Background Checks: Disentangling Class,Race,and Gender in CRPG Character Creators

Abstract

Character backgrounds are one of many elements players use to customize their protagonists in fantasy computer role-playing games. By documenting the narrative trappings, mechanical benefits, and hierarchical availability of character backgrounds in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001) and Dragon Age: Origins (2009), this paper considers how real-world socioeconomic class markers and racial stereotypes have been repeatedly associated with fictitious races such as orcs, dwarves, and elves. Class is an understudied axis of identity in media studies and this research scrutinizes how developers construct socioeconomic class, particularly through character-creator interfaces. We begin by building a theoretical repertoire for studying identity in digital game interfaces while also scrutinizing long-established discourses of race and gender in the fantasy genre. We then analyze the hierarchies embedded in both games’ character creators, connecting them with broader gameplay and narrative themes and contextualizing them in established media stereotypes and existing scholarship.

Introduction

During character creation in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), a fantasy computer role-playing game (CRPG), one of the final decisions a player makes is assigning their protagonist a narrativized background. These backgrounds adjust a character's statistics and provide narrative hooks that tie them into the game's world. For example, the factory escapee background, available only to those playing as the half-orc race, decreases a character's initial wealth, boosts their physical attributes, and describes their unfortunate past:

You were a slave in a factory until a recent escape. You have little money, but you gain a bonus to Strength ( + 1).

Released nearly a decade later, Dragon Age: Origins (2009) takes a slightly different approach. The game allows players to progress through one of six distinct “origin stories,” experiencing life as a human noble or mage, city or forest elf, or dwarven noble or commoner. While these diverse paths ultimately converge once the player adopts the heroic mantle of Grey Warden, backgrounds inform how the character is treated in subsequent narrative interactions while determining which character classes they have access to.

Character backgrounds are not a novel character-building tool. Alternatively labeled as traits, lineages, or origins, they are one of many character-creation features players can use to customize their protagonists and enmesh them within a game world. Although these backgrounds may serve little story or gameplay purpose beyond character creation, they are important narrative outlets that render ideologies related to socioeconomic class, race, and gender visible.

By documenting the narrative trappings, mechanical benefits, and hierarchical availability of character backgrounds in the CRPGs Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and Dragon Age: Origins, this paper considers how real-world socioeconomic class markers and racial stereotypes have been repeatedly associated with fictitious humanoid races such as orcs, dwarves, and elves. Class is an understudied axis of identity in media studies, with a particular dearth of literature concerning class experience in video games, and this research scrutinizes how developers construct socioeconomic class within one of the industry's most popular genres. Our analysis is primarily conducted through the examination of character creators: in-game interfaces used to customize the abilities and appearance of a player character (PC), usually upon the initialization of a new save file. Character backgrounds are not only meaningful because of the mechanical benefits and narrative embellishments they offer, but also due to their ability to expose the hierarchies behind the character creation process. The availability of backgrounds is determined by initial character-building decisions, predominantly race, pointing toward racial essentialism that dictates what roles, and subsequent socioeconomic class positions, certain types of characters may occupy in a game's world.

We begin this paper with a concise overview of Arcanum and Dragon Age. Next, we outline the central features of character creators, define key terms, and discuss our research methods. We follow these introductory sections with two key theoretical engagements. First, mobilizing Nakamura's work on the remediation of identity in digital technologies, we build a theoretical repertoire for studying race- and gender-based representations in game interfaces and discuss our study's connection to prior research on Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy literature, and digital games. Second, we dissect several competing imaginaries of socioeconomic class and explore how it is expressed in the media using class markers, particularly in the context of video games. Using these frameworks as a springboard, we then analyze our chosen titles—exploring the hierarchies embedded in their character creators and how they connect with broader gameplay and narrative themes. Finally, we close with a brief synthesis of our findings, contextualizing them with development processes and broader fantasy tropes.

An Overview of Arcanum and Dragon Age

There are countless science-fiction and fantasy CRPGs that would serve as productive sites of analysis for this study, as character creators and fantasy races have long been staples of the genre. However, we chose Arcanum and Dragon Age for our research due to their explicit integration of socioeconomic class themes, the inclusion of common fantasy races, and robust character creation systems. Additionally, both games are considered critical successes with respectable-to-strong sales (Reilly, 2010; Walker, 2001) and have won a variety of awards (IGN Staff, 2013; Staff, 2002), suggesting they were popular titles that are at least somewhat representative of fantasy CRPGs from their respective eras. Furthermore, Arcanum and Dragon Age are readily accessible through online storefronts and feature a wealth of official paratexts—game manuals, official strategy guides, box art, print advertisements, and more—that flesh out their mechanics and lore. While fully summarizing Arcanum and Dragon Age is beyond the scope of this paper, we begin our analysis with an overview of each game including their release information, broad narrative structure, and central features.

Arcanum is a CRPG created by Troika Games and published by Sierra On-Line in 2001. Like many fantasy CRPGs, the game takes place in a world filled with magic spells, untamed wilds, and strange creatures. However, unlike most of its contemporaries, Arcanum is set amidst an industrial revolution, with steam engines and firearms existing alongside swords and sorcery. Arcanum's races include humans, elves, orcs, and other fantasy staples first popularized by Tolkien and now commonly found in novels, films, and video games (Srauy, 2019; Young, 2015). Each race possesses its own strengths and weaknesses—expressed numerically through statistics and narratively through character creator descriptions—including a sliding scale that determines a character's aptitude toward technology or magic. Decidedly steampunk in its themes, its world strongly features semi-fictitious 19th-century technologies and a markedly Victorian aesthetic; complete with sprawling urban centers, strict class hierarchies, and strong eugenic undertones. At the time of Arcanum's development, steampunk was still entrenched in its literary roots, having not yet reached the mainstream status it now enjoys (Guffey & Lemay, 2014, p. 441). As a result, the game openly borrows from the texts of Verne, Wells, and other steampunk authors, with developers even naming their (canceled) sequel Journey to the Centre of Arcanum (Cain, 2012). Despite prominent science-fiction elements, the game's narrative plays off common fantasy tropes: the protagonist is the lone survivor of a strange accident who, while attempting to determine its cause, unearths an ancient plot to return a long-banished evil power to the world.

The first game in the popular Dragon Age franchise, Dragon Age: Origins was developed by BioWare and published by Electronic Arts in 2009. Holding a great number of similarities to medieval fantasy epics such as The Lord of the Rings, Dragon Age takes place in a medieval world primarily inhabited by humans, elves, and dwarves that are on the cusp of a great conflict. The titular “origins” refer to unique backgrounds that players select during character creation. Origins determine which introductory story a character plays through at the game's onset and are presented as a combination of race and socioeconomic class. Upon completing their chosen origin story, players are recruited by the Grey Wardens, an organization tasked with saving the world from a recurring, potentially apocalyptic, event called the Blight. The player's actions involve building a unified army to fight against the Blight's evil darkspawn forces, defeating its leader the Archdemon, and bringing peace to the land of Ferelden.

A popular target for scholarship, the Dragon Age franchise is commonly mentioned in discussions of narrative structures (Jørgensen, 2010) and in-game romances (Greer, 2013; Kelly, 2015), often drawing comparison to similar BioWare titles such as Mass Effect (2007). Arcanum is relatively understudied by comparison, with existing research only scratching the surface of its story and mechanics (Gee, 2007; R. Nakamura & Wirman, 2005). Despite their varying narratives and unequal scholarly attention, both titles serve as intriguing avenues of research due to their rich lore and complex character-creation processes.

Studying Character Creators

Character creators are one of the most common features of CRPGs and are usually the first interface encountered when starting a new save file, allowing a player to customize their character's capabilities and appearance based on a series of sequential choices. Despite their prevalence, game studies literature only provides scant guidelines for studying them, often lumping them together with interface studies or more generalized game logging (Consalvo & Dutton, 2006; Fernández-Vara, 2019). However, as distillations of game systems and narratives, character creators prove useful in revealing how developers have constructed race, gender, and socioeconomic class within a given title. They define what characters can exist within a game's world, what roles certain genders and races are permitted to occupy and excel at, and how such distinctions are established through a game's code. While fantasy CRPGs often tout the necessity of meritocracy, diversity, and equality in their narratives (Iantorno & Consalvo, 2021; Young, 2016, p. 352), the study of character creators can alternatively challenge or ground such claims by dissecting underlying rule systems and the ideologies embedded within them. Akin to a core rulebook in a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) such as Dungeons and Dragons, character creators provide foundational game knowledge by wedding ludic and narrative elements together. Similar to how a rulebook imparts the information necessary to understand a new game, we open this article by providing some necessary definitions for engaging with character creators and some specific rules (i.e., methods) for studying them.

Character creators usually ask players to make initial character-building decisions (e.g., selecting gender, race, and in-game role) before moving onto more detailed options (e.g., adjusting attributes, allocating skill points, or picking narrativized backgrounds). These terms merit some elaboration as they are important aspects of both games’ character creation systems:

Attributes are statistics such as strength and intelligence that serve as the backbone of a PC's capabilities.

Skills determine how good a character is at performing certain tasks, ranging from combat to crafting. Skills are often tied to an attribute—a character's melee skill, for example, may be improved by possessing a high-strength attribute.

Backgrounds grant quantifiable bonuses or drawbacks to a character's statistics while providing narrative hooks that tie them into the game's world.

The final step in character creation usually involves customizing the appearance of a player's avatar. Using sliders and boxes, players can adjust their character's height, weight, hair, skin color, and other aesthetic aspects that the game's developers have rendered malleable. The term “build” is commonly used to describe both the initial configuration of a PC, as well as its trajectory as they progress through a game. For example, a player may emphasize their character's strength attribute and weapon skills during character creation, then continue to increase them as they level up to cultivate an effective melee-combat build.

To add a definitional wrinkle, “class” in fantasy games may be used to describe both: (a) socioeconomic class; and (b) the archetypal role of a PC, such as Dragon Age's warrior, rogue, and mage. For simplicity, throughout this paper we will use the term socioeconomic class to describe class based on economic conditions and class markers and gamic class to refer to archetypal roles that players assign to their characters.

Our study requires a different methodological approach than a broad analysis of games, as it focuses on character creators and excludes most of a title's gameplay. Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton's (2006) interface study method serves as a useful starting point as it emphasizes the importance of on-screen information and encompasses the menu-driven aspects of video games. The method interrogates how freely players may arrange in-game options, what information is privileged or excluded, and how individual choices are embedded within larger decision chains (Consalvo & Dutton, 2006). Practically, this involves making numerous characters, experimenting with interface features, and documenting cause-and-effect relationships. As character creators offer a wealth of character-building options, we often referenced paratexts to ground our findings. As described by Clara Fernández-Vara, paratextual analysis involves generating contextual data about a game through materials that exist outside the game (2019, p. 40). These materials, especially those that were written or licensed by the original developer, lay out the games’ rules in an accessible format and build upon their settings and narratives. For Arcanum and Dragon Age, our paratextual materials include game manuals, official strategy guides, and online commentary from the game's developers. Additionally, some unofficial resources were used to verify ambiguous claims made in official materials and to explore the possibilities of complex character builds. YouTube walkthroughs, wikis, and FAQs all served as invaluable secondary resources in this regard. Although our research focuses on interface analysis, we also played the introductory portions of both Arcanum and Dragon Age to better understand the ramifications of character-building decisions and to see how character-creator interfaces were revisited as characters leveled up. We documented this gameplay using game logs: notes taken by a researcher during play that chronicle the dynamic and emergent elements of a game (Consalvo & Dutton, 2006). Game logging was most prominently used in the introductory sections of Dragon Age, where players experience an origin vignette that establishes their place in the game's setting.

Following our data gathering, we identified several key themes and discourses within Arcanum's and Dragon Age's character creators. Although we will elaborate on our findings shortly, it is necessary to first contextualize how identity is constructed in video games (and other digital media) and how socioeconomic class factors into digital identities.

Entanglements of Identity

The construction of socioeconomic class in video games holds many similarities with how race, gender, and other markers of identity have been remediated in numerous types of digital media. Lisa Nakamura has long documented how racialized groups who have been persistently stereotyped in older media forms are now being remastered in digital technology. In the same manner that media companies port analog media to digital formats in order to reproduce the content of the original, game developers adapt dominant discourses related to identity—commonly using tropes and templates recycled from past media depictions—to construct their worlds and flesh out the characters within them (L. Nakamura, 2002, p. 17). Nakamura uses the term “cybertype” to describe how computers and the Internet can articulate ideological constructs to propagate and commodify images of race and racism (2002, p. 18) and her writing on menu-driven identities is particularly vital in dissecting how interface design features enforce “reductive, often archaic means of defining race upon the user” (2002, p. 101). Digital technologies reduce identity to an array of clickable boxes and, while users ostensibly have a multitude of customization options, they cannot modify the terms and categories available to them. These interfaces both reify existing ideologies and exclude viewpoints that do not fit within their paradigms, perpetuating stereotypical notions of race, gender, and socioeconomic class.

McArthur et al. (2015) build upon Nakamura's research by articulating menu-driven identities in the context of videogame avatars, noting that character creators are both informed-by and enforce restrictive hierarchies. Initial character-building decisions, such as race or gender, may limit what choices are available later on during character creation, and “some options may be hidden or “buried” in deeper levels of the hierarchy, while others are prominent” (McArthur et al., 2015, p. 7). Our introductory example reveals hierarchical arrangements, as selecting the half-orc race in Arcanum not only allows for the selection of the factory escapee character background but also removes access to the bookworm background, which grants a small boon to a character's intelligence at the cost of perception. With their high strength scores, low intelligence, and underclass-themed backgrounds, Arcanum's half-orcs are relegated as poor, uneducated, and dull-witted manual laborers. As we will discuss shortly, these hierarchies should not be treated as purely fictitious constructs; half-orcs have persistently embodied harmful tropes associated with real-world racialized groups and the working poor (Bullock, 1995, p. 124).

Returning to the idea of remastering, hierarchical character creation in CRPGs draws upon rules structures that originated in TTRPGs. Restricting the progression of non-human races, for example, was present in even the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons, with many scholars noting that the game has consistently presented humans as meritocratic constructs that may excel in almost any pursuit while other races possess more prescribed roles (Garcia, 2017; Young, 2016). One of the earliest conflations of race and gamic class occurred in Basic Dungeons and Dragons, where humans could take on roles such as fighter, magic-user, and thief, while dwarves, elves, and halflings were pre-packaged assemblages of attribute adjustments, skills, and abilities (Gygax & Arneson, 1983). Even in later editions, where the TTRPG's developers granted non-human races the ability to choose a gamic class, their progression was still restricted:

In the second edition, for example, when looking at the cleric class, gnomes are restricted to reaching only the ninth level, halflings eighth, and elves 15th; humans are unlimited in their potential. Perhaps a utopian perspective of human exceptionalism, these limitations fundamentally highlight implicit assumptions about racial inferiority within the game. (Garcia, 2017, p. 240)

Despite originating nearly half a century ago, these rules and traditions are remarkably persistent. Emma Vossen, echoing earlier work from Stang and Trammell (2019), keenly notes that “norms about gender and race in fantasy video games are not simply reinterpreted across media but in some ways directly reproduced; many fantasy tropes quantified into statistics in Dungeons and Dragons became ‘a boilerplate’ that has been ‘stamped’ into contemporary games” (2020, p. 45). While statistics, mechanics, and representations of fantasy races are not uniform across digital games, this shared lineage has created a quantifiable template of what orcs, elves, and other fantasy races are.

While Dungeons and Dragons’ serves as a boilerplate for statistical representations of fantasy races, Tolkien is the key originator of the racial logics that dominate the fantasy genre at-large. As Helen Young has discussed at length, in Tolkien's writings “race and all that stems from it is fundamentally a matter of biological descent and is a strong predictor, even if it does not always entirely determine an individual character's physical, mental, and moral capacities, as well as culture” (2016, p. 349) ¹ . Importantly, it is through Tolkien that we can perhaps most clearly see how now-canonical fantasy races emerged as (often harmful) pastiches of real-world cultures. While fictional representations of race are commonly framed as harmless due to their ostensibly other-worldly constructions, Tanner Higgin warns that such assumptions are dangerous since “fantasy worlds are populated by re-imagined signs with real and significant meanings outside of the fantasy … they have an originary meaning that cannot be discarded without losing the decipherability of that product” (2009, p. 11). While his characters are rarely one-note racial stereotypes, scholars and critics alike have highlighted problematic racial tropes that Tolkien formalized in The Lord of the Rings and related works. Orcs are entangled with savage warrior-race stereotypes, initially described by Tolkien as “Mongol-types” and embodying racist tropes from many different Asian and African cultures (Gray, 2012; Hodes, 2019). Fans of the franchise often debate depictions of dwarves who, with their large noses, greedy behavior, and short stature, embody a number of harmful Jewish stereotypes (Higgin, 2009). And humans and halflings/hobbits are overwhelmingly white and “unmistakably influenced by historical and literary constructs of European culture” (Young, 2015, p. 22). Tolkien's work has become so influential in fantasy narratives that “a norm developed to adopt his ideas in contemporary video game narratives” (Srauy, 2019, p. 493), making his racial logics troublesome but inescapable.

In the realm of digital games, Alexander R. Galloway and Melissa J. Monson elaborate on racial essentialism in World of Warcraft (WoW). Galloway argues that race is presented as “static and universal” in the game's setting of Azeroth while other character aspects, such as gamic class, are “variable and learned” (2012, p. 118). While a player can fine-tune their wizard's spells and abilities, they are incapable of altering most of the aesthetic and mechanical traits imposed by race. Monson describes how the MMORPG has defaulted to simplistic cybertyping by creating a race-based society in Azeroth—one that presupposes “the essential nature of race and in so doing creates the impression that racial boundaries, differences, and inequalities are not only real but justified and inevitable” (2012, p. 49). In a race-based society, races are deemed discrete and exclusive, embody cultural markers linked to biology, and default to certain classifications legally and socially. Despite the fantastical game setting, these in-game cultural markers mirror real-world ones involving both race and socioeconomic class. The minotaur-like Tauren are segregated biologically (cannot interbreed with other races), geographically (have their own cities), and culturally (do not adopt aesthetic markers from other cultures) from other races. They are almost universally presented as noble, patient, and resourceful and begin with high strength/stamina/spirit scores and low agility/intelligence scores (and are barred from gamic classes that do not match these tendencies, such as rogue and wizard). Adorned with feather headdresses and granted skills such as “war stomp” and “herbalism,” they invoke harmful stereotypes of Native American Indian culture (Monson, 2012, p. 59).

There is a hegemony at work here, in which problematic depictions have been normalized due to their continued appearances across games, movies, and other media. As Higgin aptly notes, “it seems likely that the embedded messages are designed to make the world comfortable to as many people as possible” (2009, p. 16). Although we have mostly focused on race thus far, these underlying logics also encompass aspects of identity such as gender and, of particular interest to this paper, socioeconomic class.

Socioeconomic Class in Videogames

Socioeconomic class is often omitted or relegated to a secondary concern in game studies literature. Previous studies on creator creators, although invaluable, focus on gender and race as the primary lenses of analysis (Higgin, 2009; McArthur et al., 2015; Monson, 2012) while only alluding to representations or simulations of class. One of the reasons this research gap may exist is because socioeconomic class is somewhat difficult to define. Thus, as a final step before delving into game analysis, we offer a brief definition of socioeconomic class and establish its role in existing media studies literature.

Marx and Engel are perhaps the ur-source for research on class, and their definitions of the proletariat and bourgeoisie (1998, p. 50) dominate discussions in the field. While their notion of class is famously tied to capital and labor—particularly regarding a person's relation to the means of production—it is important to reconcile such views with factors such as education, social prestige, and cultural traditions. Predominantly economic lenses often fail to demarcate socioeconomic class groupings in a manner that reflects how the people who constitute these groups understand themselves. In a telling example, a 2016 study delimited the American middle-class as “those with household incomes above the bottom 30% but below the top 20%,” with incomes ranging “from $41,005 to $131,962” (Williams & Boushey, 2010). However, one of the study's authors, Joan C Williams, later acknowledged that stratifying class in this manner fails to acknowledge processes of self-identification (2016, p. 19). This dissonance is epitomized in a Bloomberg article appropriately titled Everyone Thinks They’re Middle Class, in which both an amusement park worker with a $22,000 salary and a lawyer making $200,000 both referred to themselves as a middle class despite the enormous gulf between their incomes (Grobart, 2016). Clearly, there is a rift between what people believe their socioeconomic class is and what others may judge it to be.

Williams later poses a useful definition of socioeconomic class as a “cultural tradition that people riff off as they shape their everyday behavior and make sense of their lives” (2016, p. 12). Her intent is not to discard financial concerns entirely—certainly, income is still central—but rather to recognize the many other factors that help construct class. June Deery and Andrea Press propose that socioeconomic class is “a combination of economic (income, wealth) and social factors (family background, education, occupation, social prestige)” (2017, p. 6) which can manifest through values, behaviors, mannerisms, and more. Pertinently, they highlight that there are certain symbols and cues that embody commonly held class ideals, and that media producers will invoke these elements when constructing fictional representations of class (Deery & Press, 2017, p. 9). Various occupations, attitudes, and material objects become class markers that can be employed in the media to evoke the desired type of class experience. Jobs in construction and manufacturing, for example, are commonly leveraged to symbolize working-class tropes related to honesty, reliability, and work ethic (Fleras & Dixon, 2011, p. 583), despite the wide spectrum of experiences these occupations encompass.

In videogames, this symbolic work is most evident in titles that feature real-world occupations. Iantorno et al.'s (2021) study of working-class videogame protagonists analyses how class markers are commonly leveraged to establish blue-collar identities. The SpaceQuest series, for example, constructs its janitorial hero by leaning heavily into the working-class “buffoon” trope popularized in television sitcoms—the ostensibly working-class Roger Wilco is characterized as “well-meaning and warm-hearted, but incompetent, immature, ignorant, irresponsible” (Butsch et al., 2017, p. 41; in Iantorno et al., 2021, p. 100). A similar process can be seen in the firefighting videogames The Firemen (1994) and Real Heroes: Firefighters (2009), in which class is established as largely attitudinal (Iantorno et al., 2021, p. 104). Their protagonists preach the importance of humility and self-discipline in their work, echoing tropes of working-class masculinity wherein “reining yourself in so you don't have an attitude” and “doing your job” without fuss or further expectation of reward are the norm (Williams, 2016, p. 20).

Whereas videogames with contemporary settings possess recognizable modern socioeconomic class markers, fantasy CRPGs have a less direct relationship to these symbolic elements. Many titles feature revolutionary conflicts that echo Marxist framings of an oppressive bourgeoisie and downtrodden proletariat, but players usually occupy the unique role of “chosen hero” who exists entirely outside of wealth-based hierarchies. The outsider role is especially difficult to engage with in games where income, labor, and socioeconomic class are largely abstract and only loosely based on historical precedent. Zanescu's (2018) analysis of The Witcher 3, for example, reveals that wealth is predominantly used as a progression mechanic in the title rather than a way to ascend class position or gain prestige, detaching it from the class struggles embedded in the game's narrative. This does not mean that modern socioeconomic class markers are absent in fantasy CRPGs, but, rather, they have been refashioned to better fit their fantastical settings. Unearthing these markers and determining their relationship with other aspects of identity is the primary focus of our analysis of Arcanum and Dragon Age.

Arcanum Analysis

Arcanum's character creator is typical of CRPGs of its era, taking inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons (as reflected in its attributes and races) and the Fallout series (by shirking gamic class in favor of skills). The character creator is split across two screens: the first requires players to make several initial decisions for their character, such as selecting race and gender, while the second allows for nuanced manipulation of statistics.

The choices presented on the character creator's first screen include character portrait, name, gender, race, and background (see Figure 1). Although displayed simultaneously, the customization of these options is predicated on embedded hierarchies. This is most evident in the relationship between race and gender, as Arcanum's dwarves, half-ogres, halflings, and gnomes can only be male ² . The combination of race and gender determines which character portrait a player may select, and which backgrounds are available to them. For example, the female-only débutante greatly increases a character's beauty and charisma at the expense of combat efficacy and backgrounds such as halfling orphan and disenfranchised gnome are race-exclusive. Although not identified as such, many backgrounds tied to race are inherently gendered due to omission of female race options. As players make character-building choices, a text box explains how their decisions affect their attributes and derived statistics. For example, half-orc characters gain a + 1 bonus to their strength and constitution attributes, a −2 penalty to their beauty and charisma, a 10% resistance to poison, and a bonus to melee and dodge skills.

Figure 1.

Arcanum's first character creation screen, where players make initial character-building decisions.

Once these initial choices are made, players progress to the second character-creation screen to configure their starting attributes, health, fatigue, skills, technological disciplines, and spell colleges (see Figure 2). At character creation, and upon leveling up, players are granted character points that can be spent to increase the aforementioned values. A character's attributes encompass eight numeric values divided into physical (strength, constitution, dexterity, and beauty) and mental (intelligence, willpower, perception, and charisma) categories. These attributes inform a character's derived statistics, such as how strength determines how much gear they may carry, with health and fatigue being the only derived statistics that may also be increased directly. Skills are sorted under the headings of combat, thieving, social, and technological, each of which contains four associated skills (e.g., thieving skills include backstab, pick pocket, prowling, and spot trap). Each skill can be increased from rank 1 through 5 to improve efficacy, with their progression restricted by a related attribute. For example, the pick pocket skill requires that players attain a dexterity of 18 to reach rank 5.

Figure 2.

Arcanum's second character creation screen, where players finely tune their attributes and skills.

Technological disciplines and spell colleges are fundamental character-building options that play into Arcanum's unique blend of high fantasy and steampunk. Technological disciplines allow characters to craft devices that aid them during gameplay, revolving around stereotypical early-industrial occupations such as electric, smithy, and herbology. Spell colleges grant access to magick, divided into categories such as summoning, fire, and conveyance. Much like skills, access to these disciplines and colleges is restricted by attributes—intelligence for technological disciplines and willpower for spell colleges—further establishing their importance in defining a character's role. Importantly, investing character points in any of these categories affects a character's technological and magical aptitudes. Having a high magical aptitude makes spells more effective and technological items less effective and vice versa, and it is impossible to excel at both since they exist on a competing spectrum. Many races have inherent tendencies toward either technology or magick, as will be discussed shortly.

Arcanum's character creation is complex, but its hierarchy is relatively straightforward (see Figure 3). Race is the highest-level decision a player makes and causes the most ripple effects—it determines what gender a player may select, how their starting attributes are configured, which backgrounds are available, what portraits they may access, and what skills they are predisposed toward. Gender is the next most prominent customization option, further adjusting attributes and the availability of backgrounds and character portraits, although these changes are less dramatic than those imposed by race selection. Portrait and background selection are the final steps in the initial character setup, after which players gain finer control over the process by assigning character points to attributes, skills, technological disciplines, and spell colleges. Importantly, while decisions made on the first screen of character creation are immutable, those presented on the second screen may be improved over time through the allocation of character points or, temporarily, by equipping items and casting spells.

Figure 3.

The hierarchy of arcanum's character creator.

Harkening back to Monson and Galloway's work, Arcanum's character creator clearly reifies a race-based society. Half-orcs and half-ogres are almost uniformly stronger, hardier, and uglier than other races; elves are predisposed toward magick but technologically inept; and halflings are dexterous and naturally adept at thieving skills. There are some character backgrounds that allow players to mitigate racial predeterminations, such as rare half-ogre birth that restores a measure of intelligence to typically dim-witted half-ogres, but these are narrativized as exceptional circumstances and do not fully nullify racial predispositions. Additionally, while it is possible to mitigate racial attribute penalties by strategically spending character points, Arcanum limits the efficacy of such efforts. Where 20 is the default maximum for all attributes—as reflected in humans, who receive no inherent racial bonuses or penalties—attribute scores for non-human races are limited based on their initial adjustments. Half-ogres begin the game with a +4 bonus to their strength and a −4 penalty to their intelligence, meaning that their strength attribute may reach as high as 24 but their intelligence is capped at 16. No matter what build a player pursues, a half-ogre character will never be able to be as smart nor as skillful as other races.

Arcanum did not invent this character-creation paradigm. As mentioned earlier, most editions of Dungeons and Dragons (and numerous games that follow it the TTRPG's footsteps) tie races to particular skill sets, gamic classes, or roles. Although eschewing gamic class, Arcanum enacts similar ideologies by adjusting character attributes, gating access to backgrounds, and implementing racial skill bonuses and aptitudes. Barring exceptional circumstances, some races are simply better than others at occupying certain roles and will struggle to break free of predefined molds. Humans, who are overwhelmingly white (it is impossible to pick a character portrait that is not white) and coded as British ³ , are the closest thing to “blank slate” characters in the game. They have neutral attributes, may use magick and technology equally well, and are the freest to co-opt the tendencies of other races through backgrounds such as raised by elves. This ties into long-established fantasy stereotypes where “being human means being racially White and culturally western European” (Monson, 2012, p. 56) and real-world meritocratic myths that frame (white) human bodies as possessing infinite potential and malleability (Appiah, 2018; Srauy, 2019). In contrast, non-human races are established through both interface and narrative as having largely predetermined lots in life.

Arcanum is intriguing to study through the lens of socioeconomic class as its character creator directly references real-world class markers such as trade skills, occupations, and education. Scrutinizing how these markers are dispersed across backgrounds and skills, and which races have access to them, reveals instances where socioeconomic class and race converge. Half-orcs and half-ogres possess naturally high physical attributes, below-average intelligence and charisma, and access to backgrounds such as tough hide and freed bodyguard. Statistically and narratively, they are largely presented as dim-witted hired muscle in the game. Dwarves are granted a natural aptitude toward technology but have difficulty casting spells, requiring twice as much effort as other races to do so, and are barred from selecting character backgrounds associated with magick. As spellcasting is loosely affiliated with higher-education in Arcanum—categories of magick are divided into colleges while technology is framed as a more universal pursuit—dwarves occupy a role akin to trade-laborers. This aptitude is further reinforced in the game's lore, which establishes dwarves as the world's paramount smithies, stone-workers, carpenters, and engineers (Arcanum Game Manual, n.d., p. 118). Gnomes constitute much of the game's merchant class, possessing an inherent bonus to their haggle skill and a natural ability to navigate tense social situations. This mercantile tendency is furthered through the integration of harmful Jewish stereotypes, such as large noses, a desire to accumulate wealth, and prominence in occupations such as “bankers, politicians, and captains of industry” (Arcanum Game Manual, n.d., p. 121). Halflings are described in the game's paratexts as rural laborers who typically “have great success as farmers and vintners” (Arcanum Game Manual, n.d., p. 124). Not particularly strong, they are presented as opportunistic, possessing bonuses to their thieving skills, dexterity attribute, and chances to land a critical hit. Elves are portrayed as a naturally gifted race whose abilities stem from inherent talents rather than hard labor—“elves rarely employ themselves in any pursuit which humans might call ‘work’” (Arcanum Game Manual, n.d., p. 133). They have a natural aptitude toward magick and a penalty for their technological skills, establishing them as a noble or “well bred” race that does not like to get their hands dirty. Their exclusive backgrounds further these stereotypes, with foppish elf providing a bonus to the persuasion skill at the expense of strength and dark elf follower increasing willpower and elevating their technological ineptitude to outright rejection.

As a closing point of analysis: since gender and race are intertwined in Arcanum, labor in the game is extremely gendered. Half-ogres, gnomes, halflings, and dwarves do not even possess female in-game models—these game assets were deprioritized during the production process, which we will further elaborate on in our closing discussion—meaning that the occupations that they dominate are predominantly male (including the role of adventurer ⁴ ). Lower- and middle-class labor roles, as defined through character backgrounds and skills, are less accessible to female characters, and NPC representations of these roles skew decidedly male.

Dragon Age Analysis

Dragon Age: Origins opens with a cutscene that establishes the overarching plot of the game, after which points players are presented with the character creator and advised that their character-building choices will affect how NPCs will treat them throughout the adventure. The character creator is divided into five screens: the first asks players to make initial character-building decisions (see Figure 4), the second allows them to customize their avatar's appearance and voice, and the final three screens (see Figure 5) are used to adjust character attributes, skills, and talents. One key difference from Arcanum is that Dragon Age characters must pick a distinct gamic class. On the initial screen, players can configure several options: gender (male or female), race (human, elf, or dwarf), gamic class (warrior, mage, rogue), and finally background (human noble, Circle mage, city elf, Dalish elf, dwarf commoner, dwarf noble). Although these options are presented simultaneously, not all combinations are possible. Humans can choose from human noble or Circle mage; elves from Circle mage, Dalish (nomadic) elf, or city (urban underclass) elf; and dwarves from dwarf commoner or dwarf noble. Characters who select the mage gamic class may only choose the Circle Mage background as the Chantry, Ferelden's dominant religious organization, tightly controls and monitors magic use—establishing mages as a powerful yet subjugated class/culture set apart from all others.

Figure 4.

Dragon age's first character creation screen, where players select their gender, race, gamic class, and origin.

Figure 5.

A section of dragon age's character creator in which players customize their attributes.

Unlike in Arcanum, gender does not limit character creation in Dragon Age beyond aesthetics. The two presented genders are described as equals and the character creator notes that men and women of all races take part in all elements of society ⁵ . This is reinforced through the hierarchy of the character creator—there are no starting bonuses or penalties attached to playing as male or female. Race, however, matters in ways that gender does not. Each race possesses inherent bonuses to the game's attributes: strength, dexterity, willpower, magic, cunning, and constitution. Elves gain an additional 2 points toward willpower and magic; dwarves an additional 1 point in strength and dexterity, and 2 points in constitution; and humans an additional 1 point each in strength, dexterity, magic, and cunning (Dragon Age Manual, 2009, p. 4). Another key difference between the races that heavily impacts gameplay is that dwarves possess a “high resistance to all forms of magic,” granting a 10% chance to resist hostile magic and completely barring members of the race from becoming mages. These starting attributes can be read as racial inclinations, with each race optimized to succeed in particular gamic classes. Under this model, elves are adept spellcasters, dwarves are sturdy warriors, and humans are adaptable in nearly any role they choose. Dragon Age creates further divisions between characters through the three gamic classes that can be selected: warrior, mage, or rogue. Here, starting attributes shift according to predetermined “class benefits,” with the game assigning more points to job-specific attributes and less to others. Warriors begin with higher strength and constitution, mages with magic and willpower, and rogues with cunning and dexterity. However, players are also granted 5 attribute points (and more as they level up) that they can use to further customize their character.

The game's titular origins are a defining element of Dragon Age, offering the player six different origin stories that span the first 60–90 min of gameplay before converging at a pivotal moment. Race and socioeconomic class both play a significant role in origins, as can be observed through the unequal distribution of class privilege between them. Apart from Circle mage, humans only have one other origin story—as a noble who sees their family destroyed before they are recruited to join the Grey Wardens. Elves on the other hand have no noble backgrounds. Rather, the game describes elves as a formerly enslaved race who:

…have all but lost their culture, scrounging an impoverished living in the slums of human cities. Only the nomadic Dalish tribes still cling to their traditions, living by the bow and the rule of their old gods as they roam the ancient forests, welcome nowhere else (Searle, n.d., p. 11).

Dwarf culture is summarized in the character creator as “rigidly bound by caste and tradition,” defined by generations of conflict with their darkspawn enemies. In contrast to humans and elves, dwarf characters may choose to be nobles or commoners. Their caste system consists of nobles at the top, skilled laborers in the middle, and a casteless underclass occupying the bottom rung.

The racial essentialism present in Dragon Age differs somewhat from that in Arcanum, as it is less defined by statistical bonuses. Arcanum's character-building system limits attributes based on race and gender choices, exacerbated through the game's narrow statistical scope—characters generally possess attributes ranging from 1 to 20 and even a small penalty can be difficult to overcome. In contrast, Dragon Age characters may increase their statistics almost endlessly as the game progresses, making initial advantages or disadvantages easier to mitigate, even considering that many skills and talents require meeting ability score thresholds to access. In the long run, a couple of bonus points makes little difference as attributes may soar well over 50 by the end of the game.

Much more impactful, however, are bonus skill allotments. Each of the six origins grants a bonus skill point that is automatically slotted into one of the game's categories: coercion, stealing, trap-making, survival, herbalism, poison-making, combat training, and combat tactics. Skills are universally available to all gamic classes but are extremely limited: characters only earn about 8 skill points during a normal playthrough and, as individual skills require 4 skill points to max out, each one is precious. Because skills define what a character is capable of, background skill bonuses hint at socioeconomic class stereotypes. In a poignant example, dwarf commoners are granted a bonus skill point in stealing—a skill whose only purpose is to pilfer valuables from NPCs—implying that lower-class dwarves have no compunction breaking the law. Although rationalized in-game as a necessary skill in an inherently unjust dwarvish society, associating theft with the lower-class reifies harmful beliefs that the poor share “defective behaviors, values, and personality traits” (Bullock, 1995, p. 124) and guides dwarf commoners toward the rogue gamic class. The idea of upper-class warriors and lower-class rogues is further reinforced with human and dwarf nobles gaining combat training as their bonus skill and city elves gaining a point in the coercion skill, invoking tropes of silver-tongued thieves. Characters eventually gain access to new sets of abilities referred to as talents, which function similarly to skills but are delimited by skill level (weapon talents require ranks in combat expertise) or gamic class (warriors, rogues, and mages possess exclusive talents or spells). Talents build upon socioeconomic class tropes initiated by character backgrounds and their associated bonus skill points. For example, dwarf commoners are granted a bonus skill point in stealing, which nudges them toward the rogue gamic class, which in turn grants them access to talents such as dirty fighting and below the belt, solidifying their unscrupulous nature.

The Dalish elf and Circle mage backgrounds deviate from the straightforward rich–poor dynamic discussed above. Whereas city elves are explicitly an oppressed class that lives within human-dominated cities in alienages, Dalish elves are described as nomadic people who exist almost completely outside human society in caravans—evoking tropes associated with many diasporic populations. In Dalish elves, we see a familiar return of the racial essentialism described by Monson, where real-world stereotypes of indigenous peoples are used to construct fantasy races (2012, p. 59). In fact, the parallels between Dalish elves and Tauren in WoW are striking; both cultures are described as nomadic, spiritual, and highly attuned to nature. This is highlighted by Dalish elves’ bonus skill point in survival, which grants supernatural tracking abilities, and resistance to nature-based magic. In this way, the Dalish are placed outside the game's overarching social and economic system. Although they may be surviving (and/or thriving) on their own terms, this difference marks them as Other to regulated, normalized systems of exchange and daily ways of living. This is made more evident in Dragon Age via images of Dalish wagons, which resemble those commonly associated with the Roma people, also stigmatized as outsiders to everyday society, and with elves referred to as wilderness-dwelling bandits.

The Circle mage origin is perhaps the most difficult to pin down through a socioeconomic lens, as The Circle of Magi is an insular organization, operating under the watchful eye of the Chantry and isolated from the rest of Ferelden. Mages are closely monitored and controlled by the Templar, children showing magic tendencies are taken from their families and forced into The Circle, and mages are looked upon with suspicion by non-mages—a key theme within the game's narrative. Mage protagonists have little history beyond their involvement in The Circle and it is explained that members forfeit any rank or title they may be due. In a sense, magehood serves as a mystical socioeconomic class eraser, in which magically-inclined humans and elves are given equal footing—a positioning reflected in the identical bonus skill points and origin stories for mages of both races. However, this supposed equalization is complicated by many factors. First, dwarves cannot become mages due to their inborn resistance to magic, further trapping them in their caste-based society. Second, The Circle represents a toxic meritocracy, where apprentices are required to complete a perilous task known as The Harrowing to become fully-fledged mages. Failure results in immediate execution and apprentices who are deemed unworthy are denied the test entirely and are forced to become Tranquil—emotionless entities who are stripped of their powers and tasked with menial labor. Finally, although Circle mages exist “within” a wider society (unlike Dalish elves) they are forever monitored and tracked (a sample of their blood is taken so they can always be found), and their actions are tightly circumscribed. Although they have a great deal of power there is strong resentment towards and fear of them from non-mages, negating most beneficial class benefits they may accrue based on their power or past positions in society. The Circle mage origin story blurs easy lines between race, socioeconomic class, and gamic class in Dragon Age and so highlights some of the difficulties in trying to isolate these elements in the first place.

Conclusion and Discussion

Our analysis reveals many commonalities in how socioeconomic class and other aspects of identity are constructed in Arcanum's and Dragon Age's character creators. Both games draw upon real-world stereotypes and well-established tropes, rooted in discourses popularized by Tolkien, reified through Dungeons and Dragons, and reinforced by a long lineage of fantasy media. While we centered character backgrounds in our study due to their explicit integration of socioeconomic class themes, their entwinement with other aspects of the character-creation process was revealing, exposing how hierarchies and statistics substantiate ideologies related to race, class, and gender. Orcs (and half-orcs), who have long been entangled with Asian and African cultures through warrior-race stereotypes (Hodes, 2019; Loconte, 2016), are consistently presented as strong but unintelligent, and rarely granted noble or wealthy backgrounds. While a few dwarves can be noble, most persist as a rugged working-class, barred from magical pursuits and entrenched in their roles as trade-laborers. In contrast, predominantly light-skinned humans are depicted as versatile and capable in most roles, with a range of abilities and the most freedom regarding socioeconomic class mobility. Gender is entangled with all these representations and, even when it has been decoupled from prescribed character builds, as in Dragon Age, sexism persists throughout game narrative and lore. Importantly, socioeconomic class themes run through many aspects of character creation but are rendered most visible through skills and abilities (which are hierarchically associated with race, gamic class, and attributes). When compared alongside other prominent fantasy games, these two titles emerge as key examples of how the fantasy genre constructs identity.

Although we primarily studied character creators as a distillation of mechanics and narrative, it is important to consider the developmental decisions that lead to these menu-driven identities. Fictitious races in fantasy CRPGs exist as strange pastiches, with elements plucked haphazardly from the real world and prior media depictions. Developers may not be fully aware of harmful tropes, simply accepting them as the “norm” due to historical practices and beliefs (Srauy, 2019, p. 482), and may downplay their real-world origins. As an example of the latter, Dragon Age's developers have become evasive on connections to real-world cultures (@PatrickWeekes, 2018), despite some early claims that elves were inspired by both the Jewish people—“the lost homeland, the existence of Jewish ghettos in many medieval cities, etc.” (Gaider, 2015)—and the Roma people, before eventually turning into something more akin to North American indigenous cultures (Gaider, 2009). It is difficult to discern whether this change of heart is an attempt to distance the game from racist tropes or simply the result of inattentiveness to entrenched problems that have existed in the fantasy genre since the days of Tolkien, but the minimal backlash over these design decisions is revealing. Both developers and players are embedded within discourses that entwine fantasy races with real-world race, class, and gender tropes. The power (and danger) of these representations is that they are easily accepted and, thus, effortlessly weaved into various media. However, as Higgin notes, these fantastical representations are only made legible in reference to formations in the physical world (2009, p. 11), even if their authors claim a solely other-worldly construction.

In addition to overlooking broader discursive formations, such justifications also ignore how videogame developers prioritize certain game features during development. As an example, Tim Cain, one of Arcanum's developers, has claimed that development restrictions were responsible for the game's gender imbalance. While half-ogres and dwarves were always designed to be “male only” races, in-game models for female gnomes and halflings were dropped due to budgetary reasons and the game's lore was updated to reflect these omissions (Cain, 2002). Cain's testimony is telling, as it frames non-male character models as an added feature rather than a core part of Arcanum. As Srauy highlights, males, particularly white males, have long been “the default model of a person in our everyday lives” and their inclusion is deemed mandatory in a risk-averse game industry that caters to white cis-male gamers (2019, p. 484). While Cain identifies two types of ideological decision-making in Arcanum—design informed by narrative, as with dwarves and half-ogres; and narrative informed by design, as with halflings and gnomes—both are outcomes of the same hegemonic corporate processes. ⁶ In either case, the result is the same: menu-driven identities that literally erase certain genders from the game world. Investigating the development reasons why some identities persist across fantasy games, and why others are deprioritized, merits further research.

Cloaked as they are in the language of personal choice, it is easy to overlook the limitations and hierarchies embedded in CRPG character creators. These interfaces present seemingly endless options, with official game paratexts trumpeting their ability to craft unique characters that can cater to diverse playstyles and narrative interests. Despite these claims, these interfaces shape and limit how characters are created and progress in countless ways. Socioeconomic class and race are presented as choices to the player and, as they gain power and prestige via gameplay, their character's advancement indicates some level of meritocratic system at work. However, while the PC is upwardly mobile, their progression is still bound by initial character-building decisions. In this way, character creators insert friction between the ostensible meritocracy of player-led character customization and the hierarchies imposed by fantastical races—which are, in turn, hegemonic entanglements of race, socioeconomic class, and gender. And perhaps most tellingly, although the player may attain riches and fame via different character choices, the socioeconomic class formations in both Arcanum and Dragon Age remain largely unchanged. While danger from outside forces may be averted, the structures of the societies they live in, no matter how limited in terms of racial, gender, or class formations, are maintained. The wealthy generally remain in power, the poor continue to eke out a living, and it is only the player-as-hero (along with a few of their companions) who can freely move through society and change their position for the better.

Our goal with this research is to establish socioeconomic class as another key axis for studying how game developers construct identity within digital games, while further establishing CRPG character creators as an indispensable site of scholarship. By identifying and contextualizing recurring elements within videogame character creators—such as the backgrounds that served as the central focus of our study—we can begin to untangle the relationship of socioeconomic class to other aspects of identity in the long-standing genre of fantasy CRPGs. Tropes, stereotypes, and markers are woven together in a myriad of ways in these games, marrying past discourses with new ideas to produce multifaceted pastiches of race, gender, and socioeconomic class.