When I started playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, the latest narrative adventure from Canadian developer Bioware, I thought it was going to be like any other epic fantasy role-playing game – except that at some point, it would allow me to do the no-pants dance with a 10-foot man-bull voiced by Hollywood actor Freddie Prinze Jr.
This is, after all BioWare, a studio renowned for exploring human relationships – or in the case of its Mass Effect sci-fi series, intergalactic pansexual human-alien relationships. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you play a character of your own creation, tasked with saving the vast and cultured world of Thedas from, well, a big green bad thing in the sky that spawns demons. Through the game’s intricate conversation system, you’re able to conduct elaborate affairs with computer-controlled characters, one of whom is – yes – a 10-foot man-bull voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr. Why would anyone pass up that opportunity?
I’ll tell you why – because of Dorian. Turning up early in the game as an optional companion, Dorian is a terribly posh upper-class mage, with a hipster moustache and a painful past. I took to him immediately, and as I wandered the pastoral paradise of the Hinterlands and the opulent city of Val Royeaux, he was always ready with some wiseass joke about pretty much every dire situation we found ourselves in. Swoon.
So yes, I ditched Freddie Prinze Beefcake and became devoted to my lovely sarcastic mage. When I wasn’t slaughtering enemies, I would go and chat to him in the library (where he could often be found perusing the Dragon Age equivalent of Mills & Boon novels), just to hear about his day. I waited patiently for the moment when our relentless, banterous flirting would come to its explosive conclusion. And then suddenly it did, but as a measure of the game’s relative emotional complexity, it didn’t go as planned.
Mystique and misunderstanding
On this fateful day, my lovely boyfriend asked if I would come to help him confront his father, a gruff driving force in Dorian’s own story. This was our moment, I thought – after the talk, we would share hilarious anecdotes about his troublesome dad, I would listen to Dorian’s sad, personal stories, eyes brimming with tears, and then we’d snuggle up next to the fire and – goodness me, this is turning into a piece of erotic fan fiction. You get the idea.
However, the confrontation took an unexpected turn. Dorian’s father had disowned him, you see, because Dorian “preferred the company of men”. Ohhhhh. As soon as we got back to HQ, I confronted the man I thought I loved.
But here’s the thing. This character, all made up of polygons, designed and shaped and written by other humans who are probably nothing like him, gave me the most human response I think I’ve ever experienced in a video game. He apologised. He said he couldn’t change his nature. I accepted that, I said I was proud of him for standing up to his father, and when I chastised him for leading me on, he said he’d stop if I wanted, but that he really liked me as a friend, and that he felt our flirtatious banter was a part of that. Somehow, someone at Bioware had predicted this very situation - that I would fall virtual head over digital heels for the wrong man - and had written heartfelt dialogue just for me.
And yes of course, the “me” that Dorian was entangled with was the “me” in the game – a semi-magical, dagger-wielding dwarf. But I still felt like he was talking to me me – the me sitting cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom, eyes wide, reminiscing over all the heartbreak she’d experienced before, because it all felt just like this. Isn’t it odd how it’s taken so long to reach this stage in games – the stage at which human conversations and relationships feel real?
Rebounds and revelations
But it’s not all sunshine, daisies and finding out your boyfriend’s gay. In Dragon Age: Inquisition, I also had to dump someone. I play games to escape this kind of thing – and perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if, once again, it hadn’t felt so damn real. In the wake of Dorian’s news, I had a bit of a rebound thing for Blackwall, the stronghold’s resident grumpy beard-wearer . But after flirting with the dude precisely once, he went all serious on me and told me we probably couldn’t be together because I didn’t understand who he was. Fair enough, I thought – but apparently from that point onwards, we were in a relationship.
I only realised this when he tried to kiss me later on, and it all became horribly, cringingly familiar, because then I had to break up with him … during the sex scene he attempted to orchestrate. It was incredibly awkward, but again, so incredibly real and familiar that I felt like it was written just for me.
And finally, in what now seems like a tale of my own awkward relationship history, I went for Iron Bull – that’s the 10-foot man-beast from earlier on, if you couldn’t figure that one out. For a guy so intimidatingly muscular, he was the most surprisingly gentle, er, lover. The defining moment of our relationship was, again, our sex scene, where he checked for consent. I’ll reiterate: a game character CHECKED FOR CONSENT.
Consent is sexy. Consent is cool. Consent is a very important thing, for women and men, and now it’s in big blockbuster video games. Dragon Age: Inquisition is easily the most personal, well-designed relationship system I’ve ever seen - and if we learn anything at all from the media we consume, then our awkward, virtual sexual encounters in games like this could maybe shape us all into better, more respectful people. Or at the very least, they could let us know that love, awkward or otherwise, can come in many guises – including 10ft-tall bovine hunks who sound like the guy from the Scooby Doo movies.
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