Trope? Are you implying that tropes are to be avoided?
No, but thatâs what the piece this thread is responding to is about.
I still find it interesting, as a white game developer, when stuff like this is pointed out.
I find it valuable to be able to reflect on how my setting appears to other people and what value may come out of that feedback. Especially if my setting ended up being predominantly white unintentionally.
A bit like accidentally using a word that is a racial slur without knowing itâs a slur, once itâs been pointed out it there some level of personal responsibility/justification I need to have to continue doing so, even if only for myself. If Iâm not meaning for the setting to be predominantly white, then why is it? And can that be potentially bad?
As someone that feels video games can be an excellent source for good in terms of teaching and helping develop empathy, I donât think I can feel games can only be a positive force and never a negative one even if unintentionally. (I wouldnât be surprised if a lot of the negative elements from our culture are not consciously done).
Cheers.
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Villains (and occasionally even heroes) are allowed to hold objectionable views, but a negative comment about Vivienneâs skin color is inappropriate in a setting that produced 2.5 games with no references at all to color-based racism. Disparaging her social class or the fact that sheâs a mage (a huge deal, in this setting, unlike skin color) would have been equally effective and consistent with the in-world fictional culture, rather than projecting nonsensical real-world racism in an ugly and jarring fashion. Falling back on âsheâs black, and therefore ugly/slutty/whateverâ shows an extremely disappointing lack of regard for the social mores of the created world from the writers.
Also itâs gross and racist.
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Mmm-- have you watched the buffyverse while browsing tvtropes? Part of the reason why I highlighted Tristan and Iseult is that itâs a tale told by many authors who are free to to elaborate on a shared narrative structure.
Maybe the designers should watch more Shakespeare. Many, if not most of the top productions these days are race blind. Itâs almost as if theyâve been atoning, as a community, for all those productions of Othello.
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I apologize that I responded to your post to highlight something in the original article-- an article about tropesâ because you donât seem to be getting that.
Thought. What about computer simulations for generating the game worlds? It is possible to simulate migration patterns and genetics, there are quite some patterns out there. Make the model, tweak the initial parameters, then get a world thatâs more complex and realistic-for-the-setting than what a mere human could come up with. Iterative simulations can be pretty interesting.
So if we know brown folks definitely existed in actual Medieval Europe, why are they absent from a made-up fantasy world only loosely inspired by Medieval Europe?
Because these games donât appeal to Medieval historians, they appeal to the half-remembered Medieval tropes of our childhood. Thatâs the level of âI know this placeâ that game developers are trying to achieve. Itâs the same reason they cling to archetypes - archetypes reach people and âfeel rightâ (at least until they donât).
A more pertinent question is âWhat aspects of peopleâs cultural experience vis-a-vis race should be incorporated into the game?â If we accept as a given that characters as a default reflect the culture, experiences and archetypes of the mainly white, male programmers, is it acceptable to have race be a visual feature only, allowing us to randomly assign characters race with no change in personality or cultural outlook? (Would this be color-washing?)
Or should visible minority characters reflect the mythology, cultural mores and present-day experiences of the real-world in the way that non-visible minority characters do (i.e. loosely, but pervasively)?
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Rome is arguably either an extremely good example or a rather poor one, depending on whether your point leans more toward âpopulation movement, actually a thing since quite some time agoâ or âonly a few people need to move, occasionally, to get visible gene flowâ.
Late Rome was an empire with both naval routes to pretty much anywhere in the Mediterranean, either for trade or between directly controlled areas; a comparatively well developed network of roads; and a longstanding willingness to draw recruits from anywhere they could and march them all over the place. (They were a bit brutal to be called âcosmopolitanâ; but they certainly had a pragmatic understanding of the fact that it was ultimately a lot easier to make cooperation with Rome rewarding than it was to put down a provincial revolt in every conquered territory every couple of generations forever.)
This definitely makes them a good candidate for lots of inter-regional travel; but also a good candidate for lots of people who look like they arenât from around here because, in fact, they arenât; and depending on their legionâs marching orders, they may or may not be here long.
(What Iâd be fascinated to know is how things went as the empire really started to collapse in earnest, and mobility started to drop through the floor; that is when youâd see how many and how often people would need to move around to keep a population from breeding its way back toward approximate homogeneity.)
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Thereâs a lot of room for the kind of cosmopolitanism @MarjaE describes in many fantasy worldsâlarge cities with sorcerers, and ports are very much a fantasy trope. While it might be possible to rigorously defend the genetics of an ingame population, itâs not worth the effort.
Also, for my convenience, a link back to the boingboing article that allegedly spawned this comment thread
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Unless theyâve improved fairly substantially, I suspect that that falls under âNot There Yetâ.
The industry would probably be delighted(things like SpeedTree are already all kinds of popular for filling more environment faster with fewer art minions, and NPCs important enough to be called âbanditâ rather than being named are virtually certain to have been pasted together algorithmically from a collection of body-bits designed to allow for a great deal of variation without creating too many horrowshows); but the more important a location is, the more likely it is that one or more artists either hand-built it in considerable detail or tweaked the hell out of the parameters that the gameâs autogenerator used and then cleaned it up by hand; and the more important an NPC is, the more face time they get, and the more emotionally salient they are supposed to be, the better the odds that they exhaustively concept-arted and created manually, or heavily modified from the output of the generator that spews out the redshirts.
If it were possible to algorithmically skip even more of those pesky and expensive artists, motion capture setups, and voice actors, Iâm sure that theyâd do it in an instant; but at their current level of maturity it tends to be a bit obvious when youâve stepped away from the area that humans have heavily worked over and into âWildscell_northernwoods_2463â and are about to run into âbanditâ and his brethren. And thatâs just on the level of visual coherence. If you want dialog that doesnât sound like ELIZA talking to itself, youâve just blown your gameâs development cycle into the time required to revolutionize computational linguistics and natural language generation.
For âour,â read âwhite people, nearly all male.â (I jest. Mostly. But itâs worth considering why the âhalf-remembered Medieval tropes of our childhoodâ are racially inaccurate, and whether or not we should perpetuate them.)
This is not a problem that can be fixed with a blanket solution like assigning random skin tones to all NPCs. There has to be a committed effort to enhancing diversity in the created world, and to examining that diversity through a variety of cultural lenses that may be outside your immediate personal experience. For example, making a noble lord black might seem like a victory for diversity, but if the plot is going to call for him and his family to be dragged out by an angry mob and hanged⌠well, you might want to reconsider just how thatâs going to look.
The best way to do this remains actually caring about making marginalized people welcome in your world, making a good-faith effort to do so, and listening to them throughout the entire process.
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Josiah Russell suggested, in passing, that there were regional beauty standards and regional physical types, in late medieval western Europe. But thatâs not to say that there were uniform physical types within each region.
Russell found that there were seperate regional urban networks across late medieval western Europe, with the largest, second largest, third-largest, etc. towns roughly following a rank-size order. These regions everaged about 100,000 km2.
By contrast, there was one big urban network across the early Imperial Roman Mediterranean, Roma, Alexandria, etc. roughly following a rank-size order, and no rivals in the western Mediterranean. The Empire usually had around 4,400,000 km2.
So different pre-industrial societies could have very different patterns of trade.
I know Russellâs population estimates have been criticized. I tried to look for follow-up on his theories about the relationship between the size of the largest towns in a region and the size of the whole population, but I havenât found any follow-up on that, and I havenât found any reply to his suggestions about regional physical types and regional beauty standards.
Nathan Rosenstein argues that modern Italian genetic variation follows the same patterns as early Iron-age Italian genetic variation, and therefore that imported slaves, mostly from other parts of the Mediterranean or from the Europan hinterlands, could not have accounted for more than a small portion of the Italian population. I canât access the original article he references, and I donât know whether class differences in mortality and fertility could explain things.
P.S. Russell doesnât use the term âbeauty standards,â or âurban networks.â
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Thereâs also, arguably, a nontrivial difference between âYeah, we made a game where your avatar canât look like you, sorry about thatâ(more or less totally accepted as unproblematic in games where your avatar is logically constrained by the premise: if Iâm the âprince of Persiaâ in Prince of Persia I probably donât get to look much like me; potentially more problematic when Assassinâs Creed: Cash-In decides that all assassins are male because motion capturing some women would totally be too much trouble(no, example not fictionalized); or when everybodyâs a white dude because we all know that Fantasy-Not-Really-Europe has Orcs, not black people!) and a situation where a game, or series, suddenly veers from âno, we donât really talk about âraceâ; but human/elven conflict is a serious issueâ to âOk, we added a black chick, and made her jive-talking and sassy!â.
That seems to be where DA: Inquisition really stepped in it vs. something like Skyrim. The DA series largely whitewashes its humans; but they have the Elven Question, and Dwarven caste issues, and those freaky Qunarii, and Orlesian absolutism vs. Fereldan decentralized feudal relations, etc. Then they add some black characters, and rather than just pass without comment over a generational improvement in the number of character art assets, the gameworld suddenly discovers some unenlightening and incongruous racial factors.
In the case of something like Skyrim, itâs fairly clear that they added the possibility of âblackâ characters in a little bit of a hurry when they moved the setting from Cyrodil to Skyrim(in TES:Oblivion âNordâ pretty much means âAryan stereotype with bonus to cold resistanceâ, which probably would have been a commercial non-starter once the gameworld moved to Skyrim); but nobody really mentions the change; all the âracialâ issues are the Aldmeri supremacists, the ethnic nationalist overtones of the Stormcloaks vs. the more cosmopolitan Empire, Kahjit and Argonians, tensions between Dunmer refugees and local populations, and so on.
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Good catch. You might jest, but thatâs spot on. By âourâ, I did indeed mean middle-class, raised and educated in the classical Anglo-Saxon tradition (which rather likely means white).
As the universality of a common cultural heritage breaks down, the necessity, and indeed, the usefulness of of these tropes as shortcuts diminishes.
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AH! We talk about vastly different level of simulation here.
I did not mean simulation of individual characters for the game runtime. I thought more along the lines of simulating the terrain/weather/ecosystem/population over millenia, on the gameâs landscape, evolving it into a believable ânaturalâ state. Things ranging from vegetation types to genetic and racial mix of the area inhabitants. Basically just painting the background on which the manually polished characters are placed, into greater nuances than whatâs feasible manually.
âŚcould this be made as a generic simulation engine, usable for all sorts of such modeling, not just for games?
Iâve been to the real Kirkwall. There arenât many black people there either.
Thatâs the sort of shorthand that really doesnât hold up to much scrutiny. Whatâs classical about anglo saxon?
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