Which of these people do you describe as “professionally offended”:
-Critics who talk about the overwhelming lack of diversity in gaming and how it doesn’t reflect the actual audience, and how that audience is being underserved.
-People who send death and rape threats to the above person.
The Jinn are in the game because the author put them in the books because he also mixed popular tales in it (there is also Snow White). Doesnt mean that the look and feel of the setting is not pseudo-Eastern Europe vs West, transposed to Northern Kingdoms vs South Empire. Same as Jews are translated to dwarves and elves.
Dunno, you may want to ask Sapkowski if he wants to make a new series with a different setting. Last I read from him it was even more Eastern Europe as he put the new books right into history with the Hussites War.
Again, of all the companies and developers and distributors, all of them Americans, that fail to do what they should, given that they are Americans and live in the reality of America, why would the Polish developer be at fault for making a game that doesnt address that, specially in an adaptation of a book series that did not address that because, well, the guy is Polish and was born in 1948?
Dont confuse me with one of you. Take your bro and your SJW epithets and find some other idiot willing to buy that crap.
wow talk about someone quick to anger and to conflate people. Glad you’re so “understanding,” not to mention totally able to read sarcasm.
If that is true then we are all racists whether we like it or not.
As we cannot avoid having race based presumptions about people.
We really do all project class, wealth, gender , age presumptions onto everyone we meet all the time.
And if we are all racist then racism is a completely pointless word.
I again state that racism should mean malicious intent as it is used as such a strong word in common speech. You cannot call someone racist without really feeling that they are deeply wrong but as I clearly showed, by your definition, we are all doing it all the time.
Prejudice is not used to mean someone hates someone else. Just has a bias. But racism is always used as a hate term.
Oda frickin’ Nobunaga
The former, they more often run ad-supported blogs or sit in some departments (or so).
The latter are overwhelmingly just hobbyists.
One thing I also wonder about. Does Dragon Age: Inquisitor have a better portrayal of diversity than, say, the Witcher?
At a glance it would seems so. You wander the places of Thedas and you find black people. Like, I dont know, 10%?
And there is where it start to sounds phony. Because is more or less everywhere. Every single place has the same numbers. You even have a black noblewoman and party member. One.
And there is no mention, whatsoever, in the whole lore, of how that happened. No mention of any migration of dark skinned or white skinned people. No mention of any racial based slavery in the past. No mention of inmigration. No mention of any place where blacks are the natives and whites are the minority.
No story and no history at all. Just an statistical representation.
… is that really better?
None of this means they can’t have dark-skinned, curly-haired characters. The reality of Eastern Europe is that it was and is a place where there are more than just white people. The reality of the world that W3 is released in is that it is a place where there are more than just white people. Both of those are reasons to have more than just white people in their game.
Because it’s hoping to be bought by diverse people, not just white people (or Polish people or Slavic people, but neither of those is simply “white” either).
[quote=“djotaku, post:32, topic:60494, full:true”]
Best part of a great post, maybe:
The neutral observer fallacy arises from the default notion of whiteness that gaming has yet to free itself from. Which isn’t to place the blame at anyone’s feet specifically, or even generally, but to say that the anti-intellectual climate of gaming feeds is fed by the myth that some people have politics and other people don’t. Privilege is blinding and allows us to ignore the many systems that keep certain groups of people isolated; “historical accuracy” is just one example. When we speak of “adding diversity” we must speak not just of characters but their consumers and creators. In order to unravel the myths of neutrality, colorblindness we must reveal our own involvement in maintaining them.
Which reminds me, there’s a power inherent to assumed neutrality that those who assume they’re neutral often don’t even realize they have.
White people are “raced,” just as men are “gendered.” There is a cultural/racial specificity to white people, at times more obvious to people who are not white than to white individuals. —Ruth Frankenburg
As the unmarked category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations. —George Lipsitz
I’m not American, I’m Spanish.
I buy a ton of videogames where the protagonists are Americans, and they problems, concepts and points of view are American. Either true American or filtered in fiction.
I read tons of comics, same thing.
I somehow dont feel that they should include an Spanish point of view, Spanish characters, Spanish cultural issues. I would wish for more of that, coming from us, and getting an audience in the world, getting a following. That would be nice.
And if we do, is going to be reflecting some other concerns about diversity, for example, than the US based creators do. Well, in all probability would be going to fail awfully at that too (I would not hold my breath for good and relevant representation of Gitanos, for example).
Me? Nah. I have no beef with the world. I can just understand that some don’t like it. And I think the proper response is - that’s the world in which he wanted to tell a story.
That sounds annoying.
I think they should! My god, I’d LOVE to see a big-budget RPG that even tried to tackle some of the complexities of a pseudo-medieval Spain. Give me the mountains and the deserts and the Alhambra and the cathedrals and the religious tensions and add in a frickin’ dragon or seven and maybe a Magi or whatever…awesome.
And I think that if people want to sell stuff to the Spanish, they’d be smart to include, you know, maybe some characters who weren’t blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, and, like, 6’5", since there’s some Spanish people who don’t look like that.
…so maybe whatever company worked on our RPG about pseudo-medieval Spain should hire some Gitanos as cultural advisors! Or, better yet, hire some Gitanos as designers.
Man, now I want to play a distinctly Spaniard-flavored RPG, the more I think about it, the more it’s crazy that there hasn’t been a big one that I can think of.
I think you interpreted my comment backwards. But I guess it makes sense in both directions. I was wondering why people get mad when they don’t have the white default.
You’re right, none of them run patreons, have youtube accounts with ads, have fake "documentaries’, work for bigoted news sites, or any of that. None of them make money off of it.
It’s only those dirty black people who make money off of 'getting offended", why can’t they just be good hobbyists like the rest of us, and just stick to telling minorities how they deserve to be killed?
I, too, would like to play a game like this. Although, what would it really mean since my impression of Spain is that it’s really like four different regions united by history, rather than culture. At the very least Basque and Barcelona seem to want out.
If I might take a third way from you and JesusCouto: I think it’s valid for an American game to have American themes. I think it’s valid for people from around the world to play that and understand it. The real problem is that in video games, as in movies, America has a hegemony. That makes things annoying for others. So, when I read (translated) Chinese Sci Fi, I don’t want them to have Americans just for me. I want to read it because I was to see how growing up in a Chinese environment changes the view of future worlds. (Just like I enjoy looking back at 50s American SF, 60s, etc and seeing how it changes with time and knowledge)
Yeah, for the people who are here for the social commentary on diversity, probably American, and are confused by all those names, I’ll translate it into something you understand:
Jewish
White
Armenian
White
Greek
White
Romani
Probably White to Looking Tan, Maybe Indian? I Don’t Know, Wasn’t Elvis A Gypsy? I Think Michael Caine Is
Russian
White
So if you’re nodding your head to my translation, you can be excused for not knowing that those groups don’t always get along.
Anyway, as an outsider looking in, it sure seems like people have decided to dogpile on one game. Once people get tired of one issue with The Witcher 3, they choose another issue. It doesn’t seem to be hurting them, but maybe they’ll take it to heart. Given how “white” has become a catch-all for anyone pale here in the 'States, they could at the very least not make everyone look downright Nordic.
But then, it probably wouldn’t satisfty the American audience, where this guy has been derided as being the “whitest guy on the planet”:
…which has got to be frustrating for a guy who’s part Hawaiian and part Chinese. (Sorry, bro, the Diversity Court has spoken, and you’re not diverse.)
Your image made my day. (even if it didn’t answer what I was talking about) JesusCouto did seem to ask the same question when talking about Dragon Age.
Videogame, I dont think so.
Tabletop, very few, but you have Aquelarre (which is something like "Ars Magica was too fluffy and unreal, lets do a proper Spanish Middle-Ages supernatural terror thing), or one about the Capitán Alatriste novels. Both very high on the historical side of the equation.
But really, I dont see the need for that inclusion for “selling” to us. Hell, we are buying anyway… but really, on my point of view, I would feel happier to know that I can grab, say, a book or a game, and use that to see the point of view of Chinese culture, or South African culture, or Brazilian culture, or Ukranian or whatever, and know that I have the options to do that kind of exploration because there is really all of that there at my grasp, than to insist everything has to be made homogeneous.
And at the same time, in the same way that if I got to explore Brazilian culture in a medium and didnt find any black person at all I would find it phony, that when I get to explore American culture I get to see only white people, or only white people as important and the rest as sidekicks, is also phony.
