Dragon Age News Thread

Also a bunch of weird skintones in Heroes of Dragon Age, IIRC.

There’s sort of an annoying fuzzy line that appears. So something can seem like an overreaction, or an appropriate reaction, to different rational people.

Let me put it this way. If you see someone chugging a bottle of vodka, you might raise an eyebrow. But if you see someone drinking 1 or 2 beers, that’s within the realm of what a normal healthy person might drink. However... if throughout the day, they’re knocking back 20, then that’s a huge problem.

We’re conditioned to look for “vodka” level racism (say, a dude in a Klan hat), so reacting to “beer” level racism (say, someone gets passed over for 1 job, but it’s sort of borderline whether bias played any role or if the other person was just better qualified) can feel a little silly. After all, 1 beer is totally within the bounds of normal behavior, maybe there’s a valid reason things went that way.

The problem is that 20 beers still gets you drunk. If someone keeps encountering that slight, barely-there bias throughout their whole day, it sucks just as bad as the vodka racism. The end result is frustrating for all parties. The person who’s seeing 1 beer thinks “this 1 beer is completely healthy and not a problem, why is everyone overreacting”. Unfortunately, the person who experiences the beer in context of the 20 beers has no other way to tackle them other than addressing them one-by-one.

If those 20 “beer biases” had been 1 “vodka bias”, it would be much easier to get buy-in from the person who only sees 1.