Tag Archives: Baldur’s Gate

What Is, What Should Be: An Open Letter to David Gaider

Dear Mr. Gaider, The following is a response to your blogpost regarding Trans* characters in the Dragon Age games. Let me begin by stating my position. I am, by all accounts, an unabashed BioWare fangirl and have been since the … Continue reading →

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Abandonment Issues and Abject Subjectivities in Borderlands 2, Bioshock 2, and Baldur’s Gate, Too

A little over a year ago, I wrote a review of Baldur’s Gate, in anticipation of its upcoming rerelease. It was a sloppy piece on looking at the relationship between the main character and their father, Bhaal, god of death, … Continue reading →

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Second Nature: Language, Exclusion, and Gamer Rage

by Edcrab A little after its release, my dad played Baldur’s Gate. I remember him being amused that hitting livestock with a quarterstaff had shifted his reputation to that of a heinous slayer of innocents. Wanting to know exactly how much harm he was doing to said cows, he checked out his weapon’s stats. “What’s a d6?” In a fit of rage I threw him out the window and then told everyone on Facebook, which existed back then if you knew where to look, what a newb he was and how I’d totally owned him, and then I got all the likes. After my father had dusted himself off and we cleared up all the broken glass, I explained the term’s origins. He seemed quite happy to accept that it was shorthand for a six-sided dice, and therefore designated a value of one to six. And then he cursed the Continue reading →

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Close Playing Baldur’s Gate: Still the Same Old Daddy Issues

While Baldur’s Gate’s game play is still clunky — I can’t count the number of times I yelled at my party: “You can’t walk through walls, goddammit!” — the themes it engages with are still worthy of attention, nearly a decade and a half later. I’m not going to drone on about the game play mechanics and how it revolutionized the arena of PC gaming or how the Dungeons and Dragon RPG style is or is not stale. Instead, I want to get at an issue that is important to me as an adult feminist, and how Baldur’s Gate functions as a beautiful example of this: that is, the identity politics at the forefront of the narrative. Continue reading →

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