I have been annoyingly sick since Monday (Sunday if I were honest) and so have found myself unable to concentrate on much of anything, including the internet (I'm sorry, Internet, for not amusing you on Twitter this week. I know you've missed me so much), but mostly the work I need to get done. The sickness, coupled with some serious anxiety from the fact that my due on April 2, first draft 30+ page thesis is closer to the “not done” category than the the “done” category, has made for a pretty crappy week. What I've done with my week, though, is play Dragon Age.
I've explored about 53% of the world and managed to amass an army of dwarves, elves, and humans in some 40-odd hours of game play. It is an amazing game. I'm playing a dwarven warrior: a face-branded, casteless woman named Fréa. She looks like, well, me: short, stout, brown, pigtails. I've enjoyed playing her and living her story for the past few days and I'm excited to see where life takes Fréa and I in our battle against the darkspawn. Something happened two nights ago in the game, however, that took me beyond my normal immersion in a game.
Fréa is a Grey Warden, as any player character in Dragon Age would be, and has gathered a motley crew of followers so far: two mages, two rouges, two fighters, a golem and a dog. With her, also, is fellow Grey Warden and fighter, Alistair. While I'll try to avoid spoiling the details for those who have yet to play Dragon Age I will say that I've been trying to get my party to like me in order to unlock their special skills (the more they like me, the better leader I am and the better followers they are). While I was chatting up Alistair in Denerim the other night after a particularly nasty encounter with his half-sister (everyone has family drama in this game) I managed to, uh, flirt with Alistair enough to enter a relationship with him. It was probably when I told him that he has other people that care about him than his biological family and that I “cared for him more than he probably knew.” What read to me as “I care for you in a fond, sisterly kind of way.” the game read as “Sexytimes nao plz? Kthxbai!” So, great, Alistair and I am in a relationship. Awesome. Notice how I keep using first person pronouns? Yeah, about that...
Last night my party and I went into a ruin (naturally) in the Brecilian Woods to finish a quest that would get the Dalish (elven) army to join us against the darkspawn. After killing some skeletons and looting their bony remains I turned to my party members to touch in and see if we could talk about any new subjects. When I turned to Alistair he auto-generated a conversation about a flower he picked way back at the beginning of the game. He waxed philosophically about how it was such a beautiful rose and how he wanted to pick it so that it wouldn't be tainted and ruined by the darkspawn's not so sudden but still inevitable betrayal. Then he gave it to me, which was sweet of him. It must have indicated further growth on the “I like you” scale because after that conversation his stock greeting to me changed. Instead of a courteous “What do you need?” (or something like that) he started saying “Yeeeessss?” and squinting his eyes at me. This I, naturally, had to further investigate. I said I wanted to talk to him about something personal. He laughed nervously and said that while the ruins weren't the most private place in the world to go ahead. My options to that were “We need to end this.” and “(Kiss him.)” Kiss him? Kiss him?! I turned to my friend Ted, who was watching me play, and laughed nervously.
“Kiss him?” I asked. Ted looked up from his laptop.
“Unless you want to end the relationship.”
I felt Fréa deserved a chance at love. So I kissed Alistair. And then I felt really weird about it.
Let me take a moment to say that, of all the video game animated kisses I've seen in my day, this is the least sexy. It was emotionless (I've seen Sims have steamer encounters) and was made hilarious by the fact that, as they both went in for the kill, my dwarf was suddenly the same height as the hulking human fighter. (I think they missed a brilliant opportunity to script in a stock scene where both characters sheepishly look around for a box or chest for the shorter person to stand on. Did the thought of a dwarven female hitting on Alistair (who is only a love interest for women PCs apparently) never occur to the programmers?) Hilariousness of the kiss aside, I got some emotional pleasure from taking my character and another character's relationship to a new level. I felt embarrassed about it, though, because Ted was there. It wasn't Ted's presence specifically that made me blush about having Fréa and Alistair get some PG action on; I would have been embarrassed to do it in front of any of my friends. I realized, when the character that looks so much like me and through whose eyes I'd experienced so much kissed Alistair, how much I had internalized the character.
I think part of it is the fact that, yes, the character looks like me and as brown, female gamer I've played almost no characters that look like me (and a shit-load of characters that look like Alistair) so my attachment to Fréa is strong because of that. (I remember feeling a similar sense of personal attachment and violation when I created a character that looked like me in On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness and got... attacked... by fruit fuckers.) But the identification with these characters is stronger than just identity politics – I really care about them because they're like real people to me (in a way). I kept saying “I went into the ruins with my party...” before because that's really how I feel about it. Dragon Age is such a large, expansive game and it feels extremely real. Fréa isn't just a character in a game – she's real, and she's me. (I get this way whenever I play a really good game of D&D, too.) It's magical when a game really makes you suspend your disbelief, especially when it's good enough to make me suspend my disbelief (a metric ton of media studies, playwriting, theatre, and film classes will give you all the tools to understand how films/television/plays/video games teach us about the world and get us to identify with certain characters but will also kind of ruin your ability to blithely watch a movie and not see how it works. I prefer understanding how stories work but it does take a lot to get me to totally forget for a moment how it's pulling me in). My embarrassment stemmed from the fact that the private moment Fréa/I had with Alistair was witnessed by someone else. I managed to get so immersed in the game world that whatever Fréa did, I did. I think that's amazing.
This incredible identification with Fréa/the other characters is also why I will never play a version of game in which I actively antagonize my fellow party members. I want them to all like “me” so much, even though they are not real in the slightest. I find it a little disconcerting that I care so much about wanting my character to have good relationships with the other NPCs for the relationship's sake alone, not the combat bonuses. But, hey, last night I got a rose from Alistair and that's the closest thing to flirting that I've encountered in quite some time. Why argue with it, eh?
So, that's where I've been this week, Internet. Cursing my sinuses, taking Benadryl, coughing up my lungs, and fighting and loving in Ferelden. I need to get better this weekend, though, because if my thesis adviser has not written me off entirely yet she will if I don't make my first draft deadline for this damn thesis.
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