"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Mangela Lansbury]

So the goal is... what, Uber, but for equal representation in, video games? And that goal means that it's okay to push back against people who have a problem with the exclusion of all non-white people in a major release of a AAA video game?

I don't understand what it is that you want or why you're being so argumentative about people saying something is a problem when you seem to agree that yes, it's a problem.

[itsamoose]

I'm frustrated that when this all blows over, like it will in the next week or two, we'll go right back to square one.  Then another game will come out with a similar problem, similar complaint, be in the public consciousness for a couple weeks and go right back to square one.  Then some developers will do the bare minimum to satisfy the criticism, but not really challenge themselves to do more than that.  Then a group, say I don't know let's call them gamergate, will come out against all of this, claiming censorship or the like, and attract people to their cause.  This is exactly what has happened to the perception of feminism, and has been happening in US politics for a while now.  Remember the controversy about evolution being taught?  Well that battle was won, but then every subsequent battle trying to bring progressive change to public institutions has been lost.  Some states like Texas have removed hip hop and rap from their history textbooks altogether, and have even had the notion that the US was founded as a Christian nation put into them (flat out wrong).  Poll taxes have fallen out of favor, but voter ID laws (really a poll tax by another name) are popular.  I'm afraid we'll keep fighting the same battles over and over again without really getting anywhere but thinking we are.

 

I mean your previous comment stated that a in depth and nuanced conversation about representation can't really be had when there are so few examples of it, which is exactly what has been going on in this thread for the last couple of pages and in the articles that have been linked throughout.  You're probably right in pointing out that I'm kind of just swinging at windmills here, and I don't want that kind of criticism to go away.  What I want is for it to keep going, and for the conversation to not be limited by some perception that we just need more time or have to wait for the next thing.  When I see people say things like progress happens in steps, I can't help but read that as nothing else to see here.  Also it's worth noting that I tend to never be satisfied, and am always pushing for more to be done because I don't know of anyone else who is.  Anyway, this is pretty much turning into a rant so suffice it to say I agree with the criticism, and wish it went further.

[Gaizokubanou]

Bit late but to add some cheery mood

 

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.

 

Why thank you, I really appreciate this.  When you posted this it definitely did feel like my point of view was getting glossed over too often.  That did get cleared up but nontheless thanks~

[Mangela Lansbury]

Anyway, this is pretty much turning into a rant so suffice it to say I agree with the criticism, and wish it went further.

I generally agree with you, but I've learned to be content that any criticism is happening even though I usually want more. If you stifle what's happening, you can't take it further.

[Twig]

I generally agree with you, but I've learned to be content that any criticism is happening even though I usually want more. If you stifle what's happening, you can't take it further.

Yeah, super exactly!!!

[Apple Cider]

I write criticism pretty often and talk about this shit a lot, so I guess I don't feel like this is "going nowhere" but I also traffic in other places besides this forum. It's also hard to say that unless you, as a singular entity, are making some sort of substantial effort against a giant capitalistic system or video game company, then it's all for naught. 

[Bjorn]

I'm sorry, but that seems like a cop out to me.  Ghandi's marches were not a step toward civil liberties, they were a radical change in the way people protest their governments.  The ending of segregation in the US was not a step, it was a radical restructuring of society and government.  The iPhone was not a step in mobile device development, it was a radical change in the way everything on a mobile device works from the marketplace to input.  Gunpower weapons were not a step in the way wars were conducted, it completely changed them.  The internet was not a step in the way people communicate, it has and will continue to radically change the way society functions.  Through the lens of history it seems as though progress was made in steps, but at the time those steps are actually radical change away from the status quo.

 

I'm tired and quite literally about to crawl into bed, so don't have time for any deep thought on this.  But I'd probably disagree with every single one of those examples.They are all examples of a single step, with many other steps preceding and following that tend to get lost because of our obsession for looking for massive turning points that rarely exist so cleanly in history.  The Internet, particularly, has been nothing but a series of thousands of steps that have been winding and ascending for several decades now.  And that's the example we've all lived through.  If we had lived through the older examples, we'd have seen the same progressions. 

 

Change never comes suddenly. It comes in fits and starts, with ground gained and lost, arguments big and small. 

[Gaizokubanou]

Getting very tangential here but...

 

Yeah agree with bjorn on those, none of those examples spring to my mind as single step that revolutionized instantly.  Take gunpowder for example... it's been weaponized since what, early 1200s?  But it wasn't this tool that instantly changed warfare.  The early gunpowder weapons were complimentary to non firearms early on and took hundreds of years of tiny refinement before ousting other weapons.  It's just very easy step to recognize so perhaps that's why it's cited so often but things like rifling or even just tactical changes like tercio perhaps had greater change than first weaponization of gunpowder.

 

We certainly celebrate moments because well, it's more manageable.  But none of those things happened out of nothing, all of those events/inventions took years of buildup before and after to take effect.  I mean maybe Ghandhi's application of non-violence to politics in such scale is closest in that list of being single step, but others certainly doesn't seem that way to me.

 

Getting back more on topic...

 

Why can't you do both?  Push for bandaid fixes while also discussing other matters in pursuit of more permanent improvement?  We should be able to hold discussion on both fronts, yes?

[itsamoose]

We could, but don't.  To bring it back to journalism, I hold critics accountable for how their audiences view and discuss games.  Even if you don't believe critics can affect the way their audiences see games, I assure it does affect how developers see them.  Time and again the only kinds of criticisms I see levied are those are concerned with minor improvements, and to me it is no surprise that all we get are minor improvements.  I've read article after article about the need for more types of romance options, but to be honest I've never read one that questioned the need for romantic relationships.  Romance options are kind of the easiest target here, but that exists for a number of other elements as well.  We criticize a feature, but never question the need for that feature whether it be a gun or jump button.  Its not hard to see the increased popularity of social justice minded journalists in the last few years along with the increased awareness and willingness to discuss social issues on the part of games enthusiasts.  That's great, and it should continue, but at the same time maybe part of the reason we see a lot of the same type of games is because we don't see a lot of criticism willing to question the existence of something in a game.  It's not that one is more important than the other, it's that one happens and the other doesn't.  If people had a greater capacity to question whether or not Third Person Shooters are valuable, if that mechanic wasn't taken as a given, I'd argue that games like Mass Effect would look much different than they do.  What is interesting to me is that for devs I've spoken with at length who are willing to question these things, representation of minority groups is never an issue in their games.

[Apple Cider]

Except there HAS been criticism about that - is violence as a verb necessary and all that? 

Also romance options are actually a pretty "new" mechanic in that way and a lot of people have wanted DA and ME to just be a romance sim/narrative game, actually. I find the honing in on just romance options really interesting because that's presumably a mechanic that a lot of women like in games vs. men. 

 

Basically, it sounds like you're upset about not seeing this criticism when it's out there and you just haven't seen it yet. I'm all for more games with romance options over shooting dudes with guns, personally.

[tberton]

Austin Walker wrote up a few thoughts on race in The Witcher. Not a full piece, but interesting nonetheless.

[Bjorn]

I'm frustrated that when this all blows over, like it will in the next week or two, we'll go right back to square one.  Then another game will come out with a similar problem, similar complaint, be in the public consciousness for a couple weeks and go right back to square one.  Then some developers will do the bare minimum to satisfy the criticism, but not really challenge themselves to do more than that.  Then a group, say I don't know let's call them gamergate, will come out against all of this, claiming censorship or the like, and attract people to their cause.  This is exactly what has happened to the perception of feminism, and has been happening in US politics for a while now.  Remember the controversy about evolution being taught?  Well that battle was won, but then every subsequent battle trying to bring progressive change to public institutions has been lost. 

 

I agree with your rant and that we'd all like to see even bigger/deeper changes emerge, but the reality of what we exist in is that the people arguing for change don't have the kind of top-level power necessary to see it enacted an a large scale and are often put in positions of having to constantly fight bushfires because they are so ever present.

 

Bringing up evolution is an interesting one.  Kansas is a state that has tried to gut the teaching of evolution within the last decade or so. I have a lot of friends who are educators.  They would love to be focusing their time and energy on improving science curriculum, but instead they have to be on near constant vigilance for religious conservatives who want to destroy some of the foundational pillars of science.  The same is true of something like abortion.  I know people who work for Planned Parenthood, and they would love to be able to focus a lot of their attention on some bigger picture reproductive and women's health issues, but the fight over abortion in Kansas is literally never ending.  Then they get criticized for focusing so much on abortion, when they are literally having to oppose multiple legislative attempts to completely ban it every year.  I feel like that's analogous to some of the pushback that people get when talking about gender or race in games.  If problems didn't show up in so many games, critics wouldn't have to talk about this shit nearly constantly. 

 

I think the fights over something like representation in games is similar.  Yes, there are some bigger picture goals that would fabulous to pursue, but how do you do that when the most basic elements necessary for them barely exist? 

 

On romances, I totally agree with Apple Cider.  Romances in games are still a relative rarity, usually only showing up in large scale RPGs or small indie games focused on them.  The vast majority of games have no romance options.  If anything, I want to see more, better and more interesting (mechanically) options for exploring in game romances.  And criticisms of unnecessary or poorly executed romances in fiction are something that have existed for many years now. 

[Twig]

Also romance options are actually a pretty "new" mechanic in that way and a lot of people have wanted DA and ME to just be a romance sim/narrative game, actually.

I'm one of them! The combat in (most) of those games just gets in the way for me. ):

[Deadpan]

Basically, it sounds like you're upset about not seeing this criticism when it's out there and you just haven't seen it yet.

 

I agree wtih this entirely. That kind of criticism exists, but it's reviews that tend to influence game developers, not design deep dives and critical interrogations of a game's politics. So the kind of criticism itsamoose wants has very little actual power to affect change, and the kind of criticism that does has very little interest in doing so.

 

Also, this all ultimately ties back to the tastes and actions of audiences at large. The only power us critics really have in this weirdly lopsided dialogue with developers comes from our relationship to the subsection of people who play games, either through our alleged ability to influence them, or our alleged role of speaking for a significant portion of them. And given that people, at least those who are vocal on the issue, tend to disregard our concerns entirely (when they aren't arguing that voicing them is detrimental to games on the whole), we have ultimately very little influence. It's not the person speaking at a rally that drives change, it's the people who came to listen.

[Mawd]

I'd be for toning down combat to big story beats or having a combat game in parallel.

But more than a romance sim I'd love to see a game that showed deep bonds of friendship, ways to strain it, or repair rifts.

It's disappointing to me that in DA you never grow beyond a working relationship with your peers. The only options to go deeper result in some kind of schoolyard flirt response and the entire camp gushing over the romance between you two.

[Gaizokubanou]

If you roleplay, you can get a whole lot of those out of Crusader Kings II as that game gives pretty rich tools about interpersonal relationships for players to use.

[Vainamoinen]

Exactly the kind of discussion that needs to be taking place in games.

 

I know! And I'm proud.   Still, I need to read all your stuffz to actually reply. Might be another few days.

[Naldean]

I suspect we wouldn't be having this conversation if the Witcher 3 weren't indicative of much wider problems with the industry. So while yes there may be a bit of truth about it being a cultural work or being singled out among other games with similar problems, when you get down to it, it represents the problems of an industry dominated by white men (well, at least the North American and European portions of the industry, obviously Japanese games are a different story). And it's not just representation in games, but among developers (which is arguably the root of the problem, but also these things probably feed into and reinforce each other).

 

One of the problems with using specific games to point out wider problems is that you always get pushback about factors which might be specific to that game, or claims that creators should have the right to choose what characters they portray. Those are both true, but it basically gets used to try to shut down any discussion about the problems facing the industry as a whole.

 

This is the same issue I have with many criticisms of Anita Sarkeesian's videos. People think that by debunking individual cases they can debunk the entirety of her claims. The problem is that individual cases on their own may be justified or not problematic, it's in the context of an industry where nearly every big game has similar issues that they really are a problem.

[Gormongous]

I can't tell if this link has been dropped before, but I have an acquaintance arguing vociferously on Facebook for "artistic freedom" and "cultural heritage" in defense of racial representation in The Witcher 3, linking primarily to this letter: http://elysianshadows.com/updates/love-letter-to-person-who-demands-racial-quotas-in-witcher-3/

 

Reading it brought into relief two separate but interlinked problems that I have with race in The Witcher 3, one buying into the game's world and one critiquing it from the outset. I'll restate them, because I can't sleep.

• The Witcher 3 has very few characters that are people of color in it. No matter the state of this made-up world, if there exist people of color within it, then it strains plausibility that virtually none of them would have made their way to the Northern Kingdoms. Even in the lands bordering the North and Baltic Seas of real-life Europe, people of color were far from unfamiliar during the Middle Ages, and even an inhabitant of the most remote village would have seen at least one or two during their lifetime. For the rich and cosmopolitan cities of the Baltic on which in-game locations like Novigrad are based, it would have been downright common to see people of color, but CD Projekt Red has decided instead to keep up the whitewashing done by decades of lazy video game world-building. What better way to make it feel like it takes place in someplace like medieval Europe than to cram it to the gills with white people? The above letter brings up the possibility of a later Witcher game taking place in Arabic-flavored Zerrikania, unfortunately focusing on how exotic its setting would be, and yet how utterly inconceivable would it be for that hypothetical game to include no white people at all? If Geralt is kept as the protagonist for that future Witcher game, which is possibly the most certain thing in the world, then there's already one white person right there. Still, make no mistake, there would be white merchants, white courtesans, white mercenaries, and white expatriates of all types, mixed into the game's setting for (ahem) color. I certainly wouldn't fault them for it, because that's how the world works, except somehow it doesn't when it takes place inside Poland's own little bubble of neo-medieval fantasy, where it's wall-to-wall white people because that's how big-budget games have always been made.
• The Witcher 3 exists in a fantastical version of the real world where people of color who actually were neighbors to Poland have been erased from the map. Instead of the steppes, there's just desert and mountains, so mercifully there are no Cumans, Mongols, or Turks invading, raiding, or trading in this analogue to Poland. The distant realm of Nilfgaard, based on the historical Holy Roman Empire that also spent centuries waging war on and exacting tribute from Poland, exerts substantial influence over the Northern Kingdoms throughout the three games made thus far, but the people just over the northern and eastern mountains, mere dozens of miles away, are so separated from the world of The Witcher 3 that they aren't even filled into the maps included among the supplementary materials to those games. People have a right to envision whatever fantastical alternatives to reality that they want, but if they end up envisioning a version of their not-so-distant history with all the people of color situated so far away as to effectively not even exist, then they're going to get the side-eye from me until I hear some reasons, and those reasons better be something less self-serving than two centuries of undeniable hardship somehow giving them the right to present their past (along with the pasts of others) with whatever additions or subtractions happen to strike their fancy, no matter how unjustified or distasteful, which is the going excuse in the above letter and among most people defending the racial representation in The Witcher 3.

I had a lot more bile to spew about several implications in the letter, most notably this persistent notion that Polish developers have a right (or even an obligation) as a formerly stateless culture to create works that feature that culture exclusively -- with the natural exception of whatever borrowings from Western European history and mythology appeal to them, so long as they don't feel pressured to represent the reality of people of color in Polish society since Varangian routes connected the Baltic Sea to the Black and Caspian Seas in the ninth century, if not before during the Avar Khaganate of the sixth century, but... uh, I guess I just did. As someone who's been reading fantasy novels since he could read and studying history intensively for almost a decade now, I'm so bored with this bullshit being the current state of affairs. The only reason that all-white settings are the standard for works of neo-medieval fantasy is because they feel more authentic to most people's misconceptions of the past, and it's time to start calling out that feeling as white supremacist, however unintentionally it may have come to them, so we can recognize its basic historical dishonesty and move on to newer and better things as a subculture and a fandom.

 

I like The Witcher 3 a lot, but I hate that good games are expected to get a pass for the shitty things that they do in the process of being good games. Cultural criticism only seems to stick when the games themselves are terrible, and then it's always overshadowed by the fact that the games themselves are terrible and of course they shit the bed in other ways, too.

 

I'm sorry. I'll stop.

[osmosisch]

For what it's worth, I've seen exactly 1 person of colour in almost a decennium of regular travel there due to my marriage to a Pole. The "it's history!" argument actually probably works in the opposite way most people use it - I would be shocked if there weren't a lot more traces of foreign incursions before the Nazis and Soviets rampaged through.

I don't think it's good that they made such a white game but I can definitely understand how it could happen just by having other things on their mind. It's always difficult to navigate between explanation and excuses in this sort of situation I think.

It would behoove them to go on record to say something about their intentions in future. CD Projekt has generally shown themselves to be quite progressive in many ways so I'm crossing my fingers.

[Gormongous]

For what it's worth, I've seen exactly 1 person of colour in almost a decennium of regular travel there due to my marriage to a Pole. The "it's history!" argument actually probably works in the opposite way most people use it - I would be shocked if there weren't a lot more traces of foreign incursions before the Nazis and Soviets rampaged through.

I don't think it's good that they made such a white game but I can definitely understand how it could happen just by having other things on their mind. It's always difficult to navigate between explanation and excuses in this sort of situation I think.

It would behoove them to go on record to say something about their intentions in future. CD Projekt has generally shown themselves to be quite progressive in many ways so I'm crossing my fingers.

 

Oh, I agree completely. The outcome of 96.74% ethnic and racial homogeneity is not some kind of historical accident, but a process beginning in the fourteenth century with the growing awareness of market dynamics, closed national identities, and political boundaries. Occupation by the Nazis and the Soviets almost certainly was an exclamation point rather than a period on that, owing to their brutally exclusionary ethnic policies. The current state of affairs is not the fault of Poland or CD Projekt Red, but when people say stuff that boils down to, "Oh, we tell stories mostly about white people because we're a nation of white people and always have been," it shows a disturbing lack of cognizance about how that sort of thing could possibly have come to pass, given the way the world works.

 

And yeah, it's not exactly poor odds that CD Projekt Red will step up where their would-be apologists won't. I'm mostly harping on this subject because it's something I know well and something that's easily avoided. Hire a medievalist, fantasy writers. Hire one that's fresh out of grad school. For ten bucks an hour, all your fake Latin will be perfect and nothing in your setting will be fresh out of Ivanhoe.

[Vainamoinen]

After these four pages, I'm still safely on the "it's excusable" side on the Witcher issue, with no actual moral obligation on the side of CDP (I don't think that this stance stifles criticism or is a "silencing tactic", not at all. Criticism and complaint without accusation and insult, that's what most people are doing here).
 
I've seen some really strong points made as to why that inclusion wouldn't just have been a great opportunity for CDPR, but would also have added to the credibility of their vision. And that may be a bit of a change from how I perceived it earlier.
 
To reiterate and build on the points that I agree with:

• the Witcher map is just too huge for lily white exclusively, the supposed epic scope is thus diminished and the vision less credible.
• The influences on the saga are definitely not just Polish folklore, so that makes for a very bad excuse.
• Even if it were, the historical adversaries of the Polish people would have been whitewashed out of the picture.
• "Historical accuracy" has nothing to do with it. Nothing against a story that focuses on a real life historical or cultural scenario, but that's not The Witcher.
• Being spread throughout the world, it doesn't even make sense that the fictional race representatives are all shown to be white. Dark skinned Elves e.g. make total sense.
• from the viewpoints of technology and clothing, The Witcher may not even be a middle ages scenario... more like the Rennaissance.

 

Now... would The Bard's Tale 4, with its clear outspoken focus on Scottish culture and focusing on just a single city, also benefit from great diversity...?

 

 

 

As a corollary to that, what could be done to address the criticism?  Additionally, why is the criticism levied at individual aspects of the game and not at some of it's deeper assumptions?  For example in games with black characters, racism is rarely ever encountered, particularly the kind of subtle racism all too familiar today, why?. Why are significant relationships in games typically limited to romance options, and why is sex always the ultimate culmination of this relationship?  Sure criticism needs to exist, but I also think that just pointing out that a certain thing wasn't done isn't really helpful beyond recognition.  I don't know of any places, save this forum, where these kinds of criticisms are levied or discussed in any detail.

 
I do, and I particularly bring up the 'sex as the ultimate success' point in connection to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Also seldom discussed, but very gamergate relevant: Why is the fact that almost every video game tells us that every conflict can be solved through deadly weapons not considered highly political in the present debate?

I also share the "square one" sentiment. I'm fairly certain that we'll get there though, and some steps are inevitable. There will be developers – and gamergaters, of course – who will bring this discussion back to step one, to 1.0, as if no arguments were ever brought forward, with every utterance and every game. Yet if a reminder doesn't help, the solution to that is to ignore these people.

[Deadpan]

As far as I'm following the discussion (not just on here), it seems like there are two valid positions being pitted against each other for no good reason. On the one hand, given that the Witcher series is already much closer to Hollywood fantasy than local folklore and it's fair to demand that if you're gonna deviate from the source material anyway you might as well make the cast a little more diverse in the process. On the other hand, I think it's also true that specific local history is deserving of more representation than always being transformed into the US version of the the representative social issue for the sake of mass appeal.

 

Like, this reminds me of when TB posted that silly thing about how there's no racism in Britain because there's no black people around (that he's aware of). Disregarding that the processes leading to such perceived homogeneity are hella problematic in and of themselves, as Gormongous points out, this also just goes to show that people have gotten so used to thinking of racism exclusively as the discrimination of black folk that they remain ignorant of the analogous baggage in their own history.

 

Like, Austria didn't ever really get involved in colonialism (although not for want of trying), but that doesn't mean we don't have some incredibly racist history through (among many other things) our past as a multinational state and the discrimination Hungaria, Croatia, Bosnia etc. faced as the "insignificant" extensions of the German-speaking "core" of the empire, which is still very much present in contemporary views. People might respond negatively to certain features or last names because they imply roots in one of these countries, even though the family of the person they're speaking to might, at this point, literally have lived in this country for hundreds of years. Despite this, these attitudes tend to be discussed publicly as being for or against immigration (!), not as being racist or not.

[Bjorn]

On the other hand, I think it's also true that specific local history is deserving of more representation than always being transformed into the US version of the the representative social issue for the sake of mass appeal.

 

Variations of this response have been popping up (both here and in other places) and they've been bugging me.

 

Please don't do this.  This isn't an issue that exists because of American diversity, American "p0litical correctness", mass appeal or whatnot.  First, as has been repeated ad nauseam in this thread, it's the region's ACTUAL history that is being ignored.  Secondly, the global effects of an American and European dominated culture that worships whiteness and demonizes color causes actual harm worldwide. The proliferation of skin whitening treatments in Africa and parts of Asia is considered to be a potential epidemic to some doctors, as dangerous and cheap products have flooded the market.   People literally say, I'm black, so I can't be beautiful, I have to become more like white people.

 

Of course the Witcher and CDPR aren't responsible for that, one game isn't going to really change anything and Poland cultural exports aren't going to fix it.  But they exist as part of the same cultural dominance that causes actual harm.  When people insinuate that the only reason to want diversity is to appeal to an American audience, they try to minimize and ignore the harm that homogenous white culture has caused, and continues to cause, worldwide.  The same is true when people say things like it's only white people who care about this stuff.  White cultural dominance is something a lot of people worldwide care about, and stories like the Witcher games exist within that framework. 

 

Intentional or not, that kind of comment is about trying to shift responsibility for caring about representation in media solely onto the shoulders of American liberals while ignoring the rest of the world. Which, hey, ignoring the rest of the world is kind of the whole problem here.

[Gaizokubanou]

Why is the fact that almost every video game tells us that every conflict can be solved through deadly weapons not considered highly political in the present debate?

 

Highly interesting question but just want to chime in that I think it would have to depend highly on the game's theme.

 

Take WW2 games for example... the setting/theme is such that use of violence is forgone conclusion.  Compare that to say, Civilization games.  Designers of those games wondered about how to combat the games devolving into war game at highly competitive level, one of reason being this question.  There this question makes a lot more sense cause game's theme should be broader (and it is, it just gets overshadowed when game is pushed to max).

 

But that isn't to say genres previously thought as combat exclusive (like mechanics demand that game be combative) are being challenged so there is that.  Like WW2 game that is about defusing the situation?  Might need few Cold War games of that sort but could be interesting.  This is the reason why I love Spec Ops The Line, such wonderful commentary on how expectation of becoming a hero by shooting everyone (how most FPS games operate) is silly/bad.  Splatoon is very cool also in that it took usually highly violent (third person shooter) genre and turned it into more friendly, cheery sports like game.

 

Not sure what my point is...