Perspective in Dragon Age: Origins

Abstract

Although the historical connection between fantasy fiction and role-playing games is well-acknowledged, little scholarship exists examining how the formal conventions of fantasy live on within the medium of role-playing games. This thesis utilizes role-playing game studies and fantasy studies to find one such point of connection: that both role-playing games and the fantasy fiction from which they emerged are both defined by specific strategies of reader (or player) positioning, and the portrayal of specific kinds of vision into the fantasy world. This thesis examines Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins is as a case study of this, and uses methods of transmedial narratology to examine how the game positions its player in relation to the player character, the game-world, and other in-game texts.

The conclusion emerges that the strategies of positioning used in Dragon Age: Origins are in some ways very similar to those found in quest fantasy narratives, in which the player (or reader) travels through a world alongside a protagonist, with an ostensibly omniscient narrative voice explaining the foreign world to both the player and protagonist simultaneously. However, it also becomes evident that Dragon Age: Origins also subverts and redefines the conventions of quest fantasy. Familiar fantasy tropes, like the all-knowing scroll and the wise guide, appear, but the absoluteness of their knowledge is problematized throughout the game. Rather than delivering a singular, unified view of the fantasy world, Dragon Age: Origins instead conveys a worldview which is necessarily incomplete and partial, which rises to the level of thematic significance.