Video games without people of color are not 'neutral'

boing
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Only because you’re choosing to move the goalposts.

You know, if I draw a stick figure with boobies on it, and it goes without comment, but if my neighbor draws the same stick figures with boobies on it but gets her life ruined because of it, it doesn’t change the amount of effort required to make that stick figure, right?

Okay. I’m saying this because Zoe Quinn isn’t exactly the only woman out there to make interactive fiction. You know that, right? She’s infamous because one person managed to mobilize an angry Internet horde against her. There’s a lesson in that, one that some folks think they can ignore because, hey, our cause is just.

Anyway, Twine is the engine used to create Depression Quest. The thing that makes Twine great is that you don’t have to write any code to make it work, but you can extend and enhance (which is what Quinn and Co. did.) You want to write a game? Write it. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of game engines out there geared toward indie developers. What, it’s hard? Of course it is, nothing worth doing is easy. Is writing easy?

EDIT: Along those lines: would you like to make a Choose Your Own Adventure, and you have a teensy bit of coding skills? You can write an ePub using Markdown and a teensy bit of Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, or any other language that has an ePub helper library available. I built an “engine” using about a dozen lines of Ruby, most of it just passing parameters to a class. Then you’re left with the hard part: writing it.

But you have the chops to lead a development team toward the next AAA game? Well, you’re not going to be able to go from nothing to leading a team, but once you build your way up, do it.

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It is and will be in large part their market, so it does matter.

It didn’t “NEED” to be, but the nature of the medium/media they employ allows that it can accommodate with very little additional effort. Whether it is choosing an avatar with a different skin tone or other characteristic, or options for NPC appearance, that it doesn’t need/want to be any different than it is for a select segment of the market is a viewpoint of exclusion whereas the small additional options that provide a wide spectrum of balance allows for a viewpoint of inclusion that also includes the current rendition of the game.

Basically developers have the option and large swaths of their audiences want them to exercise that option to inclusion, not exclusion. Yes, there are a few GG fools arguing for exclusion, but who the hell cares?

And really, these developers claim that RPG is their lives & livelihood… Since when is restricting skin tone something anyone with a grain of sense thought a good idea in RPG. It ought to be the players choice, so when it is so easy to do, why not, especially when not doing so hurts the dev in the end?

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I believe he’s rather unambiguously arguing that:

using the excuse of “historical accuracy” to justify the exclusion of PoC makes no sense in fictional worlds whose history is entirely made up by the world’s creators.

It’s quite commensurable with your contribution to the discussion. As you pointed out, “history” is far stranger than video game fanboys imagine it to be.

What is being called “historical accuracy” should really be labeled “genre convention”. People want only whites in fantasy settings because it’s always been that way, not because there’s actually a compelling reason.

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Good comment. I’d like to add on to that “genre convention” is what we’ve had “genre convention confirmation” is what some people are arguing for, since other people are beginning to break that moldy old mold.

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That is my opinion.

The source material - the books - are what they are. They didnt have sizeable minorities of people of colour in them. In fact I dont remember any. The whole thing is set up to be what it is - a pastiche of noir, fairy tales, and Eastern Europe, full of pogroms to the not-Jews and Kings being assholes and a lot of the time not glamourous at all (which is also refreshing for a Republican like me. Yep, it means something different in Spain), and the worst monsters of all being people. They address concerns of racism and of abuse of power and realpolitik from the point of view of a Polish guy born in 1948, not an American writer. They focus on, say, Nilfgaard-as-the-German-Army overruning the North-that-stand-for-the-East, which is logical, and not much on the plight of black people under white racism, which is not something he would really have in mind talking about fantasy Eastern Europe.

So really, thats why it is that white. Unsurprisingly, the concerns about racism are a bit different in the mind of somebody trying to make a fantasy that makes also points about reality, when that person comes from a different place and examines a different past.

Yet it seems to have to conform to US expectations when US made products dont make any such effort at all to address their own reality. And as they are the producers of 99% of the content it this kind of entertainent, somehow the one thing made by some other people is at fault here?

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You know they are adapting a series of books in which an albino mutant is the protagonist, right? Bit different that starting a new IP and saying hey, you hero can be whatever colour you want.

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I think your argument is correct in most situations but probably not The Witcher games.

Mainly because you and this article kind of miss is that it was developed in Poland (and clearly based on medival Poland/Germany etc although aqs it’s fantasy the could put it in, also Poland was more ethnically diverse pre-WW2 with a lot more jews and ethnic germans etc) and Poland and most of Eastern Europe isn’t diverse, like at all. Poland is one of the most homogenous nations on the world.

Ethnic diversity (in the sense of different skin colours) in Poland is almost zero. Something like 96% of the population are ethnically Polish and the other 4% are almost entirely other white ethnicities. And even in Eastern Europe as a whole when people talk about ethnic diversity or inter-ethnic conflict they mean, between different groups of white people, it’s only really western Europe that has had significant immigration from non-white populations.

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Many civil rights activists past and present as well as social scientists see racism as a system and not a defined set of actions, feelings or intentions. Everyone can be prejudice, but to be racist one has to have systematic power within their respective societies. So even the nicest guy on earth could be racist, if he is doing something that expresses that power.

The act of getting mad that an operater says “press one for english/spanish,” anytime a form of AAVE gets so popular it makes the news and they have a white kid be the center of attention. Making an entire cast white. In a lot of these, the intentions are hateful, but they still have negative consequences for those without systematic power.

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Sorry to interrupt, but your discussion is fundamentally flaved.The author is the one who is not neutral - he writes from the unique American perspective about Polish game. So:

  • He is unknowingly arrogant - what is good for America is good for the rest of the world, while in the reality it is the USA who is haunted by the past, other countries know little about this problem so they have no reason to include this in games created there.
  • He fails to sufficiently explain why developers around the world should include PoC - he just assumes that they should be included, even in the game from the foreign studio. If that is the new way, the logical next step would be the call to add black people to all mangas and games imported from Japan. Lonely Barret from FFVII is not enough, people. Also, the Chinese would logically be excused if they insisted on their own, localised version of every US game, redone with Asian-only cast. And every game that does not concern Hollocaust should be ridiculled in Israel. Basically the whole article is a hidden statement that Americans are THE PEOPLE and the rest of the world should take it or leave home crying.
  • It may give some context for you if I provide some background informations about Mr Sapkowski, author of the original books. Game follows his fantasy setting very closely, so his inclusion in this discusiion is IMO justified. Born in 1948, he (still) lives in Łódż, city that harboured a significant Jewish community before WW2, one of the largest in Poland. There were bankers and merchants, mostly concentrated aroun textile industry. And the usual came, Germans killed almost all of them, count goes into hundred of thousands. I assume, that those ‘minorities’, those elves and dwarves that are hunted in game, are recolections of Holocaust. Author newer said so, but there are too many parallels for them to be something else. So, question is, where does PoC fit into this narrative?
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In fact, there is no merit in your qualification of differences

You are aware that albinism isn’t a white person thing?

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I don’t think the point is that The Witcher needs to have POC. It’s that people who said it shouldn’t because it’s not authentic are making a silly argument. Dragons aren’t authentic, either.

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A better question is where do they not fit in?

If the player has a choice, where is your complaint then?

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The one who is not neutral? I think you missed the point, which was that no one is neutral. It isn’t a tit-for-tat which can be fixed by saying: “No! You!”

Another matter is that in hugely multicultural regions, it is impossible to accurately speak of a unified, mainstream cultural perspective - although people always still try. There are more different perspectives in the US or India than the average inhabitant is even aware of.

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I mean, there’s no lore to explain why people have different hair colors, either. Or for that matter, why everyone has two arms and two legs. Nobody complains about the lack of a backstory explaining why the lifeforms in the fantasy world happened to evolve to have the exact same form as modern humans. The reaction we have is “Well sure, they’re like us, why wouldn’t they be?”.

That’s not to say that fantasy characters are always identical to modern people, just that they default to being like us unless specified otherwise. Unless the creators have specifically imagined a world where people speak using their hands or eat their children, it’s understood without any explanation required that people speak the way we do, and feel towards their children the same way we do.

As with any other speculative fiction, you don’t have to explain the ways in which a fantasy world reflects modern society, only the ways it deviates. By this logic, it makes sense for race representation to reflect modern society unless you are specifically speculating about a world where race representation is different.

I think it can be cool to do that - so it’s not necessarily bad to have a fantasy world where everyone is white - but if you do, then it should be recognized that you’re creating a speculative fiction where race is different from how it is IRL, and that should be explained and explored in the lore. There should be a good reason for your world to be white, and you should have something to say about it.

Oh, and if a creator’s lore explanation for their world’s whiteness is “it’s based on medieval Europe”, I’m not going to argue with them so much as just yawn at their utter lack of creativity and world-building talent. Just as with any other element, if you don’t really have anything to say about race in your fantasy world/story, then probably defaulting to a generic representation of RL is the best approach.

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Not really big, maybe massively is closer, I’ve only met one person who plays it:

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@FunkDaddy #1 - I literally cannot understand your point, sorry, can you elaborate?
@djotaku - Author doesn’t agree with you - “Are black nobles and paladins really too fantastical to exist, even in worlds of sorcery, wizards and unicorns?” As for ‘authenticity’ argument you are right, it is silly, they could include PoC if they wished. My point is WHY they should do so, not being from USA and not experiencing those issues themselves.
@FunkDaddy #2 - They doesn’t fit in a country that is homogenously (99,8%) white and has no history of black slavery. I said that logicall extension of author’s arguments is the call for all the world’s developers to create games tailored for Americans, while in fact there are only two major countries that have significant black&white issues - North America and South Africa. Rest of the world hate and kill each other based on other factors, and those unique traits are often included in the local games. The author may well be right if he amended his postulate only to the games created in USA.

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  1. North America isn’t a country
  2. This is blatantly untrue
  3. You are a giant racist or misinformed to the point of not being worth listening to if you think anti-black racism doesn’t exist outside of North America and South Africa.
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If you like a post, click the like button.

It’s just that easy.

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For the sake of accuracy*?

What would change if several skin tones were introduced. Cosmetically only. Would it affect anything? I mean, it’s fantasy already… right? What’s weird about a new layer?

 *- or… purity? (ducks)

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Yes of course, you are right, I have poorly worded my thoughts. I believe that nobody is neutral, so different point of view should be cherished. And the game that has only white people is on of them. People who created it really are not bigots, they simply live in a different culture. And you have experience living in multicultural region, whereas I do not. Yet I exist, and have my own culture, which is a little different to yours. Should it be outlawed to present it?