“The stance that any game without PoC is bad does not work here in Europe.”
Nobody here(at least that I have seen) has said this or made that argument, and it is not made in the article. Saying, “it would be nice if some of these games included non-white characters” is entirely different than saying “these games are bad.”
Why have so many fellow gamers developed such a fundamental misunderstanding of critique?
Starting to see your trolli-ness reading through some of your “non-sudden” arrival comments. This one here for example you imply that worldview is a globally shared view point (which it’s not) and contrast it with “localview” implying the developers should consider other viewpoints as they expand. This is fine, and you’re right. As they expand they should consider others viewpoints, but if they do, who’s? Your worldview dear FunkyDaddy I dare say is much different than views in many cultures of the world. You are absolutely correct that they are now developing for an international audience, so who then should they appeal to in order to be most politically correct in their story telling? The US because it’s a large market? Not a wrong answer, but there isn’t really a right one either. Regardless of where you pick, who you design for, and why you did it, someone will take a beef with something. That’s also the nature of any good art don’t you think? Sparking debate and discussion?
I think any game that’s going to incorporate some sort of world setting have to thinking about representation of all participating actors in that world.
I, and the rest of humanity, will take note of your judgement and act accordingly.
I agree completely with JesusCouto. You have no idea what is it to grow up in the country where more than 60% of all culture is foreign production, mostly American. It is always nice to see some product which is created on the cultural heritage and environment you know and you can finally feel proud that something from your culture is now worldwide success. And then some idiots come and start whining about how the game doesn’t meet their own image of the world, because they have different experience with different, more diverse society.
I’m not saying that games in general haven’t problems with diversity, yes, they do have problem, but Witcher is lame scapegoat for that. Next time try to be more emphatic, people from Eastern Europe has the same right to create and depict world upon their own experiences as any other people on the planet. Be less american centric
Do you legitimately have less fun with a game where you don’t completely personally identify with the protagonist? Do you have less fun with opposite gendered protagonists? Ones from a different country? Religion? I’m honestly asking because “identifying personally with the main character’s race/gender/whatever” honestly doesn’t trip my list of top 10 reasons for liking a game.
I’m 100% in agreement on “It would be nice if some of these games included non-white characters”. More than in agreement, I want to see that!
I dont know why THE WITCHER has to be at fault here for the crime of being done following a book series about some fake-pseudo medieval Poland and neighbourghs, when the MAIN source of the problem are American games that fail to portrait the diversity of THEIR country.
Same as I would not expect a game made by a Chinese studio or an Egyptian studio or a Namibian studio, adapting a book about pseudo-fake ancient China/Egypt/Namibia, to have to conform to US ideals of race diversity. The greater diversity would be having those games, so we could play them all and move from point of view to point of view!
To all the sudden arrivals,
Please explain how offering any player the option of changing the skin tone of their avatar detracts from your enjoyment while you play the game with the avatar with the skin tone you think it should be.
That’s all. Just do that.
Cry me a river, I live in Canada. Haha not really we have plenty of rivers here.
Also in addition to being the one, if you choose, to finally reply to the simple request in my last few posts, please explain to me how Witcher is not simply an example, instead of, as you claim, a scapegoat.
Then, Cry me another river.
You left out the UK, Canada and Australia. Both all three of which have black issues and two of them have major issues with native peoples. Which are very significant in aspects of human rights being taken away. Even independent countries like Sweden and it’s low population of african/black peoples has major problems.
I didn’t leave out anything. The list I posted contained all the sovereign states on the planet, as a way of making my point.
Please see the last 2 posts of mine, you’re qualified to provide explanations, aren’t you.
Sad sidenote - according to the dev’s stats, only about 17% of players chose to play as FemShep.
One of the main factions in The Witcher are the militant Nilfgaardians who invade from the south, known colloquially as “the black ones.”
The Polish word for “black person” or “black man” is murzyn, which comes from the same root as moor.
Please continue to discuss how this game was made in a blissful paradise free from racist bias. [/sarcasm]
For what it’s worth, I fucking love this series of games. I put about 80 hours into W1, played through W2 twice, and have 120+ hours into W3 and am still in the first act.
It’s an amazingly complex reflection of the world, with craven profiteers, heart-rending callousness, charity, and grace. The non-human struggle for equality, the powerful cabal of sorceresses with their own political agency. The stark treatment of serious issues like domestic violence, abuse, alcoholism. The constant reminders and slurs that you, as Geralt, are a freak, an other, a mutie, an object of scorn. On most of these issues, the game presents a pretty nuanced and mature take. Not perfect, but who’s art is perfect? Who’s life is perfect? This game series is not afraid to take on serious real-life dilemmas.
That seriousness makes it all the more noticeable when The Witcher falls short. The one person of color reported to be found in the game is a murderous female succubus. It would be laughable if it weren’t so terrible.
Let’s not use the canon of the author as a defense, because it’s not. I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know for certain that the author didn’t dictate the skin Temerian as pearly, the Kaedweni’s as milky, the Redanians as chalky, and the Nilfgaards as snowy. But even if the canon would dictate the Pantone colours of each faction, there’s no reason to be beholden to it. Re-makes and re-boots white-wash all the time, let’s be a little creative and do some brown-washing.*
After all, a game that includes in-jokes to Assassin’s Creed, Aliens, 300, and Call of Cthulu (among others) can’t rely on the defense of “But…canon!”
*My recommended concept art for a rebooted Yennifer of Vengerberg.
Okay, as an older hand on this BBS 
and also someone who’s read the books & put several hundred hours into all three Witcher games…
If you’re talking about choosing the playable character - The Witcher isn’t Skyrim. It’s not a game where you create who you play as. It’s a very story-driven game based upon pre-existing characters, so at best you can deviate slightly from “a bit nicer than the default character” to “a bit nastier”. If you change much more than that, then the game isn’t The Witcher any more, it’s another game which would be linked to the novels (which I recommend) in name only. It’d be like making a game about Huckleberry Finn but letting you change the race &/or gender of Huck - still a good game, but changing the point of the story.
If you’re talking about NPCs, then there’s room for argument here. The world that Andrzej Sapkowski created isn’t solely white - think of a vertical slice of Europe/Africa going from Sweden/Finland down to Libya/Egypt, with the British Isles off to the left. There have been “African” NPCs in earlier games, but due to events in the games stories (I recommend the games too!) the events have been pushed up north.
Also, to those complaining that djinns invalidates the whole Polish mythology thing - the first two books are more inversions of fairy tales than mythology. You’ve got Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and so on, as well as fragments of others that turn up in the later novels.
Anyway, that’s all explanatory stuff. Take it or leave it, but I do recommend you check out the books, even the (apparently not-brilliant) English translations are some of the more interesting fantasy books I’ve discovered in the last few years.
An actual Polish person of Slavic descent would like to take issue with your shitty argumentation.
So please, stop using my culture and heritage to try to validate your own prejudices. As an actual Pole, and someone who read the Witcher novels before the games introduced them to English speaking world, I can tell you that I would not mind seeing people of color depicted in that universe. It would not somehow devalue my culture or heritage to see non-white people in the game loosely based on the beliefs and folklore of my homeland.
If you do mind, and the very idea of people of color existing in a setting based on our culture and folklore offends you for some reason, then that’s entirely on you.
First off, I have to admit that I’m not familiar with this game, or that up-to-speed on anything but ridiculously complex strategy games.
That said, based on a quick reading, while all of the arguments he presents would strike me as completely apropos were they directed at an American game developer, directing them at a Polish game developer seems a lot less clear cut, kind of like if they were complaining about a lack of non-asian characters in, say, (quick google search) Three Kingdoms Online.
Actually that request was specifically for all the sudden arrivals. But thanks.
From what I’ve already seen of the games by not buying them on gog.com where they try to sell them to me constantly, given that the protagonist is as was mentioned to me earlier both mutant and albino it would barely ripple at all if a player were allowed to change skin tone to any ethnicity, or facial features to any ethnicity, since the albinism could transfer seamlessly as could the mutant status.
Since it is story driven, and this singular (skin-tone) or multi-faceted (skin tone + facial features) would barely if at all affect story or voiceovers, I wouldn’t see changing NPC’s as a necessity at all IMO. After all, the protagonist is an outlier no matter what skin tone or ethnicity is played. The subtle changes would enhance the experience of players that want to identify more closely with the one character in the entire game that is supposed to be them & it would remain the work of art it began as.
But the primary point was that the game would not change at all, for anyone, not a single pixel, if it were an option. Because a player could simply go vanilla (pun intended) as one of their many choices, instead of it being their only choice.
That’s why they can’t answer. If it is merely an easy to add option, as it is, how can it possibly detract from any players experience if -someone else- chooses to play it in a barely different, but subtly accommodating way? It couldn’t. It’s a single player RPG.
People demanding it must be white only because it was made white from a white-only (erroneous) perception of Poland that only Polish people could understand are simply totally, 100% wrong, for the simple fact that it is a single-player RPG.
Failing to accommodate was a dev failing, that’s all. The same dev evolved their stance on women as I understand it. That’s something lots of devs had to learn, often the hard way. Race is no differrent and it doesn’t matter one bit where the dev is or where they are from. If they want to play on the world stage and do so without having justified criticism of their products cultural limitations, then all they have to do is accommodate, and accommodating in this media/medium is significantly doable because the nature of the experience allows them to also leave their original vision fully, completely, flawlessly intact for anyone who chooses to experience it.
I’d bet if there is a W4 they won’t make the same mistake. It was dumb, because even people in Poland have the internet and are aware of the rest of the world, particularly devs seeking worldwide audiences.
Also I like picking on whatever percentage of new arrivals that are GG, because when these topics come up, they are there, pretending to be what some of the others may in fact be, but a segment of today’s new arrivals are GG trolls. Don’t know which ones, don’t care either. Whether legit “It must be white because Poland” apologists, or GG trolls adopting their line, they’re wrong because technology.
Good article, the one issue I have it with the summary of Bioshock Infinite. A key part of the plot of the game is that you play character who is a conflicted person of partial Native American descent who took part in the massacre at Wounded Knee. Most of your journey in the game is uncovering your past and dealing with the consequences.
Blindly promoting tokenism. Instead let’s think things through, be sensitive, and reject absolutes.
Trollolo but I’ll bite since apparently you have a big hate on and get all territorial when new people make accounts here (does it bug you when they make movies of your fav books too and your like “dude I liked it before you!!” because that’s sad). Anyway to answer your question re: enjoyment; It doesn’t change it. Which is what I said in my previous post. This is what they do in Rust and it’s an algorithm based on username. Doesn’t change enjoyment in the least, which is what I’ve been saying if you weren’t too busy crying over “sudden arrivals” like they just ruined your birthday. The issue however, is that in some cases, it’s not the story the developer is trying to tell. Just like, again, as I’ve stated, if a game was made in oh lets name a new African country this time… Cameroon. If they based their story around a native Cameroonian, changing their skin tone wouldn’t make a lick of difference to the enjoyment of the game, but it sure as hell does to the intention of the game developer, and can you imagine the flack critics would get if they said “gee if only we could make this black main character insert race here.”
You complain about new posters being “trolls” but honestly you’re the biggest troll I’ve met here yet and intentionally obstinate and dismissive based on an irrational bias for people based on account creation time. If you’d take some time to relax and read, you’d see that most of us agree with your fundamental point that enjoyment doesn’t change, that racism certainly exists in many art forms not excluding games, but the author is presenting a poor argument using the Witcher as their example due to the culture the game came from which many of us now have posted.
It saddens me that the funk has seemingly died in you FunkDaddy 
