I am being combative in the sense that I do have a point to make and I am actively arguing it.
But this:
This isn’t combative at all, its a rhetorical device used to make a point. If it stings it’s because there’s truth in it.
But that’s the thing, the current universal constraint is that the protagonist is a white dude. We’re not arguing for different things.
In games you are the protagonist. At the very least the one who faces and overcomes challenges is the player. Always.
Novels are not games, if anything games are still in their infancy with respect to novels, and that representation is a problem in games is not completely unrelated to this.
If by diverse, you mean, to have all sorts of people just like in real life, then I don’t know why you want to argue against this. Sure, if you want to make a game set in a very gentrified neighborhood, or a corporate boardroom or some such other place where you just don’t see black people then you’ve got a point. But even then you are just arguing for fiction to be real and for fantasy to take a back seat.
Its not that every game must be forced to have diversity, its that I’m arguing in favor of breaking up artificial homogeneity in games.
Just an FYI, your flat-out racist untruths would be a little less obvious if you didn’t pepper your post and profile with the buzzwords of a harassment campaign that’s specifically fought to shove several black and other minority devs out of gaming and the internet alltogether.
This whole thing is an immediate fail for trying to have a “conversation” on Twitter.
I love Twitter, I have used the shit out of it since 2007, I have 160k+ followers, I say all that to tell you that I am a fan of Twitter. But Twitter is a horrendously bad tool for having a “conversation” of more than two sentences. It is basically self defeating to even try.
And presumably any race in games convo would be, uh, more nuanced than two sentences.
I assume you mean it’s an immediate fail because twitter refuses to crack down on racial, harassment, and abuse, yes? The problem has nothing to do with the format, and EVERYTHING to do with the users that the people who run twitter allow to ruin it.
That is also a problem, but Twitter has started to do some stuff about that, finally. The deeper problem is that Twitter is almost literally the worst possible platform for nuanced discussion of contentious topics you could pick.
I am not a fan of twitter and only read a few people on it. I do not have an account.
My observation is that Twitter is designed to create social conflict. It encourages incendiary commentary and strips messages of all nuance. I have seen people who agree with each other get shitty because the format makes it so very easy to misinterpret things. The hashtag fights resemble banners in a medieval army, the blocking and retweeting systems encourage ideological closure.
In short the design of twitter encourages humans using the platform to behave like tribes of shit throwing monkeys going to war. It is a problem core to the platform.
Since I know you won’t listen to me and my lady parts, maybe you’ll listen to my white male gif…
[ETA] ALL MY GIFS BE IN VAIN!!! THE TROLL HAS BEEN EXECUTED BY THE POWERS THAT BE!!! I am happy he’s gone and sad that he’ll never see my clever retorts in looping image form.
Look, I agree with pretty much all of what you say. Just to clarify, when I talk about a case by case basis, I’m not actually saying that studios should make decisions about what sort of games to make on a case by case basis. There’s a clear and compelling case that studios should try to make more diverse games.
All I’m saying when I talk about a case by case basis is that it won’t always be fair and accurate to “call out” an individual game as racist because it doesn’t have a diverse cast.
But it would certainly still be fair, for example, to criticise the game studio if all the games they make happen to have a very limited “cast”, even in ways that are individually justifiable for each game.
I don’t know why I’m arguing any more. As I said, I agree with pretty much all of what you said. If I disagree, it’s only over a fairly limited point.
It stings because my views are being misrepresented for rhetorical purposes rather than engaged with honestly, that’s all. Most people don’t appreciate being lumped together with a group of people they consider idiots just because they aren’t willing to agree 100% with another bunch of people they mostly agree with.
I think to be honest we have the same aim (more diversity in games) and we disagree slightly about the best way to bring about that end. I think it’s more constructive to act through the institutional environment, rather than tackle one by one what are essentially the symptoms of an institutionally racist industry.
I also just don’t think it’s necessarily always true that a game, as an individual piece of art, is racist because it has a limited cast - which of course doesn’t absolve a game studio from criticism if all or most of its games are of this sort.
I do disagree with you that the differences between novels and games are as relevant as you think, but that’s sort of by the by.
As I said, I think we agree on much more than we disagree on, and at this point it might be more constructive for you to argue with someone who doesn’t actually share your aims for more diversity both in games and in the groups of people who get to make games.
Playing the multi-player mode, it’s straight forward cops vs robbers. On the cops team, one specialist class model is a non-white. All the robbers are white - although its hard to tell because the majority of them wear balaclavas/sunglasses & bandanna s over their faces. So on the face of it, you’re forced to play white for the vast majority of in-game characters BUT the Bad Guys are always white. Only the Good Guys have a non-white.
The single player narrative is a lot more mixed.The the main character protagonist is originally from Cuba, his partner is Asian and his boss is Hispanic. The single player narrative deals mainly with cops vs drug dealers/traffickers - the gangs are sometimes ethnically aligned (e.g. the triads) but mostly mixed race, that could be argued as realistic. However, so far as I’ve played the single player game - all the high level bad guys have been white.
The first dirty cop revealed is white. The snitch and accountant are white. The most psychotic villain is white (and a woman, yay for diversity on the gender front).
I’m not sure if this is a subtle comment on racism as portraying that the most corrupt and powerful people as white or racist as portraying the non-whites as only being good enough to be foot solders in the gangs. Maybe its just the safest option to make the real villains white because otherwise…
