Wolfbytes

If you’re female and anything like me, you played Baldur’s Gate 2 as a male. Not because you usually would – given a choice my avatars are pretty much always female or asexual. It’s just that in the dawn-days of the modern CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 2 had the insanely cool idea of letting the player character romance a few of the NPC’s – and if you played as female, your options immediately sucked. Guys got Jaheira and Viconia, powerful women with opinions and personality and a chase worth having (they also got that whiny elf bint, but who ever picked her?).  Women got one lousy egomaniac Paladin, whose entire romance arc consisted of being his mother.

No wonder female gamers at the time ripped BioWare a new one, before running off to reroll as male, or mod male romance objects you didn’t want to throttle after ten seconds. And no wonder Bioware went to such lengths to fix it for the game’s spiritual successor, Dragon Age: Origins.

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Morrigan, aka The Bitchy One. Dragon Age excels at characters that you love, or love to hate, or occasionally both.

So I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Origins. Obsessing over it, you might say – I’m still nowhere near finishing it, though I’m playing at a pace that saw me finish The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion in about two weeks. Partly that’s because the game is just plain huge. But it’s also because I keep getting sidetracked into just chatting with my fellow adventurers, rather than killing Darkspawn. While at it, I realised something. I’m doing that, lavishing time on the NPC’s, because several times now those AI-controlled character simulations have conned me into thinking of them as real people.

In fact, I’ve been having an easier time treating them as ‘real’ than I generally do with the characters roleplayed by actual, (virtually) present human beings in the MMO’s I mostly play.

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