I only wish everybody found it as funny as you. I think I made some people angry with that one.Silver Scribbler said:
Oops.
And, of course, thank you.
-- Chuck
269: The Pasty White Person Is King
- Thread starter Chuck Wendig
- Start date
Oops.
And, of course, thank you.
-- Chuck
I'm forever surprised -- though I shouldn't be -- when people respond to an article in a way that demonstrates that they did not read the article in question.Sir John the Net Knight said:
I said:
"I am, of course, being a little harsh. Further, I'm not suggesting racism is at work in the creation of any of these games. What I am suggesting, however, is that the game industry can do better.
Race in games doesn't reflect race in gamers. Gamers come from all walks of life and are born of every color and creed imaginable. And yet, the main characters in these games - avatars representing the player, or at least the player's motivations - are predominantly white. Everybody else is under-represented as a protagonist, and some groups - Arabs, for instance - appear almost entirely unrepresented."
Hard to see where I'm suggesting that game developers are racist, or that some grand conspiracy exists. Hardly. My only plea is for the game industry to do better.
Actually, a game like DRAGON AGE *should* be lauded for the way it handles gender and sexuality in some cases. I'm not knocking the game. I'm not knocking any of these games. I'm simply saying, "Hey, lots of people of different races and cultural backgrounds play these games. Let's make the games reflect the gamers."
-- Chuck
Yeah, it's quite strange to be a Black guy during the Origin stories when everyone around you (And in some circumstances your own parents!) are White, so it doesn't make sense.chuckwendig said:
chuckwendig said:
The whole argument is so race-centric, this is not the way to approach the issue. If the game is of the sort where it benefits from racial diversity and whereapon it makes sence, that's great, fine, if its not imposing race for race's race is just a waste of time making an issue where there shouldn't be. -
The Sims is a game about people, where you can be who you want to be and do what you want to do, so it has people of every nationality. WoW, dragon age, fable etc have their human parts set in small old-English fantasy locations, bashing them for not representing every nationality is insane, we have the wonder of a vast world large enough for many cultures to exist and co-exist, the humans of wow have goldshire and stormwind - an area about the size of my town, and even then it tried with the retexturing. (New models in WoW do not happen easily, hell onxyia and deathwing still sit on pretty much the same base model, and these are major lore characters)
This is why I imposed the question from my original post - in games where it makes sence to have a diverse racial cast, they usually have one. In games when it doesn't anti-offence money could be put into new mobs to kill instead.
Imho, I found the dragonage origins character creator to be pretty free and open when customizing characters. But then Im sure your right its impossible to create anything but a pasty-white char.
Edit: But I have to agree there is a lack of diversity when actually in the game
[http://img837.imageshack.us/i/daoj.jpg/]
Edit: But I have to agree there is a lack of diversity when actually in the game
As a pasty white person myself, I wouldn't mind playing more racially diverse characters in games.
Granted, if given a chance to make my own avatar, that avatar would be white, male and in many things resemble me. However, that's because designing an avatar is the game's way of letting me project myself into the world.
But in cases of predetermined protagonists, I would like to see more diversity. I have no trouble being tossed into the role of a character different than myself. So keep up the fight for racial diversity in games!
Granted, if given a chance to make my own avatar, that avatar would be white, male and in many things resemble me. However, that's because designing an avatar is the game's way of letting me project myself into the world.
But in cases of predetermined protagonists, I would like to see more diversity. I have no trouble being tossed into the role of a character different than myself. So keep up the fight for racial diversity in games!
Not to bog you down in a long conversation, but ignoring culture etc. for a moment (one could argue that in a fantasy game culture is at least somewhat uniform) and staying with physical characteristics, one of the things about my warlock is that she still had straight hair. Also, her facial features were narrow and I could yammer on.chuckwendig said:Of course, skin color is really only a very small part of it -- beyond that, games could also do a better job actually attempting to embrace different cultures and the traditions of those cultures, but really, one step at a time.
-- Chuck
On of the big issues with race in video games, I think, is that race is often also a role. In real world games with a fixed protagonist this often means that if a main character is specifically black, he is also a gangster, if specifically Italian, then part of the mob. Non ethnic white is sort of the neutral point that can be anything, but outside of that you are tailored to specific roles. In fantasy games, different races are still different roles just under the guiding role of culture. So all black people may be from the mysterious land far to the south that do things xyz. All Scottish people are dwarves, and they like rock and beer. I think this is not unique to gaming... consider comics where to be black means you are an African weather goddess, a streetwise hero like Luke Cage, or the king of an african nation.
Anyway, those are just my extra thoughts. Cheers!
Did Chuck even PLAY Dragon Age: Origins? Hell, select a Human, then go through the presets and there are black/hispanic/asian archetypes. The character editor is easily MORE advanced than Mass Effect's (they both allow you to tweak the same sliders, but DA:O has more, like voice selection).
It's just that Dragon Age and Mass Effect are both from Bioware, both use a modified Unreal3 engine, and both have customizable characters of similar depth. To bash one then praise the other makes no damn sense to anybody that's played BOTH before. I don't know if he REALLY didn't get it (which is sad), or maybe he was trying to make a point and didn't think we'd notice and/or call him on it (which, for a gaming site, is just plain stupid).
That's not to say that I didn't agree with him, I just think he needs to be more consistent. Calling out DA:O like that was cheap.
It's just that Dragon Age and Mass Effect are both from Bioware, both use a modified Unreal3 engine, and both have customizable characters of similar depth. To bash one then praise the other makes no damn sense to anybody that's played BOTH before. I don't know if he REALLY didn't get it (which is sad), or maybe he was trying to make a point and didn't think we'd notice and/or call him on it (which, for a gaming site, is just plain stupid).
That's not to say that I didn't agree with him, I just think he needs to be more consistent. Calling out DA:O like that was cheap.
Again, apologies from me on that point.EvolutionKills said:
I did play DA:O (and, as I say elsewhere on the thread, it should be commended for the way it handles gender and sexuality), but like an asshole I was in the middle of a move and had no access to games during that time. It was a hasty error on my part.
That said, DA:O still has the issue of creating a swarthy character who lives in a very white world: your avatar is less someone of a different race and more someone with a genetic pigmentation problem: "Hey, my family is white, but my skin is deeper than the midnight dark." It ends up feeling the same as WoW: a new coat of paint over a white character.
But I'll totally cop to my error on that, and apologies for doing so.
-- Chuck
The underlying problem here is the tyranny of the "typical fantasy setting," which means a bunch of pasty white dudes in medieval England or France. There are a lot of opportunities to keep the swords, sorcery and feudalism angle while giving your game a unique visual style and a new mythology to mine - the Reconquista of Spain, the Italian Renaissance, the Caliphate, imperial China.
A similar principle holds for more recent settings. The parts of World War II that we most often revisit are located in France and Germany. Our spies and space exploration stories are based on the Cold War, although occasionally the white guys will be literate in Japanese.
A similar principle holds for more recent settings. The parts of World War II that we most often revisit are located in France and Germany. Our spies and space exploration stories are based on the Cold War, although occasionally the white guys will be literate in Japanese.
I started reading this thinking "Oh great, some white guy is going to whine to me about how awful it is to be black." then I realized it's not as big a deal as this guy is making it out to be. In pretty much every game where the character is really ME I can choose skin tone. Fallout 3, Mass Effect, the list goes on. The only exception I can think of is Dragon Age, where my attempts at making a black person turned out to be a VERY sun burned white person. And I've never had a sun burn in my life. Though maybe it's something to say that, despite similar game play mechanics and all following the RPG genre, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 are my two favorite games of all time...while Dragon Age was a huge flop in my eyes. Maybe it's that Red Devil creature I created...or maybe I just didn't like the game? Either way there's no real certain way to tell which is true.
So, is out there? Yeah sure, is it a problem? Not really. I even passed up the chance to play as a black character in Borderlands, because Mordecai's abilities trump Roland's in my opinion. My second character was Roland, but I didn't get far before the feeling of "I've done this before" sunk in, and the game started gathering dust. All other games where I'm forced to play as a white person don't really both me much, since it's not really me, it's Marcus Fenix, or John Marston. And even then that's only in Third Person games, first person it doesn't even really matter, I don't see the character except for cut scenes, when it's REALLY not me.
So, is out there? Yeah sure, is it a problem? Not really. I even passed up the chance to play as a black character in Borderlands, because Mordecai's abilities trump Roland's in my opinion. My second character was Roland, but I didn't get far before the feeling of "I've done this before" sunk in, and the game started gathering dust. All other games where I'm forced to play as a white person don't really both me much, since it's not really me, it's Marcus Fenix, or John Marston. And even then that's only in Third Person games, first person it doesn't even really matter, I don't see the character except for cut scenes, when it's REALLY not me.
Basically everyone in Fable, or really any medieval fantasy, is white for the same reason virtually anyone in Jade Empire is chinese (I know there was a white guy, but the whole point of him being there was to be made an ass of by you): Because people in that setting, by a wide margin, tended to be the majority race, which is white for fantasy, and chinese for Jade Empire.
Why is white the dominant colour for medieval fantasy characters? If you want to argue that there were other races with a significant population in Europe at the time, then fine, argue that. The problem is that as far as I know none of them were knights, and I highly doubt that lords and kings let them fight in their armies, and they weren't exactly meshed in with native britons.
Here, I'm going to take the article's logic and make it a little bit on the stupid side. Why can I only make Japanese Samurai in the Samurai Warriors franchise's custom warrior mode. I know that Japan is about as homogenous as they get, but there were white people going there to do trade and such. So it's not as if there were no other races there. I want to make a white Samurai. And, since I can make a white samurai, it would be racist if I couldn't make a samurai for every colour of the racial rainbow. I know that there were no samurai who weren't purebred Japanese, but with some of the shit you are asking me to believe already why can't I have a politically correct squad of Samurai called "The Diversity Force"?
Why is white the dominant colour for medieval fantasy characters? If you want to argue that there were other races with a significant population in Europe at the time, then fine, argue that. The problem is that as far as I know none of them were knights, and I highly doubt that lords and kings let them fight in their armies, and they weren't exactly meshed in with native britons.
Here, I'm going to take the article's logic and make it a little bit on the stupid side. Why can I only make Japanese Samurai in the Samurai Warriors franchise's custom warrior mode. I know that Japan is about as homogenous as they get, but there were white people going there to do trade and such. So it's not as if there were no other races there. I want to make a white Samurai. And, since I can make a white samurai, it would be racist if I couldn't make a samurai for every colour of the racial rainbow. I know that there were no samurai who weren't purebred Japanese, but with some of the shit you are asking me to believe already why can't I have a politically correct squad of Samurai called "The Diversity Force"?
I think that Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights had more racial options but they are based on the Forgotten Realms setting which, I think, is supposed to be a world were multiculturalism and gender equality are taken as granted. When you look at the cultures that are defined as exotic in the Forgotten Realms the details seem to get less defined and ruled by crude preconceptions. Pulp fantasy sells itself by delivering exactly what you expect it to deliver. You have to look to find harder content by people who really care about going past your expectations by researching real history and anthropology.
Similarly, Mass Effect is supposed to be a post melting pot vision of humanity where people with any type of racial purity are rare. But a lot of the humans you meet are really strikingly western European in appearance if that is the case. Even the aliens are sort of white, which I suppose is better than risking a Jar Jar Binks.
Similarly, Mass Effect is supposed to be a post melting pot vision of humanity where people with any type of racial purity are rare. But a lot of the humans you meet are really strikingly western European in appearance if that is the case. Even the aliens are sort of white, which I suppose is better than risking a Jar Jar Binks.
Japanese Samurai were real.Del-Toro said:
Like, really real.
History has nothing to do with fantasy. People like to pretend that fantasy is somehow bound by history, but it's not.
Fantasy has the advantage of being Whatever The Creators Decide, but so few creators actually make use of that advantage. Fantasy is always very samey-samey, and it gets trapped in these ludicrous conventions -- like the fake marriage with history, like the prevalence of white folk, like the misuse of the term "race."
-- Chuck
what really annoys me is when they have a black character in a game just to tick a box eg Sahz from FFXIII, or the sergent from Bad Company 2. I really felt when seeing these characters that the dev team just thought "ok, lets put in this black guy, ok, done, everyone else can be white as usual". I rather that game developers put in characters of different races because they wan to, not because they feel obliged. Also, i'd like to play as a Hispanic main character in a shooter. Merely a whim though
Then that gosh-derned Star Trek had to go and mess everything up, now the entire universe has to worry about fine looking black women and their fan dances.Ed. said:
That could be the link why Fable 3 (representing Fantasy) is more whitewashed then Mass Effect (representing Sci-Fi) as discussed in the article. It's just the nature of the genre.