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Dragon Age: Inquisition

Bioware's Gaider on how to improve LGBT inclusion in games

"It's a matter of getting everybody on board and thinking about other sorts of players", but "on a respectful manner and no need to justify". DAI's Krem and Dorian as examples.

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Bioware's inclusive and natural approach to including LGBT characters has been praised by the community in recent years, after the interesting examples found in games such as Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Inquisition. Recalling the recent introduction of the first "fully gay character" in DAI, we wanted to ask senior writer David Gaider which would be the next step for games to be more inclusive.

Here's pretty much his full answer, mentioning both DAI's Dorian the Mage and Iron Bull's lieutenant Krem:

"We do have gay characters and we have one transgender character in Dragon Age: Inquisition, and I think we can do better than that. The one [transgender] we had [Krem] was an interesting character. We had major characters that are gay (Dorian was definitely gay), but what about a major character that's transgender? There's also allowing the player, if they identify as asexual, for example, or in any other particular way, to put themselves in their character without being contradicted. You're never going to make a game that's going to encompass the breadth of humanity, but it's a matter of getting everybody on board and thinking about other sorts of players, inviting them actively to play your game."

"And it wasn't just a couple of people proposing [including these characters in the game], it was a team-wide thing. When this conversation is held, a lot of people assume that it's a restriction, like if somebody was forcing us to, we wouldn't do it. But it actually expands the possibilities of things you can do with the characters, as long as you're doing it in a respectful manner, and you're not just making something for the sake of it. But at the same time, I don't think you need to justify it either. If you made a character who's white and straight you would never have to justify why they're white. So if the industry as a whole has more characters like that, then we just can stop trying to explain it, it will just be."

For more details on this and what goes into characters' writing, you can watch our full Gamelab interview right here:

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