79

11 Transmedia Storytelling with The Masked Empire (2014) and ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’: Activating Recipients…Or Not ...... 82

12 Conclusion ...... 88

References ...... 93

List of Illustrations

Figure 2: Makah returning in their war canoes by Paul Kane, undated (http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_198575/Paul-Kane/Makah-returning-in-their- war-canoes, accessed September 26, 2017)...... 34

Figure 3: My Dalish Inquisitor in front of one of the various innunguaq in Thedas (BioWare 2014)...... 35

Figure 4: Pictographs of elven warriors mounted on halla (BioWare 2014)...... 35

Figure 5: The character cards of the character customization process in Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). From top left to bottom right: humans, elves, dwarves, and Qunari (BioWare 2014)...... 49

Figure 6: Early concept art of Sera (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2014, 235) and Solas (68) depicting them with different skin colors than their final results, both of which are White (for example the top row illustrations of Solas)...... 51

Figure 7: The standard appearance of the DA:I dialogue wheel (BioWare 2014)...... 55

Figure 8: Dialogue options in response to Josephine’s questions after Dalish daily life indicate the inspiration, range and confines of the Dalish worldbuilding (BioWare 2014)...... 64

Figure 9: Map of the Exalted Plains region, with the turquoise marker indicating the camp of the Dalish. (BioWare 2014)...... 71

1 Introduction

Two words: Dalish and Ameridan. They are neither mistake nor misspelling; among the elves in the Fantasy world of Thedas, they are very real: the former as the offspring of a once mighty elven empire, the latter as the Dalish Elf who became the world’s first Inquisitor, and saw his identity promptly erased for it.1 Their home, Thedas, is the world in which the Dragon Age games (2009–2014) are set– –Fantasy roleplaying videogames by Canadian developer BioWare, often hailed as a trailblazer for diversity and inclusivity in the triple-A industry. And yet the design of their elves, the game world’s indigenous population, generally oscillates between ‘noble savages’ living in tune with nature while safekeeping their traditional knowledge, or downtrodden outcasts in the cities of the hegemonic societal group, the humans. Dalish and Ameridan. Where one looks like a typographical error––D and S are located next to each other on any standard QWERTY/Z keyboard, after all––the other may as well have been a wordplay; and so the Salish peoples of the Northwest Pacific, and the French designation ‘Amérindien’ have arrived in Thedas. How the elves are written into the rest of the Dragon Age worldbuilding—their cultural design—creates an amalgam of stereotypes with which Western society associates the Indigenous Peoples of America. With fans, scholars, and the writers of the Dragon Age franchise themselves weighing in, there is little doubt that Indigenous Peoples, their cultures and histories were used to paint the canvas of cultural archetypes that identifies the elves: a fictional people, a Fantasy ‘race’, a population designed as native. They are constructed as a fictionalized Other built on real, historical and present stereotypes inherent in colonial processes of marginalization and oppression. The game design of Dragon Age both replicates and critiques these stereotypes. As such, it is caught between genre and medium conventions whence the title of this thesis is derived: Elves and Empire as the manifestation of Fantasy racism and the colonialist nature of certain Dragon Age game mechanics. The elves are further characterized as indigenous through an amalgamation of real Indigenous Peoples’ histories and cultures. The result is a generalized, partially romanticized, always idealized White version of indigenous-ness. It paves the way for gameplay that inadvertently plays into perpetuating colonial practices through common expansionist and resource-gathering mechanics. The ludonarrative element of the argument of this thesis is found in the ludic

1 Throughout this thesis, I adhere to the capitalization standards of the game. 1

interaction with or through colonialist and imperialist practices, and in the cultural and historical narrative of the elves. Unpacking the ethical dimensions behind the game’s narrative and mechanical design is relevant for two reasons: to break dominant paradigms and, borrowing an apt phrase from Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum (2014), to look at the “values at play” here. Hence, what this thesis aims to do is to challenge the Eurocentric receptacle through which Dragon Age’s worldbuilding flows, where we find a Fantasy indigenous population with clearly recognizable stereotypes about real-life Indigenous Peoples, coupled with the colonialist and capitalist mechanics present in the game design. Focusing on the latest instalment in the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), I conduct a close reading of sample playthroughs to analyze the writing of the elves as an indigenous and marginalized population in Thedas. Margaret Atwood, in analyzing the portrayals of Indigenous Peoples in White Canadian Literature, notes it can be summarized as follows: “an imported white man looks at a form of natural or native life alien to himself and appropriates it for symbolic purposes” (Atwood 2012, 95). This statement holds true for this thesis in two ways. For one, my own identity as a White European woman places me in the position of a likely target audience member for BioWare’s game design. It seems improbable that working with stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples in their game design is aimed at Indigenous Peoples. My reading of Dragon Age: Inquisition is informed by my own background, privilege and distance––both geographical and in identity–– to the real-life allegories that the cultural design of the elves imitates. Therefore, this thesis is not a manual for inclusive game design suggestions; nor is it a survey or empirical study of player behavior and choices. The likening of the fictional elves to the real lives, cultures and histories of Indigenous Peoples is first and foremost based on idealizing, romanticizing, and stereotyping. This is also where Atwood’s statement comes into play a second time: BioWare writes indigenous-ness into the design of the elves with the pen of tropes and cultural archetypes that has been wielded by the hegemonic societal group since the days of conquest and settlement. While the elves present us with a palpably Eurocentric perspective to unpack, they do not exhaust the pool of further analysis of Dragon Age, and its world and ‘races’, within the purview of postcolonial techniques. A reason why this thesis focuses on the elves is also because they garner increasing narrative importance in the plot of the games; aside from being one of the most developed and visible societies in Thedas. A framework of terminology, methodology and literature review establishes the groundwork of this thesis, and introduces the Dragon Age games (Chapter Two). Due to the

relative novelty of videogames as a subject of textual analysis, the medium’s properties have yet to improve how to accommodate academic engagement. A literary text or a film allow fairly quick access to their contents through opening a page or fast-forwarding to a scene. With analyzing videogames, one needs to keep the research objective in mind throughout the process to ensure that relevant game content will be made and kept accessible, and that alternative ways of access (such as through Let’s Play videos or gaming manuals) are available. Precedents in videogame studies have employed similar methods for similar case studies, some of them even from a similar postcolonial perspective. The main body of this thesis is structured into two parts. Part I analyzes the narrative design of the elves as an indigenous ‘Other’ based on the history, stereotypes, and cultural archetypes that flowed into their design. It precedes Part II in that the narrative background for the colonization of the elves lays the groundwork for engaging critically with Dragon Age: Inquisition’s game design: ranging from the challenge of in-game racism, in how players are invited to experience it alongside an elven player character, to the inherently colonialist nature of the open-world design of Thedas. Part I analyzes the Othering of the elves alongside their in-game chronology. Chapter Three follows the ancient elves from a coerced translatio imperii to a rising human empire, through times of violent subjugation and enslavement, to the ‘Long Walk of the Elves’: Displaced by the humans, they find a new homeland in the Kingdom of the Dales, which is eventually reconquered by humans in a land grab with missionary overtones. The next chapters investigate the cultural design of Thedas’ present-day elves. Chapter Four discloses the heavily romanticized stereotyping rendering the nomadic Dalish Elves, who hold on to the last vestiges of ancient elven culture, as a fictional ‘noble savage’. The other side of the coin, the City Elves who inhabit the slums of human cities and are considered inferior by both humans and Dalish Elves, are the subject of Chapter Five. Chapter Six conducts a literary analysis of these social tensions, both between the City and the Dalish Elves, and between the humans and the elves in general. It does so by positioning these groups along the sides of the mythical frontier, a cornerstone of literary symbolism in both Canada and the United States. As such, the frontier itself is a symbol of colonialism in that it represents wilderness and/or geographical expansion––both of which are also keywords for the colonialist nature of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s game mechanics. Part II, then, examines how the stereotyping of the elves holds up against and within gameplay properties, especially from the perspective of playing as an elven character. Chapter Seven serves as an entry point into that, looking at how the aesthetics of the character

customization process expand on the stereotyping from the cultural design of the elves. It relates the act of immersive play to the concept of identity tourism as laid out by Lisa Nakamura (1995) in an analysis of playing race in early online multiplayer games. As a roleplaying game, Dragon Age: Inquisition builds on elements of identity tourism. Chapter Eight continues in proximity to the elven player character, Inquisitor Lavellan, by looking at what players––after having created their character––can now do with them in the game. The dialogue wheel not only functions as the prime means of communication between player and game but also flexibly adjusts to the player character’s race and class. It is through the dialogue wheel that players may come into close contact with some of the stereotypes that are intradiegetically perpetuated about the elves. Within the frame of the game design, the dialogue wheel allows players to challenge such stereotypes or inherently sustain them. Either way, parallels shed another light on how colonial-times stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples have, intentionally or not, found their way into the game design. Chapter Nine delves into worldbuilding: It peels back the familiar presence of world mechanics that serve exploration and looting, i.e. the accumulation of resources, to recast them in a mantle of imperialist and capitalist practices. Game quests involving the elves can be doubly problematic in this light. For one, through the use of conventionalized game mechanics, they may lead to further exploitation of a people cast as colonized and marginalized in the game narrative. For another, playing the game as Inquisitor Lavellan, who is a Dalish Elf, may lead to an incongruous marriage of narrative meaning (roleplaying as an elf, a minority Other) and mechanical purpose (acquiring loot and land for the purpose of levelling up). Finally, Chapters Ten and Eleven relate one of Dragon Age: Inquisition’s main storyline quests to the plot of The Masked Empire (2014), a previously published tie-in novel providing a narrative foundation for fully understanding the quest in the game. Chapter Ten focuses on the quest and its portrayal of in- game racism towards elves at the court of Orlais, a human empire. The quest design skillfully marries the narrative marginalization and oppression of the elves to quest-specific mechanics. They try to convert the consequences of in-game racism into a mechanical disadvantage for player characters who are members of a minority group. Chapter Eleven focuses on the absence of relevant plot information from the tie-in novel in the quest, which uniformly disadvantages the elves more than any other group presented. This two-part structure correlates with the two aspects this thesis focuses on: elves and empire; the former as the game series’ attempt to engage with fictional colonialism, and the latter as the sometimes-unseen foundation of its gameplay properties. Applying the same postcolonial lens that other scholars have successfully used to scrutinize either thematic

videogame content or stand-alone videogames, this thesis continues along the path of probing the integrity of BioWare’s ostensibly subversive game design.

2 Framework: Establishing a Common Ground

2.1 A Word on Terminology

This section serves as guideline and explanation to the terminology used in this thesis to refer to I/indigenous populations, both the Indigenous Peoples of North America and the fictionally indigenous elves of Thedas. In a memorandum on “Aboriginal-Indigenous Terminology”, then-director of the Office for Aboriginal Peoples at Simon Fraser University William G. Lindsay says that there are “plethora of terms” for the peoples native to the North American continent (2013, 1). He proceeds to outline current terms in use, including Indigenous and Aboriginal. In keeping with Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution (1982)––which, as Lindsay points out, “was written with the assistance of Aboriginal leadership” (2013, 3)––he uses the term Aboriginal peoples to refer generally to people from the First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities while Indigenous may encompass Indigenous Peoples internationally. By now, Lindsay’s memorandum is already a few years old. With the 2015 federal election win of the Liberal Party, the terminology in political use changed: The Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada was renamed into the Department of Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development. News and media seem to prefer the term Indigenous over Aboriginal as well. In a 2016 article for the CBC, Bob Joseph, the founder of Indigenous Corporate Training, echoes William G. Lindsay by opening his opinion piece with the statement that maintaining a single, correct collective noun “has been a challenge ever since Christoph Columbus” (Joseph 2016). In keeping with the change of the government department name from using ‘aboriginal’ to ‘indigenous’, I use the following terminology in this thesis: Most of the references to Indigenous Peoples will be general and non-specific, which in itself reflects the generalized manner in which the Dragon Age gameplay draws from Indigenous cultures and histories, or the stereotypes thereof. In this case, I talk of Indigenous People(s). Where possible, I refer to a specific affiliation or First Nation in order to be as “specific to heritage, time, and place” as possible (Lindsay 2013, 2–3). Direct quotes containing other terminology are, of course, left in the original. I use non-capitalized ‘indigenous’ when referring to the elves of Dragon Age. This is because of their fictional status and to differentiate them from real-life Indigenous Peoples on

a formal level, even––or especially––where the game design tries to emulate the latter in the former.

2.2 Methodology

My analysis of Dragon Age: Inquisition (DA:I in short) focuses on close reading: playing and replaying the game, identifying key passages and ways to bookmark them for interpretation, and making myself familiar with the surrounding publications of this intertextual franchise (i.e. more playing and reading). Sabine Harrer and Martin Pichlmair, in analyzing Resident Evil 5 (2009) through a postcolonial lens, employ a similar method. Their “own gameplay experience” becomes a set of “autoethnographic vignettes” allowing the researchers to make “mechanisms, dynamics, and values afforded by gameplay activity tangible” and to take “personal involvement and intimacy seriously as a part of gameplay experience” (Harrer and Pichlmair 2015, 4). Similarly, the focal points in my close reading of DA:I encompass elements from the game narrative (including visual narrative-building, i.e. worldbuilding and aesthetics) and the game mechanics. Shauna Bennis, in an article about DA:I, also encapsulates the method in a nutshell by referring to it as a “research-play” experience (2016, 64). My personal saved game data constitutes my main body of references. In order to ensure a thorough analysis, I had to make the game quests readily available for multiple returns; so I created numerous save files on PlayStation 4 which allowed me to revisit and replay game sequences. I also made use of the PlayStation 4 image and video recording functions. Additionally, I kept a written gaming journal with notes and observations taken while playing. This allowed me to revisit certain gameplay sequences without having to replay them on the console but rather consulting a saved video or image file or my gaming journal. Playing the game with an elven player character not only allowed me to collect material central to this analysis since, for instance, elf-specific dialogue options would otherwise have been unavailable. It also created a situation where, as an “identity tourist” (Nakamura 1995), I slipped into the skin of a player character that, albeit Othered and stereotyped, is presented as fictionally indigenous. So, in a way, the close reading method directly informed at least one argument in this thesis. Mukherjee’s question posed in response to Harrer and Pichlmair’s (2015) method rings poignantly true also in my case: The first author’s experience of playing Resident Evil 5 from a drawing room in Copenhagen provided the experiential data for the analysis. One would also need to think of what the experiential data would be like if someone were to play the game somewhere in Zimbawbe or Zaire. (Mukherjee 2017, 62) Other than relying on my own saved data, I found video recordings helpful. Let’s Play videos allowed me to gain quick access to key moments in the games if my own saved game 6

data made them difficult to reach, or when I wished to follow the development of narrative decisions different than in my own gameplay. Given the interactivity of the Dragon Age: Inquisition dialogue wheel, seeing other narrative outcomes was not only a useful but in fact a pertinent addition to my own saved game data. Where possible, I tried to replay dialogue sequences as much as possible to obtain the different outcomes myself. I do not distinguish between gameplay data collated by me and Let’s Play gameplay data in references because I adhere to a strictly textual close reading. In other words, Let’s Play commentary was not considered; in fact, I consciously chose Let’s Play videos without commentary and focused solely on content that I could have also recreated by myself in the game world. Consulting Let’s Play videos helped save time since, due to their properties, videogames do not (yet) allow for quick access of material (compared to film or literature). Where necessary, I documented dialogue sequences in dialogue trees by using the interactive storytelling tool Twine. Another infinitely helpful tool in documenting narrative and gameplay information is the unofficial Dragon Age wiki (DAW in short), which also offers an overview of virtually all Codex entries found in the games, i.e. the collection of all in-game lore available to the player during gameplay.2 The findings of my close reading of DA:I and related primary sources within the Dragon Age (DA in short) franchise were bolstered by tangential research conducted in postcolonial studies and videogame studies, as the following chapter illustrates.

2.3 Literature Review

Videogame studies in the Humanities have risen steadily in the past years. Despite that, not many postcolonial perspectives have been cast at the medium so far (Mukherjee 2017, 1). What has been done are investigations into videogames as a thematic and economic engine of Empire (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009). This is similar to ways in which the Fantasy genre has been scrutinized for its predominantly and historically Eurocentric nature (Young 2016). The discursive overlap between videogames on the one hand (as the medium) and Fantasy on the other (as the genre) is the intersectional focus at which I place the postcolonial lens for my analysis of the Dragon Age elves. This two-pronged approach of medium and genre therefore informs the scope and structure of this literature review. Postcolonial approaches to videogames and Fantasy look into A) videogames as (ab)used engines of Empire, and B) the Fantasy genre as a playground of the White imagination.

2 Many Codex entries reappear over the span of the games. 7

Then, scholarly engagement with the DA series sheds a light on the appraisals and criticisms of “Bioware’s attempts to engage critically with both historical racism and Fantasy’s conventional Whiteness” (Young 2016, 67). Sundry case studies highlight the variety of research on the richness of the Dragon Age world. Studies like Poor’s (2012) provide foundational work for this thesis in that they, too, unearth the Othering tropes assigned to elves. However, previous work on how Fantasy elves, the DA elves in particular, are stereotyped and Othered within a largely Eurocentric genre, leaves room for expansion on an in-depth investigation into the particularities of their design, and how the mechanics of DA:I allow for interaction with them.

Postcolonial Approaches to Videogames

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter define videogames as “a paradigmatic media of Empire— planetary, militarized hypercapitalism— and of some of the forces presently challenging it” (2009, xv; original emphasis). Their spin on the hyper-capitalist subjectivities present in the industrial culture around videogames spans both their real-life commodification, and the representations and practices of Empire expanded into the secondary reality of various case studies. Games are “an expensive consumer commodity that the global poor can access only illicitly, demonstrating the massive inequalities of this regime” (xxix)––not to mention the capitalist engine powering their production: Consider dubitable industry practices such as “crunching”, the step in the “production schedule, when hours intensify, often up to sixty-five to eighty hours a week, sometimes more” (59). Yet at their core, videogames foster the collective “social production of possible worlds” and their exploration, which leads the authors to put a positive spin on the medium’s potential to contribute to “social change” (222). Assessing videogames as a consumerist apparatus that, paradoxically, creates a platform for critiquing or even overcoming Empire, is not unique to the medium. The novel created a similar precedent in the eighteenth century, as did film and television in the twentieth. The historical branches of capitalism are different for all three, with videogames “constitutive of twenty-first- century global hyper capitalism and, perhaps, also of lines of exodus from it” (xxix; emphasis mine). Videogames not only perhaps, but definitely allow for the subversion of the rules of Empire. Souvik Mukherjee offers examples of “playing against the grain” throughout his work examining how the ‘Empire Plays Back’ (2017, 103). Indeed, casting another postcolonial lens at videogames, they easily invite “critical play” as “thirdspace” (Flanagan 2013, 253). They are “thirdspace”, a term Mary Flanagan borrows from Homi Bhabha, in that they create a “social

space with its own social relations, struggles, and symbolic boundaries” (253). This is where subversion is made possible through the challenge of “binary divisions” (253), which again correlates with Bhabha's concept of hybridity. In that sense, play allows players to move and perform in a separate, hybrid space between real, geographical and representative, mental spaces (253). Videogames can therefore be seen as Empire and anti-Empire; they are both and neither, and in-between. They manifest their own hybridity between their characteristics of “complicated multiplicity and fluidity of identity formation” (Mukherjee 2017, 71). Dyer- Witheford and de Peuter hold on to that when they state that videogames present “a quite contrary picture” (2009, 222). They are “deeply embedded in global capitalism” and, as a commodity of entertainment and amusement, “peculiarly paradigmatic of consumer capitalism” (222). What Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter leave out in their ‘contrary picture’ is the other half of “thirdspace” according to which videogames are both “play” and “struggle” (Flanagan 2013, 253). This is why postcolonial perspectives position themselves as a valuable addition to the critical engagement with videogames. Souvik Mukherjee’s already-mentioned work has recently filled a glaring gap by discussing the main concepts of “leading thinkers of post colonialism vis-à-vis their application in computer games”—most notably space, identity, and time (2017, 2). The author’s comprehensive investigation into postcolonialism and videogames reveals that little has yet been done in that field. While predominantly non-Western videogames “have critiqued colonialism in various ways”, Mukherjee notes a lack of postcolonial analyses and discussions “within the otherwise busy critical community” around videogame culture and studies (2). Mukherjee not only spurs on that much-needed discussion but also examines how historically, the “ludic serves as a metaphor for the ‘playing back’” against colonial powers (7). In the twenty-first century, Western videogame productions, and their critical study, have yet to catch up collectively in order to “enrich the understanding of post colonialism as in the current twenty-first century contexts” (3). Being a, if not the, constitutive medium of this century, one may argue they might even have a responsibility to do so. Until then, it is all the more pertinent to dismantle the colonist and colonizing allowances present in videogame designs. Notably, Mukherjee highlights the seminal work done by Lisa Nakamura, Sybille Lammes, Hanli Geyser and Pippa Tshabalala, Sabine Harrer and Martin Pichlmair, among others (2017, 8). Relevant within the scope of this thesis are Nakamura’s investigation of identity tourism (1995) and Lammes’ relation of strategy games to “postcolonial playgrounds” (2010, 1), in particular. Mukherjee also notes that “despite early

attempts, it is only in the past 2 years that there has been a rise in game studies publications that begin to explore the postcolonial” (2017, 9). For instance, in their 2015 paper presented at the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference in Berlin, Harrer and Pichlmair give a postcolonial analysis of the gameplay of Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 (2009): We regard RE5 as yet another moment in the history of commodity racism, which from the late 19th century onwards allowed popular depictions of racial stereotypes to enter the most intimate spaces of European homes in the shape of household utensils. (2015) Their focus on how racial and racist stereotypes penetrate the game design on all levels— spanning narrative, sound aesthetics and gameplay—essentially contributes to demolishing the idea that gameplay does not carry ideological weight the same way that narrative content does (Harrer and Pichlmair 2015). Both their employed methodology, as mentioned in the previous chapter, and their postcolonial lens on videogame analysis provide a precedent for this thesis.

Postcolonial Approaches to Fantasy

Similar to the research gap on videogames and postcolonialism, Helen Young only recently provided the first “book-length work devoted to race and Fantasy” (2016, 1). She investigates the genre at large while previous work rather “focused on a single work or series, or on a particular medium – video-games are increasingly of interest” (1). This thesis is cast from the same conventional mold in that it focuses on both a single work within a single medium (although given the work’s intertextual nature, expeditions into the accompanying publications in the DA series prove essential). DA:I stands out more inclusive and diverse than other comparable triple-A Fantasy games, which makes it all the more relevant to unpack its design drawbacks. Young aptly sketches Fantasy as a “eurocentric genre, . . . one which is by, for, and about White people” (2016, 1). The genre’s engagement with race is fraught on two levels. Not only is there a historical tendency to exclude people of color from it but it also conflates ‘race’ and ‘species’ (Poor 2012, 377) in the spirit of “nineteenth century race-thinking” (Young 2016, 7). In a 2012 article, Young notes the same with regard to race in DA, which she says is “complicated . . . by the tendency to refer to the different humanoid species as races, lending biological and essentialist overtones to difference” (2012, 4). In essence, a genre that is “stereotypically – if increasingly inaccurately – White, middle-class, and male” (Young 2016, 6) is also built on an outdated race theory whose main function was to “justify European imperialism around the globe” (8). Yet at the same time, the genre’s inherently non-mimetic nature creates a space which is at least nominally not “the real world” and is therefore safer for cultural work around fraught issues such as – although by no means limited to – race. (2)

In light of this, the genre’s Eurocentrism sounds like a paradox at best and a farce at worst, because it actually keeps Fantasy from rising to its full potential. The lack of non-White and, as Young highlights, Indigenous voices in the genre attests to that, as does the scarcity of Indigenous representation in Fantasy texts themselves (2016, 115). Young’s criticism is a timely reminder of the established conventions of the genre, to which Dragon Age falls prey as well. Of course, that is not to say that there is no ‘indigenous’ or Other presence, or the imitation thereof, in Fantasy worlds; to claim such would render moot a thesis arguing to analyze the DA version of it. Continuing along the intersection of postcolonialism and Fantasy, Nathaniel Poor investigates the same: His 2012 study focuses on how elves as a cultural trope become a narrative device of Othering in Fantasy videogames (2012, 376). Appropriately, he includes the DA elves in his analysis. Given the date of publication of his article, and the subsequent publication of DA:I, this thesis can serve as a current addendum to Poor’s groundwork on DA lore and the place of the elves in it.

Scholarly Engagement with the Dragon Age Series

The broad range of “Thedap”, “the Dragon Age Podcast” of First Person Scholar (FPS), speaks to the game series’ manifold attractions for critical engagement: “the in-game politics, histories and philosophies of the games, and the focus on romance and sexuality within the universe” all yield fruitful discussions among fans, critics, and scholars alike (Brey and Vist 2016). The ‘Dragon Age’ tag on FPS3 generally serves as a good go-to point to explore the diverse arguments and ideas through which people engage with the franchise. This includes, but is of course not limited to, analyzing the elves as a cultural trope and Other. Poor and Young laid the groundwork upon which this thesis contributes to their preceding analyses of race(s) in DA. Young both praises and criticizes the game for it. As part of the larger problem in Fantasy, DA also perpetuates the “attempts to map histories of human race relations onto species-based difference in the fantasy world” (2012, 4). Note that Mass Effect, BioWare’s science fiction franchise, categorizes different peoples as species rather than races. Young highlights positively that DA at least purposefully draws attention to racism instead of sweeping it under the rug (70). In this context, she quotes then lead writer David Gaider from a 2009 interview, in which he emphasizes that elven player characters in DA:O will feel the in-world racism because they are considered a “second-class citizen” by the world around them (Gaider 2009b). Similar to Young, Poor outlines what it is that makes the elves of DA:O and DA2

3 Accessible at http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/?s=dragon+age. 11

presented as “a minority other” with what he asserts are “obvious parallels to Native Americans” (2012, 384). These analyses are embedded within a larger discourse about diversity issues and representations in Thedas. BioWare’s game design is deemed unconventional in the triple-A industry because it advocates for a more diverse inclusion in the portrayal of race, gender, and sexuality in Western videogames. N.K. Jemisin and Troy Wiggins, both Black authors (and writers of Speculative Fiction), highlight design problems with Black bodies at different steps in the DA series: Jemisin focuses on the lack of Black character customization options in the then-published DA:O and DA2 (Jemisin 2012). Wiggins essentially provides an update on how these issues have changed (or not) in DA:I (Wiggins 2014). Both authors also have praise for the game series because “Bioware tried, which is more than most game companies have done” (Jemisin 2012). Wiggins remarks that “Dragon Age: Inquisition . . . is possessed of the most PoC that I’ve ever seen in a Medieval/Tolkien styled mainstream RPG” (2014). Given the persisting problems in the character creation (with no Black hair texture available, for example), it is clear that while BioWare are ‘trying’, there is still more ways in which they can “break the Western RPG mold” (Jemisin 2012). The sentiment is a prevalent one in studies of BioWare productions. Young, too, applauds the critical awareness in their game designs while at the same time underlining the need for them to do more: Bioware’s Dragon Age franchise, which makes genuine and at times successful attempts to engage with issues of race in complex, challenging, and unconventional ways, nonetheless locates the action of its games in imagined places analogous to Europe. (Young 2016, 66) Kristin Bezio, in contrast, allows the games more leeway: Because of the diversity inscribed in its game design, DA:I “cannot be narrow, cannot be bigoted, cannot frame a narrative arc that authorizes oppression or nationalist exclusion” (2016). While the Inquisition as a pan-national institution can indeed not be shackled by “a nationalist narrative”, the push for inclusion does not protect the game design from perpetuating oppressive narrative structures (Bezio 2016). Intradiegetically, this allows the game design to foster critical engagement with pertinent questions such as: Who gets to write history? Who is silenced in the process? Extradiegetically, the continuation of stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples happens without sufficient reflection. Besides, if DA:I, as Bezio points out, is indeed a modern epic instilled with twenty-first century norms, the colonial narrative of the elves feeds all the more into an overall imperial fantasy world. While the Inquisition is a “heterodox [and] diverse” bulwark in the fight against “hegemonic oppression and extremism”, the lead hero is tailored to player choices: “brusque,

kind, tolerant, partisan, gay, straight, bi, human, inhuman, male, female” (Bezio 2016)––that is to say, if one (in line with videogame conventions) perceives the player character as the hero. René Schallegger (2016) rather notes the absence of a hero in DA:I. There is an emphasis on community rather than individuality, which Schallegger locates in the game design’s distinctively Canadian values (2016, 79), expanding to “its setting [and] the function of the Inquisition” (77). Where he reads the English-coded Ferelden and French-coded Orlais as “Canada through the Looking-Glass” (78), Young takes a step further in locating Thedas in Europe, based on a forum post by David Gaider in the now-defunct BioWare Social Network forum: “Ferelden, where the first game takes place, is ‘a fictionalized version’ of medieval England” (Young 2016, 66). In a 2012 article, Young relates this fictionalization to neomedievalist practices with their romantic notions about an ahistorical medieval period that did not actually exist in its perceived form (2012, 2). Sundry case studies of DA games look predominantly into the player character design and the relationships among characters, speaking for the maturity of interactive narrative design in the games. Kristine Jørgensen (2010) explores the differences in player character design between DA:O and Mass Effect 2, the latter of which is actually closer to the design of the DA:I player character because both Shepard from Mass Effect and DA:I’s Inquisitor have more “identity markers” than the Warden, the player protagonist of DA:O (Jørgensen 2010, 320). This includes seemingly simple design options such as giving the player character a voice and a more visible face in motion. Both Annika Waern (2010) and Veit Frick (2016) committed themselves to “researching romances between NPCs and the player character” (Frick 2016, 85).4 Shauna Bennis uses DA:I as a case study for a “gaming experience [that] functions as a catalyst for personal reflection upon behaviour in primary reality” (2016, 64), not unlike Brook Jensen does in a contribution to FPS: He points out instances where the world narrative belies the narrative choices made by the player (2017). DA2 even lends itself to a “fictional case study [that] explores the relationship between human ethics and systems of belief” (Bezio 2014), especially since the Chantry, Thedas’ dominant religion, is essentially a fictional stand-in for the Christian churches. Critical engagement with BioWare productions has room for praise, criticism, feedback, and suggestions for improvement. And, as the development between Jemisin’s and Wiggins’ comments suggests, BioWare also (try to) listen. It is therefore all the more astounding that, despite knowing their audience recognized the elven design as an imitation of Indigenous

4 NPCs are non-player characters. 13

Peoples, BioWare have not accomplished to add more of a dash of postcolonial, rather than colonial, flavoring to their game design.

Outlook

While postcolonial analyses of videogames are still few and far between in the larger, inexhaustible pool of game studies, and videogame studies in particular, BioWare games have drawn the attention and critical engagement of scholars and audiences from different angles. In turn, the studio’s own critical engagement with unconventional topics in their games becomes the common denominator of most case studies revolving around their franchises. This literature review is by no means exhaustive; for example, it disregards publications on Mass Effect and other BioWare productions entirely, lest the DA series is the subject of study as well. It just goes to show that there is more to be done, and more out there. BioWare produce games that clearly engage their audiences and create memorable play experiences for them – so much so that investigations into various design elements, ranging from character to world design, from real-world influences to fictional lore and back, are made possible. This is the scholarly receptacle to which this thesis aims to contribute by looking closely at a hitherto insufficiently explored design element: the Fantasy videogame series’ elves caught in a colonialist narrative. Most engagement with them so far has been restricted to previous instalments of the series. Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), as the latest publication, discloses new alleys to pursue in an investigation into the elves: both because it allows for an elven player character again (unlike Dragon Age II, its direct predecessor) and because more space in the plot is ascribed to elven history and culture. Not only is there more elf-related content in DA:I than in the previous games; at times, the game also retraces and reevaluates previously established lore. The addition of new mechanical functions and narrative possibilities needs to be taken into account as well, meaning there is a clear need for a revised, updated, and expanded investigation into the portrayal of the elves vis-à-vis the colonialist nature of certain game mechanics. That their portrayal in DA plays with stereotypes and tropes about real Indigenous cultures and histories has been established by the scholarly pursuits of Young (2016) and Poor (2012). Due to the variety of case studies in their investigations, Poor’s and Young’s studies could only scratch the surface on how the cultural design of the DA elves is informed by a Western concoction of historical occurrences and cultural stereotypes of the Indigenous Peoples of North America. That it also needs to be related to and analyzed against the mechanics of DA:I is made obvious by the latter’s at times colonialist nature.

2.4 Introducing the Dragon Age Games

Dragon Age is a fantasy action roleplaying video game series published, so far, in three instalments between 2009 and 2014, with more announced to follow. Developed by the Canadian company BioWare and published by the American company Electronic Arts, Dragon Age takes the player into a fictional world called Thedas which is inhabited by humans, elves, dwarves, and Qunari. 5 In addition to the three main videogames (including their downloadable contents; DLCs in short) the world of DA is expanded by tie-in novels and comics, an anime film, a web series, and a couple of fan-made spin-off games. David Gaider was lead writer in all three games; he is now succeeded by Patrick Weekes. In this thesis, I focus on the latest instalment of the series, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014), with the occasional foray into the previously published Dragon Age: Origins (2009; DA:O in short) and Dragon Age II (2011; DA2 in short) where they are needed for canonical facts. I draw from the tie-in novel Dragon Age: The Masked Empire (2014), written by Patrick Weekes and published shortly before DA:I, because it discloses information pertinent to a main quest in the game. I also find that DA:I provides the most sophisticated design of all three games as far as the inclusivity push in terms of race, gender, and sexuality diversity is concerned. Against this backdrop, it is particularly salient to look at the game through a postcolonial lens in order to explore how the continued use of colonialist mechanics and the stereotyping of the fictional indigenous people fit into a purportedly inclusive and diverse game design. All three games are set in Thedas, a fictional world with separate countries and nation- states that are inhabited by the peoples listed above. Humans make up the dominant societies across nations, with the exception of Par Vollen and other regions conquered by the Qunari. The dwarves have an underground kingdom doing trade with the humans. The elves inhabit one of the lowest steps on the social ladder. They live either as nomads or in segregated, slum-like quarters of human towns. Human and elven mages under Chantry surveillance live in so-called Circles, closed-off areas where mages are kept away from the rest of the population, which is suspicious of magic. Magic itself comes from the ‘Fade’, an otherworldly place separated from Thedas by a so-called Veil. If broken, the Veil can let spirits and malevolent demons pass into Thedas. Users of magic are particularly sensible to the Fade which means that if untrained, they are also easy

5 Qunari appear to be the only people in Thedas who are capitalized in writing. The World of Thedas explains that the capitalization of the term has to do with its etymological origin in the word ‘Qun’, referring to a religious text. Followers of the text are known as Qunari regardless of race. However, the term is mostly associated with the large, horned people who initially brought the Qun with them when coming to Thedas (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 40–1). 15

prey for demons to possess. Circle Mages are therefore guarded by Templars, a religious military order under the command of the Chantry, the predominant religious institution of Thedas. The Chantry spreads the belief in the Maker and His human bride Andraste, a martyr who petitions to the Maker on behalf of His followers. 6 It is divided into the Imperial Chantry and the Andrastian Chantry. They differ in their inclusion of Andraste in their divine worship and their stance on magic, as interpreted by Transfigurations 1:2, a line of the sacred text, the Chant of Light: “Magic exists to serve man, and never to rule over him” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2015, 63). In the Tevinter Imperium, the Chantry allows the use of magic, whereas in southern Thedas, the Andrastian Chantry heavily regulates the use of magic, both in accordance with their own interpretations of that quote. The regulation of magic and, consequently, of mages, creates sociopolitical tensions in southern Thedas, where all the games have been set so far. Therefore, in this thesis, I also generically refer to the Andrastian Chantry as the Chantry, unless otherwise specified, because it is primarily the one that the player is in contact with. DA2 deals with the regulation of magic in its main narrative in that the game follows the escalating tensions between mages and Templars in the city of Kirkwall. DA:O deals with a darkspawn invasion (malevolent creatures dwelling underground) and DA:I deals with a breach in the Veil between Thedas and the Fade. The following sections go into more detail on the particularities of the three main videogames of the franchise. They do so by following the same basic outline of three to four relevant pieces of information: who the player is, where the game is set, what the main story entails, and which significant choices the player is asked to make.

Dragon Age: Origins (2009)

Who the player is: The player character becomes the ‘Hero of Ferelden’. They are a member of the Grey Wardens, an ancient order which constitutes the vanguard against the occasional darkspawn invasions called Blights. DA:O has a unique twist in the character creation in that it allows for six different origin stories depending on which race and class the player has chosen for the player character: They can be human, elven or dwarven (race), male or female (gender), a warrior, mage or rogue (class). All human or elven mages (a dwarf cannot

6 The faith in the Maker is founded on the belief that humans commmitted their “Second Sin” when corrupting the Maker’s Golden City, not unlike the events of the Christian Original Sin and the Fall in the Book of Genesis are said to have brought sin into the world. In Thedas, humanity’s “Original Sin” was to turn away from the Maker to worship the Old Gods instead, a transgression that mirrors the idolation of the golden calf in the biblical Exodus story (BioWare 2009). For these crimes, the Maker abandoned humanity. Only when all people praise the Chant of Light will he “return to the world and make it a paradise”, evoking the Christian concepts of Judgement Day and of the Second Coming of Christ (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 111). 16

be a mage) start as an apprentice in one of the Circle towers, where the mages are kept. Other than the Mage Origin, human warriors or rogues are a member of the Fereldan nobility, elves are either a City Elf or a Dalish Elf, and dwarves are either a noble or a commoner. These choices determine the origin story. Pertaining to the elves, the City Elf origin particularly highlights the social injustices in immediate interactions between elves and humans. Where the game is set: The story takes place entirely in the Kingdom of Ferelden, with forays underground into the kingdom of the dwarves. Story: The player character must stop the Blight ravaging Ferelden by rallying different communities to the side of the Grey Wardens (Dalish Elves, Circle Mages, and the dwarven kingdom). Significant choices: Choices affecting future games include who becomes the ruler of Ferelden, whether the companion Morrigan will have a supernatural child or not, and whether the companion Leliana lives or dies. The latter two in particular have minor plot relevance for DA:I. The following two games acknowledge the choices made by the player but take the freedom to adjust them retrospectively in order to allow for a narrative to continue along its designed path.

Dragon Age II (2011)

Who the player is: More restricted than both its predecessor and successor game, DA2 is the only game of the franchise so far without race choices in its character creation process. The player character is either male or female and one of the three standard classes (warrior, mage, rogue) but always a human by the name of Hawke. Where the game is set: The plot is located in and around the harbor city of Kirkwall, where the player character is tasked with diplomatic encounters with the hostile Qunari and with sorting out problems between the Circle of Magi and the Templar Order of the city. Only the prologue is set in Ferelden, and the Legacy DLC (2011)––which introduces future antagonist Corypheus for DA:I––is set in a mountain range. Story: Fleeing the Blight in Ferelden, Hawke arrives in Kirkwall as a refugee and works their way up to owning a city estate by successfully navigating and meddling in the political landscape of the city. The story is divided into three acts, each of which culminates in a narrative climax pertaining to different diplomatic encounters. Hawke ultimately fails to resolve the Mage-Templar conflict in any meaningful way because the game ends with a terrorist attack on the Kirkwall Chantry––which paves the way for the opening storyline of DA:I.

Significant choices: The player can decide whether to support the Circle of Magi or the Templar Order. The choice has no real consequence for either DA2 or DA:I because the war between the two factions always breaks out and the chantry is always blown up. DA:I does not significantly reflect on the consequences of Hawke’s choice of allies in DA2, however.

Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)

Who the player is: Similar to DA:O, the player can choose between various races for their player character but the origin is tied to that choice. For example, the human character is always a noble while the elf is always a Dalish Elf from Clan Lavellan. Therefore, designations such as “Inquisitor Lavellan” and “the Dalish Inquisitor” in this thesis all refer to the elven player character. Again, the player character can be male or female, and either a warrior, mage or rogue. The class choice comes with slight alterations to the character background. For example, a Dalish Elf mage is apprenticed to the clan Keeper, whereas a Dalish Elf warrior or rogue is originally a hunter in the clan. In an addition to the dialogue wheel, the race and class background of the player character unlocks special dialogue options which are informed by the specific knowledge associated with, for example, being a mage or a dwarf. The player character becomes the leader of the eponymous Inquisition that is intent on restoring peace and order in a war-torn southern Thedas. Where the game is set: At first most of the missions take place in Ferelden but eventually expand to include Orlais. The game environment has a distinctive sandbox feel as opposed to the previous games, with areas filled with side quests. War table missions are additional objectives which the player can complete via a table in the main hub area; they take place all over Thedas but gameplay is restricted to assigning the missions to different advisors at the war table. Story: The player deals with the aftermath of DA2 only on the sidelines: The Mage- Templar war is pushed towards the margins of the narrative because of a new problem facing Thedas. A large rift in the sky threatens to allow demons and spirits from the Fade to pass into the realm of mortals. Out of sheer coincidence, the player character receives the ability to close these Fade rifts and restore order. As the Inquisitor at the head of the reborn Inquisition, the player character must rally the people of Thedas against the antagonist who wants to conquer Thedas with the help of the Fade rifts. Significant choices: The player can choose whether to side with the mages or the Templars to conscript them as allies to the Inquisition. This quickly and comfortably resolves the Mage-Templar conflict introduced in DA2. The player also decides who will occupy the

Orlesian throne in the aftermath of the Orlesian Civil War. During a battle, the player chooses whether or not to sacrifice the life of Hawke, their DA2 player character now turned temporary NPC companion. At the end of the Trespasser DLC (2015b) which concludes the plot after the main game fails to do so, the player can decide whether to uphold or disband the Inquisition. How these choices will affect a sequel game remains to be seen, as the development of a potential Dragon Age 4 is still in the beginning stages.

Part I – Othering the Elves: Laying the Narrative Groundwork

The elves, as the native population of Thedas, fall outside the prevalent pattern of European7 inspirations for DA worldbuilding. Their markers of Otherness are as much informed by the occasional parallel to real-life history as they are by a recurring array of colonial attributes associated with “outsiders”: laziness, aggression, violence, greed, sexual promiscuity and deviance, female masculinity and male effeminacy, bestiality, primitivism, innocence and irrationality are attributed (often contradictorily and inconsistently) by the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese colonists to Turks, Africans, Native Americans, Jews, Indians, the Irish, and others. (Loomba 2015, 114–5) Stereotypes serve to make sense of the ‘other’ by defining it through, often artificial, differences to the known ‘self’. This is information processing by way of image reduction into a “simple and manageable form” (Loomba 2014, 74). In the wake of European expansion and enlightenment, the meaning-making via stereotypes was married to the advance of science produced articulations of otherness that were scientifically justified and, to some extent, still are (76). The basic function of stereotypes, then, is to define difference by focusing on and exaggerating a narrow set of characteristics that determine something as ‘other’ than the hegemonic self. Storytelling is full of stereotypes, both benign ones and those that fall within a postcolonial definition. In the context of game design, Tynan Sylvester uses the broader term “cultural archetypes” (2013, 54) to refer to familiar conventions that can be harnessed for what he calls “elegant” game design: “maximizing the emotional power and variety of play experiences while minimizing players’ comprehension burden and developer effort” (49). Minimizing the effort in designer-design-player communication, he says, can be achieved by drawing on cultural archetypes that players can be expected to be familiar with and that therefore do not have to be explained. In other words: designing a good game is not that dissimilar to processing information into a “simple and manageable form”, to requote Ania Loomba from above. Sylvester (2013) gives both mechanic and narrative examples of cultural archetypes. In terms of mechanics, he presents the computer folder as a typical case of cultural archetypes in information technology. There are no literal folders in a computer hardware, yet we still refer to the data structures stored on it as “folders” because the association between “folder” and “organizing information” is entrenched in our culture (2013, 221). Sylvester’s narrative example of cultural archetypes shows how image reduction works on physical features:

7 Other (possible) exceptions lie in fictional cultures and countries that have, so far, been only touched upon: Nevarra and Rivain, both home to companion characters throughout the DA games. 20

There is no natural law that says that men who wear pointy goatees must be evil. But we all know that goatee-stroking masterminds are evil because the goatee is an archetypical symbol of evil in our culture. (221) The awareness of employing familiar images and ideas in order to communicate with the audience is a well-established practice in videogame storytelling, much like in any other form of storytelling. In this vein, DA capitalizes on Western notions of ‘indigenous-ness’, many of which harken back to the colonial environment that provided the backdrop for racial stereotyping. The elves are characterized by both harmful stereotypes, and more neutral cultural archetypes. Drawing from Loomba’s list of characteristics above that denote someone’s outsider status, human perspectives in the DA narrative have identified the elves as the following: The Dalish Elves have been considered aggressive, violent, bestial, primitive and, even, irrational (hunting for knowledge that is considered lost). The City Elves have been related to laziness and greed by way of thieving (Weekes 2014, 94). Their beardless design and petite frame for all genders could be viewed as rendering the male elves effeminate. Easily graspable cultural archetypes make the elves recognizable as “the Aboriginal element” of Thedas: a “semi-nomadic life-style, animistic spirituality, their tradition of storytelling, their petroglyphs and inuksuit” (Schallegger 2016, 78). Recognizing the DA elves as indigenously coded is not a novelty in an academic engagement with the games; Poor mentions similarly that they have “obvious parallels to Native Americans” (2012, 384). Awareness of it in fan circles predates even that: Already in 2009, with only DA:O out yet, David Gaider contributed to an online fan discussion on the official BioWare forum about real- life influences on the worldbuilding. The forum has by now gone offline but is still accessible through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Gaider confirmed that the elves “evolved into something more akin to North American Natives (and, really, the Native situation is also a good analogy for elves as a whole)” (Gaider 2009a). He also used to run a by now archived Tumblr blog where he answered fan questions. A Tumblr blog called “DGaider Tumblr Archives” succeeded in collating some of the material on his blog before it went offline. In one of the saved posts, Gaider said that the “initial inspiration for the elves actually came from Jewish people —consider the lost homeland, the existence of Jewish ghettos in many medieval cities, etc.” but that he can “definitely see comparisons to Native Americans as well as a number of other peoples who have experienced oppression in our history” (DGaider Tumblr Archives 2015). Part I works towards unpacking the narrative structures and worldbuilding choices that create this resemblance. The chapters are structured chronologically. Chapter 3 starts with the

historical ancient elves and early parallels to the colonization of North America, and to the subsequent treatment of Indigenous Peoples by settler-colonists. In some such instances, the DA worldbuilding is straightforward with its parallels, referring to the relocation of the elves as their ‘Long Walk’. Looking more closely, however, inconsistencies or narrative twists come to the fore. The Long Walk of the Elves was, rather than a forced displacement, a voluntary return to a homeland. The parallel in name remains shallow as it repurposes the negative real-life incident into a positive experience for the elves. Chapter 4 delves deeper into the stereotypes inherent in the design of the Dalish Elves, who are written as an idealized and romanticized nomadic community native to Thedas. They look to the past rather than the future, isolate themselves in their forests, and form a close bond with nature. Chapter 5 takes us to the segregated town quarters inhabited by the City Elves. Unlike the Dalish, they live among the humans but sit on the lowest step of the societal ladder. They are shunned and live in poverty, crime rates in their so-called alienages are high, and they are exploited as cheap workers. Tensions between these two present-day communities of elves are palpable, as Chapter 6 illustrates. It employs the image of the frontier as a means to map the unease and distance between the groups of elves, and between the elves in general and the humans. The spatial distance between them constitutes a postcolonial element in the design of the elves.

3 Colonization: The Ancient Elves and the Historical Elves of the Dales

As the indigenous people of Thedas, the elves are given an extensive historical background in the game design. Most of their heritage ties into the (self-)perception of the present-day Dalish Elves but the player also encounters artefacts and chronicles in the world design which enhance the plot through worldbuilding. With the history of the ancient elves, the game design recreates an imperialist takeover in which “New superimposes itself on Old” (Johannessen 2012, 869). This chapter spans the time period from the fall of Elvhenan,8 the ancient elven empire, through the time of elven enslavement in the human Tevinter Imperium, to the fall of the Kingdom of the Dales, the last autonomous elven country. The timeline depicted in Vol. 1 of World of Thedas situates the Tevinter Imperium at roughly two hundred years of age by the time it conquered Elvhenan (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 23). In comparison, the ancient elven empire was founded 4,500 years before humans even began to explore Thedas. Drastic changes in elven history came about through conquest, subjugation,

8 Elvhenan is the name of the empire. Arlathan is its capital city. 22

relocation and, ultimately, displacement owing to a crusade, which is why it makes sense to focus on a postcolonial point-of-view in unpacking key moments of their history.

3.1 Conquest of Elvhenan

Unlike the American continent, Thedas was (so far) never classified as terra nullius, as far DA canon goes. European colonizers in North America justified their land grab by proclaiming that its Indigenous population wasted the land by not extracting its resources in the way Europeans did (Pommersheim 2009, 94–5). In Thedas, humans and elves coexisted for centuries before the war, more redolent of French encounters with the Innu and the Odawa peoples in the seventeenth century. They “formed a tacit military alliance” and fur trade connections with the settlers (Nelles 2004, 24). Patrick Weekes, the current lead writer of the DA series after David Gaider left the project, puts it this way: The Tevinter Imperium, the first human empire in Thedas, took “the remains of the elven empire, and [was] basically spray- painting human faces over the elven faces and knocking the ears off the statues” (Weekes 2016). Rather than establishing a “colonial centre” and positioning people “in an oppositional relation” to it (Smith 2008, 53), Tevinter subsumed Elvhenan completely. There are two theories as to why it came to the war between the elves and the humans in the first place. The older theory, first introduced in DA:O, revolves around the so-called “quickening effect”—the hitherto immortal elves became affected by human mortality and began aging, a process that is likened to a disease in the chronicles of the elves: The humans brought worse things than war with them. Our ancestors proved susceptible to human diseases, and for the first time in history, elves died of natural causes. What's more, those elves who spent time bartering and negotiating with humans found themselves aging, tainted by the humans’ brash and impatient lives. (BioWare 2009) The elves’ exposure to mortality and disease shows an uncanny correlation to the conquest and overthrow of Indigenous populations on the American continent. Conquistadores like Cortés and Pizarro had “a powerful ally” in smallpox and other diseases (Foner 2011, 26). The Odawa and Wendat nations were equally exposed to European epidemic diseases through their French allies from the Saint Lawrence River. This weakened them against the attacks of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy who, armed with Dutch weapons, severely decimated the Odawa and Wendat in the mid-seventeenth century (Nelles 2004, 28). Diseases spread through the penetration of Indigenous land by war or exploration, but also by malicious intent: Sometimes, blankets infected with smallpox were deliberately distributed by Europeans so as to weaken and decimate Indigenous communities (Deloria Jr. 1988, 54). The quickening of the elves only partially mirrors the historic use of disease as a weapon of genocide because while smallpox is

generally understood to have been a contributing factor to the conquest and colonization of the Americas, the human influence on the quickening was debunked as unreliable narration. Five years after the inception of the DA series, DA:I reveals that the initial historical information approximates an unreliable account of history in that it fails to mention the strife within the elven community, which equally contributed to the downfall of Elvhenan. Whether intentional or not, deconstructing the unreliable recording of colonial history in this case strips the human colonizers of some of the agency in their victory. Elven immortality was not failing due to exposure to mortal humans but due to internal conflicts in the empire. Humans contributed to the downfall but did not orchestrate it entirely on their own. This changes the perceived power shift from elven to human hands in that casting the elves as culturally and politically inferior to humans reveals itself as a convenient half-truth perpetuated by human- written history; in other words, an ‘alternative fact’ penned by the victors of the conflict. On the other hand, the likelihood of the downfall of the ancient elven empire being belatedly attributed to internal strife rather than conquest, can be interpreted as a mark against them: blaming them for their own downfall takes the blame from the shoulders of their subsequent oppressors.9

3.2 Building an ‘Imperium’ on the Back of an Empire

Tevinter is “founded on the notion that we defeated Arlathan”, as the Tevinter mage Dorian explains about his home that is literally built on the ruins of Elvhenan (BioWare 2014). Using translatio imperii as a narrative metaphor for the power shift may lend itself given the evident inspiration the world design of Tevinter draws from Ancient Rome: From Greece to Rome to Western Europe and to the United States, translatio imperii describes the chronological power shift in historical empires (Loomba 2015, 8). More than passing on the scepter of political power, it concurs with a transfer of knowledge, culture and learning—a translatio studii (Mitchell 2003, 475). This is where it becomes evident that by conquering Elvhenan, Tevinter began a process of exploitation and appropriation rather than one of smooth transfer. Their coerced translatio imperii establishes the colonial dominance of humans over the elves, whom they enslaved and whose culture became a cornerstone of Tevinter culture. Despite the designation of empire, which both Elvhenan and Tevinter carry, equating the conquest with a translatio belies the colonization of the elves that followed, and still persists in Thedas to the present day narrative.

9 Justin Biggi, in personal conversation with the author, January 2018. 24

Their status as slaves places the elves so far outside the nexus of Tevinter society that both their ethnic and social identities merge into a new form of Other to stand in opposition to humans. Free humans versus enslaved elves constitutes a complimentary pair whose antonymic character lends itself to the formation of an indigenous subaltern in the new order of the old land. There are also human indentured workers in the Imperium but institutionalized slavery at large capitalizes on the elves, as Sera, a City Elf in the Inquisitor’s party, points out to Dorian. He responds: “Not all of them, but…yes, you have a point.” (BioWare 2014). Slavery is a part of contemporary Tevinter culture, not just of history. If Dorian is in the Inquisitor’s party along with Solas, an elven mage, they will discuss how the Imperium avails itself of elven magic as another form of cultural subjugation and exploitation. In one particular case, Dorian is left equally stammering as when talking to Sera about slavery in Tevinter. After asking Solas about the specifics of a magical technique he used, the conversation proceeds as follows: Dorian: Fascinating. It’s a Tevinter technique. I’ve never seen anyone in this part of the world do it. Solas: The technique is not Tevinter. It is elven. Dorian: Oh? That means we… never mind, then. Solas: But do go on about the wonders of Tevinter magic. (BioWare 2014) Labor and goods are part and parcel of the imperial extraction from the colony—or, in the case of Elvhenan: Tevinter’s foundation. The Imperium “went to great lengths to expunge elven history” and yet it is built on the remnants of the ancient elven empire (BioWare 2014). Knowledge and power in the form of magic are the main goods the Imperium extracted from its conquered and subjugated enemies––next to the combined body of physical labor provided by the now enslaved elves. Colonialism is not just an “impulse to conquer” but “an integral part of capitalist development” (Loomba 2015, 40). The forced translatio imperii meant a redrawing of the hegemonic map of Thedas’ sociopolitics. Through subjugation and exploitation, Tevinter expunged Elvhenan from the pages of its history-writing altogether: “Tevinter is the cradle of civilization”, claims the Tevinter mage Calpernia (BioWare 2014). The ancient elves, an “Other as the Self’s shadow” (Spivak 2003, 24), are relocated into the position of an outsider, away from the imperial center that used to be their own.

3.3 Relocation versus Homecoming

Hundreds of years after the enslavement of the elves, they rebelled against the Tevinter Imperium under the leadership of Shartan at the same time as Andraste, the human prophet of the Maker, challenged the nation over its ruling class of mages. Joining forces, they succeeded

in defeating the Imperium, and in the process Andraste was turned into a martyr at the stake (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 12). For their part in the successful rebellion, the elves were rewarded by Andraste’s human army: They were given the Dales, a region of present-day Orlais. The Kingdom of the Dales with its capital Halamshiral became the new homeland of the freed elves, while the Tevinter Imperium began to buy new slaves soon after its defeat (78). The elves, meanwhile, marched south in what the narrative calls “The Long Walk to Halamshiral” (BioWare 2014). There is, of course, an actual ‘long walk’ in North American history, only it was not a joyful, voluntary homecoming but a forced deportation: the Long Walk of the Navajo from Arizona to New Mexico in 1864. The DA worldbuilding may draw from a direct naming parallel but it does so with a mismatched purpose and execution in its own fictionalized history. While there were hardships on the Long Walk to Halamshiral, the overall connotation with the experience is still that it was worth it for the outcome: Only sixty-four of our group made it to Halamshiral. Some gave up. Some sickened, especially the little ones. Bandits stalked us. My mother forgive me, I had to steal food. A child fought me for extra scraps of bread. A few days later, I carried her for miles after her legs gave out. She died shivering in my arms. . . . I fell to my knees and wept when we crossed through the gates of my new home, a village for my people. (BioWare 2014) In contrast, both in Canada and the United States, removals and deportations of Indigenous Peoples had little to do with a regifted home. Canadian relocations, as the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples elucidates, took place mainly for administrative reasons (in order to centralize communities and make access to them easier) but also for settlement reasons (urban growth, agricultural development, or to build dams) (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996, 399). Two Inuit communities were relocated in order to remove them from the negative responses they had received from non-Indigenous settlements (399). In the United States, particularly so under the Jackson administration that signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830, land under Indigenous sovereignty was bought out for the promise of increased White settlement (Go 2011, 54). The discovery of mineral resources on Navajo territory set in motion the military campaign that led to the Long Walk of the Navajo in 1864 (Blackhawk 2014). In these and similar cases, the federal government drew on the ‘right of discovery’ doctrine to systemically justify the removals; a doctrine that, like other cultural, philosophical and political aspects of U.S. society, was “inherited from the British imperial system” (Go 2011, 54). Indigenous populations are exempt from the American concept of liberty, as Go elaborates: In the 1823 Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Native Americans’ “right of occupancy” was subordinated to the United States’ “right of discovery” (i.e. white man discovers brown men and women already living on land, but because the discoverer is white, he was there first). . . . By 1837, 26

the Jackson administration had managed to remove 46,000 Native Americans from their land, thereby opening up yet more territory for white settlement. (Go 2011, 54) The relocations were a crucial step in the process of transferring Indigenous land to colonialist authority for good, just like the principle of terra nullius served as the justification thereof. In DA:I’s rendering of ‘indigenous relocation’, the elves embark on their trek to their new home of their own accord. While the outcome is similar (isolating Indigenous communities in a remote area), the modus operandi (forcible removal vs. voluntary migration) and the motivation behind the trek (extrinsic vs. intrinsic) determine the vast differences in the fictional reshaping of a critical historical event. The elves were not primarily relocated from their ancestral homeland to a new place, but from the homesteads of their slave-masters to a land tied to their pre-colonial culture and identity. This takes on a biblical undertone of Exodus: the freed slaves returning to their homeland, the last vestige of their mythical ancestors.

3.4 Crusades and Displacement

The Exalted March of the Dales, a war waged between the elves and the Chantry, is a quagmire of rumors and accounts of miscommunication over the span of three games. The differences among historical accounts is nowhere nearly as palatable as in DA:O’s Codex entries pertaining to the Exalted March, which are revealed in the Elf Origin variants. If the player character is Dalish, the Codex entry is written by an elf and focuses on intruding missionaries. If the player character is a City Elf, the Codex entry is written by a Chantry scholar, who elaborates on isolationist elves rebuking all efforts at “civilized discourse” with humans (BioWare 2009). Throughout the three games, both sides are encountered and paint different pictures, leaving it to intradiegetic voices of reflection and critique, and ultimately to the players themselves, to find a possibly true account somewhere in the median gray zone, which features so often in BioWare’s game ethics. In the eyes of the elves, the humans brought the war to them. Given their past experiences with humans, they trained elite warriors to become the ‘Emerald Knights’, the protectors that would “ensure that the Dales remained free” (BioWare 2014). They also ceased to trade with the human nations (BioWare 2009). These defense procedures read similarly to the isolationist measures the ancient elves had taken in Elvhenan to steer clear of too much contact with humans. As if to prove them right, the humans started testing the borders of the Dales. An excerpt from a Codex entry about a Dalish Keeper’s memories informs the player: But the humans and their new Andrastian Chantry . . . sent missionaries to spread the word of their prophet. They sought ways to subjugate the People once more. When we refused, we angered them. (BioWare 2014; emphasis mine)

Missionaries are synonymous with the intention to proselytize for a certain belief system. In North America, Christian missionaries were the horse on which European colonialist powers rode in, either to convert their Indigenous allies (Nelles 2004, 35) or as justification of a “doctrine of discovery” (Deloria Jr. 1988, 30). The DA worldbuilding parallels the idea of a religious institution acting as a legitimizing force of colonial conquest. According to Exaltations 1:13 from the Chant of Light, the Maker will only return to his believers if He hears the Chantry’s sacred texts echoed “from every corner of the earth” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2015, 75). This resonates closely with the missionary sentiment of “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). The humans blame the elves for the war because they attacked first. A DA:I side quest culminates in the discovery of a scroll containing the “truth of the events at Red Crossing”, in the words of the Dalish Keeper who wrote it (BioWare 2014). Red Crossing is the name of a human village near the border to the Dales. Apparently, a woman from the village and a Dalish man fell in love, despite the already tense situation between their peoples. The elf intended to convert to the belief in the Maker so as to be with his lover, but then the human was killed by a suspicious Dalish archer. The humans sought revenge for the murder of the woman but were no match for the elves; the attack on Red Crossing resulted in the massacre of its villagers. Other accounts, even among the elves themselves, imply that the elves attacked the Orlesian city Montsimmard: A plaque on a commemoration tree in the Emerald Graves is meant to honor an elven warrior who “conquered the human city of Montsimmard” (BioWare 2014). Volume 1 of The World of Thedas even states that the Exalted March was only declared “after the elves of the Dales captured . . . Montsimmard and marched on Val Royaux” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 13). A few pages later, the argument sways back to laying the blame on the attack on Red Crossing, which is representative of the general uncertainty surrounding the onset of this war (28). What immediately catches the eye is that a twenty-first century narrative casts its fictional indigenous population as the more grievous perpetrator in an altercation between colonizer and colonized. This creates a dubious allegory to real historical events in that massacres were predominantly committed against Indigenous Peoples, not by Indigenous Peoples: Consider the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, and the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. All of them raise questions about historical truth(s), authorship and legitimization, and require continuous critical revision.10 Other massacres happened for

10 Indigenous scholars criticize that even modern historians cite the Ghost Dance ceremonies as the reason that sparked the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the U.S. military had already been stationed on all Sioux homelands 28

political reasons11 or in response to armed protests that had been brought about by the negligent treatment of Indigenous Peoples through the settlers’ governments. We find traces of that in how the Exalted March of the Dales is written. For one, an anonymous human author dismisses elven oral tradition in direct response to a City Elf’s account of the Exalted March which draws from either side of the conflict: both the isolationist measures and the attack on Red Crossing. Printed in Volume 2 of the World of Thedas, an anonymous human-written note precedes the account: The elves like to talk. Be they Dalish or of the city in origin, the elves have an oral tradition in which much of their knowledge and traditions is passed along but never actually written down. Is it any wonder then that what they have written down is to be taken with a grain of salt? . . . None [of their teachings] should be consulted in any serious search for knowledge; they should at best be regarded with a kind of novel curiosity. At worst, these elven sources are apocryphal. (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2015, 128) The dismissal of oral tradition is a manifestation of colonial violence, attacking the “culture, ideas and value systems of the colonised peoples” (Loomba 2015, 69). Western academia is particularly susceptible to the “prevailing authority of Eurocentric discourses” (Battiste 2002, xx); it poses the question as to whether the identity of this fictional author is to be located somewhere in the fictional scholarly sphere in Thedas. It would not be the first time that the game design uses the hegemonic society’s scientific discourse to comment on the colonial status quo in the game world.12 With the Exalted March on the Dales, the dismissal of certain historical accounts goes hand in hand with what is not being said: that the conquest of the Dales is a prerequisite for an Orlesian expansionist push into Fereldan territory, given that the Dales are crucially positioned between Orlais and Ferelden. With this in mind, the Exalted March appears like “an expansionist ploy hiding behind the mask of faith” (BioWare 2014). This is the argument presented by an anonymous pamphlet titled “A New Perspective on the Exalted March” and published by the University of Orlais. Players of DA:I can encounter it in the form of another Codex entry (BioWare 2014). Here, scholarly voices hold against the historical account written by the victors. The game design utilizes intradiegetic reflection of its own (intentionally) unreliable narration to point towards the victor’s self-autonomous right to dictate how the past is remembered, recorded, and retold. It does so by deconstructing the belief in the one single version of Truth, and centers around the concomitant idea of making space for different, and

before the battle (Cook-Lynn 2001, 164) and only four years afterwards, an Act of Congress opened up Sioux land for White settlement (191). 11 Sand Creek is said to have been the pre-elections proving ground for Colonel Chivington running for Congress, as John S. Smith later recounted in his own Congressional testimony about the massacre (The West Film Project 2001). 12 See Chapter 5. 29

differing, voices about history. Perhaps this paves the way for hegemonic societies in Thedas to recognize the oral tradition of the elves as “a legitimate form for understanding and transmitting Indigenous knowledge, history, and consciousness” the same way the Supreme Court of Canada has legally done in 1997 (Battiste 2002, xx). The Exalted March of the Dales had a lasting effect on the elven people. They were once again routed from their home, and dispersed into two groups. The Dalish Elves became a wandering people trying to keep their ancient culture alive as much possible, while the City Elves moved into human cities. The vilification of the elves in the aftermath of the war also resulted in drastic measures such as the erasure of Shartan from official Chantry texts. All Chantry art featuring him was either destroyed or transformed, docking his pointed ears so as to make his elven identity invisible (Weekes 2014, 16). Shartan essentially became the Louis Riel of Thedas: Although he was not even alive anymore at the time of the Exalted March of the Dales, Shartan as the once-leader of the elves rebelling against the Tevinter Imperium was turned into a singular scapegoat for his people’s conflict with the dominant societal group. First Inquisitor Ameridan, himself an elf of the Kingdom of the Dales, was equally erased, albeit in a less radical manner: History simply failed to record his elven identity, and in the course of time, it seemed only ‘natural’ that Thedas would come to look upon him as a human.

4 Custodians of the Old Ways: The Dalish Elves

Nowhere are stereotypical notions about Indigenous cultures more apparent than in the design of the Dalish Elves: a nomadic, isolationist network of clans who traverse the wilderness in hopes of maintaining their ancestral way of life; who are simultaneously barbarized and idealized; and who are inherently tied to nature. Their wistful attempt at maintaining ‘the old ways’ makes them the Thedosian equivalent of a romanticized “last vestige of real Indian culture” (Barker 2005, 17). A hegemonic Eurocentrism casts the elves in the noble savage paradigm, and fills their culture with visual and material references to Western depictions of Indigenous Peoples. Drawing inspiration from various cultures and communities, such a depiction invariably plagiarizes from a multitude of reference points to create an eclectic amalgam of stereotypical presumptions about what is ‘indigenous’. Yet in the midst of this, similarities––whether intentional or not––to real-life Indigenous mythologies, such as of the Innu, shine through.

4.1 “Deeply rooted in nature”: Reviving the Noble Savage Trope

In Thedas, the noble savage trope emerges as the paradigm by which the Dalish Elves are judged: As the last remnants of ‘real’ elven culture, they span the bridge to the nigh mythological past of Elvhenan. “Serenity and patience was part of being Dalish” (Weekes 2014, 69) in the same vein as stoicism has become a clichéd veneer for the “brave but honorable warriors” of the Iowa people that painter George Catlin conceived of as “his ticket to . . . wealth and fame” (Herring 2006, 228). This idyllic albeit naïve view corresponds with the portrayal of the Dalish Elves, their longing for the past and their close-to-nature lifestyle. “Noble savagery”, Philip J. Deloria explains, “both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them” (Deloria 1998, 4). The oxymoron is already in the term itself: noble and savage. The former aspect is what Jean- Jacques Rousseau focused on to wield it as a critique of Western culture. The latter aspect “justifies (and perhaps requires) to eliminate barbarism” (4). The association between the two reflects the marriage of Enlightenment and Empire, and the “traditions . . . of self-criticism [and] of conquest” therein (4). Under the noble savage paradigm, Indigenous Peoples are permanently located in “prehistory” and on the “margins of ‘civilization’” where they are pigeonholed as “desert wanderers” or “hunters and gatherers” living “’simple’ unchanging lives” (Blackhawk 2008, 4). The trope links them to an idea of “innocence and purity” through a harmonic symbiosis with nature (Smith 2008, 49). In DA lore, the bridge between nature and the elves is magic. More than mages of other backgrounds, those among the Dalish Elves draw from nature to foster their skills: Their spells have evolved to be deeply rooted in nature, manipulating earthly forces with a heavy emphasis on herbalism and healing. (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 104) Herbalism and healing are part of the Dalish traditional knowledge which they guard in reminiscence of a better past. That their lore includes “many medicinal remedies that the humans have forgotten” is something that the elf Felassan points out not to a human, but to City Elf Briala, who herself is portrayed as ignorant of “certain types of bark [that] can be chewed to ease headaches” (Weekes 2014, 71). Magic, as part of the historic knowledge that the Dalish Elves seek by emulating their ancestors, is rooted within nature, trapping them more deeply within the noble savage trope. Magic may also be one of the reasons for the self-isolation of the Dalish Elves. After all, they practice their magic outside of Chantry authority, which is tolerated to a degree but makes the Dalish wary of possible ramifications nonetheless. They take drastic steps: Minaeve, an elven researcher in DA:I, recounts how she was abandoned in the wild by her clan when her

magic manifested (BioWare 2014). Merrill, a companion mage in DA2, was made to assimilate into another clan (BioWare 2011). Keepers (clan leaders) and their Firsts (apprentices) are always shown as mages. With one exception, Keepers consistently appear as elderly leaders, wise and wizened. Their task is the safekeeping and revitalization of the past, harkening back to the notion of unchanging culture anchoring the Dalish, as noble savages, in their history. In their clinging to the past, the Dalish are also subject to historical misinterpretation. A visual marker of Dalish identity are their facial tattoos, the vallaslin, with which they adorn themselves in honor of their gods. Playing DA:I with a female Dalish Inquisitor who pursues a romantic side narrative with Solas reveals that the vallaslin were initially slave markings in the ancient elven empire. The player can have Inquisitor Lavellan bemoan that the Dalish Elves make a mistake by clinging to “relicts of a time when we were no better than Tevinter”, referencing the slave trade in the Imperium (BioWare 2014). Another dialogue option allows the Inquisitor to argue that, as the practice carried over from ancient to contemporary times, its meaning has shifted. If the player refuses to allow Solas to remove the Inquisitor’s vallaslin, their choice legitimizes the vallaslin as a cornerstone of Dalish culture that has dynamically evolved over time to derive its contemporary meaning. In contrast, if they allow him to remove the vallaslin from the Inquisitor’s face because their original meaning clashes with the romanticized opinion the Dalish have of their ancestors, the decision rattles at the foundations of Dalish identity (BioWare 2014). The noble savage trope is nowhere as visible as in Inquisitor Lavellan. Analyzing the genre of the captivity narrative, Yolanda Pierce mentions how sometimes, the hero protagonist of the story––the one who “resist[s] the savagery” (2007, 84)––is characterized as noble savage: “one who, although a member of the uncivilized group, is of royal birth and thus able to serve as a link between the cultures of the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilized’” (84). Lavellan, as the elven leader of the Inquisition, a human initiative, embodies both of these sides. They communicate with both oppressor and oppressed, a process in which the former never fails to point out Lavellan’s heritage as the latter. The Inquisitor as a noble savage comes into full light during the quest taking place at the Orlesian court (see Chapter 10.1).

4.2 “I imagine that’s a metaphor for … something”: Clan Culture

Dalish clans have been encountered in all three main games published so far, all of which take place in different regions of Thedas: from Ferelden to the Free Marches to Orlais. They have been presented fairly similarly, despite the fact that they don’t have much contact with each other. . . . Of course, staying deliberately separated has led to clans growing more and more different, losing their commonalities. (Weekes 2014, 180) 32

This impression relayed by the ancient elf Felassan (who masquerades as a Dalish Elf in present-days Thedas) is compounded by his concluding statement: “I imagine that’s a metaphor for … something” (180). The Dalish disdain for the hybridity of City Elf culture is suddenly revealed as hypocritical when they themselves are said to change more and more, rather than grasping for purchase on a static notion of tradition. Differences in clan life manifest in their relationships with humans, which can range from relatively friendly to outwardly hostile, resulting in elves that trade in proximity and frequency with human cities, or elves that engage in guerrilla-like banditry against humans (DAW, s.v. “Dalish”). Yet what the individual games present us with are the same broad strokes of Dalish clan life repeated across the regions. Whether we encounter a clan in the Free Marches or within Orlais, the societal make-up repeats itself with its clear hierarchy of a Keeper, a First, and roles sustaining the wellbeing of the clan. Some aspects of Dalish culture are direct parallels to the Indigenous Peoples of North America, such as rock art from the Great Prairies regions or the innunguaq of Inuit heritage. Other aspects, such as the close relationship with the halla, go beyond stereotyping in that they disclose direct parallels to Indigenous mythological knowledge. Spatial stories within an inherently nonlinear medium of storytelling are the embodiment of staged exploration; like a mise-en-scène, they consist of the elements embedded in the environment in which acting takes place (Jenkins 2004, 123–24). The very concept of ‘worldbuilding’ expresses the narration through space, and as such it is not surprising that the Dalish Elves are determined by their environment yet again. Even on a basic level, the visual design of the elves evokes a Western lens through which Indigenous Peoples have been gazed at. DA:I’s concept art presents us with a painting that evokes the sublime natural landscapes of Romanticism, the westward movement along the Frontier, and the Indigenous person watching (over) both the land and the people; only in this case, both the nomad group and the indigenous person in the foreground of the painting are Dalish Elves. In Fig. 1, the Dalish scout to the right becomes the Thedosian equivalent of an Indigenous person overlooking the land, a motif in

Romanticism that already the Hudson River School was familiar with (cf. Thomas Cole’s Indians Viewing Landscape, c. 1827).

Figure 1: The train of Dalish aravel traverses the land in a concept art of DA:I (http://blog.bioware.com/2012/10/20/first-look-dragon-age-iii-inquisition-concept-art/, accessed April 17, 2017). Even more evocative is the comparison to Paul Kane’s Makah returning in their war canoes (Fig. 2). Here, actual canoes take the place of the aravel, the “Dalish landships” (BioWare 2009). In the bottom left corner, Kane depicts a group of Makah watching the trail of canoes from a rock; in BioWare’s concept art, the watcher on the outcrop is situated in the top right corner, making the depiction seem even more like a horizontal flip of the painting. Even the landscape of Thedas with its rocky cathedrals evokes the grandeur and vastness of the North American canyon regions.

Figure 2: Makah returning in their war canoes by Paul Kane, undated (http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_198575/Paul-Kane/Makah-returning-in-their-war-canoes, accessed September 26, 2017).

Aside from their aravel, other elements of the elven world narrative constitute the Dalish Elves as indigenous by drawing from real-life Indigenous cultures: through the incorporation of innunguaq (Fig. 3) and pictographs. Both examples illustrate that the real- life inspirations for the game design only probed the surface of cultural artefacts, Figure 3: My Dalish Inquisitor in front of one of the various appropriating generalized references rather innunguaq in Thedas (BioWare 2014). than aspiring to inclusive game design. Tumblr user Dalishious draws attention to the misappropriation of innunguaq as “inuckshuck” (BioWare 2014) in the game, made visible in the actual game code (Dalishious 2016). She refers to a video interview with Inuit cultural activist Peter Irniq, who explains: It’s not an inukshuk, it’s innunguaq which means it’s a formation with a head, with arms and with legs. That is not called inukshuk. That is called innunguaq, which means ‘imitation of a person, imitation of an inuk’. (Irniq 2007) Dalishious rightly points out the oversight by the game designers who, despite clearly drawing from Inuit culture, either failed to properly research the culture they are using or fail to pay attention to the differences. Elven stone carvings (Fig. 4) are similarly inspired by real-life precedents. Among the most famous and fitting comparisons would be the pictographs in the Nine Mile Canyon in Utah. The artwork featured there stems mostly from the Fremont Peoples and, later, from the Ute tribes native to the region. DA:I subsumes the innunguaq of Inuit culture alongside pictographs evocative of Fremont and Ute art. There is no clearer rendition of stereotypes as a “reduction of images and ideas to a simple and manageable form” (Loomba 2015, 74) than the either deliberate or inconsiderate amalgamation of different cultures into one homogenous apparition. Adrienne Keene’s critique of the North American-based worldbuilding Figure 4: Pictographs of elven warriors mounted on halla (BioWare for the Harry Potter franchise notes a 2014). 35

similar practice with regards to a contemporary, real-life ‘ethnic blend’ undertaken by the author of the series (Keene 2016). In DA with its fictional peoples, it remains an issue to be disclosed and scrutinized that distinct real-life, non-White cultures are not only the inspiration for non-human ‘races’ but also negligently lumped together as one. In their daily lives, the Dalish Elves rely heavily on the halla, a deer-like Fantasy creature of DA lore. They serve as a migratory companion to the elves, pulling the clan’s aravel, providing milk and butter, and historically bearing elven knights into battle. They are considered highly intelligent animals who the Dalish ask for aid rather than commandeer around their camps (DAW, s.v. “Halla”). Among humans, halla horns are prized as an exotic treasure with contested medicinal properties (BioWare 2009). The distinction between hunting for necessities and hunting for profit is self-evident in the differing attitudes of elves and humans towards the halla. They also bear echoes of the cultural significance of the caribou in Innu mythology. The elves elevate the halla to the sacred: “No creature is more revered . . . No other animal has a god of its own” (BioWare 2009). The narrative design of the halla allows us to move past stereotypes here because it discloses similarities to Innu mythology. The atanukana (myths) of the Innu Nation include the tale of the female caribou who courted a young man to marry her (Henriksen 2009, 39). The former “Innu Mythology” section of the Innu Nation’s website, now still accessible through the Wayback Machine, lists this myth as the origin story of Kanipinikassikueu, the Caribou Master (“Innu Mythology” 2005). The Dalish have a similar origin story for Ghilan’nain, the goddess of the halla, who is said to have been transformed from an elf into the first halla by Andruil, the goddess of the hunt, after she had been wounded. Her transformation thus comes as salvation, allowing her to return home despite her injuries. For the elves, she became the divine figure of navigation (DAW, s.v. “Ghilan’nain”) while the Caribou Master “provides the Innu with caribou” (“Innu Mythology” 2005). Another navigator in the elven pantheon is the raven, as a legend in the DA:I Codex reads: The god Falon’Din subdued the ravens Fear and Deceit, after their attempted trickery, and bade them guide him to his twin brother, from whom he had been separated (BioWare 2014). The raven in Innu mythology is likewise a guiding figure––of healing. The narration in a digital production titled “Atanukan” explains: “Le corbeau, ce grand poison noir, guide la magie de la guérison” (NAD – UCAQ 2016). The elves know ravens as navigators who cannot quite be trusted––‘ce grand poison noir’ again––while Innu atanukana also recognize ravens as healers as part of their trickster aspect. Relating this back to Ghilan’nain, whose transformation into a

halla saved her from death, it becomes clear that the game design applies similar elements of myth-building. The ultimate trickster figure in the elven pantheon, however, is the god Fen’Harel, also known as companion hedge mage Solas in DA:I––the reveal of his true identity is the cliffhanger ending of the game. Fen’Harel overthrew the ancient elven god-kings, who abused their powers to exploit and enslave the lower classes of elven society. The trickster became the “slayer of monsters” (Rickets 1966, 327). In ancient times, the war between Fen’Harel and the gods had fatal repercussions: It sundered the world from the Fade, resulting in the creation of the Veil. The remaining elves were weakened by the absence of magic, which paved the way for the human conquest of Elvhenan. The golden age of the ancient elves ended with the golden age of magic. The one responsible bears the chaotic imprint of the trickster-esque “thief of daylight” and the “maker of the earth . . . who changes the chaotic myth-world into the ordered creation of today” (327). However, he is also a “victim of his own tricks and follies” (327): Fen’Harel had not intended for the world to collapse as a consequence of his battle with the other gods. Even in their monikers, Fen’Harel and the North American trickster figures of Coyote, Raven, Mink, Bluejay and Hare share certain attributes. While the trickster may appear as “Widower-from-across-the-Ocean” (328), Fen’Harel is characterized as the “Roamer of the Beyond” (DAW, s.v. “Fen’Harel”). As someone who walks both amongst the elven pantheon, and the pantheon of the antagonistic ‘Forgotten Ones’, he contains symbolism from widowhood to loneliness, and from vast oceans to a sea of nothingness. Fen’Harel, Gilhan’nain, and Falon’Din with his ravens incorporate elements of Indigenous epistemological and mythological frameworks. The resemblances to real-life counterparts such as the Innu atanukana of caribou and raven, or to trickster figures who transform the world, create a more complex foil to the evidently stereotypical visual references in the game world surrounding the Dalish Elves. Their halla, landships, innunguaq and pictographs contribute to a landscape littered with references to Indigenous cultures as a means of tapping into players’ reservoir of cultural archetypes. Streamlining meanings and associations like that fosters immersive gameplay (Sylvester 2013, 54–5). By comparison, unpacking the myths is a more engaging task that might require active research on part of attentive or participatory players who wish to do so. Stereotypes––made to be ‘easily graspable’ by a presumably non-Indigenous target audience––translate the immediate culture of the Dalish Elves, while Indigenous mythologies are picked up by the narrative design mostly on a metaphorical level.

5 Living under the Human Thumb: The City Elves

Pitched against the relative freedom of the self-regulated Dalish Clans, the City Elves are trapped between a history of oppression and the poor living conditions in the slums of human towns. Urban policies bring to bear their racist undertones on these ‘alienages’ and slums: Dishonest trading conditions (Weekes 2014, 93), “nightly beatings” by human guards (38), and sexual abuse by human nobles (BioWare 2009) are only examples. The City Elves live in poverty and are mostly relegated to menial jobs and servant positions. They are segregated and treated worse because of their race: While poor humans may also toil away under dismal living conditions (note Templar-turned-lyrium-addict Samson in DA2), the City Elves are, for one, victims of racist hate crimes, and for another, systematically oppressed. In the plot of The Masked Empire, rebellious elves turn hostile on human guards in their slums, and do to them what is usually reserved for their own kind: “their ears hacked off in the manner used on elven bandits” (Weekes 2014, 94). The proximity between City Elves and humans in the larger towns of Ferelden, Orlais, and the Free Marches foments open violence and hatred towards the elves. Among others, this is displayed in the way that elven physical features are turned against them. On top of the injustice that comes with life in human cities, the City Elves have to contend with racist slurs.

5.1 Alienages: A Life in Segregation

The definition of an alienage is “a section of a predominantly human community reserved for the elven population” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 28). The alienages encountered so far come from three countries or regions in Thedas: DA:O introduces us to the Fereldan alienages (BioWare 2009), DA2 to the Kirkwall Alienage in the Free Marches (BioWare 2011), and the DA:I tie-in novel The Masked Empire has a few scenes taking places in the elven slums of Halamshiral (Weekes 2014). The initial inspiration for the alienage comes from “medieval Jewish ghettos” which Gaider himself confirmed, as quoted by Helen Young (2012, 4). She also notes how fans are willing to acknowledge “that [the alienage] could be modelled on any number of historical and contemporary real world situations” (Young 2012, 4). Given the comprehensive amount of historical parallels to Indigenous Peoples, especially after contact with the Europeans was established, the allegory of the elves as Thedas’ indigenous people can be continued through the existence of these alienages. Slums, ghettoes and reservations have all been, throughout history, ways in which to localize and ‘distance’ the Other from the hegemonic epicenter. While the subaltern determines the societal marginalization of the Other on the fringes of society (Spivak 2003, 25), the urban isolation of 38

the City Elves localizes and makes visual their Otherness through their placement in—or rather, around and outside of—human society. Historically, reservations in North America were supposed to serve as “intertribal refugee centers where previously unrelated peoples joined together in diaspora” (Blackhawk 2008, 10) similar to how human history notes that the City Elves were “invited . . . into our own homes” where humans “gave them jobs as servants and farmhands” (BioWare 2009; emphasis mine). Reality, for the City Elves, turned out much more dreary than the ideal sentiment promised. After the Exalted March of the Dales, those elves who did not wish to adjust to a nomadic lifestyle, were “allowed to live among the humans only as second-class citizens” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2015, 128). The City Elves thus became a foil to the Dalish, whose cultural identity harkens back “to an idealized past when there was no colonizer” (Smith 2008, 73). They perceive the City Elves as a threat to the very concept of this “‘pure’ and authentic ‘self’” (73). With their ‘unauthentic’ lives in the slums of human towns and with their half-human, half-elven children (sprung from often nonconsensual sexual relations), the City Elves function within a paradigm dictating that “indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous” (74). By doubling down on the marginalization of City Elves, the Dalish Elves themselves are coated in the mantle of oppressor by the game design. Violence is a constant companion in the life of a City Elf. Players of DA:O who choose to pursue the City Elf Origin are made aware of this in the very prologue to the game, when either their player character (if female) or the character’s bride is kidnapped to be raped by a human noble (BioWare 2009). By making the distinction between genders, the game design may well literalize a “colonialism-as-rape” metaphor to portray a gendered demonstration of systemic violence (Loomba 2015, 90). Although sexualized, it remains within a heteronormative framework, thus disallowing the notion that a male player character could be a victim of rape, too. Another display of colonial violence comes at a later point in the game when the player character is confronted with Tevinter mages. They came to Ferelden to buy City Elves as slaves who were forcibly removed from their alienage and sold into slavery by Loghain, the game’s major human antagonist, to fund his war effort (BioWare 2009). Loghain is Fereldan, so even in the south, elves are not safe from the threat of slavery. Meanwhile, in Orlais, it is custom that newly-appointed chevaliers, the elite knights of the Empire, commit the murder of a City Elf as the initiation ritual into their order (Weekes 2014, 53). The violence of colonialism did not halt with the end of the war against Elvhenan or the Kingdom of the Dales. Rather, it has become a constant companion of the now colonized indigenous population

of Thedas. What the game narrative emulates, especially with the daily hostilities the City Elves have to endure, is akin to the real-life “violent deformations of Native communities . . . within the broader field of European global colonialism” (Blackhawk 2008, 9). The diaspora that led the elves into human cities also means they undergo a process of hybridization, “generat[ing] new and complex identities” (Loomba 2015, 174). Traditional elven knowledge changed, over time, into new customs, such as the planting of a “tree of the People”, a vhenadahl, to commemorate Elvhenan (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 31). When the City Elf Briala shows it to Felassan, he rejects the idea that it is a tree representing his people. It is the tree of “your people”, he says to her (Weekes 2014, 83). The tree symbolizes the wish of the City Elves to hold on to a historical, even romanticized image of elvenness, amidst an environment that recognizes them only as inferior to their colonizer. They even emulate Dalish clan structure to some extent: Every alienage has a hahren, an “elder” reminiscent of the Keeper of Dalish clans (DAW, s.v. “Elven Language”). The City Elves are ‘too human’ for the Dalish Elves but still clearly elven in human eyes. They stand outside either culture, shunned by the former for their apparent closeness to the culture of the oppressor, and shunned by the latter for their racial difference. Their diaspora lays bare the hybrid conundrum of the colonized subject which Loomba, after Frantz Fanon, explains: “that he can never attain the whiteness he has been taught to desire, or shed the blackness he has learnt to devalue” (Loomba 2015, 174). In this vein, it comes hardly as a surprise that the City Elves in Orlais are not even considered equal citizens by the human government (Weekes 2014, 101).

5.2 Rabbits and Knife Ears: Racial Slurs

The one slur most often encountered is “knife ear”, and the DA Wiki lists “slant-eared” as a close synonym (DAW, s.v. “Elf”). Their large, pointed ears are one of the most striking physical features of elves, and also constitute the source for another slur against them: rabbit. While usually spoken “with a friendly condescension”, the insult likens the elves to small and helpless prey animals (Weekes 2014, 25). This showcases how language shapes the (self-)perception of the City Elves in particular, who regularly experience aggression and violence at the hand of human nobles (93). Just like real-life racism benefited from a validation by Western science, racial slurs in the DA lore are the subject of fictional scientific arguments: Several of the professors have been asked to write papers about the elves. One will be saying that their large ears mark them as similar to rabbits, which means that they are simple prey animals, relying upon base instinct for survival and not to be trusted. Another will claim that anyone fornicating with an elf is insulting the Maker, as one who lies with animals. (Weekes 2014, 109–10)

Through association, physical features are thus determined by arbitrary value judgements, in what strongly resembles Western anthropological research at the height of colonialism. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus used no less generalizing characteristics to draw up his taxonomy of humans based on racial differences (Slotkin 2011, 177–78). Throughout the nineteenth century, “women, blacks, the lower classes, animals, madness and homosexuality” were equally compared using negative associations to systematically justify a sense of superiority over certain groups of people (Loomba 2015, 160–1). Bolstered by scientific explanations in Orlesian academia, the ‘rabbit’ slur becomes a symbol of elven inferiority much like the figurative association with rabbits as prey animals implies a sense of weakness and helplessness. Yet observations in participatory fan spaces reveal that the “rabbit” slur undergoes changes in fan-produced content such as drawing or writing. For example, a member of an online play-by-post (written) roleplaying community remarked that for an original elf character in the DA universe, she repurposes the “rabbit” association with the elves into an empowering aesthetical tool. Drawing inspiration from Richard Adam’s adventure fable Watership Down (1972), she characterizes her elf character with positive and praiseworthy attributes of rabbits: their quickness, agility, cleverness, and loyalty.13 In a way, such practices embody the ideal example of ‘textual poaching’ in the spirit of Henry Jenkins (1992). Here, the “disruption of dominant cultural hierarchies” (Jenkins 1992, 17) happens on two levels at once: In the very practice of participatory culture, which challenges the idea that canonical texts are worth “serious merit” and popular ones are not (17)––and in the literal disruption of the intradiegetic hegemonic discourse of racial slurs.

6 Settling the Frontier: Interpreting Tensions Through a Process of Colonization

After the fall of the Dales and the dispersal of the surviving elves into either Dalish or City Elves, this arguably postcolonial setting saw the two groups of elves develop separately and drift apart. Current tensions between them can be traced back to notions of authenticity and hybridity. The City Elves have come to idolize the Dalish as some kind of mystical allies who might, one day, come to save them from their harsh living conditions (Weekes 2014, 123; 179). The Dalish, in contrast, look down on the City Elves for having forgotten how to be ‘proper’

13 Tasmin M., in personal conversation with the author, February 2018. 41

elves. They derogatorily call them “flat-ear” in addition to the “knife-ear” slur used by humans (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 27). Ironically, in their attempt to lift themselves up as the ‘true’ custodians of traditional elven knowledge, the Dalish approximate a stance more closely aligned with the thought process of a colonizer: When Native peoples adapt to foreign economies or utilize outside technologies, they are assumed to abandon their previous—that is, inferior—ways while in the process losing parts of themselves; they lose the very things that according to others define them. (Blackhawk 2008, 4) In this vein, the Dalish Elves all but subscribe to the process of Othering. The other side of the coin, Blackhawk argues, is to remain caught up in “static definitions of culture” in a trap of “timelessness” (4). The rift between the Dalish and the City Elves can almost be seen as a literalized metaphor of this, oscillating between static and lost culture, both of which are incubated by the violence inherent in the colonialist system. This, in turn, is reflected in the wedge between the two groups of elves. Another way to visualize their societal positions is to imagine the Dalish and City Elves as inhabiting diametrically opposed spaces along an imagined frontier, an inherent symbol of settler colonialism. Taking their positions in the DA worldbuilding literal, one of the most apparent differences between them is their location: the wild (Dalish Elves) versus the city (City Elves). Throwing humans into the mix reshuffles the positions. Here, the elves can find themselves on either side of the frontier. Depending on different national understandings and meanings of the frontier, this could either be a juxtaposition of in versus out (Canadian frontier pushing in) or old versus new (American Frontier as pushing out).

6.1 In vs. Out: The Garrison Mentality of Canada Among Elves and Humans

Canadian settlement underwent an “east-to-west thrust” (Frye 1971, 217) similar to U.S. expansion, something that Frye even refers to as a “generally North American phenomenon” (224). Nonetheless, the frontier in Canada is conceptualized with a different understanding, using different metaphors. The Canadian frontier, more than pushing out and westwards, also pushes in: “to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent” (217). Civilization in Canada manifests in “forts” and an ensuing “garrison mentality” (225) against the “isolating” sensation of being surrounded by a vast “no-man’s-land” (220). In Canada, “the frontier was all around one” (220). In two ways, the Canadian frontier becomes a metaphor for the—social and local—situation of the elves: once in the past and once in the present. For the elves of the Dales (not the present-time Dalish Elves), their historical kingdom became the garrison mentality literalized: Humans “pushed against our borders” in an attempt

to take over (BioWare 2014). These tensions, hurtling both sides into a war, became a matter of “survival” for the elves, another core concept of Canadian culture (Atwood 2012, 27). The narrative function of the historical Dales is all about survival. Their very existence as an elven kingdom in between the time of the ancient elves, and the present-day bifurcation of Dalish and City Elves, is informed by the need to have a place where the elves could “rebuild their culture” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 28). The Dales are their chance to “carv[e] out a place and a way of keeping alive” while clinging to “cultural survival, hanging on as a people” (Atwood 2012, 27). The narrative design of elven history embodies an unsuccessful attempt at keeping the frontier, the unknown, out: Humans, in this reading, are the “physical or psychological ‘frontier’” (Frye 1971, 225). In terms of analyzing DA:I, the framings of the garrison and survival metaphors are not new. Schallegger also applies them, albeit with different actors, to Thedas as a whole. Brought into the present-day setting of the game’s storyline, the main plot becomes a quest for “re-establishing the ‘meta-garrison’ protecting humanity from the outside” (Schallegger 2016, 77). Here, the Fade is the wilderness, and Thedas the spacious fort in which humanity (and others) find refuge from the dangers of “the Beyond”—an aptly-named synonym for the Fade, used by the elves (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 143). Using the Canadian frontier in a present-day reading of the situation of the elves, the two opposing sides are once again humans and elves—City Elves. Readers of The Masked Empire are familiarized with the elven quarter of Halamshiral which stands out from other Orlesian alienages due to the city’s layout: In Ferelden, and maybe even in other parts of Orlais, the elves were kept locked up in small sections of the cities called alienages. Here in the Dales, however, there were more elves than humans, and it was the humans who locked themselves away in the High Quarter. (Weekes 2014, 38) Here, the elves are the ones ‘pushing in’. Humans react to them similar to how Canada’s First Nations are interpreted in the country’s White literary tradition: “seen as one of Nature’s children”, “as tormentor”, and, notably, “as related to the Nature-as-Monster complex” (Atwood 2012, 96–97). In Halamshiral, the human garrison is threatened by the City Elves as such a ‘monster’ manifestation of Nature’s frontier: “actively hostile” in their rebellious intentions, “unreal” in their Otherness, and to be “distrusted” because of acts of resistance (45). Atwood’s reading of one of Nature’s key roles in Canadian literature reverberates in the diegetic transformation of Empress Celene’s elf-friendly politics to the harsh measures deemed necessary in order to quell the Halamshiral rebellion: “man’s task is not to identify with Nature but to oppose it” (98). In the metaphor, the elves find themselves on both sides of the Canadian frontier at different times in their history. The elves of the Dales are beleaguered by humans in their

doomed garrison, the Kingdom of the Dales. While humans continue to see them as savages in a holy war, the Dalish Elves revere the fallen Emerald Knights of the Dales as heroes. There is room for both accounts of history in the game design: Humans may not (conventionally) participate in honoring the dead on both sides of the historical conflict, but the elves may remember their own, even romanticize them. Perhaps the sentiment echoes a common reading of the noble savage, who “can be idealized only when they’re about to vanish” (Atwood 2012, 95). If the first reading of the Canadian frontier places the elves within the garrison, the second reading places them without. In Halamshiral, the alienage is not a single segregated part of a human city, but rather is the city. Elves find themselves on the outer margin of the frontier, on the side they are usually equated with from a human perspective: wilderness, savagery, Other.

6.2 Old vs. New: The Imagined American West between the Dalish and the City Elves

The American frontier has become synonymous with westward expansion and the existence of wilderness. Its conception as such presupposes the continent as terra nullius: After all, wilderness, in an antonymic relationship to civilization, is what settler-colonists set out to settle (Loomba 2015, 85). In order for the American emigration story to work, people had to come from somewhere old (Europe as the old ‘Metropolis’) to somewhere new (the frontier), which was made palatable by the qualities bestowed upon these “geographical poles” (Slotkin 1998, 35): the Metropolis, with a predominantly negative character (else why should we leave it?); and the wilderness Frontier, necessarily with a rich endowment of good things to appeal so strongly to us. (35) That the City Elves establish themselves as a manifestation of the Metropolis is evident. Their existence in the ‘metropoleis’ of Thedas is marked by the relative scarcity [of the place], in which improvement of conditions can be achieved only by difficult labor within the bounds of custom, where expectation is dimmed by history and self-transformation limited by law and jealousy. (Slotkin 1998, 41) They are figuratively and spatially trapped on the ‘old’ side of the frontier, a situation exacerbated by, indeed, the limited self-transformation afforded to them as “second-class citizens in most of Thedas” (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 27). Both in the eyes of the societally dominant humans and of their own brethren, the Dalish clans, the City Elves are an inferior Other. Slotkin sees the Metropolis as a representation “of the highest state of cultural and economic development” (1998, 41) but the City Elves, segregated in their alienages, find themselves only with the “defects of its virtues” (41)––social hierarchy and economic scarcity– –while its “heroic energies” flow into the frontier effort (41).

The American frontier, historically, is a mythical, biblical place. Its image is carried by a “traditional mythic association of the West with sacred and magic lands” (40), bestowing upon the ‘New World’ a “restorative and regenerative power” (39). The positive transformation connoted with the frontier becomes the lens through which the City Elves view their Dalish counterparts: “the mythical elves who lived alone with no humans to rule them” (Weekes 2014, 179). While the Dalish live isolated on the other side of this metaphorical and sometimes literal frontier (oftentimes vanishing in the woods and valleys of Thedas), the City Elves are not afforded this relative peace: Their lives are marked by the continued, visible violence of colonialist subjugation that places them in the poorest quarters of human cities. The irony of this old-versus-new juxtaposition with the elves lies in its placement. Positioning the City Elves as the manifestation of Metropolis places them with the old, while the Dalish Elves, wandering along the frontier in the wild while clinging to the past, paradoxically represent the new. Where they are headed, there is no place for the weight of the ‘old’. Their aloofness towards the City Elves is itself a product of colonialism, based on the idea that the City Elves are somehow less than the Dalish because of their resigned lives in the human cities. The City Elves fall in line with one possible definition of postcolonial hybridity as a result of “when settler-invaders dispossess indigenous peoples and force them to ‘assimilate’ to new social patterns” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2003, 183). The City Elves are caught between being forced to assimilate by humans, and being resented for it by the Dalish Elves, resulting in another, flawed representation of hybridity as “indicating something that denies the traditions from which it springs” (184). This is the distorted lens through which the Dalish Elves look upon the City Elves. Yet the “disappearance of independent cultural traditions” in hybridity is more often than not untrue (184); rather, a “continual and mutual development” allows new practices to evolve and coexist alongside older forms (184). The co-development of City and Dalish elven culture, as envisioned by the game design, seems in line with notions of (post)colonial hybrid cultures, and can as such be seen as part of the American frontier juxtaposition. The City Elves in their alienages look upon the roaming Dalish Elves with a sense of mysticism and wonder, hoping that they, too, shall be delivered into a life in which they can run from the shackles of human society. The Dalish Elves, in turn, consider the City Elves beneath them because their assimilation into human cities makes it appear as if they reject the “barely remembered traditions” of past elven cultures (Gelinas and Thornborrow 2013, 28). The metaphorical implementation of both frontiers, American and Canadian, always means tension between two opposing sides.

Part II – Playing the Elves: Engaging with the Colonial Sandbox

Mary Flanagan understands games as “frameworks that designers can use to model the complexity of the problems that face the world and make them easier for the players to comprehend” (Flanagan 2013, 249). They allow their audience to reflect on issues critically and from the distance between primary and secondary reality. This potential of games is one that BioWare productions tap into by raising the bar for a more diverse cast of characters (both DA and Mass Effect characters have steadily gained more diverse on-screen expressions of sexualities, for instance), or through sociopolitical commentary (consider the way Dragon Age touches on a ‘Who gets to write history’ debate). To what extent players are able to establish a critical distance to the content of a game depends, among others, on the specific circumstances and environment of each individual player. The flexibility of the gameplay experience, especially with the non-linear narrative of DA:I, is ultimately determined by what parts of the narrative the player engages with—or, to draw from Jenkins (2004), what players enact. To retrace enacted to embedded narratives, Jenkins postulates that the former hold the latter together. DA:I contains “multiple information channels” (Jenkins 2004, 127) that transmit the narrative to the player, including but not limited to: entries in the Codex, which collects “stories and backgrounds on the world of Thedas” (BioWare 2014); conversations with non- player characters (NPCs); environmental storytelling; and elaborations in companion books, tie-in novels and comics. Together, they comprise DAI:’s world narrative. This world narrative helps construct the ambiance and history of a fictional place (Sylvester 2013, 86). Here, cultural symbols and archetypes become influential emissaries of meaning-making: They allow players to associate structures in the secondary reality with existing ones in primary reality, and to transfer meaning from primary to secondary reality. Through “broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map” (Jenkins 2004, 124) what stories players act out within the confines of the system is the narrative glue of a game. Enacted narratives are, in short, gameplay narratives, and as such constitute the focus of Part II of this thesis. For cases of gameplay in which narrative and mechanics clash, Clint Hocking coined the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, describing an experience when players are caught in a “leveraging of the game’s narrative structure against its ludic structure” (Hocking 2007). When the narrative experience diverges from the mechanical framework, the player’s suspension of disbelief is in jeopardy. For DA:I, as a game which tries to comment on colonialism by way of implementing it as a narrative experience in its worldbuilding, the obvious ludonarrative dissonance lies in the colonialist nature of its mechanics. That videogame mechanics that 46

engender narrative-driven exploration and conquest are read as virtual reenactments of colonization, is nothing new. “Resources are there for the taking” in the form of unquestioned loot items (Mukherjee 2017, 12), and colonial practices are repurposed as exciting themes of play, from “conquest” to “dominance over the local inhabitants and natural landscape” (Flanagan 2013, 205). A Fantasy videogame can thus run the risk to be doubly laden with the colonialist specter because the imperialist techniques in its mechanics may well correlate with the conventional Whiteness of the genre. Part I established that DA:I’s embedded narratives surrounding the elves rest on stereotypes and romanticized notions about Indigenous Peoples, alongside real historical parallels reaching back to the early days of European colonialism and settlement in North America. How these stereotypes are brought over into the enacted narratives of DA:I is what several chapters in Part II investigate. The following chapters, then, look into colonialist elements of DA:I’s gameplay that are either intentional (in-game racism) or unintentional (Lavellan, the noble savage). Since player characters “hold the middle position between designers and players” they constitute a vital embodiment of enacted narrative themselves (Schallegger 2017, 44). Chapters 7 and 8 therefore look into the direct continuation of stereotyping the Dalish Elves by way of the Dalish Inquisitor, Lavellan, if chosen as a player character. Chapter 7 focuses on the visuals and semantics of character creation and customization, while Chapter 8 delves into gameplay proper with a focus on the dialogue wheel. As one of the key interactive tools of DA:I, the wheel allows players to navigate conversations, make choices, and develop the personality of their character. It also unearths design lapses where the game mechanic does not keep the player’s background choices during character customization in mind. In the case of Lavellan, ludonarrative oversight compounds with erasing the elven character’s voice in order to have humans speak over or about them. Chapter 9 moves from the player character to the enactment of embedded stories. Land grabs and looting are a part of spatial storytelling, and the mechanics behind them provide conventional play experiences (reward, expansion). Such ludonarrative elements clash strongly with the worldbuilding of the Dalish Elves. Little to no commentary weighs in on the role of a Dalish Inquisitor in the rapid expansion of the Inquisition on what includes elven territory. This chapter thematizes a lack of awareness of the “prevalence of a site as a social, discursive category” (Flanagan 2013, 205) within the gameplay design where such a category would be designated as indigenous; instead, the colonialist nature of the mechanics are mostly perpetuated without any significant narrative interference.

While the main quest ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’ offers an example of how to avoid ludonarrative dissonance in the dealing with in-game racism, it also comes with a major design drawback in its lack of transmedial acknowledgement of the tie-in novel The Masked Empire (2014), published a few months before DA:I. The particular omissions are not only plot- relevant to help players make quest-altering decisions in ‘Wicked Eyes’ but also concern the treatment, position, and reputation of City Elves in Orlais.

7 Othering and Identity Tourism in the Player Character

Chapter 4 focused on stereotypes in the background information and worldbuilding pertaining to the Dalish Elves. This chapter looks at how the stereotyping continues on the player character level with Inquisitor Lavellan. The noble savage shines through again, particularly in the design of the character cards in the character customization process prior to gameplay. Skin color options in the customization of the player character––but also in how the elven NPCs are presented––play into the impression of whitewashed elves that was already noted by Poor (2012, 383). The romanticized indigenous-ness of the elves, in a game in which the Dalish Elves are a playable option, provides fertile soil for “identity tourism” in a fantasy setting, allowing White players to perform “racial play” not only within but because of a range of stereotypes (Nakamura 1995). The elves, who are already presented as an Other in a fictional setting, are again Othered on the player character level, which opens the door for members of a non-minority community (such as the author of this thesis) to ‘play’ in(to) the oppression and marginalization of the Dalish Elves in particular, but also the elves in Thedas at large.

Character Cards

The first introduction to a potential elven player character anchors them in the myth of the noble savage, an “embodiment of primitive simplicity” (Dennis 2006, 20) and “natural nobility” (19). The player character cards in DA:I pretty up the character customization process aesthetically. They resemble painted tarot cards as part of a design concept coherent throughout the game (party members have a set of three to four cards per character). The Inquisitor cards only appear at the beginning of the game when players customize their character. There are two cards per race, male and female, so players choose from the available genders and races simultaneously by clicking on the applicable card. Othering the elves starts with their depiction

on the cards (Fig. 5). The elven card is dominated by visual references to nature: depictions of trees, flowers and saplings are bolstered by a green color scheme that sets the elves apart from the other three playable races. These seem more uniformly coded in tones of gray, brown, and orange-red. The elven card evokes romantic(ized) associations Figure 5: The character cards of the character customization process in Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). From top left to bottom right: humans, elves, dwarves, and Qunari with nature or the forest. (BioWare 2014). Even their weapons are made of wood, their outfits scant and willowy. DA:I uncritically weaves a noble savage aesthetic into the first impression of the elves, so that the player may associate them with the cultural archetype of what an Indigenous person looks like in (predominantly) Western minds. So, the first visual code for the Dalish Elves, as presented in DA:I, is to expand on the cultural trope of the elf as “almost human but more in tune with nature” (Poor 2012, 376). They are made to look willowy in both senses of the word: tall and lithe, but also literally depicted against the twigs of a tree, the gossamer tendrils of a willow to drape them in a shroud of esoteric Otherness. But the ‘savages’ are not only ‘noble’, they are also sensual: Both the elves and the Qunari are more sexualized than their human and dwarven counterparts, who wear full- body steel armor. The potential warrior class for humans and dwarves are foregrounded, regardless of the fact that it is the Qunari and the elves who, at different points of history, have been in conflict with humans. Violence and nudity, shadowed by abundant sensuality, are among the fence markers that place the Other “outside civil society” (Loomba 2015, 72). The wild as localizer of the elves is never more symbolical than in the depiction of the bow and arrow as the weapon of choice on the Inquisitor card: a hunter’s tool yet also an instrument of warfare, a visual reminder of the violent history between elves and humans; and at the same time harkening back to the archetypical elf of the Western literary landscape: otherworldly archers of the forest (Poor 2012, 380).

7.1 Elf Aesthetics

Skin Color

While all other three races are represented with realistic enough skin colors which can be recreated in the character customization, the Dalish Elves are inexplicably tinted in a greenish hue in the card, as if to emphasize the connection to nature even more. There are no green- colored elves in Dragon Age lore. In terms of realistic skin colors and complexions (i.e. useable in character customization and also encountered in the games), DA:I has a range of them that allow players to create a fairly diverse collection of player characters. There is no one default character, as is the case with the default Commander Shepard of the Mass Effect series or the default Hawke from Dragon Age II, for instance. Instead, the game lets its players either customize the entire character, or conveniently choose from a set of five pre-customized faces. A lack of kinky or curly hairstyles prompts Wiggins to assert that “diversity is more than just skin color” (Wiggins 2014). Two years before, Jemisin criticized the same design drawback in earlier DA titles, so the problem was already known then: “the best I could do for trying to assemble a character who looked like me was a sort of burnt-sienna-skinned woman with naturally straight hair” (Jemisin 2012). Out of the default female elven faces, three have complexions that look clearly or strongly White. Out of the default male elven faces, one has a tanned to light brown complexion. The other four again strongly resemble pale complexions and features, a common occurrence in Western fantasy worlds regardless of medium (Poor 2013, 378). It is all the more interesting, then, how this is reflected in the design changes in the elven NPCs in DA:I. Both elven party members of the player character, Sera and Solas, were noticeably darker-skinned in some of the concept art for their characters (Fig. 6), and yet both ultimately appear White in the final game design. This leaves the human mages Vivienne and Dorian as the only (visible) people of color among the Inquisitor’s quest companions. Unless the player decides to make a non-White player character, there are no canonically non-White elves among the Inquisition party members in a game that, apart from Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017), is in all probability the least homogenously White BioWare production to date, at least on screen. Other elven NPCs who are not part of the Inquisitor’s team (and thus have less narrative time allotted to them) include Briala, who is canonically brown-skinned, and Fiona, who also used to appear, or was described as, darker-skinned in DA:O and in the DA:O tie-in novel The Calling (2009). In DA:I, both of them feature significantly in only one quest, respectively. What we are left with in DA:I, then, are predominantly White elves with “non-

White identity markers” which, as Nathaniel Poor’s study demonstrates, is not an isolated case of game design (2013, 379).

Vallaslin

Since the Inquisitor is a Dalish Elf, they can also be customized to wear one of the traditional vallaslin. While over the course of the games, different designs of the facial tattoos emerged, the ones available and seen in DA:I each symbolize a member of the elven pantheon, although this information is not available at the time of character creation. Only if the player character is a female Dalish Elf who enters into a romance with Solas will the player find out, through Solas, that the original vallaslin in the times of Elvhenan represented slave markings. The elven gods were real back then, and tattooed the faces of their followers and servants as a mark of ownership (BioWare 2014). This may be the explanation as to why the meanings of the different vallaslin were streamlined and categorized so neatly in DA:I, as opposed to earlier games. While the DAW (s.v. “Vallaslin”) offers a comprehensive overview of meanings and associations of the vallaslin, the game itself does not. The character customization process presents the designs without explanation. The player either choses according to the aesthetics but foregoes meaning or must rely on outside help to identify a meaningful vallaslin for their character to wear. Players given to enhancing their roleplaying experience by adding their own backstory and personality elements to their character may well be displeased to find out, 51

through later consultation of the DAW, that their chosen vallaslin design may in fact clash with their character’s personality, for instance. Players familiar with the meaning of the individual tattoos may still be disappointed by the game design: It is a particularly glaring oversight that, for example, an elven player character wearing the vallaslin of the goddess Mythal is still subjected to an ‘info dump’ about Mythal provided by a human mage––inside a temple dedicated to Mythal, no less (BioWare 2014). Swapping the narrative exposition to the player character would have been preferable in this case because it would show that the game design takes the character customization choices into account.

7.2 Whitewashing the Avatar: Identity Tourism

Identity tourism describes the appropriation of a racial identity “without any of the risks associated with being a racial minority in real life” (Nakamura 1995). Lisa Nakamura uses the term in her 1995 study on early multi-user dungeons (a kind of virtual real-life online chat with roleplaying elements) to describe the phenomenon of “Orientalized theatricality” in these MUDs (1995). This kind of cross-racial avatar experience is a one-way street upon which players “who are almost always white” can “indulge in a dream of crossing over racial boundaries temporarily and recreationally” because these boundaries are comprised of stereotypes. Players “are not ‘really’ Asian; they are instead ‘playing’ in an already familiar type of performance”––a performance of compartmentalized ideas about what constitutes racial difference (Nakamura 1995). Stereotypes lie at the heart of what identity tourism is: a process that is “the temporary experience of life as something other-than-what-is” (Deloria 1998, 15). It is no surprise that Deloria, in this context, talks of “playing Indian” when European settlers in the North American colonies disguised themselves as Indigenous for the purposes of “carnival and misrule” (14). Carnival (with the exception of the Orlesian court, perhaps) and misrule (other than on the antagonist’s part) hold little sway on the DA:I plot but ‘playing elf’ becomes its own form of identity tourism in DA:I. Supported by Fantasy’s “rhetorical distance” to reality (Young 2016, 2), DA:I’s manifestation of identity tourism functions differently than the one Nakamura laid out in her seminal study on MUDs, most importantly because the type of virtual avatar inhabited is completely different. While people create a real-life persona in MUDs, the player slips into a pre-defined “role” in DA: “players are given great freedom to design their own, individualised character by choosing from aesthetic, narrative, and mechanic options presented to them” (Schallegger 2017, 45). All DA player characters have functioned according to the same principle so far (albeit to varying degrees). The Inquisitor, like their predecessors in DA:O and

DA2, is a role cobbled together from pre-defined design elements chosen by the player (race, class and gender) and informed by the continuous choices the player makes throughout the game in dialogue and at important narrative crossroads. So, players choosing to inhabit a character whose narrative background includes being a member of a marginalized or oppressed community in this fictional world, are all but invited by the game design to perform identity tourism––to “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998) digitally, in the twenty-first century, in a removed Fantasy setting where the allegorical and metaphorical is relied on to blur the boundaries between what does and does not make a ‘real-world’ statement about race (Young 2016, 2). Already in DA:O, the player could assume the role of an elf and, in individualized origin stories of the player character, play through different, fictionalized representations of oppression. The Mage Origin, regardless of race, positions the player character, a mage, in a world in which mages are shunned by the rest of society. Similarly, the City Elf origin discloses how the downtrodden elves living in slums in human towns are faced by and exposed to racist hate crimes, violence, and, in the origin story, rape. A display of human power over the elves by means of sexually abusing elven women is certainly a nod, whether intentional or not, towards the “double colonization” of women of color, who are positioned at the crossroads of race and gender discrimination (Loomba 2015, 165). DA:O’s storyline allows the player (either as the bride who was kidnapped or the bridegroom who came to her rescue) to take revenge or to turn a blind eye in exchange for a bribe. The latter includes leaving the kidnapped elven women with their human abuser, except for the player character, if female, who takes the bribe and leaves. However, players who forego moral choice for a “statistical” one to collect “game tokens” will be disappointed (Sicart 2009, 209). Going for the bribe is not the easy reward it promises to be because unless the player stashes the money in the alienage right after the quest and before departing the city, the bribe will be lost forever. Even if they do, they can only come back and collect it at a later point in gameplay. Still, the sum of forty gold coins is a considerable amount of in-game currency. The other option is to take revenge, in which case a fight ensues and the victorious player still receives a reward. The loot drop does not consist of forty gold coins but equipment, which at this early stage of gameplay might be considered just as useful (DAW, s.v. “A Day for Celebration”). The elves of Dragon Age are a mosaic of stereotypes, drawn from a well of Western perceptions that began with the colonization of the Americas. More than that, “elves, as a textual creation, have consistently been produced by the same group over their long history: educated White males” (Poor 2012, 390). “Magic, bows, and poisons” along with their affinity for nature (390), are all characteristics that can be traced back to their origins in Norse and

Germanic mythologies. They anchor the elves in the noble savage trope and other stereotypes about the Dalish Elves. Although the fantasy genre uses elves as a depiction of the Other, it is important to note that although they are visually “based on a real-world ‘other’” (387), the real- world equivalent is absent from the fantasy game world. In other words: Elves in Thedas exist as stereotyped Indigenous North Americans, but there are no North America or North American Indigenous Peoples in the game world. The game design simply uses “elves as a stand-in” (391), as an example of how to use “cultural symbols to communicate by association” (Sylvester 2013, 87). Once again, the use of stereotypes––simplified, reductionist images through the outside lens––makes it clear who this ‘communication by association’ is for: Certainly not the real-life people(s) whose cultures are leveraged as the compass with which White people can read the map of a fictional people’s game design. Stereotypes, identity tourism, and predominantly White default characters in the player character creation process––they all build a case for physically Othered elves who provide a canvas for (re)enacting White fantasies. As one Elfquest fan, quoted by Nathaniel Poor (2012, 383), puts it: When you have a group of people who live in trees, commune with nature, and are magical, they’re savage, barbarian, cannibals, or at best, primitives…unless they’re white- then they’re Elves. (Chris 2008) The elves seen in DA:I are doubly whitewashed by not only appearing predominantly White but also thanks to the stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples that are manifest in their game design. Players “reflect upon those values that are contained in the system of the game” and “evaluate them keeping in perspective the values of the game world, of the player’s community, and ultimately cultural values” (Sicart 2005, 17). If those cultural values draw a blurred line between stereotypes and reality, then Nakamura’s critique of identity tourism in MUDs cannot go unheard––even, or rather especially when players are invited to engage in reflexive evaluation of game values through their own cultural values.

8 The Dialogue Wheel: Continuing Characterization alongside Moral Player Engagement

The dialogue wheel is at the heart of player interaction as it imbues players with a certain amount of flexibility and agency to co-shape the plot of the game. Hardly a novelty in DA:I, it has become a staple feature of BioWare RPGs. It functions as a mechanic of moral engagement and makes it possible to challenge the stereotypes affiliated with the elves, although similar to character customization, it can also contribute to a ludonarrative dissonance particular to a playthrough with a Dalish Inquisitor. As a mechanic allowing a restricted amount of player

agency, it also gives players the feeling that they contribute to the narrative. They do so through shaping the player character and their choices which, through the wheel, are often tied to expressions of a moral, emotional and background-related spectrum. The player thus shapes the world and the character at the same time.

Life is a Wheel: Intensifying the Player-Character ‘Bleed’ through the Dialogue Wheel

A wheel-like interface (Fig. 7) allows players to “choose among a number of social interactions their character can perform” but which are under the purview of authored Figure 7: The standard appearance of the DA:I dialogue wheel (BioWare 2014). design choices: since it is impossible to realize the “near-infinite variety” of choices people can make in real life, players are left with only “a handful” (Sylvester 2013, 107). Within the confines of the system, the dialogue wheel makes it possible to fashion the individual player character’s voice according to the player’s decisions. The dialogue wheel thus contributes greatly to the identity formation of the player character. Taking different types of player characters (which can again depend on either pre- defined design choices or player style, or both) into account, the Inquisitor follows in the shoes of highly individualized player characters that BioWare audiences will be familiar with from earlier productions. Previous research into the function of the dialogue wheel (or dialogue trees more generally) in BioWare games exists. Jørgensen looks into the role of the dialogue wheel in identity formation for both player characters and NPCs, and how different modes of dialogue in DA:O and Mass Effect 2 are likely to affect the “bleed effect” between the player and their character (2010, 327). While she also argues that the properties of DA:O’s dialogue (voiceless player character; unseen player character face while answers are given) lend themselves to greater player-character immersion, DA:I corresponds more to her analysis of the player character dialogue in Mass Effect 2 (voiced player character, the player character’s face is seen when the answers are given) resulting in a more individualized character (320). Annika Waern also highlights the DA:O dialogue tree (the predecessor of the more flexible wheel design) in her study of the bleed effect on narrative romances in the game. Again, it becomes clear that letting players participate in the dialogue narration for their character may contribute to greater identification with said character, “blurring the boundaries between player and character” on an emotional level (Waern 2010). Incidentally, the fact that RPGs are susceptible to ‘bleed’ playstyles only makes Nakamura’s (1995) critical stance towards identity tourism all the more

pertinent. Not only do players of cliché-ridden game designs and characters run the risk of perpetuating stereotypes, but they might also do so developing their own emotional and moral connection with the(ir) character. As such, the dialogue wheel, as the compass of the character’s emotional and moral expressions, is a poster child of a morally engaging mechanic in DA:I. Jensen, by roleplaying into the character identity of his Dalish Inquisitor, felt that the portrayal of heroism in the game rendered the roleplaying experience meaningless. There is little narrative work done or provided to reconcile a Dalish Inquisitor with their no doubt complex feelings towards Andraste and the Inquisition, an institution brought to life by the dominant societal group that has also been responsible for the subjugation and oppression of the elves for centuries. This lack of reflection on part of the narrative led to incongruent decision-making on Jensen’s part, which in turn left him “mad”: And not like, “Okay I’m roleplaying mad” mad, but like I was in real life mad—not at the humans who committed this genocide against my character’s people, but at myself for experiencing even a modicum of reverence for the figure in whose name it was done. (Jensen 2017) Here, everything played a part in creating a rift between the player and the experience. The dialogue wheel did not contribute to a more reflexive decision-making process, and as a result, the worldbuilding and narrative fell apart. In Jensen’s case, dissonance happens on a purely narrative level because the game design does not enough to take a player character’s identity as a member of a marginalized community into account.

Background-Specific Dialogue Wheel Options

The moral spine of BioWare’s dialogue wheel has come a long way from its dividing line between the binarist Paragon (lawfully good) and Renegade (rather, though not always, morally evil) options in the days of the Mass Effect trilogy (2007–2012). The distinction between ‘morally good’ and ‘morally evil’ within the game design is one that Sicart derides as counterproductive to reflexive engagement on the player’s part: The game design already does it for them by making that distinction, and so decision-making becomes “just another element in the game system and not a part of the moral interpretation of the game” (Sicart 2009, 212). In DA:I, the distinction between dialogue options emphasizes a character’s emotions, past, and personality rather than what the narrative considers good or evil. For example, responses may be sad, stoic, angry or confused but, as Jørgensen points out, it is “up to the player to fill in motivations behind the choices” (2010, 318). Players, after all, “act as moral beings,” as Miguel Sicart candidly claims (2005, 17; emphasis mine). BioWare’s game design actively pushes this with high agency over the decision-making progress via the dialogue wheel. In DA:I, the player has a twofold kind of agency over the dialogue. In the moment of narration,

it is up to them which dialogue line to pick; but even before that, in the character customization, they determine the dialogue options which will be available to them in the first place. This is because all races and classes grant access to specific dialogue options in applicable situations. A mage character, for instance, has access to mage-specific dialogue options in narrative situations where this kind of knowledge is relevant to be brought in. This is why, as Jensen points out, race and class choices in the character customization process are indeed “‘story’ choices” in DA:I––or at least should be, given his own case of narrative dissonance conjured by a Dalish Elf clashing with Andrastian principles (Jensen 2017). As a general rule, these specific dialogue options do not overlap; for example, there is no dwarf-warrior or human-warrior distinction. The only case where an option merges both class and race aspects is with the human mage dialogue option (DAW, s.v. “Dialogue wheel [Inquisition]”). In other cases, characters simply have two specific options available, one relating to their class, the other to their race. A player character from the mage class and with a Dalish background, then, will have access to mage-specific and elf-specific dialogue options when applicable. Some options can only be manually unlocked as players advance through the game and characters accumulate knowledge pertaining to politics, history or the criminal underworld of Thedas. There is also an “arcane knowledge” perk which allows player characters to contribute to conversations about the Fade or magical theory (DAW, s.v. “Dialogue wheel [Inquisition]”)––in this case, the knowledge is unlocked regardless of whether the player character is a mage or not. Lastly, special dialogue options denote special opportunities to the players: to flirt with NPCs, end a romance, bribe or attack someone, accept or reject offers, and to enquire about further information through the ‘investigate’ function of the dialogue wheel (DAW, s.v. “Dialogue wheel [Inquisition]”). This is often where the player is provided with the necessary lore and in-world information to follow the narrative. So-called ‘info dumps’ are a familiar narrative practice not only in videogames but in storytelling in general, providing “background information in a narrative” in a “large (often unwieldy or indigestible) amount” (OED, s.v. “info-dump”). If providing narrative background information in DA:I is not done through Codex entries, it is usually relegated to conversations with NPCs.

8.1 Elf-Specific Dialogue Options and the Lack Thereof

The elf-specific dialogue options, especially those pertaining to the Dalish Elves, provide great opportunities for delving into elven worldbuilding: Within the game, they give weight to the cultural design of the elves (and consequently a Dalish Inquisitor) and on a metalevel, they

provide more narrative content to dissect and analyze within the framework of this thesis. Therefore, my close reading of DA:I compelled me to choose them whenever possible. Unfortunately, this was not always possible since the game did not provide elf-specific dialogue options even in narrative situations that clearly called for them. Three examples serve to highlight the different ways that race impacts the Dalish Inquisitor. Information provided by Scout Harding (a dwarf) and Morrigan (a human) disclose the use or lack of elf-specific dialogue wheel options; and a short conversation with fellow elf Solas reveals how the race choice can even impact the extradiegetic properties of the game.

Scout Harding and the ‘Last Elvhen’

Since altogether three regions that can be explored by the player character are located in the former Dales, elf-specific dialogue options are given weight in these regional introduction scenes. In general, unlocking a new region comes with a short cutscene and dialogue in which the NPC Scout Harding answers the Inquisitor’s questions about the location. In the Dales, she explains the surroundings even if the Inquisitor is elven, similar to the way that Morrigan explains the Temple of Mythal. With Harding, the exposition is subtler and more plausible for two reasons: She mostly informs the Inquisitor about current events and quest-related developments in the area; and Clan Lavellan, where the Inquisitor is originally from, is located in the Free Marches, not in Orlais. In the Emerald Graves, located in the heartland of the forested Dales, the exposition through Harding takes on a historical flavor rather than being about geographical input. The Inquisitor also asks if this is where the elves made their “last stand” (BioWare 2014). Given how central elven history is to Dalish identity, it stands to reason that a member of a Dalish clan would be knowledgeable enough about the events of the Exalted March to not have to ask. Instead, the player character could have informed the player themselves. In this way, their identity could have been emphasized, and expressed through the use of the same mechanic. It would have therefore been favorable to have an elf-specific dialogue option that shifts the exposition from the non-elven to the elven character, for the sake of narrative plausibility and immersion. After all, the very existence of race- or class-related dialogue options attests to a wealth of accumulated knowledge that is the player character’s; not the player’s. This distinction is crucial: Every time the player uses a ‘specific’ dialogue option, they practically delegate their agency to the player character’s knowledge. The comment about history can be followed up by another question by the player character, leading to information about the (mostly human) group of Orlesian deserters referring to themselves as the “Freemen of the

Dales” (BioWare 2014). Again, the significance of the Dales for elven identity could have been reflected in Inquisitor Lavellan raising the “right of occupancy” (Go 2011, 54) but it is not. So, along with denying the Dalish player character (not the player or an NPC) the agency of the/ir historical knowledge of the Dales, the narrative of the current occupation of the Dales by human soldiers misses the chance to critically reflect their presence through a similar use of the dialogue wheel. However, the very same cutscene dialogue also provides an example of reflexive game design that takes not only the player’s customization choices but also the player character’s racial background into account. In response to more exposition about the elven history of the Dales, the player can make use of a specific dialogue option. Lavellan may recite the Oath of the Dales, a verbal acknowledgement that makes Harding visibly uncomfortable; she starts stammering and apologizes. The conversation goes like this: Inquisitor (investigate option): “Do you know anything else about the region?” Harding: “They call this place the Emerald Graves. Legend says that a tree grows here for every elven knight of Halamshiral who perished in its defense. Makes you sad, doesn’t it?” Inquisitor (specific option): “We are the last elvhen, never again shall we submit.” Harding: “Oh, I… I’m sorry, Inquisitor. I spoke thoughtlessly.” (BioWare 2014) There is no follow-up; after this, the player may only end the talk and move on with the gameplay. What becomes clear here is that some consideration of the player character’s racial background went into the dialogue design. Pitched against the generic exposition provided by Harding to any Inquisitor, regardless of race, this snippet of dialogue allows for a differentiation. Harding’s response concedes both to her unreflected contribution to the interaction, and to her awareness that it was unreflected, that she did not consider who she was talking to. The player character can subtly call her out on that by reciting the Oath which underlines their strong identification with elv(h)en14 culture. What is remarkable is that the Oath of the Dales, as a dialogue option, is not marked as an elf-specific dialogue choice; instead, it appears with the star icon pertaining to ‘specific’ dialogue choices. It is nonetheless elf-specific as it appears on neither a human, dwarf nor Qunari player character’s dialogue wheel. Failing to mark the option as elf-specific may have been a simple design oversight. As far as narrative goes, it would be difficult to find anything with as much weight in Dalish culture as the oath to never submit to human supremacy again.

14 That the Dalish Elves and the ‘elvhen’ of Elvhenan of old have less in common than the Dalish believe, is another poignant storyline revelation woven into the DA:I narrative. 59

Morrigan Explains Elven Culture 101

The previous chapter expanded on a crass example of disregarding a design choice enacted by the player (their elven character’s vallaslin), and how it is disregarded by the narrative design in the quest taking place in Mythal’s temple even if the player chose the symbols of Mythal for Lavellan’s facial tattoo. In the quest it is Morrigan who, as a temporarily mandatory team member, provides most of the information, with the occasional aside coming from Solas (if brought along by the player). The majority of this ‘info dump’ comes again through the ‘investigate’ function on the dialogue wheel. The (almost total) absence of not only elf-specific dialogue options but, more broadly, elven input from a Dalish Inquisitor on their historiocultural background, translates into the near-absence of their cultural voice. That Solas is even more closely affiliated with the history relevant to the quest only becomes public knowledge intradiegetically after the end of the game, where his true identity is revealed. Morrigan would be solely responsible for providing information about the ancient elves and their lore if it were not for Solas, whose presence depends on another player-made choice (the makeup of the party). Similar to how the Tevinter Imperium comes with a foundation of conquered elven culture, Morrigan as a human mage perpetuates the “epistemic violence” of imperialism (Spivak 2003, 25). Her character design is built on a foundation of magic expertise, incorporating a vast knowledge about ancient elven culture––of which Morrigan becomes the amplifier during the quest. The design of the dialogue, by not granting the Dalish Inquisitor a voice in most instances, supports her in that. Again, most of the exposition is relegated to the ‘investigate’ function and is thus optional; and again, the game design does not take the racial background of the player character into account. A Dalish Inquisitor thus asks Morrigan about their whereabouts, about the goddess the temple is dedicated to, and even about the group of “odd” temple elves they encounter (BioWare 2014). The human mage explains the temple architecture, the riddles and puzzles along the path to reach its center, the ‘Well of Sorrows’ from which she wants to drink, and wall mosaics depicting the ancient elven gods. The well is the reason why Morrigan is an obligatory additional party member in this quest. The player can decide whether to let her or the player character drink from it. Whoever does so, obtains the knowledge of all elven temple guards who, upon dying, transferred their accumulated knowledge and life experiences into the waters of the well. Considering magic a research subject, it is Morrigan’s expertise in the field that presents her as qualified for drinking from the Well of Sorrows, despite the misgivings of the elves present in the temple––and it is here that the “subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge’” (Spivak 2003, 25). At the Well of

Sorrows, Morrigan argues that “of those present, I alone have the training to make use of this” to which Lavellan may angrily exclaim: “‘You alone’? This is my heritage!” (BioWare 2014). Again, Solas’ presence is entirely glossed over. Even without revealing his true nature as an ancient elven god-king, as both an elf and a mage he would have logically qualified to drink from the well more so than Morrigan or a non-mage Dalish Inquisitor. The Inquisitor’s class does not create any meaningful change in the overall exploration narrative of the Temple of Mythal. It does not matter whether the Dalish player character stems from a rogue or mage background. It would have been narratively consistent for the mage to possess and display a wealth of historical and cultural knowledge about the Dalish Elves and the ancient elves. After all, before the Inquisition Lavellan was their clan Keeper’s apprentice and thus groomed for future leadership and custodianship of elven knowledge. In the Temple of Mythal, none of that matters to the narrative. It is principally Morrigan’s voice that shapes it; and the stipulated silence of the Dalish Inquisitor truly begs to re-ask within this Fantasy setting: “Can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak 2003, 24).

Solas’ Quest: For Elven Ears Only

Lastly, a companion quest for Solas displays how the race choice in the character customization process impacts the extradiegetic dialogue layout of the game. Based on their character’s race, the game determines whether players can follow a conversation happening in elvish, which is conveyed not only on the audio level but also in the game’s subtitles. In the quest, Solas converses in elven language with a friend (a spirit from the Fade). Depending on whether the player character is a Dalish Elf or not, they will understand what Solas is saying. That knowledge is conveyed to the player via the game subtitles: For a Dalish Inquisitor, the subtitles to Solas’ conversation with his friend appear in English; for a non- Dalish Inquisitor, the subtitles are a direct transcription of the elvish words. Only a Dalish Inquisitor is given a specific dialogue option to address the contents of the conversation they listened to. Again, it is noticeable that the dialogue option appears as ‘special’ but not as ‘elf- specific’, even though the narrative content can only be accessed with an elven player character in the first place (BioWare 2014). Here, player understanding clearly depends on character understanding. The content of Solas’ conversation is channeled through an understanding of the elven language, which the character provides to the player, who is thus ‘rewarded’ for a choice made in character customization. If defining immersion includes that “perceptions, reactions, and interactions all take place within the text’s frame” (Douglas and Hargadon 2004, 196) then the interactive use

of language here provides a great way of increasing player immersion. Through subtitles, the game suggests to the player of a Dalish Inquisitor that they can understand the language. It is a smooth move to equate character with player knowledge by suggesting that the player takes on the character’s language skills. This strategy can strengthen the player-character bond either way. Even with a non-Dalish Inquisitor, the player “sees and hears the same things as the character” (Sylvester 2013, 41). Consequently, a lack of elven language skills in, for example, a human Inquisitor only underlines the notion that the player is not omniscient, that they take on the role of a character in a world of characters. Play, here, means to feel like a part of the fictional world. The player’s ability to understand what is said and read, thanks to the game design referencing the player character’s race, becomes a literal process of increased player perception.

8.2 Perpetuating Stereotypes or Challenging Them

Players do not only act morally, as Sicart contends (2005, 17), but can also be seen as “agents of action and change” (Flanagan 2013, 206). Within the permitted space of the game design, players of DA:I can indeed contribute to change the narrative, especially through their navigation of dialogues with the wheel. In my close reading of the game, I utilized the properties of the dialogue wheel to explore whether, and to what extent, the game allows me to subvert latent stereotypes and power structures that disadvantage the elves as an indigenous population in Thedas. Two conversations with humans serve as examples: a discussion with a farmer about the use of the romanticized label “halla-rider”, and a conversation with the Inquisition’s head diplomat Josephine about Dalish lifestyle(s) (BioWare 2014).

Elves and Their ‘Majestic Beasts’

The Dalish Elves cooperate with the deer-like halla in their daily lives. It is important to them that the halla not be seen as domesticated animals but as autonomous creatures who the Dalish greatly respect as their riding mounts, beasts of burden, and hunting prey. This is what earns them the label “halla-rider” (BioWare 2014). As a Dalish Inquisitor, the player first encounters the term in the Hinterlands––fairly early on in the main narrative, given that the Hinterlands are the first unlocked region of the world map. “Halla-rider” is uttered by one of the first ‘agents’ that the Inquisition can recruit for its efforts, a human horse trainer named Dennet: So you’re the Inquisition, eh? Hear you’re trying to bring order back. It’s high time someone did. Never thought it’d be a halla-rider from the wildlands, though. (BioWare 2014)

Needless to say, the moniker depends on the chosen character race but according to Dennet is meant appreciatively. The DAW reveals that he similarly refers to a dwarven Inquisitor as a “mule-rider” which, too, is intended as a “mark of admiration” (DAW, s.v. “Dennet”). Regardless of character race, the Inquisitor can always enquire if Dennet has a problem with them personally after he has refused to send horses to the Inquisition because of safety concerns. The player can choose the dialogue wheel option to investigate the possibility of the NPC being racist towards elves. Lavellan sounds hesitant to dubious: “If you have a problem with me personally, I’d like to know about it” (BioWare 2014). In response, Dennet insists that the label be meant as a compliment because the halla are “majestic beasts” and he would “give [his] right arm to ride one” (BioWare 2014). Meaning is thus ascribed to the term by the human speaker who first uses it, while the only reaction we obtain from the elven recipient is ambiguous at best. What it leaves us with is that the term may be positively connoted albeit not always positively received. Regardless of how it is pragmatically embedded in the context of the conversation, its semantics clearly involve a racial denomination which sets the Inquisitor, when not human, apart. The meaning for it shifts according to who examines it; but while the speaker is given the space to shed light on the intentions behind his use of the term, the recipient is not granted the same to explain how the term is perceived, past a follow-up question to prompt Dennet into baring his reasoning. The player can choose to have their character react to the use of the term, but the game design keeps the character from voicing their opinion, after Dennet voices his.

Violent Elves and Noble Savages, Again

Early in the game, a conversation with Josephine, a human diplomat on the inner council of the Inquisition, revolves around the Inquisitor’s background. In the case of the Dalish player character, this means a talk about the lifestyle of Clan Lavellan, where the player character hails from. Josephine voices her concern about stories she heard in the camp of the Inquisition about “wild Dalish Elves” and, once pressed, she repeats them for the Inquisitor to hear: “stealing children, selling peasants to slavers, burning down villages, using infants for blood magic” (BioWare 2014). Reminiscent of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century captivity narratives, ‘Natives abducting White women’ becomes ‘elves abducting human children’ in DA:I. The conversation effectively reveals the fabricated stories with which humans justify their bias towards elves: by equating them with danger for the perceived weakest members of the dominant societal class.

The captivity format of the frontier romance “cast the Indian in a totally unsympathetic role as gratuitous persecutor of whites” following the “Puritan historical accounts” of confrontations between White settlers and Indigenous Peoples (Barnett 1975, 4). It served as a justification settler violence towards the Indigenous population and continued to be a widely popular format of nineteenth century pulp fiction (5). The similarity to certain fictional (hi)stories involving the elves is uncanny. Consider a historical account of the Chantry’s anti- elven propaganda: “Naturally, we stood to benefit from propagating the narrative of a hostile, unreasoning people attacking innocent missionaries and making blood sacrifices of good Andrastian babies” (BioWare 2014). When Lavellan is exposed to the same rumors more than seven hundred years after the date of this account, the tone of the gossip and of the Chantry’s war propaganda is astoundingly similar. It stands to reason that the game design follows familiar, real-life historical patterns once more. The ‘violent elf’ follows the familiar schematic pattern “of an irreconcilable difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘Christian’ and ‘heathen infidel’, self and other” (Loomba 2015, 72). In DA, this list is complemented by ‘human’ and ‘Dalish Elf’, who unlike any other propounds the “European figure of the ‘wild man’ who lived in forests, on the outer edges of civilisation, and was hairy, nude, violent, lacking in moral sense and excessively sensual” (72). While not all of these attributes hold true for the Dalish (they are certainly not the hairiest of Thedas’ inhabitants) a great number of them correlate with the rumors and attitudes that humans engage with. Therefore, to avoid conflict within the Inquisition, Josephine asks the Dalish Inquisitor to share with her an authentic account of what life in a Dalish clan is like. The response options on the dialogue wheel are depicted in Fig. 8:

Figure 8: Dialogue options in response to Josephine’s questions after Dalish daily life indicate the inspiration, range and confines of the Dalish worldbuilding (BioWare 2014).

These five answers can be grouped into three sentiments: (I) Othering: “Poorly . . .” and “Through hard work” (II) Romanticizing: “I was happiest in the forest” (III) Evasive: “Not so different . . .” and “That’s not for outsiders” In (I), Lavellan paints an image of hardship and oppression that haunts their clan in their daily lives: “We were at the mercy of everything. Foul weather, disease, village mobs” draws

the attention back to the hostilities between elves and humans (BioWare 2014). This response is very much in line with the beginning of the conversation in that the mention of village mobs picks up the perception of the Dalish Elves as the violent Other. The second dialogue option in this group focuses on material differences: Getting up before dawn to fish, constantly mending wagons and tents, spending days on the hunt... I still can't believe city dwellers have food delivered straight to their doorsteps. (BioWare 2014) The narrative not only actively Others the Dalish Inquisitor through their upbringing, it also acknowledges them as such through a juxtaposition of “decadence” and “primitivism” (Loomba 2015, 117), in which the former is associated with “city dwellers” (BioWare 2014). Since there is no specification here, it is quite possible that Lavellan, as a Dalish Elf, refers to humans and City Elves alike; it would play into the narrative that the Dalish think themselves superior to the City Elves. In (II), the Inquisitor paints a romanticized image of their lifestyle: “The best part is when the aravel––our wagons––turned from the plains to the woods. I used to spend weeks exploring the forest” (BioWare 2014). The Dalish Elves are untainted by the pollution of an industrialized, technocratic society. This corresponds to the lingering colonial image of the noble savage again, similar to “through hard work” alienating them from the metropoleis in Thedas (BioWare 2014). Finally, (III) still manages to cast the Dalish in the mold of the Other, even though––or perhaps because––the Inquisitor attempts to relativize the differences between elves and humans: “The human towns we traded with ate the same food and suffered the same weather we did. The main difference was that they had homes, while we wandered” (BioWare 2014). Not wanting to answer Josephine’s query at all leads to: “I'd rather not discuss it. In the past, the Dalish have suffered from revealing too much” (BioWare 2014). Players will still have visual exposition to the Dalish lifestyle at a later point in the game, when they visit the clan in the Exalted Plains region; it just does not happen verbally by the player character. BioWare’s dialogue wheel allows the player to relay differing accounts of an elven life, but the common denominator is that the elves are ‘one with nature’ and traverse their land in nomadic caravans. Despite the hard work that Lavellan points out is at the core of such a life, they miss it dearly and wish to return to it once the Inquisition would not be needed anymore. This once again drives home the idea of praising a simplistic existence over the complex and complicated lifestyle that Lavellan is exposed to through the Inquisition. The overall conversation has the intradiegetic purpose of dismantling hostile rumors about the Dalish Elves (the kidnapping of children or the barbaric lifestyle) and the extradiegetic purpose of introducing the player to Dalish culture. However, a romanticized 65

image of Dalish life persists, even by admission of the Inquisitor themselves. The Dalish are always Other: “There is a wish to become the Other while at the same time there is one to spurn it” (Mukherjee 2017, 59). Whether the player character actively feeds into it or tries to curb it through their dialogue options only decides on which side the coin of Other-ness will fall.

9 (Re-)Colonizing Thedas: The Colonialist Nature of Open World Mechanics

Empire and empire-building hold “continued relevance” (Mukherjee 2017, 30) in videogames, especially in those that mechanize their spatial manifestations in “the acquisition of geographical space” (29). Long-standing strategy franchises like Age of Empires (1997–) or Civilization (1991–) even espouse empire-building as their primary ludic goal (Lammes 2010, 1). Dragon Age, being of the RPG genre, comes with another, subtler exposition of empire- building in its game design: regional expansion as the backbone of the main narrative, resource- related “micronarratives” that are enacted as a “localized incident” (Jenkins 2004, 125), and the mechanical need for fast-travel locations across various regions of Ferelden and Orlais. In the words of postcolonial discourse, the player character becomes an explorer who “penetrates and takes possession of lands which are seen as passive, or awaiting discovery” (Loomba 2015, 84). This principal element of the game design does not take into account the different racial backgrounds that the player character can have. Whether the Inquisition is helmed by a human noble or a Dalish Elf makes no difference to the importance of and reflection on the expansion element in the game design. Colonizing Thedas with a Dalish Inquisitor is not rewriting the colonialist history of the (real and fictional) past but rather playing “straight into the procedural rhetoric of empire” (Mukherjee 2017, 86). The player (character) becomes a benevolent colonizer: By abstaining from active, overt violence (except when against the forces of the otherworldly antagonist), the Inquisition asserts itself as a supportive, magnanimous presence in regions all around Orlais and Ferelden––but a presence through colonialist practices nonetheless. Mechanics pertaining to the geography of the game include its sandbox-like structure of the world map, and its ample use of looting as a means to accumulate knowledge, resources, wealth and quest artefacts from these ‘discovered’ regions. The two-fold structure of this chapter explores both in relation to playing the game as the Dalish Inquisitor. Given the history of the elves, ripe with conflict and conquest, employing conventional game mechanics of

expansion and exploitation runs the risk of a breach between narrative plausibility and mechanical possibilities.

9.1 Inquisition Presence on the World Map: Our Chief Weapon is…the Land Grab

The ‘open world’ or ‘sandbox’ mechanic opens the world, as the name implies, to deliberate player exploration, bringing medium conventions to full fruition. Indeed, Jenkins labels games “a kind of information space, a memory palace” for that very reason (2004, 126). DA:I draws from such open-world tendencies yet still provides a slightly linear gaming experience by implementing quests in a fixed sequence. Through an in-game world map, the player can visit several places in Thedas. For example, the Inquisition base starts in the village Haven, and at a later point in the story moves to the mountain fortress Skyhold. Other areas must be unlocked in the world map (through so-called ‘power’ points generated by accomplished missions) which are then open for exploration. In all regions, players establish camps throughout the landscape. These camps have a mechanical as well as a narrative function: For one, they serve as fast-travel locations and allow players to change their party members without having to return to the Inquisition base. Players can also refill potions, restore health points to their characters, and fulfil local side quests. For another, the camps visualize the advance of the Inquisition as an expansionist force in Thedas. The purpose of the institution is to defeat the main antagonist of the game, and in order to achieve that goal, the player is tasked with promoting the Inquisition in Thedas and with forging alliances along the way. The regional camps are a powerful reminder of the Inquisition’s accumulation of power, playing into the logic of spatial expansion connected with which is the necessity to remove the “fog” which prevents the player’s ‘line of sight’ from accessing information about surrounding areas. (Mukherjee 2017, 29) Mukherjee thus sees the mechanic as a manifestation of Empire. Lammes, in contrast, argues that the interactive quality of player agency makes expansionist videogame plots more in line with a “hybridised and transformed” meaning of postcolonialism (Lammes 2010, 2). Being able to co-shape their surroundings allows players to deviate from a colonial legacy rather than reproduce it. Such an elastic understanding of (post)colonial spatiality in videogames may seem to apply to a DA:I playthrough with an elf as the player character protagonist; but even a Dalish Inquisitor who participates in land grabs employs “the same logic of colonial rule and empire” (Mukherjee 2010, 86). It only means that they ‘play back’ within the rules of the imperial ludic system (86).

Both Lammes and Mukherjee draw their examples from strategy games which have colonial techniques such as “exploring, trading, mapmaking and military manoeuvring” inked into their main plot (Lammes 2010, 1). Through “cartography and surveying” (Mukherjee 2017, 33), flag-placing, and a “struggle for the resources” (35) these games “perpetuate the logic of colonialism instead of challenging it” (31; original emphasis). DA:I’s sandbox exploration draws, to various degrees, from almost all of these practices. The gameplay purpose of the Inquisition presence around Ferelden and Orlais is as clear as its narrative purpose: “Establish camps to hold [the region] and support Inquisition activity in the region” (BioWare 2014). All of this becomes particularly poignant when the geographical expansion takes place on elven land such as the so-called Emerald Graves, located in the historical Dales. Elven history here is still tangible in land markers such as statues and ruins, dialogues with NPCs, and in the embedded narratives about elven history, which the player obtains as Codex entries. This exposition helps build the world by infusing its history and culture into the geography of the game architecture. The historic elven claim to the land is clearly visible in the Inquisition camps in the region. All four of the camps that the player can set up in the Emerald Graves are erected beneath a statue of a wolf. The wolf is a recurring image throughout the Dales regions, representing an ancient elven god and serving as a monument for fallen elven warriors from the Exalted March. A note found beneath such a wolf statue discloses that the Dalish clans passing through the region would “honor these statues with offerings of flowers” (BioWare 2014). The wolf statues evoke the territorial presence of the Dalish Elves: They become “spatial forms and fantasies through which a culture declares its presence” (Carter 2003, 376). In an echo of planting “the imperial flag to mark out territory” (Mukherjee 2017, 34), the player places an Inquisition standard next to available landmarks such as the wolf statues and others (monuments, buildings, geographical formations), which now visibly assert the Inquisition’s control over this piece of land. Only afterwards does a pop-up box inform the player about the landmarks they laid claim to. Apart from gaining ‘influence’ and ‘power’ as a reward, the player can also visibly customize the regional map and, accordingly, the regional landscape. In another region in the Dales, a ‘claim’ opportunity is even the first mechanic to appear when the player character ventures forth from the starting camp. Again, the landmark seems of elven make, a stag statue which at some point was marked by a pro-Chantry plaque commemorating the Exalted March. Not only does the claim mechanic instill in players the belief that they can own a part of the game world, it also offers them the choice to do so in the first place. The Inquisition may be no

Empire in the sense that it “absorbs [old powers] into a new international network” (Loomba 2015, 10) but the colonial techniques in the mechanics still echo the real historical displacement of Indigenous Peoples during the heyday of colonialism in North America. The regional maps are (literally) laid bare step by step as the player explores every nook and cranny of the world, claiming landmarks and collecting resources while establishing camps for quick-travel access along the way. The camps become the forts in the ‘wilderness’, a place carved out of ‘unexplored’ space much in the sentiment of a Canadian ‘garrison mentality' (Frye 1971, 226). The fact that the player has to peel away the unknown of that space by scouting ahead into the initial obscurity implies that there was nothing there before the player’s arrival, bestowing upon the regions a terra nullius character: a problematic embodiment to create, given the historical baggage that comes with the idea of justifying colonization by identifying somebody else’s land as ‘unexplored’ or ‘wild’. While the tangibly violent character of colonialism is more directly exposed in the bloodshed and massacres that often follow territorial expansion, the subtle violence inherent in territorial expansion is no less significant. As Blackhawk argues, the work of explorers and cartographers such as the Lewis and Clark corps lay the groundwork for the settlement of the land that was to follow, “forever altering the region’s ecology and societies” (2008, 10). Under the player’s control, the Inquisition assumes the same exploratory mantle to permanently change the landscape by scouting the area, establishing camps and landmarks, and removing resources. The visual references to elven culture in the Dales mark them as the only region (visited so far in the games) that does not stem from a Eurocentric inspiration in the DA worldbuilding. Ferelden and Orlais are generally read as England and France, respectively; notably also in their (post)colonial manifestations in Canada (Schallegger 2016, 78). Gaider himself, as quoted by Young, confirmed that Thedas was planned as “a fictionalized version of European history” (Young 2012, 5). On the other hand, the Dales with their cultural markers (innunguaq and stone carvings) visibly paint a geography inspired by the Indigenous Peoples of North America. The reforming of the Dales under the standards of the Inquisition becomes a poignant foil for the process of “un-forming” the people(s) native to that land (Loomba 2015, 20; original emphasis). That this process is already underway is palpable in the remarks by NPCs that highlight the oddity of Lavellan’s presence as the only elf in the Emerald Graves: “Funny, we’re in the Dales, but I haven’t seen any Dalish yet” is pitched against a human soldier asking the Inquisitor: “Shouldn’t I be asking you about the Dales?” (BioWare 2014; original emphasis). Clearly, the emphasis is there because of Lavellan’s race; ironically, given the colonial techniques employed

by the player character in the Inquisition’s name, it might as well be addressed at any Inquisitor. They become, after all, the principal cartographer of the land.

9.2 Looting: A Colonialist Reward System?

In videogames, looting serves a simple mechanical function: to equip the player with the resources necessary to play the game. The noun loot refers to “goods (esp. articles of considerable value) taken from an enemy, a captured city, etc. in time of war; also, in wider sense, something taken by force or with violence; booty, plunder, spoil. . . . Also, the action or process of looting” (OED, s.v. “loot, n.2”). Used as a verb, it means to “carry [something] off as loot or booty” (OED, s.v. “loot, v.”). These general definitions also apply to loot as a gaming term, where it describes every resource that the player can pluck from the game, usually stripped from defeated enemies or found while exploring the world. In DA:I, this means mostly coin, armor, weapons, herbs, clothing materials and other accessories. As a way to interact with the embedded narrative, looting yields information on the world and its characters when material gain and exposition merge into one. For instance, some armor and weapon items (categorized as ‘unique’) come with an individualized, short description of the item’s history. Usually they are associated with one of the various cultures and/or ethnicities of Thedas, including the elves. The description of the magic staff named Yavanalis explains the history of the weapon: Following the Dalish clans’ diaspora from Halamshiral in the Glory Age, one of the Keepers became famous for his vicious attacks on Orlesians. Known among humans as “the Pale Demon,” he blasted unprotected merchants or soldiers with a blizzard from his staff, even in summer. The attacks lasted until chevaliers killed the Keeper and his entire clan. (BioWare 2014) The player character is equipped with elvish weapons once used to fight against the oppressors of the indigenous population of Thedas. Unlike the race-specific options in the dialogue wheel, depending on the background of the player character, this is not race-locked: All unique items of various origins are available to player characters of any racial background. However, if the weapon in question is an artefact of an oppressed indigenous culture and community, the ethical discourse surrounding it must inevitably pick up on the issue of colonial supremacy. Land acquisition (expansion of the Inquisition by means of the open world mechanic) aiming for material gain (collecting resources for the Inquisition with the looting mechanic) comprises an “age-old colonial apologia for conquest” (Voyles 2015, vii). With the history the elves were given in the game design, exploitation as an element of colonialism seems as evident in the fiction as it does in reality. Neither the Dalish nor the City Elves hold societal status equal to humans; and yet elven artefacts are coveted as valuable resources to acquire as they are categorized as ‘unique’ items for the player to collect––or be given as a reward. 70

Var Bellanaris

In the Exalted Plains, the local Dalish Elves have become passive bystanders in a region once part of an autonomous elven kingdom. Borrowing from Spivak’s terminology, the Orlesian armies are the agents of the colonialist Subject exploiting and reigning over the colonized subaltern, which has been pressured to the margins of the map (Spivak 2003, 24– 25)—literally and figuratively, in the case of the Dalish clan in the Exalted Plains (Fig. 9). The location of the Dalish camp is to the left bottom corner of the map,15 and is furthermore visibly cut off from the rest of it by a river. Their isolation on the map all but visualizes the Dalish Elves as a community on the fringes of society. One of the quests the player can choose to do here is to win the clan’s support for the Inquisition. In order to do so, various members of the clan approach the Inquisitor with assignments to gain their trust, expressed through so-called ‘Dalish Favor’ that is numerically collated. Once enough favor is collected, a member of the clan can be recruited as an agent for the Inquisition, and the player is paid experience points and further rewards. One of these assignments is a quest to cleanse a nearby historical burial site from demons wreaking havoc there. Before departing, the Keeper of the Dalish clan reminds the player character to be “mindful of the resting places of the dead. Var Bellanaris is sacred ground” (BioWare 2014). As the game is wont to do, the landmark mechanic again allows the player to literally mark the burial ground. The information pop-up that is unlocked by doing so informs the player not only about the purpose of Var Bellanaris as an ancestral cemetery but also how the elves have managed to keep humans, or “shemlen” as the pop-up reads, from Figure 9: Map of the Exalted Plains region, with the turquoise marker indicating the camp of the Dalish. (BioWare 2014). reclaiming this piece of land

15 The map continues to expand further in the north, beyond what is depicted in this screenshot, with more military strongholds that are occupied by the armies involved in the Orlesian Civil War. 71

that “now belongs to Orlais”: thanks to “uncomplimentary tales of elven curses and vengeful spirits” (BioWare 2014). The game might well play with the audience’s expectations. After all, the trope of the ‘cursed indigenous burial ground’, especially when associated with eldritch horrors, has already brought Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) to literary prominence, while the first Poltergeist film (1982) and its 2015 adaptation play with a narrative of (sometimes indigenous, sometimes not) vengeful ghosts.16 The spirits of Var Bellanaris are, of course, creatures from the Fade rather than the actual ghosts of the deceased buried there, as far as the narrative goes––so at least the “vengeful spirits” bit is taken literal in DA:I, while the ‘elven curses’ bit probably remains more on the side of gratuitous warnings/threats to keep humans away from the place. Once at the burial site, the demons spawn immediately and can be taken care of in a quick fight. Now players can return to the Dalish clan and inform the Keeper of their success, after which they will be rewarded with +3 Dalish Favor. If the player decides to explore the burial site first, it becomes clear that the graves can be broken into. A ‘destroy’ command pops up and if players act on it, they can empty the graves of their valuables. So, in essence, the player has both fulfilled the request of the Dalish Keeper but at the same time desecrated an elven burial site. Upon return to camp, the Keeper reveals that some hunters of the clan have watched the player character, and that the elves are, naturally, unhappy about the actions taken. The player is awarded +2 Dalish Favor as a “small token of gratitude” for defeating the demons, with -1 Dalish Favor for disrespectful behavior (BioWare 2014). The Keeper is not the only NPC channeling the game’s ethics here. Even the Inquisitor’s party members speak up. In one of my playthroughs of the scene, the dwarf Varric remarks as soon as the party enters the burial site: “Let’s try not to poke around in someone else’s grave, alright?” (BioWare 2014). Švelch refers to this as a character “express[ing] fictional moral emotion” (2010, 57). The looting mechanic is incorporated into the narrative by intradiegetic comments on its ethical dimensions. A player who wants to explore every nook and cranny of the game world might not be deterred from doing so that easily, but the ethical framing of the quest still turns the mirror of self-awareness towards the player and prompts a process of critical reflection on what is transpiring. An inconsistency in BioWare’s moral gameplay reveals itself in the fact that a Dalish Inquisitor is not given a voice to express doubt or concern about the grave-robbing, or even the halla-hunting in the region. Both acts make little narrative sense for a player character of Dalish

16 I am grateful to Justin Biggi for pointing out the Poltergeist references; while the original Poltergeist does not, in fact, take place on ancient native burial ground, subsequent parodies do. 72

background, and yet the game does not give direct feedback through the (re)actions of the player character, but through the NPCs. The need to uphold player agency overrides a chance for implementing moral gameplay; or once more, the consequences of letting players choose different racial backgrounds for their character have not been considered. It is not surprising that side missions such as grave-robbing or open-world mechanics such as looting are designed in this way. Švelch criticizes in an analysis of Mass Effect that making moral choices in videogames is “often relegated to small, isolated islands” (2010, 61). For the main plot, it matters little whether a player character, Dalish or not, hunts halla or steals from elven graves in order to boost the Inquisition’s resources. Thus, the moral gameplay of DA:I is inconsistent in its execution. There is yet another way to solve the quest: Players can wrap up the assignment from the Keeper without any trespasses, thus earning all Dalish Favor necessary and recruiting the Dalish agent for the Inquisition. After the quest is displayed as completed, the player can then return to the burial site and raid the tombs. They will be awarded with the full Dalish Favor for the mission, receive the full loot from the tombs, and walk away unchastised since none of the Dalish will mention the grave robbing committed by the player character. The mission is already registered as completed in the game design, and therefore it fails to renegotiate the narrative structure. What Švelch notes as a design drawback of moral gameplay unfolds here: that feedback “is usually quantified and the consequences . . . arrive instantly” (2010, 61). For instance, the design could have automatically triggered a reaction whenever the burial site is looted. There could have been a short cutscene that shows the Dalish Keeper calling back the agent he sent to aid the Inquisition after the player completed the missions necessary to collect enough Dalish Favor. By doing so, the ramifications of the player character’s actions would have resulted in a plausible withdrawal of previously earned Dalish Favor in the form of the clan member who started aiding the Inquisition. The intradiegetic moral judgement in this quest indicates the direction into which the game design intends to steer the player. It also encompasses the identity that is created in the secondary reality, which can never be quite the same as in primary reality because it is not fully created, but it is at least partially inherited. The user cannot carry over her or his identity, because to become part of narrative textuality means to be born again in the fictional world, and to be confronted with its ethics and politics. (Maietti 2008, 100) In addition to the choices, actions and comments of the player come the narratively plausible motivations and experiences of the player character. This confrontation with ethics and politics is at the core of what playing, according to Sicart, is all about: “an act of judgment of the rule systems and the fictional world the player is presented with” (2005, 16; emphasis mine). The

game acts as an “artificial system for generating experiences” that allows players to explore, test and find their values in a fictional context (Sylvester 2013, 44). Of course, given that DA:I’s player character comes with a prefabricated background complicates the player-to-character mapping. While the player is free to develop their character as they wish, for the sake of narrative plausibility they might wish to keep character development within the confines of what would be consistent with the character’s background. Sometimes, as with the example above, the system will actively push the player towards certain choices. By imbuing the grave-robbing scene with consequences, both on the narrative (NPC comments) and the mechanical level (subtraction of Dalish Favor), the design of DA:I attempts to make players aware of the in-game reception and repercussions of morally ambiguous choices. What about the mechanic itself, though––does looting, as this chapter set out to ask, function as a colonialist tool or not? At the heart of the mechanic is the intention to gather resources, a convention that players will come to expect from the medium because it is tied up in the familiarity of the practice of (video-)gaming itself. From a purely mechanical mindset, then, the intention is to amass one’s own material wealth from the resources provided by the game design. It is designed to be always useful to the player––even when it is not: Unnecessary items can simply be sold, generating more in-game currency that the player can spend on other useful items. It sits, therefore, “at the core of economic activity” in the game (Dyer-Whiteford and de Peuter 2009, 138). While DA:I disallows the conversion of real-world currency into in-game coins, it cannot escape the capitalist cloak of the looting mechanic. As such, looting in DA:I inadvertently plays into the colonization of the elves when it happens on indigenous territory or in relation to a quest assigned by elves. It parallels the power structures present in the narrative in a way that corresponds to the concept of increasing player agency by means of implementing power fantasies. Putting aside the conventional associations with combat mechanics and the nature of first-person shooters, even non-combat mechanics such as the world map expansion or resource-gathering unfurl into imperialist authority practices when channeled through a lens of postcolonial discursive practices.

10 An Elf at Court: Narrativization and Mechanization of Othering

As one of the major quests of the main plotline, ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’ warrants its own chapter in this thesis, seeing as playing DA:I with a Dalish Inquisitor highlights particularly well the in-world racism towards elves. However, the game fails to include sufficient narrative information from the tie-in novel The Masked Empire (2014; TME in short) 74

which would have resulted in a more comprehensive understanding of the oppression of the Orlesian City Elves. This chapter looks at the main quest from two different perspectives: For one, it explores how game mechanics unique to the quest allow for an adaptable portrayal of in-game racism. For example, they regulate how the Inquisitor is perceived at court by taking the Inquisitor’s racial background into account. It then compares how in lieu of game mechanics, micronarratives are not only responsible for the way in which nobles approach Lavellan but also their elven companions, Sera and Solas. For another, the chapter serves as an entry point for Chapter 11, which traces the existent and missing links to the tie-in novel, focusing on the City Elf Briala and her plotline, parts of which are absent from the game quest. As a result, a lack of transmedial knowledge may lead to players misinterpreting their decisions in major narrative choices in the quest.

The ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’ Quest

The quest takes place in the Winter Palace in the former elven and now Orlesian city Halamshiral, where an assassination plot threatens the life of the Empress Celene. The ongoing Orlesian War is coming to an end with peace talks that are set for the same date. The Inquisitor is expected to throw their weight behind one of the two contenders for the throne: the current empress or her cousin, Duke Gaspard. Meanwhile, Celene’s former servant and secret ex-lover, the City Elf Briala, leverages her stealth skills and connections to negotiate for a more elf-friendly government. The player needs to gather information on Celene, Gaspard and Briala, and ultimately guide the peace talks into one of altogether five possible outcomes (with either Celene or Gaspard on the throne, Briala involved or not, or a public truce between all three). The in-game racism is reflected both in micronarratives (how other ball guests talk to the player character) and in mechanics unique to the quest (‘Court Approval’). For a player character who is a member of a marginalized community––either as a mage, or as an elf, dwarf or Qunari–– the quest highlights how they are met with racism. The missing information from TME complicates the quest by leaving out key information about the elven actors in the Orlesian Civil War. Set before the events of DA:I (and published half a year before the game) the novel revolves around the beginning of the war and the secret romantic relationship between Empress Celene and her elven handmaid, Briala. It reveals valuable information about the NPCs but not all of it has been transferred into the game. So, players unfamiliar with the novel cannot rely on the game narrative to give them the full picture of interrelated occurrences and incidents when their player character dabbles in Orlesian politics. A lack of clear communication of intent from the side of the game developers makes

it difficult to gauge whether this was an intentional knowledge vacuum in the game design or not. One could interpret that the player is supplied with incomplete knowledge about the relationships between Briala, Celene and Gaspard in order to mimic a real-life scenario. Along that line of thinking, the player character would not be omniscient about goings-on they are not directly involved in (despite an otherwise impeccable spy master in the Inquisition). However, it is striking that the missing information considerably changes Briala in the eyes of the narrative. As a result, the quest glosses over the systemic and political violence committed against the City Elves of Halamshiral.

10.1 Perceptions and Reactions: Interacting with In-Game Racism

In the vein of the noble savage analysis given by Pierce (2007) in Chapter 4.1, the Dalish Inquisitor becomes a symbolic cultural interface not only between the Inquisition and the Orlesian Court but also between elves and humans. The quest only drags to light what is already there from the beginning of the game. It is, after all, in one of the first conversations with Josephine that she propounds: “[Your clan] must see that you move in different circles now” (BioWare 2014). At the Orlesian court, Lavellan’s status as Other is addressed on both a narrative and a mechanic level. While the narrative reinforces the exotic appeal that the human nobility of Orlais sees in a Dalish Inquisitor, one mechanic in particular shows that the game design of DA:I tries to expose the player (character) to in-game racism. Objectifying Lavellan happens by way of exoticizing them under the scandalized gaze of the Orlesian court, while other reactions emphasize the sheer incredulity of the idea of an elf as Inquisitor. After the initial conversation with Duke Gaspard, on whose invitation the Inquisitor joins the festivities, various NPC voices emerge from the crowd gathered in the entrance courtyard: “Is that the elf Inquisitor?” “An elf savage? Maker forbid!” “This is Gaspard’s idea of a joke!” . . . “Is that the Inquisitor?” “A Dalish? No, that cannot be.” (BioWare 2014) A Qunari Inquisitor is similarly discredited by the court. Under these first impressions of the palace and its guests, the player is left to roam the area, possibly stumbling upon the first side quest: helping a distraught noblewoman to retrieve a valuable ring she has lost. She greets the Inquisitor by way of a “You there! Rabbit!”, using one of the most common racial slurs against elves (BioWare 2014). While Gaspard foregrounds his guest’s status as the Inquisitor over the fact that they are an elf, other members of the nobility find the heritage of a Dalish Inquisitor

immediately jarring to their mental image of the leader of the Inquisition. The irony of this is particularly tangible in a replay after completing the Jaws of Hakkon DLC, which reveals the identity of the original Inquisitor, Ameridan, as an elf from the Kingdom of the Dales (BioWare 2015a). It is only ever humans who erroneously address the Inquisitor like they would an elven servant, whereas the servants themselves never seem to mistake the Inquisitor for one of their own ranks. They can differentiate between a City Elf and a Dalish Elf, while the human nobility apparently cannot. This points towards racist structures that disallow the hegemonic classes to differentiate between multidimensional representations of a minority community, which conforms to one of the many definitions encompassed in the process of stereotyping: “a reduction of images and ideas to a simple and manageable form” (Loomba 2015, 74). Against this backdrop, it makes sense to have Briala, a fellow elf, ask the Inquisitor: “How many of the guests have mistaken you for a kitchen servant?” (BioWare 2014). Given her identity, she would be more aware of the ramifications of stereotyping than a human NPC would. Instead, the human NPCs in the mission are designed to perpetuate the stereotype: In a first step, they reduce the Inquisitor to their identity in court gossip (see the NPC snippets quoted above). In a second step, they neutralize the Inquisitor’s presence into invisibility. A key mechanic during the mission is to eavesdrop on other guests to gather clues useful for the progress in the story. One such eavesdrop opportunity allows the Inquisitor to listen to a brief dialogue between palace guards: “Did you see that knife-eared servant girl in the kitchen? The ginger?” “Keep talking, I’m starting to believe I was there.” “I need to get one of those.” (BioWare 2014) Intersecting marginalization of race and gender is at work here, allowing the soldiers to assert their supremacy over servants who are elven and female. All Inquisitors are able to employ the ‘eavesdrop’ mechanic to listen to the palace guards’ gossip, but it becomes a particularly poignant narrative moment when playing the game as Lavellan. Lavellan is, after all, elven; and they may also be a woman. Unfortunately, the game does not incorporate further reflection by the player character themselves. It misses an opportunity to more immersively highlight the in- game racism by, for example, have the player character speak to themselves about the heard things and thus unpack them more visibly for the player to follow, rather than leave them standing uncommented. At least the eavesdrop mechanic adds weight to the reductionist process of the human stereotyping of the elves: It makes narrative sense that a celebrity guest such as the Inquisitor could listen to other conversations unperturbed when they are easily mistaken for a kitchen servant by the people they eavesdrop on. 77

The quest also involves the player in a new mechanic and statistic called ‘Court Approval’. It assesses direct and indirect interactions between the player character and NPCs, and follows the same logic as dialogue trees: controlling player behavior by “predefining a list of actions players can take and matching responses from other characters” (Sylvester 2013, 107). The Inquisitor’s actions and comments through the dialogue wheel garner positive or negative reactions from the Orlesian nobility, resulting in either a gain in or loss of approval points. The initial value of Court Approval for non-mage humans is 40 but varies for other races and for mages. An elf, dwarf or mage Inquisitor starts with -10 Court Approval, while a Qunari

Inquisitor loses as much as 15 Court Approval, given that Qunari are considered a hostile race in the rest of Thedas. Rogues and warriors may receive additional 5 Court Approval but only if they are human (DAW, s.v. “Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts”). The quest makes players immediately aware of how their minority character is marginalized by the Orlesian nobility. A Dalish Inquisitor receives the following pop-up message at the beginning of the mission: “Orlesian nobility looks down on elves. The court watches you with a critical eye.” The game also tells the player that Court Approval is gained through “finesse, entertaining people, or keeping up appearances” (BioWare 2014). This already implies that it goes beyond navigating conversations, i.e. direct interaction. While most of the approval is won or lost via choices made in the dialogue wheel, even indirect interactions influence the rating, for example through how much time the Inquisitor spends at the party. The mission requires the Inquisitor to explore closed-off parts of the palace while the rest of the nobility is mingling in and around the ball room. The longer the Inquisitor’s absence, the higher the loss of approval points since the nobility will take note and consider it rude. The player either decides to hurry and return as soon as possible, or takes their time with exploring the area (and looting it) but risks a loss of Court Approval. Especially for players assuming the role of a minority race or of a mage, this decision might be a costly one to make, given their lowered starting points. The mechanic may prevent players from exploring as much of the palace as possible simply because of the race of their player character. This could have been intensified by having certain areas of the palace cut off entirely to Dalish or Qunari Inquisitors; especially with Lavellan, the game design could have utilized the above-mentioned invisibility of the character. A Dalish Elf who is mistaken for a kitchen servant might naturally not be granted access to parts where court guests would be free to roam. However, such a choice might have been dismissed so as not to risk alienating players unfamiliar with a lack of privilege, or agency as its in-game equivalent. If the player succeeds in garnering +60 Court Approval or more, the game design acknowledges that this feat was made more difficult by race and/or class circumstances. A high-

ranking noblewoman may comment: “You are an interesting one. A Dalish in the Winter Palace, more genteel than the Grand Duke. That’s put this lot in their place, hasn’t it?” (BioWare 2014). The juxtaposition of the Inquisitor’s ethnicity (‘Dalish’), and their elegance and good manners at court (‘more genteel than the Grand Duke’) is coupled with exoticizing the Inquisitor as ‘an interesting one’, someone whose very appeal lies in their outlandish identity. The benevolent prejudice inherent in the noble savage trope is exposed in an environment fertile to the romanticized conception of the Indigenous person ‘tamed’ enough to partake in high society get-togethers.

10.2 The Elves of the Inquisition: Court Reactions to Sera and Solas

While the quest design allows for a few dialogue scenes between the player character and Inquisition council members (such as Josephine or Cullen) or court guests, it displays little interaction between the court guests and Inquisition party members. After two playthroughs with elves in my customary party of three, I could not note any incident in which Sera or Solas would be subjected to ridicule by the Orlesian nobility. 17 Notably, however, their introductions at court differ. Sera’s introduction reflects her general attitude towards upper-class society, whereas Solas’ introduction provides another example of how elves are reduced to stereotypes. Unsurprisingly, given her own activism on behalf of “the little people”, Sera seems to think highly of Briala––but only initially (BioWare 2014). It is more surprising that her approval of the fellow elf does not extend past humorous remarks and an admission that she finds Briala “frigging funny” (BioWare 2014).18 Sera fails to endorse Briala’s political goals beyond this and appears to be cautious of them. If the player implies in the dialogue that they might support Briala’s cause, the game’s feedback system informs them that Sera slightly disapproves of Briala. She thinks that the achievement of Briala’s goals is carried out on the backs of the Orlesian City Elves who died in the scheming between Briala and Celene. It is only after the quest that, when talking to Sera again, the dialogue cutscene allows for a conversation about Sera’s disapproval of Briala. Angered about dead servants at the palace, Sera explicitly states that she blames both Celene and Briala for exacerbating an already tense situation. As TME reveals, the City Elves in Halamshiral were all but massacred when Celene gave the order to burn down the elven quarter there. So Sera asks the poignant question: “How many lives are worth an empress’

17 I also included the Qunari party member, Iron Bull, in a playthrough to see how he would be treated as a member of another race unpopular with the Orlesian nobles. In a conversation with the Inquisitor he states that “the nobles keep messing with me” but does not go into detail beyond that (BioWare 2014). 18 I am indebted to Justin Biggi for drawing my attention to this. 79

arse?” (BioWare 2014). She resents that Briala entered into an affair with the Empress of Orlais because “their mistake made everything worse” (BioWare 2014). Whether she means the affair or the burning of the Halamshiral slums is unclear; Sera generally alludes to the events of TME by reminding the player character that many people died even before the “hole in the sky” (BioWare 2014). Her advice for dealing with Celene and Briala is candid and on point, in typical Sera manner: “Maybe remind them not to be idiots” (BioWare 2014). So, despite taking to Briala’s personality, Sera disapproves of her politics because she partially blames Briala for the deaths of Orlesian elves during the Civil War. Incidentally, Sera is not the only City Elf questioning the methods in Briala’s political role. One of the few mentions of Celene and Briala’s affair comes from an elven servant who can be talked to at Halamshiral. Like Sera, she feels dissatisfied with Briala’s way of “playing revolution” (BioWare 2014). The same sentiment that makes Sera wary of Briala is echoed in this nameless NPC: Becoming too intimately involved with the ruling class distances Briala from her people––in the eyes of her people. Both Sera and the servant seem to feel that Briala cannot but feed into the class division by participating in the Grand Game, in an almost literal depiction of what Mukherjee criticizes about “reverse-colonialism” (2017, 86): “Playing against the grain” or, in Orlais, playing the Grand Game, is “the logic that validates empire” (86). All companions of the Inquisitor are introduced by the court’s crier when they enter the ballroom and all of them are introduced differently. Some introductions seem to be done without the character’s cooperation (for example, Cassandra reacts with annoyance when the crier takes the time to mention all five of her first names) while others seem to be initiated by the characters themselves. Sera’s introduction falls into the latter category. In fact, she uses it to play a prank on the court, and the court’s crier in particular, by having herself be introduced as “Her Ladyship Mai Bhalsych of Korse” (BioWare 2014). Of Korse, the wordplay becomes immediately obvious when heard aloud. It is also a play on expectations: An elf introduced as a ‘Lady’ would be novel in Orlais, where being elven and being noble is practically an oxymoron (although the quest can end with the establishment of the first elven noble: Briala as Marquise of the Dales). Solas, on the other hand, is announced as the “Inquisitor’s elven servant” (BioWare 2014; emphasis mine). While his status as a homeless elf, apostate and hedge mage sometimes earns him ridicule or scorn from the other companions, the game no more or no less places him in an employment role than any of the other party members. He regularly stresses the fact that he stays with the Inquisition out of his own will and interest in

the rifts in the sky. Of course, the revelation of his real identity at the end of the game casts Solas’ motivations in a new light. The historical retelling of his life in the Trespasser DLC (2015b) adds a retrospective layer of meaning to the fact that out of the two elven companions, it is not the City Elf Sera but the apostate Solas whom the public eye mistakenly coerces into a servant’s role: In a rebellion against the ancient elven god-kings, Solas freed and recruited former slaves in order to fuel the war that would eventually, in addition to the subsequent dispute with the newly formed Tevinter Imperium, destroy Elvhenan. Solas’ relationship to slavery is woven into his character concept, especially where his historical past is concerned (BioWare 2015b). Even if slavery is, in present-times Thedas, not formally part of the southern nations’ policies, the sociopolitical exploitation and oppression of the City Elves especially in Orlais approximates the enslavement of elves over the course of history: either by other elves in Elvhenan, or by humans in Tevinter. It could well be that the narrative here takes into account Solas’ involvement with slavery and the anti-slavery uprising in Elvhenan by singling him out among the companions. His identity as an elf undoubtedly also contributes to the status of a ‘servant’ which the court’s crier wants to attach to him. None of the other companions is received by so simple a moniker. Some of them have titles at court, such as Cassandra or Vivienne, but even those who do not, such as the Iron Bull or Blackwall, are still introduced as noteworthy individuals by pointing out their achievements in battle. Only Solas is cast as a servant, and what is interesting to note is that depending on the Inquisitor’s gender, his address changes slightly: He is the “elven servant” for a male Inquisitor and the “elven serving man” for a female one (BioWare 2014). His own gender is stressed when pitched against a female player character,19 but in both cases, the reference to his conceived status as a lower-ranking member of the Inquisition shines through. A dialogue option with Solas reveals to the player that he does not think of himself as a servant because he actively distances himself from the appearance of the elven servants at court: “I do not have the look of one of the elven servants, or I might well be invisible” (BioWare 2014). This statement both indicates his own sentiment on the matter of service, and refers to the invisibility of the elven servants when among human nobles. It is also the only instance where he makes a statement of that sort; he neither interrupts the court’s crier (like Cassandra) nor does he make a later reference to the introduction he was given. When asked whether he is

19 Given that Solas is an exclusive romance option for a female Dalish Inquisitor, the slight difference in his announcement poses the question whether or not it is entirely unintentional, or serves to objectify him (further) by sexualizing him. 81

being treated well, Solas reveals that the Orlesian nobles “do not quite know what to make of me” (BioWare 2014). So, paradoxically, while Solas is not mistaken for a local servant, his race makes the nobles assume he is still employed in a position of service within the Inquisition. The overarching theme of both Solas and Sera’s treatment at court is one of confusion. While with Solas it is clear-cut, Sera’s narrative in this quest seems to downright play with it: In a reversal (or reclamation) of how elves are treated at court, she initiates a different kind of misinterpretation of herself. How other court guests treat the two of them remains unknown, given that the player is not privy to conversations between the party members and other NPCs, but both Sera and Solas receive introductions that could not be more different from one another, and that yet both reveal different approaches to the relationship between humans and elves.

11 Transmedia Storytelling with The Masked Empire (2014) and ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’: Activating Recipients…Or Not

Transmedia stories are characterized not only by a decidedly economic motive in this day and age (Jenkins 2006, 104) but also by texts published across multiple media platforms with each new publication “making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” (95–6). The ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’ quest becomes more complicated when looking not at what it contains but at what is missing, seeing as one of the tie-in novels for DA:I specifically paves the ground for the plot of the quest. Dragon Age has been a voyage in transmedia storytelling from the very beginning. Its transmedial universe spans videogames, spin-off games, novels, comics, and television spin-offs. The first publication was the novel Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, released in March 2009 and followed by Dragon Age: The Calling in October 2009, both written by David Gaider. The release of the first game, Dragon Age: Origins, followed in November of the same year. Dragon Age II came on the market in March 2011, a few months before the novel Dragon Age: Asunder (also written by Gaider) in December. When Dragon Age: Inquisition was released as the hitherto latest game instalment in November 2014, it was preceded by a novel called Dragon Age: The Masked Empire, written by Patrick Weekes, in April 2014. In September of the same year, the so far last tie-in novel was published: Dragon Age: Last Flight, written by Liane Merciel. Other publications are also officially part of the franchise, including the World of Thedas companion books (2013 and 2015), an anime film called Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker (2012), an ongoing comic series, and more. The videogames remain the central installations of the franchise, however. As this thesis focuses on

DA:I, it serves to take a closer look at Dragon Age: The Masked Empire (TME in short) given that its plot precedes the storyline of the ‘Wicked Eyes’ quest. While the quest concludes the Orlesian Civil War, involving the player in the decision on who should be the ruler of the nation, the novel deals with the beginnings of the conflict. Since it provides all the background information necessary to understand how it came not only to the Civil War but also to the rift between former lovers Briala and Celene, it constitutes the ideal narrative foundation for the quest. However, since every franchise entry should be self- contained (Jenkins 2006, 96), the ideal transmedia story would not require the player of the game to have read the novel back to back in order to understand the plot, expectations or requirements of the game. The transition from TME to ‘Wicked Eyes’ does not fulfil these transmedial properties because the missing pieces of information contain important narrative information for the treatment and involvement of Orlesian elves in both society and politics. Being familiar with the novel may well tip a player’s decisions in the quest into another direction. No franchise entry should simply repeat its predecessor but rather expand on it and add to a larger pool of shared stories (Jenkins 2006, 105–6). In this sense, ‘Wicked Eyes’ considers the generalities of Celene and Briala’s relationship: (1) that they used to have a secret affair, (2) that it has been ended, and (3) that Celene put the elven quarter of Halamshiral to the torch and that Briala was somehow involved in it. What the quest does not account for is (A) in what role Briala was involved in the attack on the elven slums, and in Celene’s elven politics at large, and (B) the revelation in TME that in her youth, Celene had had Briala’s parents murdered in a ruse de guerre (Weekes 2014, 357–9). The lack of information in both cases pertains to either injustice against the elves at large, or injustice against Briala as an individual fighting for elf rights. In other words, the in-game racism and classism, particularly prevalent in the socially stratified Orlesian Empire, are greatly reflected in Briala’s storyline. She is vulnerable to abuse and exploitation because she is an elf in a distinctive, unusual position: not just that of Celene’s “jilted lover” (BioWare 2014), but also as a handmaid who was raised alongside a young Celene since Briala’s own parents had been servants in the household of Celene’s family (Weekes 2014, 234). For her entire life, she has been positioned directly in Celene’s shadow. The burning of the elven slums20 in Halamshiral serves as an entry point to examine more closely how the proximity to Celene changes Briala as a colonial subject. The reason why the alienage is put to the torch by Celene’s soldiers is because an elven uprising threatened Celene’s

20 Note that the elven quarter of Halamshiral is referred to as “slums” rather than alienage due to its size (Weekes 2014, 38). 83

authority: “Sitting on my throne, I see every city of the empire. If I must burn one to save the rest, I will weep, but I will light the torch!” (Weekes 2014, 184). Two things stand out from this quote. Celene justifies the sacrifice of the one for the good of the many; only the good of the many correlates with assuaging the dominant societal class in her empire: Fueled by a backlash against recent policies creating more equity for the elves and the emerging rumor about the Empress’ secret relationship with her elven handmaiden, Celene reverts to harsh measures to quell a growing resistance in the slums in order to disprove the notion that she be too lenient with the elves (111–12). Additionally, Celene using the word ‘city’ does not actually encompass the entire city. The particular part of the city that she has burned down, after all, is the elven part. It is also how players are introduced to the incident in the game quest: Briala “was sleeping with the Empress who purged our alienage,” says an elven servant in the Winter Palace (BioWare 2014). Although this conversation with the servant takes place after the player character can interact with Briala herself for the first time, the burning of the slums is not mentioned during the conversation with Briala; neither is it mentioned in her Codex entry, which glosses over the events of TME. Out of a novel filled with significant personal and social developments in Briala’s life, the implication that Briala is leading a spy network in Orlais is the only reference that the game designers chose to divulge in the in-game Codex entry for her. Briala’s identity as a colonial subject is clear because she is a City Elf and yet unclear because as part of Celene’s personal entourage, she was/is placed outside the orbit of the everyday experiences of elves living in an alienage: “Don’t walk up in your fancy armor and your bath-scented skin and act like you know what we’ve been through!”, an angry elf from the Halamshiral slums tells her at some point (Weekes 2014, 124). It is well possible that the intention of the writers was to create tension between Briala’s identities as a member of an oppressed people and as the lover of the Empress of Orlais. She is, in a sense, the “upwardly mobile immigrant” (Loomba 2015, 131), leaving her Othered by the dominant class because of her racial identity, and Othered by the racially oppressed community she identifies with because she is nominally better off than them. Others think her blind to their struggles: Briala is “urging [the empress] to help these elves in a hundred ways they will never notice” (Weekes 2014, 123), which implies that she, just like Celene, is unaware of the futility of Celene’s policies. Even after Celene has the slums burned down, Briala struggles throughout the rest of the novel with giving up the idea(l) of Celene as the savior-empress of the elves. This goes so far as to shifting the blame from Celene to Gaspard: “So you spread the rumours, which forced her to crush the rebellion instead of letting it sputter out and die peacefully…” (Weekes 2014, 150; emphasis mine). While unwilling to free Celene of all blame (184), Briala notes that she is not

the only one who is responsible for the deaths of the Halamshiral elves. This changes when she discovers that it was Celene who had caused the deaths of her parents in her youth. Her parents were servants of Celene’s family and fell victim to a political stratagem that should prove Celene’s savviness in playing the Grand Game (359). In other words, the lives of elven servants, in this case Briala’s parents, are seen as an acceptable bargaining chip among the Orlesian aristocracy who need to survive in the ruthless scheming of their politics. Only after discovering this can Briala distance herself from Celene, both physically by her erstwhile retreat from court, and mentally in terms of their ideological methods: “But freedom is not given. It is won.” “It is both. . . . Change comes through careful planning, through compromise.” “You compromised my parents.” (Weekes 2014, 362; original emphasis) After the burning of the slums, the revelation of Celene’s hand in the murder of Briala’s parents is the last straw to divert Briala’s politics from those of her former lover. Ultimately, it is the same sentiment with which Celene justified the burning of the slums which now costs her her lover: “sacrific[ing] some to save the rest” (362). The novel ends with the implication that Briala will radically change the way she petitions for elf rights in Orlais (360–3). By doing so, she becomes the architect to reiterate the spatial history left behind by Elvhenan: The ‘Crossroads’, an ancient elven network in a third dimension between the Fade and the real world, are paved as “a prehistory of places, a history of roads, footprints, trails of dust and foaming wakes” (Carter 2003, 376)––a pre-colonial history of roads outside of the known world, waiting to be reclaimed by Briala’s footsteps. All of this is part of the plot of the novel. Players unfamiliar with the novel are at a disadvantage as opposed to players who have read it. What the game quest tells us is that Celene and Briala were rumored to be lovers, that there had been a fire in the Halamshiral slums for which some elven servants blame Briala as much as Celene, and that Briala is back at court and ready to complicate Orlesian politics. What is particularly striking is that during the dialogue with the elven servant divulging Briala’s affair with Celene at the time of the alienage tragedy, the player has no ‘investigate’ function on the dialogue wheel for demanding more information on the alienage fire. The encounter focuses on the disreputable role Briala has as Celene’s lover in the eyes of the elven servant rather than giving the player the option to enquire about the context. The game quest does not have the “same frame of reference” for every audience member and therefore falls victim to a weakness of transmedia storytelling: to count “on a knowledgeable audience to ride over any potential points of confusion” (Jenkins 2006, 120). Instead, it may lead from minor confusion to a subversion of player intentions in key narrative choices.

This imbalance in narrative information in the game quest is entirely in Celene’s favor. Players who lean towards the quest option to reconcile Celene and Briala, but who are unfamiliar with the novel, may be entirely misled in their judgment of the moral character of that choice. While talking to Briala, the player can ask her about her and Celene’s history; the answer is: “She betrayed me . . . to save her political reputation” (BioWare 2014). Generally, there are two ways in which this quote may be understood: either as a reference to the alienage fire, or to the murder of Briala’s parents. Players unfamiliar with TME will only have knowledge of the first reference point, and that only after talking to the elf servant who mentions the fire. Since that conversation is unlocked at a later point in the quest, the player might then have to return to Briala and lead the conversation again in order to make the connection. The second reference point is available to players who read TME; but again, the game design relies entirely on the players themselves to make the connection because the murder of Briala’s parents is not even mentioned during the ‘Wicked Eyes’ quest. So on the one hand, the quest allows players to reconcile Celene and Briala, which next to the public truce21 is also the most difficult outcome to achieve: The player has to sparingly use limited in-game currency in order to unlock access to objects that are, in turn, used to unlock specific dialogue options with which the player can attempt the reconciliation between Briala and Celene (without any mention of the latter’s assassination of the former’s parents). In a cutscene after their successful reconciliation, the Inquisitor says: “You two deserve to be happy,” to which Celene replies with “We truly are” (BioWare 2014). Of course it is Celene who answers the question––Briala is not even given any dialogue at this point. Any altruistic motivation for nudging them towards a rekindling of their relationship, however, cannot extend to the elf involved. While non-readers, thanks to being unfamiliar with the storyline of TME, miss the conundrum entirely, readers of the tie-in novel are almost actively punished for having done so: Narrative reveals provided by one medium are not transported to the other while the whole purpose of the novel-to-quest relation is that the latter provides a conclusion to the story arc begun in the former. Instead of making visible the already existing power imbalance in the relationship between Briala and Celene, the game design puts Briala at an additional, extradiegetic disadvantage by glossing over tragedies committed against her because of her race. While Briala is upfront about the racism she has encountered––“I’m an elf. . . . That should tell you

21 The public truce is an altruistic non-lethal outcome that invokes the public mask of ostensible peace by drawing all three parties into a collaborative effort. The mechanics postulate at least 85 Court Approval and a careful and curtailed use of in-game currency in order to successfully arrive at this outcome. 86

all about my life” (BioWare 2014)––the one time we hear about the imbalance between her and Celene, it is from Celene: “She never loved me. Only my influence” or “She wanted change. And she thought I should deliver it” both paint the picture of Briala as exploiting Celene for her power (BioWare 2014). It is in TME that the audience is directly confronted with how the criminal justice system works against the elves: ignored atrocities committed against them (Weekes 2014, 93–4), tolerated workplace abuse (65), and the “ghettoization of native inhabitants” (Loomba 2015, 24) through an inside look into the alienages of Orlais (e.g. Weekes 2014, 38–42; 79–89). ‘Wicked Eyes’ may offer players the chance to observe in-game racism against elves both with an elven player character and the elven servant NPCs at the Winter Palace but it misses the chance to reveal to the player more narrative layers dealing with the depiction of fantasy colonialism and oppression. By dragging the murder of Briala’s parents at the hand of Celene to the surface, the game design could have leveraged a more nuanced, and ultimately more morally gray depiction of the entanglement between Celene and Briala. Due to DA:I’s RPG conventions, players have great freedom over developing and shaping their character. If said character is a Dalish Inquisitor, it might make narrative sense from the player’s perspective to have their character support a fellow elf. It would, however, also make sense not to, given the tensions between Dalish and City Elves, but that could still be made either vocal or visible in the game design. Briala and Lavellan have something in common no other Inquisitor can claim: a shared racial background (which, for the player, is emphasized in having their player character be mistaken for an elven servant by the human nobility at court), if not a social one (the Inquisitor is Dalish while Briala is a City Elf). So, even if the quest is supposed to be played with incomplete background knowledge of the goings-on at court (perhaps to create a more realistic feeling of knowledge distribution), the game design could have made use of the race- specific dialogue wheel option, for example, to allow for a more nuanced gameplay. Although disillusioned with the Dalish Elves, Briala might have still been more open towards one of them than towards a human, dwarf or Qunari. The quest could have included another sidequest in which the Inquisitor must prove towards Briala that they want to support the City Elves (the same way they have to prove to the Dalish Keeper in the Exalted Plains that they are committed to supporting the Dalish Elves). Building on that, the race-specific dialogue wheel button could have allowed Lavellan specifically to unlock the TME knowledge held back by the main quest. Jenkins rightly stresses that it is an ideal to expect transmedia storytelling to successfully build up on preceding texts without falling into the trap of repeating too much (2006, 96). With the ‘Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts’ quest, DA:I could have built a strong narrative example

of injustice and oppression in the Orlesian Empire. By missing out on a key opportunity for doing so, it fails to adequately address one of the key reasons as to why the Civil War even came to be (Weekes 2014, 120). The lacking background information from the novel works against Briala not only as a character but as a player in the Grand Game for the Orlesian throne, in which the player is asked to be judge and jury. By omitting the injustices committed against her and her people, players unfamiliar with the novel may have a harder time sympathizing with her cause than the ones who have read TME. These reader-players are also made more aware of the narrative parallel between human- elven social structures at large, and the relationship between Celene and Briala. While Orlais does not allow slavery like the Tevinter Imperium, the Orlesian elves are caught in a notoriously bad societal hierarchy compared to other southern nations like Ferelden. In this, Orlais is closer to Tevinter than any other nation. A form of translatio imperii by means of social stratification and the racist flavoring of a classist system is at work here. Just like their brethren in Tevinter, the elves of Orlais are exposed to the reciprocal relationship between racism and classism at a state level: Institutionalized slavery on the one hand; alienages and servitude on the other. Neither Tevinter nor Orlesian elves are free; the same way that Briala is not free, even in her relationship with Celene. By virtue of being Empress of Orlais, Celene naturally sits at the end of the power balance with more sway. Labeling DA:I with its ‘Wicked Eyes’ quest a self- contained franchise entry fails to take into account these power structures revealed by its preceding tie-in novel.

12 Conclusion

The representation of elves and empire in Dragon Age: Inquisition is only the tip of the Eurocentric iceberg sitting on BioWare’s productions, and DA:I is in good company. The latest instalment in the Mass Effect franchise, Andromeda (2017), recycles game elements like fictional noble savages, expansionist land mechanics, unreflective resource-gathering, all of which are familiar from previous productions whether they be part of the Mass Effect space opera or the Fantasy world of Dragon Age. That the company has been made aware of the ludic and narrative imprints of colonialism in their game designs, comes confirmed by the very same critical voices who were ignored: their own non-White developers. Manveer Heir, formerly on the design team for Mass Effect: Andromeda, gave a statement in a podcast interview that warrants reprinting in full: When I brought up the concern about colonialism, they were like: “Oh, we’re going to address that in a good way.” But how? And I never got a good answer. And I would ask that every few months,

and I wasn’t the only one, there were other people––there were other White people, White men, who spoke up. There’s a lot of really good people inside of BioWare who spoke up on this stuff. The problem was, the lead writer at the time did not seem to care or understand. And so this is what happens when, I think, you have a homogenous leadership. The leadership of Mass Effect: Andromeda was all White men. (Heir 2017) So, rather than addressing the issues brought to the front, the developers seemed to sweep them under the rug. Critical voices were derided as too loud and too angry. In the light of this, it seems highly unlikely that the situation was any different during the production of DA:I a few years prior, even when keeping in mind that Heir was part of BioWare’s Montréal studio and DA:I was developed in their Edmonton studio. There is no public information available as to how many Indigenous persons were included and/or consulted in the development process of DA:I; multiple of my queries sent to BioWare on that regard went unanswered. If the picture of Mass Effect: Andromeda’s team leadership is representative of BioWare’s other franchises as well, however, the answer may well be found in its absence. Yet the game design of DA:I shapes a legacy of displacement, segregation, and oppressing and Othering a Fantasy people based on their race. If there were indeed no people of Indigenous descent involved in the development process of the game, this disallows the notion that the elves are representative, allegorical or not, of Indigenous experiences, or even American colonial history at large. What the game does, instead, is recreate experiences and histories based on these real-life inspirations. Rather than using Fantasy as a means to un-realize the real and use the distance to cast a sharp, critical eye on it, the game design uses Fantasy’s escapism as a vessel for cultural archetypes that should quickly re-familiarize players with already familiar stories. Whose stories are written by whose hands, is fairly clear. This thesis aimed at investigating some of the “values at play” in DA:I. How their meanings are absorbed, depends on how the player is situated “personally, politically and culturally” (Flanagan and Nissenbaum 2014, 31). It also depends on how these values are encoded and, ultimately, decoded. For this, a corpus of postcolonial techniques can be invariably helpful, especially at the interplay of videogames and Fantasy: a medium whose existence and usage have been associated with Empire and empire-building before, and a genre whose conventions are steeped in Eurocentric and colonialist overtones. Yet, both medium and genre show a strong potential to overcome their own trappings. The participatory and procedural properties of videogames render them particularly suitable for conveying values through meaningful action; and the escapist distance between reality and Fantasy creates within the genre a safe space for real, sociopolitical comments wrapped in fiction. Instead, looking at how the elves are written over the span of three games but particularly the latest instalment of the series, the principal characteristic of their fictional indigenous-ness

are stereotypes channeled through a Eurocentric lens. Even though twenty-first-century Fantasy tries, at times, to critique the Eurocentrism and the colonialist themes in which the genre is entangled, the “cultural and social legacies of those same structures still have significant power” (Young 2016, 115). Henry Jenkins claims that “spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations” (2004, 123). Taking ‘spatial stories’ literally, Thedas is filled to the brim with geographical associations: Ferelden is based on Medieval Britain, the pomp of the Orlesian court conjures impressions of France during the Baroque era, and the Tevinter Imperium bears the imprint of the Ancient Roman Empire. All of these are references to European history; all of these are (mostly) part of the human world in DA, and even the dwarves with their uniform General American accent constitute a Western-centric element of the worldbuilding. The Qunari and the elves, notably Othered in the storyline and in the lore, diverge from that. The elves are written as the population native to Thedas, and as such bear a resemblance to the Indigenous Peoples of North America but through a Eurocentric lens. Their cultural design is informed as much by historical occurrences as it is by stereotypes. The fictional history of the elves speaks of conquest, slavery, and displacement, while the present-day elves encountered during gameplay are either subjected to self-imposed exile or segregation because of the racism they encounter. All of this is compounded by the inherently colonialist nature of game mechanics that essentialize geographical expansion and the exploitation of resources, or that simply disregard the cultural narrative of the elves in favor of universal ludonarrative experiences. Especially with a Dalish Inquisitor, this oversight is counterproductive to roleplaying, and can lead to ludonarrative dissonance. In usual BioWare fashion, the attempt is there: Background-specific dialogue choices make player-to-character interaction more dynamic, diverse, and ultimately realistic; but clear instances that call for elf-specific dialogue options are disregarded by the game design in favor of generic exposition that, more often than not, comes from a human character. What would not call for critical narrative analysis in a playthrough with, for example, a human or dwarven player character, becomes redolent of the in-game colonialism surrounding the elves. Only in this case, it is not a story element embedded within the game world but a functional absence that prevents players from enacting dialog scenes that would be in line with other choices they have made. Hence, Lavellan with a facial tattoo dedicated to the elven goddess Mythal ends up prompting Morrigan: “You said this Mythal was worshipped as a goddess” because the restrictions in the dialogue system stipulate the information be delivered by the human mage Morrigan (BioWare 2014).

Dragon Age candidly crafts a Fantasy world which does not shy away from addressing issues such as racism, slavery, imperialism, and the continued oppression of an indigenous population. Historical elements of the elven narrative design clearly draw inspiration from real- life history, especially pertaining to the conquest and settlement of North America. In a few cases of Dalish worldbuilding in particular, the settlers are left out of the picture, and the world is embedded with direct markers of Indigenous cultures. Gameplay enables players to slip into the skin of Lavellan and to navigate a hostile world with a noticeably Othered player character. Yet at the same time, history is romanticized; distinct cultures of Indigenous Peoples are merged into one representation of ‘indigenous-ness’; and the noble savage embodied as the elven player character entraps players in a covert, distant case of identity tourism with a prolonged layover in a Fantasy realm. “Questioning one’s own worldview is a good start” to think about implementing values into a game design, Flanagan and Nissenbaum state (2014, 11). I kept this quote by my side during various stages in this research project in order to remind myself that questioning my worldview is indeed a good way to start, proceed, and end an investigation into BioWare’s ‘values at play’—because it is also the best possible way to play their games. As a close reading case study of a specific game, this thesis draws from postcolonial approaches and perspectives in order to unpack the stereotypes in the cultural narrative of the Dragon Age elves, which are propounded by the colonialist flavoring of some of the game’s mechanics. Where, then, does that leave future research into BioWare’s game designs? DA:I alone offers ample fruit that can yet be harvested. Following a similar trajectory to this thesis, the ludonarrative portrayal of other Fantasy races can be analyzed in detail. It would be interesting to see whether the dwarves or Qunari, as Thedas’ other major non-human populations, have similar non-White reference points in their cultural design. The already present exoticization of the Qunari implies as much—considering their depiction on the tarot character cards, it is closer to the elves than to humans or dwarves (Fig. 5). Along the same lines, DA’s humans warrant analysis in full, especially when pitched against the non-human designs that trap the game in colonial times. The portrayal of the humans marries Eurocentrism as the major (though not exclusive) engine of their worldbuilding, with visible diversity in skin color. Jemisin calls similar representative practices in literature “the ‘Just Paint ‘Em Brown’ technique” (2012). In-game human minorities such as the Avvar, a mountain community casually classified as ‘barbarous’ by other humans, would also warrant a closer look at potential colonial themes in their cultural narrative. Lastly, with at least another DA title in production, the game design may yet yield more insight into the stereotyping surrounding the elves, and

how future mechanics may be influenced by it, perpetuate it, or allow to deconstruct it. Given the constant conflict between humans and elves on the fringes of DA:I, taking center stage at the end of the Trespasser DLC, the narrative for any upcoming game teases significant involvement of the elves. That BioWare “try” and do so harder than most of their peers among triple-A producers and developers, has been noted by their fans and scholars alike. The company is better “than most with creating safe spaces in games for diverse gamers, but there’s still a while to go yet” (Wiggins 2014). There always is, along with room for improvement and betterment. Wiggins suggests that BioWare invite more people and voices from diverse backgrounds onto their teams in order to continue improving their designs; from Heir’s experience, it seems they are still working on the part of listening to these voices. Diversity extends beyond the margins of cultural archetypes that speak, first and foremost, to a White audience. BioWare, let your Eurocentric iceberg melt.

References

Primary References

BioWare. 2009. Dragon Age: Origins. EA.

BioWare. 2011. Dragon Age II. EA.

BioWare. 2014. Dragon Age: Inquisition. EA.

BioWare. 2015a. Dragon Age: Inquisition. Jaws of Hakkon (DLC). EA.

BioWare. 2015b. Dragon Age: Inquisition. Trespasser (DLC). EA.

Gelinas, Ben, and Nick Thornborrow. 2013. Dragon Age: The World of Thedas. Volume 1. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books.

Gelinas, Ben, and Nick Thornborrow. 2014. The Art of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books.

Gelinas, Ben, and Nick Thornborrow. 2015. Dragon Age: The World of Thedas. Volume 2. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books.

Weekes, Patrick. 2014. Dragon Age: The Masked Empire. London: Titan Books.

Secondary References

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. 2003. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Reprint, London: Routledge. First published 1995.

Atwood, Margaret. 2012. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Reprint, Toronto: House of Anansi Press. First published 1972.

Barker, Joanne. 2005. “For Whom Sovereignty Matters.” In Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestations and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, edited by Joanne Barker, 1-31. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Barnett, Louise K. 1975. The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790–1890. Contributions in American Studies, no. 18. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Battiste, Marie. 2002. “Introduction: Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization.” In Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, edited by Marie Battiste, xvi–xxx. Reprint, Vancouver: UBC Press. First published 2000.

Bennis, Shauna Ashley. 2016. “When All You Can Be Is About Who You Already Are: Dragon Age: Inquisition and the Uncovering of Real-Life Behaviour Patterns.” In Levelling 93

Up: The Cultural Impact of Videogames, edited by Brittany Kuhn and Alexia Bhéreur- Lagounaris, 63–72. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Bezio, Kristin M.S. 2014. “Maker’s Breath. Religion, Magic, and the ‘Godless’ World of BioWare’s Dragon Age II (2011).” Online – Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 5:134-161. doi:10.11588/rel.2014.0.12162.

Bezio, Kristin M.S. 2016. “Hero, Champion, Herald, & Inquisitor: Epic Storytelling and Dragon Age.” January 1. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://thelearnedfangirl.com/2016/01/hero-champion-herald-inquisitor-epic-storytelling- and-dragon-age/.

Blackhawk, Ned. 2008. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. First published 2006.

Blackhawk, Ned. 2014. “Remember the Sand Creek Massacre.” New York Times, November 27. Accessed January 27th, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/opinion/remember-the-sand-creek- massacre.html?_r=0.

Brey, Betsy, and Elise Vist. 2016. “Thedap: The Dragon Age Podcast.” First Person Scholar. February 24. Accessed March 03, 2018. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/thedap-the- dragon-age-podcast/.

Carter, Paul. 2003. “Spatial History.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 375–377. London: Routledge. Previously published in From The Road to Botany Bay: An Essay in Spatial History, P. Carter (London: Faber, 1987).

Chris. 2008. Comment posted to “Elves, Elves and more Elves!” Words from the Center, Words from the Edge. August 19. Accessed March 26, 2018. https://naamenblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/elves-elves-and-more-elves/#comment- 5366. Quoted in “Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” Nathaniel Poor (Games and Culture 7 [5], 2012): 375-96.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 2001. Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dalishious. 2016. “Ancient Elves and Inuksuit/ Inunnguat.” May 13. Accessed March 07, 2018. http://dalishious.tumblr.com/post/144307595832/ancient-elves-and-inuksuit- inunnguat. 94

Deloria, Philip J. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Deloria Jr., Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. First published 1969.

Dennis, Matthew. 2006. “Red Jacket’s Rhetoric: Postcolonial Persuasions on the Native Frontiers of the Early American Republic.” In American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, edited by Ernest Stromberg, 15–33. Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

DGaider Tumblr Archives. 2015. “David Gaider and ‘the initial inspiration for the elves’.” January 29. Accessed March 03, 2018. http://the-gaider- archives.tumblr.com/post/109509566283/i-was-wondering-if-the-elves-in-dragon-age- were-at.

Douglas, J. Yellowlees, and Andrew Hargadon. 2004. “The Pleasures of Immersion and Interaction: Schemas, Scripts, and the Fifth Business.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 192–206. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dragon Age wiki:

s.v. “A Day for Celebration.” Accessed March 14, 2018. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/A_Day_for_Celebration.

s.v. “Dalish.” Accessed March 07, 2018. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Dalish.

s.v. “Dennet.” Accessed February 21, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Dennet.

s.v. “Dialogue wheel (Inquisition).” Accessed February 27, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Dialogue_wheel_(Inquisition).

s.v. “Elf.” Accessed February 20, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Elf.

s.v. “Elven Language.” Accessed February 20, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Elven_language.

s.v. “Fen’Harel.” Accessed February 17, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Fen%27Harel.

s.v. “Ghilan’nain.” Accessed March 08, 2018. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Ghilan%27nain.

s.v. “Halla.” Accessed April 14, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Halla.

s.v. “Vallaslin.” Accessed February 22, 2018. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Vallaslin.

s.v. “Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts.” Accessed June 9, 2017. http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Wicked_Eyes_and_Wicked_Hearts.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Electronic Mediations 29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Flanagan, Mary. 2013. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First published 2009.

Flanagan, Mary, and Helen Nissenbaum. 2014. Values at Play in Digital Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Foner, Eric. 2011. Give Me Liberty! An American History. Third edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. First published 2005.

Frick, Veit. 2016. “Romance is Difficult: Choice, Agency and the Sexual Identity of NPCs in BioWare’s Dragon Age: Inquisition.” In Levelling Up: The Cultural Impact of Videogames, edited by Brittany Kuhn and Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris, 85–96. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Frye, Northrop. 1971. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” In The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, ed. Northrop Frye, 213-251. [Toronto?]: House of Anansi Press. Previously published in Literary History of Canada, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. xiv, 945.

Gaider, David. 2009a. “BioWare Forum Post.” Wayback Machine. Accessed March 14, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20160216210659/http://forum.bioware.com/topic/16536- thedas-nations-real-world-historical-insperations/#entry189310.

Gaider, David. 2009b. “Interview with Dragon Age: Origins lead writer, David Gaider.” Interview by David Pucik. August 24. Accessed March 03, 2018. https://www.tor.com/2009/08/24/interview-with-ligdragon-age-originslig-lead-writer- david-gaider/.

Go, Julian. 2011. Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harrer, Sabine, and Martin Pichlmair. 2015. “Black Skin White Guns - Becoming Colonizer in Resident Evil 5.” Paper presented at the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference

2015, Berlin. Accessed February 26, 2018. https://www.academia.edu/28979449/Black_Skin_White_Guns_- _Becoming_Colonizer_in_Resident_Evil_5.

Heir, Manveer. 2017. “We Talk EA Woes, Mass Effect: Andromeda, Race, and Sexism with Manveer Heir.” Interview by Waypoint Radio. October 20. Accessed March 12, 2018. https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/evbdzm/race-in-games-ea-woes-with-former-mass- effect-manveer-heir.

Henriksen, Georg. 2009. I Dreamed the Animals: Kaniuekutat: The Life of an Innu Hunter. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books.

Herring, Joseph B. 2006. “Selling the ‘Noble Savage’ Myth: George Catlin and the Iowa Indians in Europe, 1843-1845.” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 29 (4): 226–245.

Hocking, Clint. 2007. “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about.” October 07. Accessed February 05, 2017. http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html.

“Innu Mythology.” 2005. Wayback Machine. Accessed March 08, 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20050828084236/http://innu.ca:80/myth.html.

Irniq, Peter. 2007. “What is an Inukshuk?” Interview by Ap Verheggen. March 30. Accessed March 07, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKQ97rOwBH0&feature=youtu.be&t=1m47s.

Jemisin, N. K. 2012. “Identity should always be part of the gameplay.” August 2, 2012. Accessed March 02. http://nkjemisin.com/2012/08/identity-should-always-be-part-of-the- gameplay/.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers. Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 2004. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118– 130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jensen, Brook. 2017. “Choices don’t matter: At least, the good ones don’t.” First Person Scholar. June 7. Accessed March 03, 2018. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/choices- dont-matter/.

Johannessen, Lene M. 2012. “Palimpsest and Hybridity in Postcolonial Writing.” In The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol. 2, edited by Ato Quayson, 869–902. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9781107007031.008.

Jørgensen, Kristine. 2010. “Game Characters as Narrative Devices: A Comparative Analysis of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2.” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 4 (2): 315–31. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol4no2-13/192.

Joseph, Bob. 2016. “Indigenous or Aboriginal: Which is correct?” CBC News, September 21. Accessed January 26, 2018. http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/indigenous-aboriginal- which-is-correct-1.3771433.

Keene, Adrienne. 2016. “Magic in North America Part 1: Ugh.” March 8. Accessed January 27, 2017. http://nativeappropriations.com/2016/03/magic-in-north-america-part-1-ugh.html.

Lammes, Sybille. 2010. “Postcolonial Playgrounds: Games as Postcolonial Cultures.” Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 4 (1): 1–6. Accessed March 03, 2018. http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol4no1-1/145.

Lindsay, William G. 2013. Memorandum: Aboriginal-Indigenous Terminology. Accessed January 26, 2018. https://www.sfu.ca/aboriginalpeoples/aboriginal-terminology-.html.

Loomba, Ania. 2015. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. Third edition. London: Routledge. First published 1998.

Maietti, Massimo. 2008. “Player in Fabula: Ethics of Interaction as Semiotic Negotiation Between Authorship and Readership.” In Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon. Games Without Frontiers – War Without Tears, edited by Andreas Jahn- Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann, 99-107. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 2003. “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism.” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 475–479. London: Routledge. Previously published as “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism,” Transition 55 (1992). First published in a shorter form in the Chronicle of Higher Education (19 April 1992). 98

Mukherjee, Souvik. 2017. Videogames and Postcolonialism. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

NAD – UCAQ. 2016. “Atanukan - un projet NIKNAD.” Accessed March 08, 2018. https://vimeo.com/156720361.

Nakamura, Lisa. 1995. “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.” Works and Days 13: 181–193. Accessed March 02, 2018. Retrieved from: http://faculty.humanities.uci.edu/poster/syllabi/readings/nakamura.html.

Nelles, Henry V. 2004. A Little History of Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press.

Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

s.v. ‘info-dump, n.’ Accessed March 06, 2018. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/248374.

s.v. “loot, n.2” Accessed January 31, 2018. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/110210.

s.v. “loot, v.” Accessed January 31, 2018. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/110212.

Pierce, Yolanda. 2007. “Redeeming Bondage: The Captivity Narrative and the Spiritual Autobiography in the African American Slave Narrative Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, edited by Audrey Fisch, 83–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521850193.006.

Pommersheim, Frank. 2009. Broken Landscape. Indians, Indian Tribes and the Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Poor, Nathaniel. 2012. “Digital Elves as a Racial Other in Video Games: Acknowledgment and Avoidance.” Games and Culture 7 (5): 375–96. doi:10.1177/1555412012454224.

Ricketts, Mac Linscott. 1966. “The North American Indian Trickster.” History of Religions 5 (2): 327–350. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1062118.

Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Commission royale sur les peoples autochtones. 1996. Looking Forward, Looking Back. Vol. 1 of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Ottawa: Canada Communication Group.

Schallegger, René. 2016. “Designing the Peaceable Kingdom: The Canadian-Ness of Dragon Age: Inquisition.” In Levelling Up: The Cultural Impact of Videogames, edited by Brittany Kuhn and Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris, 73–84. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Schallegger, René Reinhold. 2017. “WTH Are Games? – Towards a Triad of Triads.” In Digitale Spiele, edited by Jörg Helbig and René Reinhold Schallegger, 14–49. Klagenfurter Beiträge zur Visuellen Kultur, Band 5. Cologne: Herbert von Halem Verlag.

Sicart, Miguel. 2005. “Game, Player, Ethics: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Games.” International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) 4 (12): 14–18.

Sicart, Miguel. 2009. The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Slotkin, James S. 2011. Readings in Early Anthropology. Reprint, London: Routledge. First published 1965.

Slotkin, Richard. 1998. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. Reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. First published 1985.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2008. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Twelfth edition. London: Zed Books. First published 1999.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, 24–28. London: Routledge. Previously published in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988).

Švelch, Jaroslav. 2010. “The Good, The Bad, and The Player: The Challenges to Moral Engagement in Single-Player Avatar-Based Video Games.” In Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play, edited by Karen Schrier and David Gibson, 52–68. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference. doi:10.4018/978-1-61520-845-6.ch004

Sylvester, Tynan. 2013. Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.

The West Film Project. 2001. “Documents on the Sand Creek Massacre.” In Archives of The West 1856–1868. Public Broadcasting Service. New Perspectives on the West. Accessed April 17, 2017. http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/four/sandcrk.htm.

Voyles, Traci Brynne. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Waern, Annika. 2010. “‘I’m in love with someone that doesn’t exist!!’: Bleed in the context of a Computer Game.” Paper presented at the Nordic DiGRA Conference 2010, Stockholm.

100

Accessed March 02, 2018. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital- library/10343.00215.pdf.

Weekes, Patrick. 2016. “BioFan Interview | Patrick Weekes [BioWare Lead Writer for Dragon Age].” Interview by BioFan. March 17. Accessed February 16, 2017. https://youtu.be/Aj0m_eQtwXA.

Wiggins, Troy L. 2014. “Dragon Age: Inquisitioning While Black.” November 23. Accessed February 26, 2018. https://afrofantasy.net/2014/11/23/black-dragon-age-inquisition/.

Young, Helen. 2012. “‘It’s the Middle Ages, Yo!’: Race, Neo/medievalisms, and the World of Dragon Age.” The Year’s Work in Medievalism 27. Accessed February 26, 2018. http://frc.gatech.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/491/2016/09/27-Youngx.pdf.

Young, Helen. 2016. Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness. New York: Routledge.

101