Racial Identities in Dragon Age: Being a Black Dwarf

I’m a huge fan of RPGs in general.  I spent hours and hours playing Daggerfall, in fact I still have an old PC where I can play it every once in a while in all its pixelated glory.  When I fired up Dragon Age: Origins, I was lost in the stories of the downtrodden elves who were essentially gentrified into the slums of human cities.  I both envied and pitied the plight of the powerful mages.  I managed to play through every origin story until my last one as a dwarf fighter noble.

I’d remembered Nick Yee’s Daedalus project about the perception of beauty, attractiveness and race.  So I decided to find out what life was like as a dark-skinned dwarven noble.

I was immediately plunged into the intrigue and deception politics of the dwarven court, it was well written, complex and satisfying.  Yet there was something that pulled at me.  There was something wrong.

My father, my brother, my best friend… the arena master, the two dwarven girls who agree to a threesome.  All fair skinned.  Once I made that connection, I tried to find another dark skinned dwarf like myself.  While I’m sure there are dark-skinned dwarves at some point, I couldn’t find a single one in the origin stories.  It seems I wasn’t alone in noticing the lack of pigmentation in dwarven society as the blog Brain Dump also noticed.

Why was it overlooked or disregarded by the Bioware team?  Did they not notice the discrepancy?  Did market research show them that the RPG population was so completely dominated by whites that they didn’t need to represent other skin-tones in the game?  Is it really so difficult to make the skin tone of the player character a hitch to which the other familial pigmentations are attached to in a sort of variation of tone?

I ended up chatting with a few friends of mine from Spark Plug Games about the technical feasibility of making the player character’s skin tone a factor in dynamically generating any familial skin-tones.  They said it wasn’t hard to do, games make much more dynamic calculations and decisions on the fly than just rendering a series of colors.

I still couldn’t really pin down why it bugged me so much.  Then, it hit me.  Sort of.

I’m white.

I don’t live in an area where I’m the different one.  Where I grew up, my race never really was an issue.  I wasn’t the different one.  However, now that I’m in a mixed-race marriage where my wife has described to me what’s embedded in the experience of being the one that’s different, the one that’s had to be very conscious of her pigmentation, I realized I was uncomfortable because this game had made me experience something I’d never experienced before.

I became the outsider in a world separated by pigmentation.  Sure, no one in the game treated me differently, they made no differentiation to me based on my skin color.  Yet, I felt it.  My character was different than my own family, than my friends, than every other dwarf I related to.

What I experienced at that moment of revelation was two-fold.  I was drawn into an emotional and empathetical experience by a video game.  For only a few moments, I felt a fraction of what it may be like to be the outsider, the one who’s different.  It made no difference to how I was treated, I was different and it mattered to me.  I didn’t want them to recognize my difference, I didn’t wanted to be treated differently… I just ended up looking for some other character that looked like me.

The second thing I noticed was that whether it was intentional or unintentional on the part of Bioware to make the pigmentations on the families static, to not place any (that I noticed) black dwarves in the origin experience seemed to me a slight injustice.  I know that even with this slight experience, I cannot even come close to relating to anyone who’s suffered a real injustice for their race, but if a video game can give me that experience, I can recognize the amazing potential to teach people, to have them experience life from another perspective and ultimately, contrary to some punditry out there, raise more thoughtful and empathetic people… even if they’re playing a bloody good game like Dragon Age.

Racial Identities in Dragon Age: Being a Black Dwarf