Shadows of Normativity: Representations of Indigeneity in the Dragon Age Franchise

Although the field of game studies has slowly been gaining ground, studies on the ways in which race and Indigeneity are represented in videogames remain scarce. Moreover, such analyses rarely consider how mediaevalism informs a game’s constructions and receptions of Indigeneity. Yet the roles of mediaevalism in this process deserve attention because perceived historical accuracy tends to be a significant justification for the overall absence of characters who fall outside the ‘white, straight, cis-gender, able-bodied man’ norm in mediaevalesque fantasy games such as the Dragon Age (DA) franchise. This insistence on excluding minorities from games rife with dragons and sorcerers for the sake of perceived historical accuracy not only misses the point but is also arguably historically inadequate as such a (lack of) representation fails to address the games' diverse, present-day audiences and does not acknowledge how the world has changed culturally since the European Middle Ages.
In my paper, I address this overarching issue by investigating how Indigeneity is constructed in the digital environments of Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and the franchise's latest instalment, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014). Firstly, using the hermeneutics of research-play, I survey the depictions of the Chasind, the indigenous human Non-Player Characters (NPCs) whom the player can encounter in DA:O, after which I proceed to discuss the way the Avvar, the indigenous human NPCs of DA:I are portrayed. Then, I zoom out to focus on my main point: how Indigeneity is spatially constructed within the games’ environments. Where on the world map of Dragon Age is the player most likely to encounter indigenous NPCs and what are the implications of such spatial constructions? I demonstrate that the games’ general spatial simulation of native NPCs perpetuates a problematic mediaeval racial trope. Furthermore, I argue that such a representation is historically inadequate and caused by how white normativity and romantic mediaevalism inform the ways in which racial thinking is technologically embedded in the DA games. Finally, I also suggest why it is relevant for historians to become more involved in analyses of contemporary mediaevalism, specifically mediaevalesque videogames, even though the subject matter might lie outside the disciplinary toolkit of historians.