Eventualisation (Événementialisation), Inevitability and Futility in Dragon Age: Inquisition

Eventualisation (Événementialisation),

Inevitability and Futility in Dragon Age:

Inquisition

Feng Zhu

The University of Manchester

Dragon Age: Origins (2009)

Dragon Age: Awakening (2010)

Dragon Age II (2011)

Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)

The Dragon Age Series: 2009-2014

Dragon Age Keep (1)

Offers around three-hundred options from which to decide on the events in the prequels that have shaped this world.

Players are able to write the recent history of Thedas as they see fit.

Multiple world-states can be created.

Dragon Age Keep (2)

Did the player (the Hero of Ferelden) make Alistair king?

Dragon Age Keep for the events of Origins

What are the tensions and connections between two distinctly discernible symptoms? And of what are they symptomatic?

To what kind of understanding of history and historical causation are they most amenable?

How can they be thought to undermine themselves?

What is gleaned by introducing Foucault’s concept of “eventualisation”, as a methodology, an approach to history, and a political position, for comparative purposes?

Which avenues are opened by critiquing “eventualisation”?

What are the implications of the above for thinking the theoretico-political project of enacting change?

Overview

Industry rhetoric (see subsequent slide).

A range of affirmative game techniques.

The First Symptom: The Promise of Freedom, Individualism, and Meaningful

Expression

The standard tropes of the genre: momentous decisions with NPCs and a host of crucial level-up options.

The Arl of Recliffe Questline Expanded (One Version)

The Arl of Recliffe Questline Expanded (Another Version)

Dragon Age: Origins“Your Story, Your Way – With its emotionally compelling story, players choose with whom they wish to forge alliances or crush under their mighty fist, redefining the world with the choices they make and how they wield their power.”http://investor.ea.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=321760

Dragon Age: Inquisition“Change the world: Deciding the fate of villages and ransacking keeps will shape the world around you. As a leader, you can deploy followers of the inquisition to act on your behalf.”http://www.dragonage.com/en_GB/theGame

What inferences can we draw from this with regard to contemporary subjectivity, to the forces that produce it, and to the role that games promise to fulfil (the particular ‘unfreedoms’ that are to be recuperated)?

Game Industry Rhetoric

The inordinate reliance on codex entries to denote differences in world-states.

A lack of wide-ranging repercussions to decisions that could be deemed to impact on Fereldan society.

The Second Symptom: The Constraints that Thwart the Realisation of the

Promise of Dragon Age Keep

An unalterable Redcliffe.

Redcliffe Codex Entry

A deterministic view of history development. Not in the sense that ‘B’ necessarily follows from ‘A’, but that there can be no significant deviation from a certain state of affairs.

Which considerations factor into producing this?

The human limits of conceptualising and then writing different outcomes.

The financial resources of developers and publishers, and the constraint of market logics.

Genre expectations amongst players.

Difficulties in programming: decision pathways, object states, multiple object interactions, etc.

Technological constraints can never be completely divorced from the directions in which technological advance have been driven. This can be thought to be no less embedded within the aforementioned ‘totality’ as the other factors.

The Second Symptom (Continued)

Eventualisation/Eventialisation/Eventalisation (Événementialisation) is a method for us to foreground the contingency of history and the transience of that which might otherwise appear necessary and inevitable.

This assists us in imagining the openness of possible futures.

“No founding recourse, no escape into pure form – that is no doubt one of the most important and most contestable points of this historicophilosophical approach: if it does not want to fall either into a philosophy of history or into a historical analysis, it ought to maintain itself in the field of immanence of pure singularities. What then? Rupture, discontinuity, singularity, pure description, immobile tableau, no explanation, no passage, you know all that.” (Foucault, 1996, pp. 395-6).

Michel Foucault, ‘What is Critique?’ (1978)

Foucault, M. (1996). What is Critique? In J. Schmidt (Ed.), What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (K. Geiman, Trans.). Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.‘What is Critique?’ was originally a lecture given at the French Society of Philosophy on 27 May, 1978.

“The analysis of positivities, to the extent that it has to do with pure singularities related not to a species or an essence but to simple conditions of acceptability, supposes the deployment of a causal network that is “at once complex and tight” but which does not obey the requirement of saturation by a profound, unitary, pyramidalizing, and necessitating principle” (Foucault, 1996, p. 396).

“Let us say roughly that in opposition to a genesis that orients itself toward the unity of a weighty principal cause of a multiple descent, we are concerned here with a genealogy, that is, of something that tries to restore the conditions of appearance of a singularity from multiple determining elements, of which it would appear, not as the product, but as the effect. Thus this singularity is made intelligible, but it is not seen as functioning according to a principle of closure” (Foucault, 1996, p. 396).

Foucault and Eventualisation

Eventualisation is not confined to any single category of historiography, epistemology or politics. As such, there are multiple ways in which it can be used to counter different forms of determinism.

The form of dialectical thinking that requires us to draw connections between relations via reference to a ‘totality’ is destabilised by the work of eventualisation.

A critique of eventualisation? Perhaps something important is sacrificed: an insight into unavoidable causal relations that cannot be bypassed. In the interests of desired political change, this can be a hindrance.

Interestingly, computer games could be argued to cultivate precisely the mindset that discerns these relations, and takes pleasure in the activity of doing so. Patrick Crogan: “[f]or fun, gamers repeat history in order to develop their control over events ” (Crogan, 2003, p. 85).

We must constantly re-examine the distinction between “intelligibility” and “closure”. However, to do this with a view towards an end may call for an attitude that is more sympathetic to totalities than it is to eventualisation.

Conclusion