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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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Well, to my knowledge Poland hasn't practiced imperialism, cultural or otherwise, at any time in the recent past either. To the contrary, Poland has repeatedly been the victim of imperialism.

 

That's arguably untrue with some of their actions in WWI, but anyway.

 

Polish people are white. They enjoy certain privileges in global culture because of that. Even if they didn't, expecting people in 2015 to include any people of color in their media is not unreasonable.

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The representation issue is one I often get frustrated by, but not because of what is actually represented in the game.  Naturally people tend to make things that reflect themselves, so to some degree I understand why mostly white game devs make mostly or all white characters.  I can't quite decide if pointing this out is a desire for someone to say the game is bad as a result of it, or is simply a criticism/something to take into account.  Then of course there are the various production concerns, which while certainly relevant, discussing them tends to basically put a dollar price on someone's identity which is unfair at best and depraved at worst.

 

What really bothers me about this is that games which are praised for representation generally have 1, or in rare circumstances 2 characters of color.  Personally I compare that with gender representation, which seems to have normalized somewhat in recent years where about half the major characters are female and the other male, and in this case less represented genders perhaps are represented by an ancillary character.  So I guess my question here is what is the point of this objection?  Is it to see a more equitable distribution of people represented, or does there just need to be one darker skinned character, a line of dialogue, or a scene and everything is OK?  Does this need to just be mentioned somewhere in the game, or something more substantial?  I'm sorry if this sounds condescending, but honestly I don't know how to ask these questions without sounding that way.  It's one of those issues I bump up against every now and again, but it feels like each time I get nowhere.

 

I'll be the first to admit I'm a pretty standard white guy, raised in suburbia, middle-class family, the whole nine yards.  I really would like to make games where people other than myself are represented, but given how easy that is to fuck up I'll probably just end up sticking to what I know when the rubber hits the road.  I remember a while back on the podcast something that really stuck out to me.  Danielle complained about there not being a transgender writer on Dragon Age 3, which contains a transgender character.  Not to call her out specifically, but it is this kind of complaint I just don't know how to process.  There are myriad reasons why this might not be the case, and even then a transgender coder, artist, designer, etc could arguably have just as large an impact on the game as a writer.  I like the fact that more people, myself included thanks to many of you, are thinking about this kind of thing but I get aggravated by the fact it seems to really just amount to finger pointing.

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The representation issue is one I often get frustrated by, but not because of what is actually represented in the game.  Naturally people tend to make things that reflect themselves, so to some degree I understand why mostly white game devs make mostly or all white characters.  I can't quite decide if pointing this out is a desire for someone to say the game is bad as a result of it, or is simply a criticism/something to take into account.  Then of course there are the various production concerns, which while certainly relevant, discussing them tends to basically put a dollar price on someone's identity which is unfair at best and depraved at worst.

 

I think some people will be saying that a game or movie is "bad" because of its representation. Others will just be pointing it out, to have a conversation about it, without making a sweeping judgement about the rest of the work.  I usually feel like those two sentiments come through pretty well in criticisms, though I am sure there are examples where a criticism feels like a judgement. 

 

What really bothers me about this is that games which are praised for representation generally have 1, or in rare circumstances 2 characters of color.  Personally I compare that with gender representation, which seems to have normalized somewhat in recent years where about half the major characters are female and the other male, and in this case less represented genders perhaps are represented by an ancillary character.  So I guess my question here is what is the point of this objection?  Is it to see a more equitable distribution of people represented, or does there just need to be one darker skinned character, a line of dialogue, or a scene and everything is OK?  Does this need to just be mentioned somewhere in the game, or something more substantial?  I'm sorry if this sounds condescending, but honestly I don't know how to ask these questions without sounding that way.  It's one of those issues I bump up against every now and again, but it feels like each time I get nowhere.

 

This idea of checklist representation (my term for what you described) gets brought up quite often in these discussions, and it's a frustrating argument to deal with.  No, none of us want a proscriptive checklist that developers have to follow for representation.  I feel like good representation is kind of like the old definition of obscenity, you know it when you see it.  In some games, a single character or scene might be enough.  In others, it would feel woefully inadequate or even insulting.  That definition is both frustrating, and actually highly subversive.  Because that was the bar set for "obscenity" decades ago, instead of a firm checklist, the idea of what's obscene has been allowed to shift and change with our culture.  Things that are commonplace now would have deemed grossly obscene by the Warren court.  In the same way, things that would have been acceptable representation a decade ago are different than what is acceptable now and will be different than what will be acceptable in 2025.  I feel like this call to checklist representation is often looking for clear rules to a subject that inherently defies being defined in that way.

 

Edited to add: I understand that desire for a clear set of rules or expectations.  It would be easier if we could say, "It's always good to do X, and always bad to do Y."  That desire is perfectly rational, it unfortunately just isn't realistic for this subject.

 

 

I remember a while back on the podcast something that really stuck out to me.  Danielle complained about there not being a transgender writer on Dragon Age 3, which contains a transgender character.  Not to call her out specifically, but it is this kind of complaint I just don't know how to process.  There are myriad reasons why this might not be the case, and even then a transgender coder, artist, designer, etc could arguably have just as large an impact on the game as a writer.  I like the fact that more people, myself included thanks to many of you, are thinking about this kind of thing but I get aggravated by the fact it seems to really just amount to finger pointing.

 

I think you could flip the last sentence around though, and ask how do you address these topics without it feeling like finger pointing to someone?  Silence isn't the answer, silence has been the de facto expectation for most of gaming's past. 

 

I take Danielle's point to be one that if you're going to try and write a believable transgender character, having someone on staff to help inform that experience is probably a good thing.  Look at Fury Road, and Miller bringing in an expert on sexual slavery to talk with the cast about that experience to help better portray those fictional characters.  Gaming culture tends to fawn over developers who bring in soldiers to advise shooters, so why shouldn't we ask for the same kind of consideration when dealing with something like a transgender character?

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I really would like to make games where people other than myself are represented, but given how easy that is to fuck up I'll probably just end up sticking to what I know when the rubber hits the road.

 

Going bit tangential but IMO one of best way you could do this is to just write them as any other character you would create... like, unless your setting demands racial tension, ignore the differences other than appearances of it.  Use racial diversity as just another tool for how characters look and that's it because unless there is a contextual reason (which IRL there are lot of but in fictional world there could easily be none), that's all our racial differences are, just looks.

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You mean the Japanese games that generally feature a lot of people with generically white characteristics?

Are they white characteristics, or generalized characteristics that we've been conditioned to perceive as 'white' by default? Do you think the Japanese creators intend the characters to be white?

Does Japan even have the same concept of whiteness that we have?

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This is less prevalent in games or at least harder to see, but Japan actually makes it pretty clear when they are representing Americans or white people in anime. It's us as Westerners who presume that anime characters are all NOT japanese but in fact white when they are usually all Japanese characters. American characters tend to have different features and mostly blonde hair. 

 

The issue is that if we didn't have an institutional problem with race in Western civilization, our media in both our hiring practises and the representation we see in games, Witcher 3 being a fantasy game based on Polish mythology being all white wouldn't really be a big deal. But the problem is it's one more game in million games that are made by studios with very few people of color, particularly the higher up you go, with almost all white characters. As far as bringing up Polish studios specifically, Hatred is also made by a Polish studio. Poland has historical issues with racism - Jewish people, Romani, and yes, black people. They even have words for black people in Polish. You want to know why? Because black people and other people of color have been all through Europe at literally every point in history. Black people didn't just appear around the 1500s when we started slavery and imperialism - they were merchants, traders, sailors, and also indigenous people's all around Europe (see the Sami, etc.) 

 

That being said - it's a fucking fantasy game with witches in it. They are trying to sell their games in the US. The US is diverse. They want people of color to buy their games. People of color are demanding this stuff, both from game studios but also attempting to get jobs within the industry and it just ISN'T happening. Same goes for women, trans folks, LGBT folks and all the way on down. Gaming has a huge issue and it's tied to the fact that we've had race issues for hundreds of years now. You cannot ignore it. 

 

And since you're not hiring these people or giving them spaces comfortable to address these issues in the games being made, they just don't come up as a consideration, they don't have a huge hand in making narratives that represent their realities, writers and designers don't research or work on writing and creating "The other" as it were, and the cycle repeats itself.

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This idea of checklist representation (my term for what you described) gets brought up quite often in these discussions, and it's a frustrating argument to deal with.  No, none of us want a proscriptive checklist that developers have to follow for representation.  I feel like good representation is kind of like the old definition of obscenity, you know it when you see it.  In some games, a single character or scene might be enough.  In others, it would feel woefully inadequate or even insulting.  That definition is both frustrating, and actually highly subversive.  Because that was the bar set for "obscenity" decades ago, instead of a firm checklist, the idea of what's obscene has been allowed to shift and change with our culture.  Things that are commonplace now would have deemed grossly obscene by the Warren court.  In the same way, things that would have been acceptable representation a decade ago are different than what is acceptable now and will be different than what will be acceptable in 2025.  I feel like this call to checklist representation is often looking for clear rules to a subject that inherently defies being defined in that way.

 

Edited to add: I understand that desire for a clear set of rules or expectations.  It would be easier if we could say, "It's always good to do X, and always bad to do Y."  That desire is perfectly rational, it unfortunately just isn't realistic for this subject.

 

I don't get the sense that people are looking to see a checklist fulfilled, but time and again this kind of design is what gets praised for it's inclusiveness.  Mass Effect 2 has 1 black character, as does Dragon Age Inquisition, Mass Effect 3 has 1 Hispanic character, etc.  Furthermore, it is rare where people of color hold positions of authority in games, and usually fit into well known archetypes.  Now certainly some of this is doing what you know, but just like the lack of representation can be said to be demeaning to people of color, isn't slotting them into well defined roles just another version of this?  When I hear people complain about some representational issue in games, I tend to see a hidden meaning there were they want them to be represented, but in a way that is palatable to them.  It's OK or satisfactory to have the black police sergeant, but I've never heard any complaints about the lack of black monarchs.  There are a number of examples of ancillary characters represented in this way, but almost always the main characters are not.

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For what it's worth, I think this conversation is way cooler than the usual "look what idiots exist online" that this thread usually gets used for :P

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I don't get the sense that people are looking to see a checklist fulfilled, but time and again this kind of design is what gets praised for it's inclusiveness. Mass Effect 2 has 1 black character, as does Dragon Age Inquisition, Mass Effect 3 has 1 Hispanic character, etc. Furthermore, it is rare where people of color hold positions of authority in games, and usually fit into well known archetypes. Now certainly some of this is doing what you know, but just like the lack of representation can be said to be demeaning to people of color, isn't slotting them into well defined roles just another version of this? When I hear people complain about some representational issue in games, I tend to see a hidden meaning there were they want them to be represented, but in a way that is palatable to them. It's OK or satisfactory to have the black police sergeant, but I've never heard any complaints about the lack of black monarchs. There are a number of examples of ancillary characters represented in this way, but almost always the main characters are not.

Part of the problem you're talking about is that representation is so rare that even mediocre representation is praised. That the bar is set so low doesn't mean that it's not okay to vault over it, but it does mean that just hopping over it gets some applause.

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The issue is that if we didn't have an institutional problem with race in Western civilization, our media in both our hiring practises and the representation we see in games, Witcher 3 being a fantasy game based on Polish mythology being all white wouldn't really be a big deal. But the problem is it's one more game in million games that are made by studios with very few people of color, particularly the higher up you go, with almost all white characters. As far as bringing up Polish studios specifically, Hatred is also made by a Polish studio. Poland has historical issues with racism - Jewish people, Romani, and yes, black people. They even have words for black people in Polish. You want to know why? Because black people and other people of color have been all through Europe at literally every point in history. Black people didn't just appear around the 1500s when we started slavery and imperialism - they were merchants, traders, sailors, and also indigenous people's all around Europe (see the Sami, etc.)

 

Yeah, that is my issue with it. The Witcher 3 does so many things right, for which it's getting justifiable praise, but it also makes the exact same mistakes with race in its setting that thousands upon thousands of fantasy works have made, which it is somehow unfair to criticize. Here, look at the map, everyone:

 

Northernkingdoms_full.jpg

 

The world of The Witcher books and novels is most emphatically not just the world of Poland. Great swaths of the third game take place in Nilfgaard, the plain-as-day Holy Roman Empire analogue. The Northern Kingdoms are rather obvious as the fragmentary kingdom of Poland before the time of Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century, although individual kingdoms like Temeria have strong flavor from other medieval monarchies like France. There is even a group of islands to stand in for the kingdom of Denmark! The Witcher is Polish, but it is definitely peddling a vision of neo-medievalism that encompasses the greater part of Europe. And, at least for me, what is the most striking aspect of the map? Well, it's been rotated ninety degrees counter-clockwise and cropped so that Poland's eastern and southern neighbors functionally exist no longer. It's just fuckin' deserts and mountains there, move along. That means no Huns, no Avars, no Magyars, no Pechenegs, no Khazars, no Cumans, no Turks, no Mongols, and no Ottomans can have analogues here, none of the nomadic peoples of color who shaped the face of medieval and modern Europe. That's really weird, isn't it? A history of Poland without Hungary or the Golden Khanate is unimaginable to me, yet here it is, and people are defending it as "historically accurate," whatever that means.

 

The Polish have the right to reimagine their history as a fantasy in which all of their historical nemeses no longer exist. I'm not trying to deny that of Andrzej Sapkowski or CD Projekt Red. However, I am going to criticize them, as a historian, a fan of speculative fiction, and a gamer, for giving me yet another neo-medieval world wherein people of color have to be assumed from various fantastical races because they've been carefully excised from the portrait of humanity. In the same way, Gaizokubanou, I'd criticize, with slightly less assurance because it's not my specific sub-discipline, a fantasy work about Joseon Korea if it included analogues for China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, but carefully ignored mention of the Manchu or the Mongols. That's peddling a specific vision of the past that I find a little too pernicious.

 

 

Also, I can't find a way to work this link into my rant, but People of Color in European Art History is always relevant to any talk of fantasy: http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/

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I also just want to know why people care about preserving games with entire white characters. I'm sincerely asking. Is this something you're really invested in? 

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I also just want to know why people care about preserving games with entire white characters. I'm sincerely asking. Is this something you're really invested in? 

 

From what I've seen, yes! Yes, it is! And that's very, very sad.

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In the same way, Gaizokubanou, I'd criticize, with slightly less assurance because it's not my specific sub-discipline, a fantasy work about Joseon Korea if it included analogues for China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, but carefully ignored mention of the Manchu or the Mongols. That's peddling a specific vision of the past that I find a little too pernicious.

 

AFAIK most fantasy works of this type use aesthetics but ditch any historical resemblance regards to political framework outside of vague "big evil empire" type of trope which are too vague to mean much.

 

I also just want to know why people care about preserving games with entire white characters. I'm sincerely asking. Is this something you're really invested in? 

 
Ehm, I don't want to "preserve" this type of production at all.  Maybe I wasn't really clear on this so my apologies if I wasn't, but I think Witcher 3 could have benefited greatly from good inclusion (like, avoiding balatant tokenism or bad racist tropes) of non-white cast... just that it just doesn't seem like the best example of the problems of white washing in western media (which I agree is very real) because of its very specific national/cultural context.
 
To clarify again, I thought it was excusable, not commendable.

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AFAIK most fantasy works of this type use aesthetics but ditch any historical resemblance regards to political framework outside of vague "big evil empire" type of trope which are too vague to mean much.

 

Well, in that case, it's more weird that medieval "aesthetics" always involve a bunch of white people and no brown people. Yet another reason to stump for Ursula LeGuin, I guess?

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I honestly don't think it's excusable because I don't think any of it is excusable but that's me. I really just don't. But I also think the whole "medieval times" shit is boring and basic as hell on all of these fronts too. Just because it's not the worst doesn't mean it's not something to be criticized. (that'd pretty much leave, like maybe, Birth of a Nation.)

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Well, in that case, it's more weird that medieval "aesthetics" always involve a bunch of white people and no brown people. Yet another reason to stump for Ursula LeGuin, I guess?

 

Hmm, maybe.  I know that it would be weird thing to sell to Korean audience on a medieval Korean themed fiction with non-korean looking character so I just applied that in reverse here (my sister's webcomic is korean themed but has few explicitly non-korean looking characters (who are suppose to be non humans), her western audience didn't really care to take note of but her korean audience instantly assumed that all of those non-korean looking characters had to be non-native).  Maybe that says something more about her korean audience (I know that Korea has shitload of racism/sexism/ageism in its culture).  Maybe I just got too used to overt racism that this kind of problems aren't bothering me much as they should :/

 

Had to google Ursula LeGuin cause of my very limited knowledge... her works seem really cool, so sure.

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AFAIK most fantasy works of this type use aesthetics but ditch any historical resemblance regards to political framework outside of vague "big evil empire" type of trope which are too vague to mean much.

 

Ehm, I don't want to "preserve" this type of production at all.  Maybe I wasn't really clear on this so my apologies if I wasn't, but I think Witcher 3 could have benefited greatly from good inclusion (like, avoiding balatant tokenism or bad racist tropes) of non-white cast... just that it just doesn't seem like the best example of the problems of white washing in western media (which I agree is very real) because of its very specific national/cultural context.
 
To clarify again, I thought it was excusable, not commendable.

 

Something being excusable (which is arguable! I don't think it is) doesn't mean it's defensible, and if it was defensible that doesn't it mean that it's worth defending. This is a glaring flaw in the work. I actually played a bit of it earlier this week and yeah, it was fun. I think I might actually buy it, which is something I didn't even consider about a week ago. That doesn't mean I like its exclusion of anyone but white ass motherfuckers, and criticizing it doesn't mean it's not a fun (and maybe even well plotted!) game.

 

Also, I've read a lot of fantasy, and exactly none of them had no resemblance to a specific time and area in history that the author was connected to. Except maybe Wheel of Time, but that whole thing was a mess.

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Something being excusable (which is arguable! I don't think it is) doesn't mean it's defensible, and if it was defensible that doesn't it mean that it's worth defending. This is a glaring flaw in the work. I actually played a bit of it earlier this week and yeah, it was fun. I think I might actually buy it, which is something I didn't even consider about a week ago. That doesn't mean I like its exclusion of anyone but white ass motherfuckers, and criticizing it doesn't mean it's not a fun (and maybe even well plotted!) game.

 

Also, I've read a lot of fantasy, and exactly none of them had no resemblance to a specific time and area in history that the author was connected to. Except maybe Wheel of Time, but that whole thing was a mess.

 

Not when all I wanted to explain was the fact that I thought it was excusable :P

 

The fantasy works I'm refering to are probably way too 'trashy' if you are raising that kind of comparisons hehehe.  I'm talking about original Dragonball (NOT Z, original started off as loosely inspired fiction on the popular mischievous monkey king tale) level here, which IIRC has like zero resemblance to specific time and history.

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Then there is what I Saw Dasein said about this game being product of Poland.  Let's just replace Poland with Korea.  There is Korean book based on Korean mythology, and Korean devs make a game based on that book with exclusively Korean cast... stuff like that is generated in korea quite frequently (and judging by how often Japan becomes center of the world in few japanese fictions I read, similar with china, USA, etc, I gather this is bit of a norm) so Witcher 3 just doesn't feel like the best example of this white washing problem (which I think is both real but kinda mis-evaluated at the same time) because of its very specific national/cultural identity.

 

Yeah this is basically how I feel. It's pretty ridiculous to get upset about something like this that it doesn't feel like it features enough "people of color" (I hate that term, sounds so condescending) to a (mostly) a bunch of complaining white males.

 

And the way I think of this is to consider the movie Akira. Akira is completely fictional and there is hardly anything based on reality in that movie. However it is a tale that is about Japan, World War II, and takes place exclusively in Tokyo. The whole cast is Japanese except for one black person (who is last seen being hit in the face (although his role is greatly expanded in the comic and is an ally, he's still the single one)). Katsuhiro Otomo found it important to depict solely Japanese people in a variety of his works as usually anime tends to portray white people with a bunch of multicolored hair. To get upset at Akira would be missing the point concerning its roots.

 

And then on the other hand some things don't get enough criticism. Universally loved indie movie Boyhood failed to represent any Mexicans or black people in Texas despite it taking place in multiple major cities. There was one gardener of hispanic descent and that's it. A fucking gardener. Obviously Richard Linklater has never seen the rest of Texas since he spent his whole sheltered life in shiny white Austin, but growing up in Houston (where whites are no longer the majority) I was never in a place where people were completely white. My elementary school was bilingual just because that's how it was districted. The majority of people I went to my college there were not white. Of all of my friends I go to visit, only one is white (not counting my family). So concerning that shit, it pisses me off. Linklater was trying to represent some kind of real tale of a Texas kid in the suburbs but that is pretty much impossible to do without bringing race into it as some sort of element. I guess in Austin, sure, but the kid didn't only live in Austin.

 

Just I completely understand what you are saying Gaizokubanou. It is not that easy to just draw a line in the sand and demand a quota from a story. It always depends.

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And the way I think of this is to consider the movie Akira. Akira is completely fictional and there is hardly anything based on reality in that movie. However it is a tale that is about Japan, World War II, and takes place exclusively in Tokyo. The whole cast is Japanese except for one black person (who is last seen being hit in the face). Katsuhiro Otomo found it important to depict solely Japanese people in a variety of his works as usually anime tends to portray white people with a bunch of multicolored hair. To get upset at Akira would be missing the point concerning its roots.

 

I feel like that's a good example of exactly how I was saying that the "know it when I see it rule" applies to representation. It can be completely and perfectly appropriate for a movie to have little to no diversity. But when "generic fantasy tale #938" is told, and it continues a long tradition of being totally white for no particularly good reason, it's a different situation.

 

And then on the other hand some things don't get enough criticism. Universally loved indie movie Boyhood failed to represent any Mexicans or black people in Texas despite it taking place in multiple major cities. There was one gardener of hispanic descent and that's it. A fucking gardener. Obviously Richard Linklater has never seen the rest of Texas since he spent his whole sheltered life in shiny white Austin, but growing up in Houston (where whites are no longer the majority) I was never in a place where people were completely white. My elementary school was bilingual just because that's how it was districted. The majority of people I went to my college there were not white. Of all of my friends I go to visit, only one is white (not counting my family). So concerning that shit, it pisses me off. Linklater was trying to represent some kind of real tale of a Texas kid in the suburbs but that is pretty much impossible to do without bringing race into it as some sort of element. I guess in Austin, sure, but the kid didn't only live in Austin.

 

I saw several pieces of great criticism about Boyhood, and those criticisms were even talked about on these forums, so I'm not entirely sure how it's a good example?

 

 

I don't get the sense that people are looking to see a checklist fulfilled, but time and again this kind of design is what gets praised for it's inclusiveness. Mass Effect 2 has 1 black character, as does Dragon Age Inquisition, Mass Effect 3 has 1 Hispanic character, etc. Furthermore, it is rare where people of color hold positions of authority in games, and usually fit into well known archetypes. Now certainly some of this is doing what you know, but just like the lack of representation can be said to be demeaning to people of color, isn't slotting them into well defined roles just another version of this? When I hear people complain about some representational issue in games, I tend to see a hidden meaning there were they want them to be represented, but in a way that is palatable to them. It's OK or satisfactory to have the black police sergeant, but I've never heard any complaints about the lack of black monarchs. There are a number of examples of ancillary characters represented in this way, but almost always the main characters are not.

 

Similar to my Boyhood response above, there were some interesting discussions of the portrayal in Mass Effect of various human races/ethnicities. One I remember is an argument about Steve Cortez, how on one hand he's a twofer, but then on the other hand, he's a gay Hispanic character, the kind of character we rarely see. I ended up hanging around the Bioware forums a lot because of Mass Effect, and saw a whole bunch of interesting (and sometimes terrible) discussions about the various types of representation in those games.  And oh dear god don't even get into the fights about representation into who was and was not playable in ME3MP.  People had very passionate opinions about how well representation was being handled there. 

 

Some of these examples that have been brought up are just not as clear cut as having been ignored or received universal praise as they are presented here.  There was discussion and criticism of them, just like there is of the Witcher now.  I think the Witcher criticism is showing up in more mainstream channels, but I don't think that's anything particularly special about it, and more because that's how quickly this conversation has moved into mainstream gaming publications in the last few years.

 

 

 

Now, to throw my own favorite games under the bus, a series to ask why it hasn't received any criticism that I've seen for its representation might be the Souls games (and Bloodborne).  They've got some of the most powerful (and at times nightmarish) character creators, which is awesome.  But their supporting cast is, I think, pretty incredibly bland and white.  They all feature a mix of interesting male and female characters. But while there are some characters who might be ambiguous, there are very few who you couldn't just easily assume that they're white.   So they do a pretty good job with gender representation, but not so much race.  So what's the difference between the Witcher 3 and Bloodborne that causes the difference in reaction?

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I saw several pieces of great criticism about Boyhood, and those criticisms were even talked about on these forums, so I'm not entirely sure how it's a good example?

I saw one which I linked to and yelled about on these forums. Sure it wasn't just me?

 

On a side note, while I liked the diversity in Wind Waker, why does Tetra turn white when she becomes Zelda? That really pisses me off.

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For the last couple hundred years, the Japanese haven't really practiced cultural imperialism. They had a brief foray into imperialism (as a political motive, since they still have an emperor) in the 40s, but it was quashed.

 

This is not quite right.  Japan was actively colonizing the surrounding area from the late 1800s in a way that was undeniably cultural imperialism, occupying places like Taiwan and Korea, treating the natives as primitives, and trying to "civilize" them. It got much worse the 1940s within Japan, but imperialism outside Japan was a pretty fundamental aspect of Meiji and beyond, not a brief aberration. From more or less the moment Japan became something we would understand as a modern nation state, it was practicing the cultural imperialism associated with the major modern nation states of its era.

 

Additionally (not related to your post, but related to this discussion), the degree to which Japan was isolated from the world during its "closed nation" period (and also before then, obviously) is itself something of a cultural myth, precisely analogous to the way games like Witcher and other works of fantasy pulp portray a cultural myth of white homogeneity in Europe. The frequency and nature of the relationship between Japan and the continent shifted based on their respective political situations, but basically any aspect of Japan known via recorded history is necessarily a record of Japan after it has been transformed by substantial cultural exchange with people living in places now known as Korea and China. (Because the earliest extant Japanese myth-histories are written with Chinese characters and modeled after Chinese histories.)

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I saw one which I linked to and yelled about on these forums. Sure it wasn't just me?

 

It was actually me who linked to the article, but you did do the bulk of the yelling.  I didn't say much because I felt the article pretty much nailed everything worth saying. 

 

My point was that I'm not sure there is a big overlap between people praising Boyhood, and criticizing the Witcher 3.  If there is, then it's perfectly reasonable to ask those people about the disconnect in their opinions.  But I'm not sure that it works to use Boyhood as a counterpoint in a group that never praised it. 

 

In general there's been a lot of reaching back in time in this discussion (Akira, Mass Effect, Mononoke, etc) that I don't think is particularly useful.  Our standards are constantly shifting, and none of us necessarily expect out of a 20 year old movie, or 8 year old game, what we expect out of a modern movie/game.  There's also a difference between a story that is clearly focused on a specific culture or place, and one that is generic fantasy fare created for a global audience (which is what the Witcher is now, regardless of pedigree). 

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I just don't understand why asking for More Than White People in a fucking video game always leads to these long pointless arguments where people try to defend lack of representation.

 

Nobody's accusing CD Projekt of being intentionally racist. It's obviously just not something they thought about. I thought the article Mangela linked earlier was pretty fuckin' spot-on as far as explaining what happened, and it sounds entirely reasonable. (Here it is again, since it seems like some people here didn't even bother reading it: http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2015/06/04/witcher-3-and-diversity/)

 

I just don't fucking get it. Nothing is immune to criticism. Likewise, criticism doesn't automatically mean the subject of criticism is the worst thing in human history.

 

Without criticism, nothing will ever change. You people understand that, right?

 

The only reason gay romance existed in Mass Effect 3 after not existing in Mass Effect 1/2 is because people spoke up about it. Anyone else remember that whole kerfuffle? I don't believe for a second that they intentionally left it out of Mass Effect 1/2. It's just not something they thought was important. If it  had been intentional, they never would've added it in the next game, you know? (Although I just remembered the whole Asari thing so yeah. ANYWAY.) It was ridiculous the amount of people (i.e., more than zero) who fought against it, but Bioware listened, and rightly addressed the issues in future games. Their romance stuff has only improved with every iteration, and while still not perfect, is better than most. Because they listen to, what's that word again? Criticism!

 

Likewise, I honestly believe that CD Projekt has listened to a lot of criticism (and not just in terms of. Anyone remember the first Witcher? It had fucking collectible sex cards. I do believe they're actively trying to make their sexy-fun-times more believable, or at least less absurd. The Witcher 2 was a huge improvement in that regard. Like immense, vast improvement. It still has a good deal of titillation to it, and I'm not sure I believe they'll ever be as good about it as, for example, Dragon Age, because I think they like their titillation. (I haven't played TW3, yet, but I hear it's on the same level as TW2?) In a perfect world, titillation would be fine, since not everything (i.e., most things) would be titillation. Just like, in a perfect world, having 100% white people would be fine, since not everything (i.e., most things) would be 100% white.

 

You see how it all comes together? Because I don't I just fuckin' ranted and rambled but there's a coherent point in there somewhere. Man I hate this stupid fucking argument every time it fucking comes up. It's the same shit every time.

 

(EDIT: Could've sworn there was a gay romance option in ME2, but it appears that was only added for ME3? Huh. Maybe Dragon Age would've been a better example, eh?)

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