One way to avoid cultural appropriation: Seek collaborators, not just characters

[tekk]

Piet embodies what fascinates me about the dutch. From a distance if you’re white it’s easy to conclude “Oh, those dutch, always having fun and not being shit. The Pilgrims hated them because they had drinking and debauchery in New Amsterdam” then you look what they did literally anywhere else and it’s like holy shit.

[tachin1]

@ubbaK

“complicated”

Not picking a fight, justsoyouknow.
But complicated does not mean subjective, it is not used like that here either.

@boingboing

The line between cultural appropriation and cultural inspiration is often a complicated one for creators of art,

The use of complicated cannot refer to the creators subjective worldview but to the complications that arrive from expressing said worldview.
Its not complicated to share your subjective worldview unless you realize that it is problematic, then it becomes complicated,

Complicated is always used when you want to address an issue without just saying outright what the problem is. Ending hunger is complicated, even though the solution, and how to go about it is simple.

@Boundegar

Maybe that’s because the line doesn’t actually exist - except for the line between “art I approve of” and “art I disapprove of.”

Notice he didn’t say “art I like”, but instead he used “approve”, and the line in this case is completely arbitrary. Art is a thing humans must do, it is also a commercial enterprise, thus, its complicated.
The line between cultural appropriation as an unfair phenomenon and normal behavior for a social creature is drawn at the commercial level. The "line between what is acceptable, useful and necessary does not exist. Any attempt to judge art as the vehicle for cultural appropriation is a distraction from art as business which is guilty of much more than just cultural misappropriation.

In this case, I’m not so sure that cultural appropriation didn’t happen, sure, they got the details of the culture right, people were employed and received a salary for their work, but the end product is now owned by the developer. The culture has become a commodity. To what extent will this benefit this culture? IDK, hopefully it will be for the best, but let’s not kid ourselves that we are now talking about this art as something that’s approved as if that meant it wasn’t also appropriated.