E3 is happening and I’m… disinterested.

For those not aware, E3 (short for Electronic Entertainment Expo) is a yearly conference that covers the developments from the biggest studios in the video gaming industry. It’s a trade’s fair meant to announce and build interest in upcoming products from the major players (Ubisoft, Microsoft, EA, Sony and Nintendo). As a young, modern individual, I naturally have an interest in video games as they’re becoming one of the largest mediums of entertainment. Unfortunately, my interest lies in PC (personal computer) gaming whereas this conference mostly focuses around the home entertainment consoles. All I have to look forward to is the glimpse of the multiplatform releases which will inevitably arrive to the PC space some three to six months after they’re console launch.

So, while others are pumped for the exposition, I really can not get into all the hype. That said, I tried and turned on the stream for a few minutes to see how the conference is going. In prior years they had been really embarrassing for the members of the more enthusiast portion of the hobby with a greater focus on gimmick and generic titles that often involved presenters dancing or waving foolishly on stage as they tried to peddle the next motion sensor device as the hottest new thing. So, in one way, this E3 seems to be off to a better start. With the recent release of a new generation of consoles the focus is back to announcing and promoting games. The major studios have taken a more traditional, trailer focussed approach too which is a step above the antics of yesteryear.

What does this have to do with my title? That’s a good question as I’ve three paragraphs in and haven’t touched anything writing or speculative fiction related. So here’s the bridge!

One of the first trailers shown during EA’s presentation was for the upcoming Dragon Age 3 by BioWare. I’m a little surprised my colleague has not written about Dragon Age as he is the one to have played its most recent release. I used to be a great fan of BioWare when I was younger. They produced the nostalgia inducing, widely acclaimed Baldur’s  Gate Trilogy which stands, if I may be so bold, as the single most influential western role-playing game in the entire industry.

Sadly, their output after that has been lackluster at best. Part of that may have been a problem of coming out the gate too strong. Inevitably, all their newest work is going to get compared to that magnum opus and draw up short. Part of its problem, I think, is that BioWare was working with a proprietary intellectual property. Baldur’s Gate was set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons. This world has had years and years of development and re-iteration by the time the company picked it up. It had a lengthy history which the writers could tap into and the different regions they set the story across were pre-created with interesting and connected cultures. The process of world building is a long and involved one and when they adopted the world for their first games, all they had to focus on was the narrative they wished to tell and the components of creating a video game.

Of course, the downside with licencing is that you have to pay the owner a sizable fee. It’s reasonable any successful studio would want to create their own free of the constraints of licencing and adhering to established works. It gives them the freedom to develop their own world filled with its own peoples and histories and stories.

The downside is they have to make all this.

And the downside of that is we get racism.

I have come to loathe fantasy and its handling of races. I complained about this before when I felt that most writers essentially are rehashing the work Tolkien did with his re-envisioning of mythological creatures into a cohesive and internally consistent world. He established the repetitive trope of dwarves being incurable alcoholics obsessed with mining wealth and loathing elves. Elves, likewise, have morphed in the collective unconsciousness to become these tall, elegant and beautiful peoples with pointy ears and a dying culture. Orcs are a shorthand for middle easterners.

And that’s, unfortunately, become the issue. So often when I see fantasy races in fiction it’s as a cultural shorthand for a real life peoples. It creates a rather uncomfortable situation especially given the rampant racism that erupts in these stories because now these peoples are actual different races. I feel there’s an issue when you conflate real cultures with fantastical peoples as it almost dehumanizes or “others” these cultures from which you borrow.

For example, Dragon Age features the Qunari instead of your standard orc. When we were first introduced to them in Dragon Age: Origins, the only member you met was a man named Sten. He was, by all appearances, a human with darker skin and lighter hair. I welcomed this as the shorthand for culture=race, I feel, has a tendency to draw upon and highlight differences between peoples rather than commonalities. Sten carried the appearance as being the same as the player (assuming a non-dwarf or elf background) with the biggest difference in his personality and beliefs being the cultural heritage of his distant upbringing.

Dragon Age 2, however, made sure to clarify that this was not the case. Sten and the Qunari were shunted into the fantastical race segregation giving this air that culture and beliefs are tied to some bizarre genetic composition. We see this with the other races – all dwarves and elves essentially struggle beneath the expectations of their physical appearance intimately connecting behaviour and potential with one’s birthright. Of course, given this expectation from the audience one would imagine that fantasy would be a ripe area to undermine racist beliefs and tendencies. However, invariably, the narratives reinforce the core separation of racial thinking even if they attempt to express that racist behaviour is bad at the same time. Which is, of course, reasonable given the world’s creation in that these two entities are separate along racial lines.

So fantasy basically writes a creator into a corner. They have, biologically speaking, separate races but these races invariably take the cultural shorthands and iconographies of real life peoples. Even if the author attempts to argue that discrimination based along these lines they’ve created themselves is bad it does not ignore the problem that they’ve fallen into the trapped thinking these people fundamentally are different. Course, there are ways around this. For one, Dungeons and Dragons breaks down the different races into even more variable culture groups disassociating the race with any real world analogy. In the Forgotten Realms alone we have the High Elves, Moon Elves, Wood Elves, Dark Elves and just about any other permutation you could require. And though the difference between the factions is often represented physically with their bodily attributes (like the black skin of a Dark Elf or the golden skin of a High Elf) the biggest separation is their cultural and philosophical heritage. Furthermore, you generally do not have a genetic incompatibility with these different groups thus reinforcing their differences are not tied to inherent characteristics.

Unfortunately for new worlds like Dragon Age, they do not have the development to portray this distinction. There are only one group of humans, elves, dwarves and qunari which leads one to assume their differences are tied to genetic inheritance as it is to cultural education.

The long and the short of it is I hate the Qunari’s stupid horns. I’d rather fantasy focus on creating unique peoples and beliefs without taking the lazy shortcut of highlighting people’s differences through physical characteristics. Take humanity in its entirety and there is a staggering breath of variety amongst our own race – we don’t need to put funny horns or ears on their heads in order to experience it.