I’m hoping to avoid this devolving into some kind of political “discussion,” but I realize that may not be possible, given the fact that this is the Internet and my question can be construed as having political components. I’ll try.
I’m always intrigued by games that claim to have multiple paths where every decision can have a bearing on the rest of the game, and ultimately, the outcome; games that claim to be filled with ethical dilemmas that aren’t always black and white, etc. Naturally, any undertaking of this kind is going to be somewhat colored by the values of the people responsible for actually determining what those dilemmas are, and what the consequences of players’ decisions are.
It always seems to me that the designers of these games either don’t put enough effort into truly making the choices ideologically neutral, or fail simply because of how difficult it is to completely divorce oneself from his/her own values.
A good example of this in an actual game (which probably is reflective of my own inherent “bias,” for lack of a better word) would be Fable II, where raising the rent your character charged for a property resulted in you becoming gradually more “corrupt” every time your rent was collected, and less “pure.” For a game that purported to be ethically nuanced, you were treated as some kind of slumlord for simply charging more rent. They throw away an opportunity to do something TRULY nuanced, like having the going rate for rent vary depending on the neighborhood (giving you the ability to possibly affect that rate), then having high rents result in tenants who MOVE OUT (which they’re perfectly free to do), or making it easier to attract tenants with lower rent, etc. Instead, it’s literally boiled down to: charge people a lot, you’re bad; charge them little, you’re good. In this case, the game designers’ naive anti-capitalist beliefs totally destroy what could have been an actual interesting game within a game (and a chance to actually deliver on what they CLAIMED to provide).
At any rate, now that I have that diatribe out of the way, to the question: has anyone who’s played Dragon Age: Origins–and is politically savvy enough to recognize it–noticed just that sort of ideological bullshit? After picking up the game on sale, I checked out the web site, and couldn’t help but notice some typical class warfare “morality” crap in the Origins section, which describes the back story of each character class that you have an option of choosing. Naturally, it is the horrible human “nobles” who are deplorable wealthy snobs, guilty of having enslaved the elves, and now callously subjugate those poor pathetic elves who still stick around to serve them and act as cheap labor. This is the kind of class warfare bullshit that I expect from politicians, not video games that purport to offer complex, ethically nuanced decision-making that results in profound consequences.
That being said, there’s a very real possibility that I’m reading too much into it, and the game actually is relatively fair. Really, I just don’t want to be condescendingly preached to, or be subject to transparently naive and juvenile political correctness. I got enough of that crap in high school and college, and now I get enough of it from Hollywood to last ten lifetimes.