I finished my first play-through of Dragon Age 2: Mark of the Assassin the other day and have been thinking a lot about the experience. I hadn’t picked up Dragon Age 2 in a long time and it was fun re-familiarizing myself with my old character. Combat was intuitive, but I had forgotten all my skills and combinations. It took a few minutes of playing around before I got reoriented but I soon found that my previous opinion of the game held true. Even still, it was great returning to the world and catching up with the old group.

But I’m not here to review Mark of the Assassin. It was a fun bit of DLC that kept me thoroughly entertained for an evening and it is worth the eight bucks I spent on it. But that isn’t what has kept me thinking about the game even days after completing it. What struck me about Mark of the Assassin was its star, Felicia Day, who takes on the role of Tallis, a Qunari assassin. The character is modeled to look remarkably like Felicia herself, which I’ll admit was a little strange for me at first. I’ve never been one for celebrity chasing and to actually be able to control one felt odd, like some strangely voyeuristic puppeteer. Needless to say, I stuck to playing Hawke and only possessed Tallis to force a potion down her throat (turns out Felicia Day has a poorly developed sense of self-preservation).

It wasn’t the writing, or the voice acting or even the Felicia-shaped Tallis that impressed me most about Felicia’s appearance in Mark of the Assassin. It was that she was in it at all, and more importantly, that we gamers actually care. We care more than if Tallis were instead voiced by some A-list actress like Jennifer Connolly or (shudder) Angelina Jolie. We care because, while Felicia Day is an actress, she was a gamer first, and when we play Mark of the Assassins we see Felicia and say, “Look, she’s one of us and she made it!”

She stands as inspiration to us gamers with a bit of talent and the ambition to take our passion beyond the pastime. She is proof that it can be done. Sure, it takes hard work, but so does anything worth doing. Felicia didn’t get the Guild produced on her first attempt. She had to work hard to turn her passion into a profession. The single greatest achievement Mark of the Assassin unlocked in me was the desire to put down the controller and get to work.

In my last post I talked about my recent trip to Turkey and my penchant for a good old-fashioned ruin. They invigorate me, inspire me, fuel my imagination. They make me want to write about their glory days so I can spend time walking their streets, if only in my mind and on the page. As my wife and I walked the broken marble streets of these ancient cities, I swear I could hear the crowd swarm about me. Touts shouted their wares, and officials congregated in the bouleuterion. The entire experience was quite visceral and compelling.

At first I attributed it to a past life, echos from that time I was a pleb in Rome filtering through the ages like I’d spent too much time in Assassin’s Creed’s Animus.  Or maybe it was just my own over-active imagination. Then I read an interesting observation by Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe on how video games might alter our own sense memories.

His post led me to view my intense experience in the ruins in an entirely different light. Is it possible that my sense memories didn’t come from a past life at all, but were instead implanted firmly into my subconscious by hours of playing Caesar III during my formative years? It makes sense. Video games are immersive, and as technology and game design advances it becomes easier and easier to lose yourself in them, similar to how Assassin’s Creed caused me to view a walk downtown as an obstacle course. Who need’s Abstergo when your XBox is creating real memories of events that only happened in a binary universe.

I can hear the masses railing against this brainwash from in front of their TVs as their waistlines expand. Even my parental superego raises an eyebrow at the possibility that experiences might be injected directly into my temporal lobe. But, if true, is this really such a bad thing? Some might argue that the realism of first person shooters is desensitizing us to violence and lay the atrocities of the mentally disturbed on the shoulders of recreational games. But even as I accept that my perceptions of real life events might have been altered by my time with video games, I refuse to believe that they can control us. If anything, my experience at the ruins was only heightened by these digital memories. While immersed in Assassin’s Creed, an everyday walk on the town becomes an adventure, and life gets a little bit more interesting, even if it isn’t entirely real. Is that such a bad thing?