It Was Always Designed to Kill Us: How Discrimination, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, and Orientalism Shape the Design of Dragon Age: The Veilguard

This thesis is an analysis of how necropolitics, discrimination, and Orientalism shape the design of the game Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024). In examining how the game depicts race, gender, and sexuality, I explore the tension between the game’s intended progressive message and the design decisions that run counter to it. The first chapter explores how the game’s design shapes the player character and their allies into citizens and defenders of the status quo, and the problematic implications of connecting citizenship to humanity. This chapter goes into depth about how this defense of the status quo naturalizes some forms of oppression, such as misogyny and transphobia, by reproducing the effects of patriarchy and cissexism while disavowing structures of power that create these conditions. In the second chapter, I explore how Veilguard uses Orientalism as a marker of monstrosity for its enemies. To protect the player’s heroic fantasy and the need for self-reflection, enemies are reduced to Orientalist caricatures to be mowed down by the player character. I conclude by examining how this design ultimately hollows out queer and progressive ideas into a thin aesthetic coving fascistic logic. Keywords: Orientalism, Necropolitics, Monstrosity, Role-Playing Games, Transgender