Short Cut is a series of short-length blogs about video game experiences and thoughts and feelings towards them through a personal perspective.
Leaving one’s life behind for the promise of safety is not something one can do easily. Be it your predictable existence, a childhood home, a pet who helped you get through many hardships or a sense of belonging, there is always going to be a part of you that you leave behind with no way of getting it back.
When I first played Dragon Age 2 a couple of years ago while I was still in Russia living with my parents, I did not think much of the set-up that the game had: a story of a refugee struggling to find a place for themselves to call home. A premise like this is not something innovative and is pretty common as a way to make the player character to be a clean slate with enough ambiguity to their past to fill it in as the game goes on. Now years later after I had to make a choice to leave my home to make my life free of codependency and fear of being openly queer, having to move from one temporary housing to another with fluctuating mental state and constant and the deep feeling of being alone in a different world with only strangers to rely on, the game has become relatable in ways I didn’t think it was or could be.
Dragon Age 2 is a game about searching for home, for a place to belong in, and about moving on despite everything. Be it Hawke or any of your party members, everyone had a place that they were told was their home and had their own reason to leave it behind, everyone has their own emotional baggage to carry without the opportunity to open and deal with any of it.
Dragon Age 2 is also a game about a city. People leave and people come, conflicts spark and get extinguished but the city will always stay the same. It can burn to the ground but it will always be build back up as long as it’s a home to someone.
Dragon Age 2 is a messy game. It’s not perfect. It has many flaws, enough to be hard to count them. There is ableism towards people with mental disabilities, false equivalency that is common with fantasy oppressed minorities and the general tendencies towards “both sides are bad”-ism. If you cannot deal with any of it, it is understandable. However, outside of those caveats, there is a game about messy people struggling in a world that doesn’t want them to exist in one form or another. And messiness is exactly what makes these characters, and us, human.
Short Cut is a series of short-length blogs about video game experiences and thoughts and feelings towards them through a personal perspective.
