Three Cities: Baltimore, The Eye, and Kirkwall
At the heart of each piece of media is a city with its systems, and its people with their communities.
Systematic failure is at the heart of The Wire’s themes and what permeates American society. The show illuminates such with a laser focus on a singular city, Baltimore. Corruption and apathy pollute politics. School systems are put under such pressure that they can only hope to stay funded by playing the numbers games designed by those so far removed from material conditions in the classroom and the lives of the students. Labor unions are pushed to the brink of extinction. Chiefly, a style of policing designed to deter the pursuit of worthwhile cases and encourage a violent relationship between officers and the communities they police.
In season three , Major Colvin, a disillusioned district commander eyeing up retirement attempts one last desperate plan to fix the western district. The standard procedure towards policing the issue of drugs is to “take corners and crack skulls.” Essentially, to catch dealers in the act of selling drugs on the street, and to do so in a flashy and often violent way. It’s a faulty plan for a number of reasons, but as Major Colvin claims, is the result of America’s “War on Drugs” that prefers a showy style of policing that puts drugs and guns on the table over finding long term solutions. After all, many of the people being arrested are younger gang members that are low in the power structure of their respective gangs and are easier to replace.
Major Colvin rejects this approach. He creates three free zones colloquially known as Hamsterdams. Vacant areas within the western district where the sale of drugs is, for all intents and purposes, legal. He agrees to let the dealers do what they do so long as no violence occurs. Colvin’s plan is…incomplete. He alters an ecosystem and thinks little of the potential consequences. Because the police aren’t a threat to breaking up the sale of drugs, the mid-level dealers who operate each individual “corner” no longer need to employ “hoppers,” AKA kids who act as lookouts and runners. Additionally, not only is the sale and purchase of drugs ignored, but the use of them as well. All three free zones have also become hotbeds feeding the addiction and the spread of disease through shared needles. The character simply known as the Deacon, a literal deacon and friend of Colvin’s, points this massive oversight out and offers his assistance along with the ample connections he has throughout the city.
In time, the free zones begin to take form into a truly radical solution to the drug and crime epidemic. Volunteer medical organizations come in to offer needle exchanges, free blood tests, and condoms. They’ve never had better access to folks in the midst of addiction, which has provided invaluable data, and have even managed to convince some to enter rehabilitation programs. Community activists and organizers, such as the recurring character of Cutty, come in to offer guidance to the now out of work hoppers. By some miracle, even one officer, Sergeant Carver, begins to recognize that these free zones are worth protecting. In a matter of weeks violent crime rates within the western district drop 14%. The people living within the communities Major Colvin is in charge of are sending stacks of letters expressing thanks.
Inevitably, higher-ups get word of Colvin’s experiment. In the aftermath of their discovery, they pay little mind to the stats that they had worshiped not weeks ago. The conversation among the police commissioner and his most immediate subordinates is how they can save their careers. The mayor is the only person entertaining the idea, solely because his poll numbers are plummeting in an election year. However, in the end, all that comes of the free zones is Major Colvin is given the boot even sooner than he expected and every ounce of promise from the program is swept under the rug in an attempt to salvage careers by putting drugs on the table and the mugshots of young black men on the news.
The free zones are far from perfect, even with all the outside assistance, but they offer tangible benefits. Ones that are ultimately ignored in the face of a mayoral campaign. It’s a solution staring an entire city in the face and those in power turn away. They reject the possibility in favor of familiar narratives because the societal benefits even their regressive eyes see are politically inconvenient.
Every season of The Wire ends the same. Little changes. The corner boys are still the corner boys. The police are still the police. And the politicians are still those that sit atop it all, watching the preventable suffering and refusing to embrace radical change. The American way; its brand of capitalism, labor, policing, racism, education, and politics is a self-perpetuating sickness upon all of its people. One that will not be cured easily.
You will wither without labor, for you are Sleeper. A body specifically designed for dangerous work, and shackled to it by their need of a stabilizing medical injection, which is nearly monopolized by your corporate owners. And yet, an escape attempt has led you to The Eye, a space station on the outer reaches of humanity’s expansion into the stars. You are poor and alone in a city barely hanging on in the years since bureaucrats co-opted an uprising. You will not survive long without finding a line on the stabilizer, and surely it wont come cheap.
The Sleeper does not survive alone though, as is the case with anyone who calls The Eye home. Lives intersects and cohabitate upon the station which barely keeps the void of space at bay. Citizen Sleeper is a game all about surviving not by pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and proving the value of a meritocracy, but finding community. To rely on others and letting them rely on you. The single father Lem, works multiple jobs to provide for his daughter, Mina. At times you’ll become an impromptu babysitter, share shifts at the dockyards, or exchange anxieties about the future over a drink. Within some scenes with other characters there can be something to gain. Money, valuable items, information, or stabilizer. But with Lem and Mina this is not a quid pro quo exchange. You help them because they are people who need help. Without a friend to vent to, Lem might break under the strain of the labor he is required to do all in the hopes of winning a lottery ticket to board a ship that will take him and Mina off The Eye. It’s through numerous stories like this, that the Sleeper finds a home. A community that they will support and that supports them. But this all comes under threat in the three DLC chapters.
Refugees have flooded into the system, running from an EMP event echoing throughout the galaxy. The Eye’s government, Havenage, has a number of hardliners unwilling to provide aid and dismisses the refugee claims of an oncoming disaster. The Sleeper meets a handful of key people among those who’ve left their homes who all have their own complex histories and intentions. Peake wishes to help the Sleeper defend The Eye from the coming tragedy, but even with their best plan executed to perfection, uncertainty remains. The Sleeper is desperate to protect a place they have come to known as home. Their first and only in a world that created them to be disposable. After setting up the defenses of The Eye, my Sleeper got to work on the back up plan, helping to organize the refugee flotilla in order to take on as many evacuees as possible. The stream of the fearful is endless though.
The shabby apartment my Sleeper settled in alongside some of The Eye’s most vulnerable, whose only protection comes from the Yatagan gang and its leader Rabiah. Her ferocity to defend them is only matched by her distrust of those in power who’ve allowed their situation to fester. The workshops and dockyards where I spent countless shifts earning just enough money to buy stabilizer from the back alley doctor, Sabine, in her clinic near the poorest neighborhoods. Emphis’ cozy food stall where stories are exchanged for a warm meal. The digital spaces where the AI of the station linger like ghosts. The outer reaches where a commune tills soils once thought unworkable. All of it. This place I have spent 20 hours enraptured by is going to die. The Sleeper’s home, a place I peered at through a monitor, and despite its flaws, yearned for its sense of community, was ending.
One final choice is left, will your Sleeper leave on the flotilla or stay on The Eye? Will they accept that The Eye, even if it somehow survives, will be irrevocably changed? Will it even be that home they came to know? When so many of the faces that made its metallic corridors warm are leaving, how could it be? Is it even worth fighting for when all the state systems that have failed it are rendered inert by their narrow political vision? Those same systems failed the Sleeper from the moment they arrived as a refugee months ago. In a world dominated by the failures of capitalism, there are times where selfish decisions are the only rational option. Citizen Sleeper asks where the line is. Where do you finally put your foot down, and yet still have empathy for those who are unable to and have to make that impossible decision?
The unfortunately named Dragon Age II is about a lot of things. It is after all, a AAA RPG, telling a tale in Bioware’s highly detailed fantasy world of Thedas. But the second installment has a focus that Origins, with its traditional sweeping fantasy epic, and Inquisition, with its typical 2014 everything but the kitchen sink open world design, do not possess. In the grand world of Thedas with all of its rich history spelled out across the franchise’s hundreds of hours of multimedia content, lengthy codexes, and hardcover tomes, the resulting picture is often that of the macro. How does magic work? What is the Tevinter Empire and their relationship to the other powerful nations? What is the theological understanding of the apocalyptic Darkspawn from the perspective of The Chantry? Dragon Age II doesn’t ignore all of that, but instead puts it through a specific filter of time and place. That being the city-state of Kirkwall in the decade following the Fifth Blight, a mass invasion of Darkspawn which is the focal point of Origins’ plot.
The player character known as Hawke, doesn’t care about all that. In the opening minutes all that matters is protecting themselves and their family as they flee the monstrous hordes of Darkspawn. Barely escaping their homeland of Ferelden for the city across the sea where a distant family awaits. Though their escape comes at the cost of one of the younger Hawke siblings, and Kirkwall is hardly a refuge for the grieving Hawkes or the hundreds of other Fereldians fleeing war. As the game’s narrator and one of Hawke’s potential companions, Varric puts it:
“Two weeks they spent in that dark hold, packed in with the fearful and the desperate. And then they saw it: Kirkwall, the City of Chains. Long ago it was part of the Imperium, slaves coming from far and wide to work the quarries. Now it’s a free city, but I used the word loosely.”
The game cuts from its dramatized pop-up book aesthetic to the Hawke, staring up through the cage of the ship’s hold and upon the massive bronze bodies lining the cliffside. Emaciated, in rags, and covering what one could reasonably presumed are sorrowful faces.
It is not accidental that Kirkwall, a free city — as Varric sarcastically remarks — was founded upon slavery and has yet to tear down the monuments to its wretched history. It refuses entry to not only the Hawkes but all of the refugees seeking asylum. The area where you first arrive looks like a prison, because it is not only the former slave market but has partially been converted to the mages’ tower. Throughout much of Thedas, mages are not free. The Chantry, fearful of their power and their vulnerability to demonic possession, keep all who are attuned to magic cooped up in towers under strict watch. In Kirkwall, the mages face especially harsh treatment under Knight-Commander Meredith Stannard.
Eventually, the Hawkes do gain access to the city proper, but only by Hawke and their remaining sibling agreeing to work for one of the local gangs. The home they reside in with their maternal uncle and mother is located in the heart of the slums. The city opens up to the player and this is it. This is where you will spend almost the entirety of the game’s roughly 45 hour run time. This is no expansive metropolitan area like in Grand Theft Auto. No massive surrounding countryside as you might find in other fantasy outings such as The Witcher 3. It is here, in Kirkwall and the bits of surrounding countryside. All of it laid out in “level” based fashion typical of Bioware games pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition.
The companions of Dragon Age II are largely made up of outcasts. Either Bethany or Carver — the younger Hawkes — are in the same impoverished dwellings within Lowtown as the rest of their family. Isabella is a career criminal and pirate. Fenris is a fugitive slave. Anders is an apostate; a mage illegally living outside of the Chantry’s control. Varric is son of a family of merchants but his carefree attitude and status as the second son draws ire from his family. Merrill meanwhile is not only an elf — who are treated as second class citizens across much of Thedas — but is also an apostate, and recently departed her wandering clan of Dalish elves for the big city. Aveline, while she is able to settle into a job with the city guard, barely escaped Ferelden alongside the Hawkes as a refugee.
No one quite fits into “typical” Kirkwall, and yet they nestle into their own little places around the city. Their own home spaces. Typically in the Bioware Formula, all of the companions share the same home space as the player character whether that be the Normandy of Mass Effect, or the camp of Origins. But here they have their own lives, jobs, homes, and places in specific communities around the city. While their lives intersect with that of Hawke’s they are not so obviously sucked in by the gravitational pull of the main character. Merril makes her way to the ethnic slum of the Alienage where all the elves of the city reside. Avelline has an office at the guard barracks up in Hightown. Varric has his room at his favorite haunt down in Lowtown. Walking in on any of their home spaces means walking in on their lives that appear to exist without the player’s presence. Through those moments of intersection you watch their stories play out across the game’s three act structure which spans nearly a decade of their lives.
What becomes clear in the wake of the failed racial uprising by the elves who were assisted by the stranded Qunari — a warrior people from a far away land whose society is vaguely coded to be both Islamic and communist — is that Kirkwall is a powder keg. A decade on, many of the refugees who were eventually let in still live in Lowtown or the Undercity. Some of them work those same mines that the slaves of the Tevinter Imperium did all those years ago, for starvation wages and under deadly conditions. All the while facing prejudice from the city’s “natives.” The remaining elves are hated even more now from the humans both poor and rich. And though their revolt failed, it did succeed in assassinating the former Duke who has since been replaced with the brutal marital law of Knight-Commander Meredith who has only increased her heinous treatment of the mages.
The closing hours should come as no surprise even if they are shocking. Anders, the often outspoken illegal mage has taken matters into his own hands. The increasingly poor treatment of the mages of Kirkwall under Meredith has driven him to desperation. Though the head mage of Kirkwall’s Tower, Orsino, openly speaks out he is unwilling to fully commit to open revolt. In the midst of an argument in the courtyard that Hawke has arrived to mediate, Anders interjects.
“I will not stand by and watch you treat all mages like criminals, while those who would lead us bow to their Templar jailers… The time has come to act. There can be no half-measures. There can be no peace.”
In the upper city the cathedral of The Chantry ignites in a magical fire. Red beams burst through the roofs of the two towering steeples and up into the sky as the monument to the church’s hypocritical opulence crumbles. Kirkwall, its people, and Hawke are thrown into chaos. Companions — depending on their accumulated alignment with the player’s actions — take sides and the killing has only just begun.
The Chantry, despite its teachings of an open-heart, clearly have always applied strict conditions for such. An open-heart, if you’re not a mage, if you’re not an elf, if you’re not a foreigner practicing a foreign religion. The Chantry is the most powerful organization across much of Thedas influencing the governments of some of its most powerful nations. Nations whose rulers and nobles are more than happy to have spent generations hand-in-hand with The Chantry, in order to suppress and exploit so many of their most vulnerable citizens.
Across these three pieces of media the realities of oppression play out leading to various outcomes of various desirability. In the world of The Wire, “our” world, too often little changes. The systems of the state keep churning. They keep chewing up those who don’t get in line or who the state deems worthy of suffering. Citizen Sleeper believes that as the systems of power fail to provide we take comfort and support in each other. That the tangible ways we can affect the individual lives of those in our community through friendship and organization will see us through. Dragon Age 2, does not give into apathy. It doesn’t hope that the systems of oppression will fall down around us. It proposes a more forceful strategy. That when someone has their boot on your throat, you don’t ask them to stop, you make them.
