Adventuring for Digital Love. On the Readoption of Quest-romance in the Romantic Subplots of Dragon Age: Origins

This paper presents a brief examination of the intersections between the literary tradition of quest-romance and digital entertainment. It discusses the readoption of this tradition into the romantic subplots of a fantasy digital role-playing game, Dragon Age: Origins. Grounded in theoretical literary approaches concerning the convention of quest-romance and its historical transformations, especially the introspective turn that can be traced to Romanticism, as well as quest-romance’s cultural influences on popular romance narratives, the exploration addresses four in-game romances available to the player, with specific focus on their relationship to the main heroic plot, and their intrinsic structure based on constant challenges and eventual rewards. The analysis allows one to conclude that the romantic subplots of Dragon Age: Origins not only draw on the literary tradition of quest-romance, but they also engage medium-specific means of expression to accommodate its structural and thematic aspects to the reality of the procedural, ludic medium of the digital game.