The Feminism in Dragon Age

With Dragon Age: Inquisition coming out in a few months I have decided to try and do a second play through of Dragon Age: Origins. Part of the reason that I want to do this is to play through some of the other options available in the game. I had started a mage a while back, but it had been recent enough since I had played and ended up with a lot of other games I needed to play. Thus, I decided to start a brand new character. Playing through the game again has reminded me, not just how good the story telling is, but how feminist and forward thinking the story-lines can be. This is especially in a game that takes place in what would usually be considered an unfriendly place for women, as it seems to relate to a time where women were controlled. Dragon Age seems to understand that it is a fantasy game that both women and men play and reacts accordingly.

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Positive Female Video Game Characters

As I talked about before I think it is important to be critical of the media we consume because it can often point to a larger societal problem that needs to be addressed. While it is important to point out things that are problematic, it is also important to point out places where things have been done right and look at why they work.

I first learned this from a class I took in college, Feminist Introduction to the Bible. It could be easy to dismiss the story of the bible as a misogynistic book that looks more at men. Our professor talked to us about how it is important to examine where females are present in the Bible versus trying to point out where they are missing. Now obviously the Bible is a different than video games, but it is still important to note where and how female characters have been done right in media spaces to understand the importance of having characters that are similar.

This will mostly look at more recent video games because I think there has been some great examples of positive female characters in video games recently.