By May

As I continued playing Divinity: Original Sin 2, I grew to really appreciate listening to the dialogue sequences. My friends, whom I have been playing with, both told me that they generally tend to skip the dialogue since they played it so much, but I took my time to listen to what the characters had to say. For a while, I was simply enjoying listening to the voice acting in this game, many of which I thought were really good and very captivating. It took me a while to even realize what was wrong with the voice acting as I was fixated on other aspects of this game. The more I paid attention to the dialogue, the more I realized that all the voice acting was very Eurocentric and that all the accents the characters had were mainly European.
In Astrid Ensslin’s paper “Speech Accents as Language Ideologies in Video Games,” she observes voice acting in the game Dragon Age: Origins and talks about the differences in accents between the different races in that game. She brings up an idea of a “matrix” (4) of which the game’s accents center mainly around both “Anglicized” and American matrices and that any other accent either breaks off from the matrix or just adds to it. Through this idea, I took a look at the choice of accents among the different races in this game but I didn’t notice the same exact patterns. There didn’t seem to be a specific matrix that each race stuck to and in fact every race used all sorts of accents. They all definitely remained within the Eurocentric spectrum, however.

All of the videos below are some examples of the voice acting in this game.

As you may hear, the majority of the voices are English and I did notice that most of the characters in the game have English accents. The other most common accents were Irish and Scottish. This idea really challenges the idea of what the “fantasy” genre really is. Divinity: Original Sin hasn’t been the first game to demonstrate ethnocentrism with a European bias within a fantasy world. For Ensslin, it was Dragon Age: Origins, in Mattie Brice’s article, “Speaking in Accents and the American Ethnocentrism in Video Games,” she talks about Final Fantasy, and Brian Wheeler’s article, “Why are fantasy world accents British?,” he discusses the same issue but in the film industry with examples like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. There are plenty more examples which makes this issue all the more apparent.
So the question is, why are characters within fantasy worlds centered around European accents, especially the English accent? I had said before that when I first started playing Divinity, I never thought twice about this idea. I had simply accepted it as a given, as something I’m used to hearing. Most people in general don’t seem to bat an eye to this issue. This shows a problem of personal bias and how much European culture is heavily ingrained within our ideas of the fantasy world despite it being an imaginary genre. Then how do we move away from this problem? Much of culture today has been working harder on diversity and inclusion and within film and video games, there has been a push for more racial and gender diversity especially. It is through this push, that we need to discuss in further detail our personal biases such as Eurocentrism beyond the common ideas such as physical appearance. There are many other ways our biases become apparent that we end up not realizing and this issue I brought up is a good example of one.

Works Cited:
Brice, Mattie. “Speaking in Accents and the American Ethnocentrism in Video Games.” Game Developer, 17 Nov. 2011, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/speaking-in-accents-and-the-american-ethnocentrism-in-video-games.
Cutts, Charlotte. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of British Voice Acting in Games.” Destructoid, 21 Oct. 2018, https://www.destructoid.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-british-voice-acting-in-games/.
Ensslin, Astrid, and Tejasvi Goorimoorthee. “Refiguring Innovation in Games.” Speech Accents as Language Ideologies in Video Games, 2017.
Wheeler, Brian. “Why Are Fantasy World Accents British?” BBC News, BBC, 30 Mar. 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17554816.

By May

The fantasy genre is always a wonderful genre that allows anyone to essentially create their own world and rules and Divinity: Original Sin 2 is no exception to this idea. In this game, the creators have developed an open world viewed in third-person. In this game, you will complete missions and follow the main story with either a pre-made character or a personalized character. Throughout the game, you will pick up other characters who can join you on your mission or you can play co-op with friends. Despite the open world aspect and personalized character creation, I’ve noticed that there isn’t as much personalization as I thought.
The first obvious trait I noticed among most of the characters was how most of them shared the same body templates.

The photos above are all examples of the human characters in this game. They all share or have somewhat similar body templates. When paying closer attention to their physical traits, I noticed just how much these characters tended to follow the stereotypical standards of beauty in our society today. For the female characters, they were usually young, thin, with curves, and large breasts. The male characters were typically young, muscular, and/or fit.

While this game does follow many gender stereotypes, there are certain aspects of this game that lie beyond the social norms of gender and sex. During this game you spend a lot of time talking to NPCs and are constantly given the choice of multiple dialogue options. One option I’ve encountered several times has been the ability to romance or kiss the character you are talking to. Normally when you see this option in video games, it is typically because you are playing a character of the opposite sex. I, however, created a female character and I was given the option to romance both female and male characters in this game. I like to believe that the options remain the same if I created a male character instead.
In Megan Blythe Adams’ article, “Bye, Bye, Birdo: Heroic Androgyny and Villainous Gender-Variance in Video Games,” she brings up the aspect of characters in video games that are non-human but still appear to be “humanoid”. Now in her article, she focuses on androgyny and androgynous characters, however, I still thought this idea of humanoid characters plays an important role in Divinity: Original Sin 2 as well. In this game you can choose multiple races and one of them is a Lizard race. They have lizard-esque aspects to their appearances such as a tail, scaly skin, and a face and arms/legs that are similar to a lizard, but they also have certain human features as well. What stands out in particular is that the female lizard character design takes on many stereotypical “feminine” human aspects such as a thin frame and an obvious bust. The male lizard design does the same with stereotypical “masculine” features such as a muscular and broad frame. What I find so interesting about this observation is despite being a race completely different to humans, the developers still felt the need to essentially sexualize this race in the same way.

This game has much content to it, but I believe it lacks much diversity of character design, especially for the player’s own personal preferences. There is more diversity among NPCs than there is for the player’s choice of character creation. Given the limited choices of character creation, players are left to deal solely with what society today generally sees as typical beauty standards for both men and women. While I understand games can lack the funds to afford more visual design details such as this, it is still something to think about when it comes to other games in the future.

Works Cited:

Adams, Meghan Blythe. “Bye, Bye, Birdo: Heroic Androgyny and Villainous Gender-Variance in Video Games.” Queerness in Play, 2018, pp. 147–163, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90542-6_9.

Perreault, Mildred F., et al. “What Does It Mean to Be a Female Character in ‘Indie’ Game Storytelling? Narrative Framing and Humanization in Independently Developed Video Games.” Games and Culture, vol. 17, no. 2, 2021, pp. 244–261, https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211026279.

Skowronski, Marika, et al. “The Effects of Sexualized Video Game Characters and Character Personalization on Women’s Self-Objectification and Body Satisfaction.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 92, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2020.104051.

SkylentGames. “Are Games Oversexualized?” YouTube, YouTube, 27 Feb. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsmLdS_xC_Q.