This is most of the reason I don’t care for Tolkien.
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[quote=“Remainz, post:19, topic:60494, full:true”]
Is there no difference between racism and prejudice?
I see a clear distinction where racism is premeditated and or malicious in intent.
[/quote]Racism and prejudice are same thing in general - racism is actually just a subset of prejudice. Racism is, by definition, prejudice based upon racial characteristics. Prejudice itself includes all forms of “-isms” defined as “the other”, such as sexism, nationalism, etc. as well as ones without specific names (such as hating people who like the wrong sports team or political party).
There are also plenty of harmful prejudicial actions that don’t require premeditation or malicious intent. In fact, I’d say that you can reasonably argue that racism and prejudice exist totally separate from those - if you’re not already racist, you’re not going to go out and commit a racist crime “just because”. What happens is that you decide to go commit a crime, and your racism directs who the crime will be against (because you view “those people” as less human than “your people”, it’s easier to commit that crime). About the only racist/prejudicial crimes I can think of that have specific malicious intent against the target are those meant to “keep them in their place” - and even that can be viewed as a general crime of oppression with your prejudices directing who it is you feel needs to be controlled.
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Every fantasy game was developed on earth.
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[quote=“peemlives, post:23, topic:60494, full:true”]
[quote=“TheRizz, post:17, topic:60494”]
The “historical accuracy” excuse really is a flimsy one considering the fact that just about no fantasy game I can think of is actually placed on earth, and as such just doesn’t hold up when given as an excuse.
[/quote]Every fantasy game was developed on earth.
[/quote]I fail to see your point. I’m talking about where the game takes place, not where it was written. If a game is set in Africa, but written in Japan, does that mean the game should be given a pass if it has no black people, but only Asians?
The point is that since the game does not happen on Earth, you cannot use the excuse that you’re making it conform to Earth’s history.
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Don Donatelouse (Dona Dona)
A foreigner who wishes to be a samurai. Notable for his large afro,
he is often referred to by the villagers as “Dona Dona” and has taken
the role of protector for Suzu and Kurikichi. He is in love with Suzu,
but cannot find the right way to express it. Though canonically he is a
poor fighter, in actual gameplay he can be quite a formidable opponent.
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OK, you did an infodump about a game where a black guy shows up in 19th century Japan. I fail to see what that’s supposed to illustrate about games set on other worlds.
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That inclusion of characters of color is reflective of the willingness of the content creators to visualize characters of color in their stories, which, if they study enough history, will realize people of color were involved in all sorts of events, because we live on a strange planet filled with wonderful people who move all over.
Like, if you depicted the death of Oda Nobunaga and there wasn’t an African samurai there, your depiction would be historically inaccurate. Even though there is an ‘essential’ view of Japan as exceedingly homogenous and xenophobic, despite the fact that there are several dialects and (indigenous) ethnic minorities.
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[quote=“peemlives, post:27, topic:60494, full:true”]
That inclusion of characters of color is reflective of the willingness of the content creators to visualize characters of color in their stories, which, if they study enough history, will realize people of color were involved in all sorts of events, because we live on a strange planet filled with wonderful people who move all over.[/quote]My point was that on not-Earth excluding PoC because of “historical accuracy” is nonsense. The fact that PoC are all over the place in actual Earth history doubly reinforces my original point, so I’m not sure what you were arguing with? (I think we’ll have to chalk this whole thread up to a misunderstanding of what we each were trying to illustrate.)
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The exclusion itself or the concept of the possibility of exclusion? Your statement is ambiguous.
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You aren’t being argued with. You’re being offered a viewpoint of how the product being defended with a flimsy historical excuse was created with a homogenous cast to begin with.
Games set on other worlds are developed on Earth.
Developers on Earth who make make fantasy games with homogenous casts are for whatever reason (locked in a cellar, lazy, stupid, insensitive, actively racist) displaying that their worldview is racially constrained.
They may have thought they were mimicking some historical premise because swords etc, but that reveals an ignorance of history, thus a racially constrained worldview.
There are any number of reasons a developer would make a homogenous cast, but none of them are much good and all reflect a damaged goods worldview.
The poster was expanding on the depth of your point by addressing issues in game development that brought about a product that needed dumb excuses to begin with.
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For me, I think, sure, why not. It’s a fictional mythical China that never really existed, so why can’t it have black people in it? There’s no reason it shouldn’t (we’re not trying for historical accuracy here, you can evoke an age without monolithic skin tone). There’s a few reasons it should, including the all the black people in the world who have some interest in a wuxia RPG set in the mythical Chinese past and would like to throw money at a developer who creates such a game (corny martial arts movies of the '70’s influenced more than Wu-Tang).
It should probably also have Chinese minorities. I’d expect such a game to have characters that Tibetans an Hui Muslims and Mongols and Uyghur.
Are there any characters in W3 that are evidently Jewish or Armenian or Greek or Romani or Russian? 'cuz Poland, as hard as the Nazis tried, still isn’t monolithic, either.
Diversity is more representation for everyone everywhere. If you’re hoping to sell a copy of W3 to black people in America, you would serve that audience well by not making your entire cast white.
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The article made me think of a few things:
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GoT: It has to be this way or that way because of historical accuracy, but has dragons, magic, etc. On GoT I’d rather the more honest answer: Those are the gender constraints GRRM envisioned for his world and is telling a story within those gender constraints. Therefore, it is valid to dislike the world he has created. It is valid to wish authors would be more creative/sensitive/etc.
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It’s interesting that people get upset if their character is a woman or non-white. For the most part, I don’t care what my character is - I wasn’t upset when I was a Gorilla and Monkey while playing Donkey Kong Country. The point is to play and have fun - why get upset?
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Even though it makes for a much harder programming job (and more voice actors), this problem does make a good argument for character designers - so many played as FemShep in Mass Effect Trilogy
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Most people who are in the privileged class (white in the west, Chinese in China, etc) end up viewing themselves as default which is why they view arguing for whites as non-political. This was brought out in highest relief to me when my wife told me about a conversation at work.
wife: “blah blah… acting white”
white coworker: “What do you mean acting white? What does that mean?”
wife: “If I said to you ‘acting black’ - that means something to you, right?”
white coworker: “Yes.”
wife: “So, by contrast acting white has to have some meaning too.”
White coworker is enlightened about realizing she viewed “acting white” as just “acting normally”
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They aren’t developing for the Polish market anymore, not for awhile, and they boast 230 employees in countries all around the world.
They’ll need to adapt. If they did it before they’ll be smart and do it again. It isn’t called localview, it’s called worldview. The medium they distribute on ought to be enough to clue them in, but I suppose that is what is happening.
There’s apparently a vocal group that enjoys being upset more than playing the games.
Somebody found even Angry Birds to be “racist”.
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I agree with you. As a conversation expander for this thread - I’m curious what you think (as well as others reading):
Is it enough to just have the game randomly assign skin tones to NPCs and playable characters? Or should there be consequences within the world to having different skin colors?
or to ask it another way:
If you took The Matrix and made Neo black without changing anything else about his worldview/history/experiences; the script remains exactly the same, but with a black guy - is that good? bad? neutral? Should there be something different about him and does that mean falling prey to stereotypes or acknowledging that we have different experiences based on race. (At least in America)
Sometimes I wonder if it’s just trolls or if there really are so many people incapable of understanding that others have different points of view. No one should get upset if I say I’d like to play as a black, white, asian, whatever character.
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“White default” makes it hard for people to play and have fun, so they get upset.
And also: nothing ever changes if you don’t get upset about the way things are.
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They are not developing for the Polish market anymore - but here, in this game, they are adapting a Polish fantasy series written by a Polish writer that is know for inspiration from Slavic mythology mixed with a current Polish use of language. Nilfgaard has its parallels with Germany, the North with Slavic countries, the issue of race is deal with parallels to the reality of Eastern Europe - pogroms and all.
Really. Why THIS has to be singled out as to NEED to conform to US ideas and cultural outlooks on what diversity is? Why it has to be “global” - a.k.a whatever the US thinks is global? It is not an US story. It is not an US franchise. It is something inspired on a different culture, where the issues of what is race and what is discrimination and what is representations are different. Why does it has to pay for the fact that the production of videogames/comics/movies FROM the US is awfully bad at portraying its own diversity?
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Please explain to me what part of Polish folklore the Jinn, which are in the game, come from.
I’m of the opinion that if you include a culture’s mythology in fiction, you probably have room to include people who look like they’re from that culture.
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No problems with that. Get a modkit, make the mod, share with others. Get support directly from the frameworks/engines, Unity comes to mind.
The annoying thing is that instead we get that endless stream of criticism, much of it from the professionally offended people with blogs catering to the righteously angered consumer segment. Apparently complaining brings more clicks and eyeballs than doing.
In that atmosphere the only thing a developer can be certain about is that somebody will get offended. Writing screeds is apparently easier than writing code and you cannot make everybody happy.
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