briankoontz said:
If a game is about a CEO of an American multinational corporation, having that CEO be a white male is the best way to go. It makes zero sense to allow the player to pick a Native American as an option, and not a lot of sense various other ethnic options, and if a female is selected then the narrative should reflect that.
Developers that give players irrational choices restrict and falsify their own narrative. One can't talk about race when one doesn't even know the race of the main character.
This type of "choice" in games is regressive, not progressive. That is not how CEOs are chosen in the real world, and because of that the game becomes ridiculous before it's even begun.
Compare the "progressiveness" of allowing multiple race choices for a CEO to a game which restricts the player to play as a white male CEO and is about the real process of how one becomes a CEO - covering the many systemic realities, some of which relate to race, class, and gender. Which game does a serious progressive of any race or gender want to play?
Rather than focus on representation, progressives should focus on games that *deal with* issues related to gender, race, and sexuality, of which there are countless. Almost no games currently do that and certainly no mainstream games, which favor the mass murder of demonized creatures by a superpowered protagonist.
Wanting females and minorities to murder demonized creatures or to be more often murdered alongside white males does nothing for anyone. It's kind of like people outside a party who desperately want to get in to the party, and once there find that they should have been doing their own thing all along.
Right now white males are wasting their time with "power fantasies" where mass murder is the solution to the world's problems. We shouldn't be encouraging the rest of the population to join in. We should be shutting down the party.
Well, your right to an extent, but a lot depends on how realistic your trying to be. Most video games tend to involve at least some fantastic elements, or a fantastic setting. For example in say "Shadowrun" there are several corporations most infamously "Aztecnology" which are run by Native Americans, but this in part happened due to the way magic returned to that world where Native Americans were one of the first groups to really get a grasp on it, and managed to retake a large swathe of their own lands during the chaos and then got too dug in to remove, of course then the elves took over part of their lands as well. Basically in a world where perhaps the most powerful mega-corp was being run by a Dragon who also ran (successfully) for president before being assasinated, reality isn't a big priority.
That said even today things become debatable when anything goes international. Native Americans were playing the business game on a world class level down here on the East Coast and built two of the three largest casinos in the world. Of course they also wound up getting burnt trying to play hardball with even bigger corporate bigwigs. I worked for both of them at one time or another. While the specifics are different the bottom line is that both tribes figured they could borrow huge amounts of money from Asian investors and international development corporations, and then renege on partnership agreements and paying back the agreed sums and interest by pulling the whole "we're a sovereign nation, screw the non natives" only to find it didn't work quite that way. This lead to lovely situations like how when working for Mohegan Sun (the "Sun" part comes from their partnership with Sun International) the wound up splitting security in half because the tribe didn't want to share and by contract any outside managerial authority ended at the casino doors, so they decided all of the outside patrol guys in the parking lots and stuff would be put under a tribal dispatch authority (sort of junior tribal cops) and separated from the inside security which were under the shared management umbrella. That might not sound like a big deal, but it was annoying. Basically it meant that if say some dude robbed a store and ran for the parking lot, you could no longer just call it in directly and have monitor room dispatch an outside officer to help intercept them. You'd call monitor room (where I frequently worked) who would have to call tribal dispatch, which might not really have much awareness of the casino, who would then try and send outside patrol (renamed "Protective Services") to intercept. Along with this of course came security no longer being encouraged to chase people outside the casino doors... basically the way political and financial slap fighting trickles down to actual function.
The point is though that during the heyday though a tribal casino mogul/CEO was kind of possible. Some guys like Roland Harris were exactly that. Nowadays, after my time, the whole thing is a shadow of what it once was though (both casinos) and a giant mess of debt, politics, and misguided construction/expansion attempts.
Outside of the US though, consider that various cartels like those running diamonds and such might very well have people who aren't white at the helm. Thai silk kings, and ethnically Chinese Hong Kong Capitalists are stereotypes, as is the South African gem cartel kingpin. Then of course through a lot of the world drugs aren't exactly illegal (which is a big part of the problem with keeping them out of the US) so pretty much any country that produces drugs could very well have big shots of the regional ethnicity that control that production even if the country is otherwise dirt poor. One part of the Afghanistan conflict people tend not to consider is that Afghanistan doesn't have a lot of resources in a general sense, but does have a lot of poppies which can be turned into Heroin, and of course the really wealthy countries that could bring money into Afghanistan through trade refuse to allow the trade (regio0nally where most countries are poor, this isn't a huge demand, or at least not a lot of profit to be made). I've read some things about how this has actually effected relations between Afghanistan and the US/Allies, although unlike some of the articles I've read I wouldn't go so far as to say the entire "War On Terror" in the region is really an extension of "The War On Drugs". It is possible however that some theories about how the CIA might have promised the Taliban (back when we were allies) that they would be able to sell heroin to the US to prop up their economy and then of course reneged on it might have a grain of truth and explain why some of those alliances fell apart.
That said I do agree with you in a general sense that political correctness has gone too far, and that characters should fit within the constructed reality. As a general rule if your trying to present a "like the real world" backdrop when looking at US corporations the majority are going to be run by white dudes, and the exceptions are REALLY going to stand out and generally be tied to very specific things. If you have some kind of corporate illuminati meeting for example it doesn't make a lot of sense to make it heavily multi-ethnic. On the other hand if you were say doing a crime piece set 10-15 years ago and say had someone trying to take over all gambling in the US, and somehow getting the leadership together to make his ultimatum, then in that case it would make a lot of sense to have a couple of CEOS
from east coast tribes sitting there.
It's not even really racist or anything, I mean it's no different than pointing out how stupid it would be if you had some white dude ruling communist China to be politically correct.
In fantasy worlds though, it comes down to obeying the established rules of those worlds as opposed to reality, and they might be very different. For example in a lot of vintage cyberpunk a lot of the concept revolves around the whole world, including the USA, largely being taken over by Japanacorps. As a result having whites on a shadowy board of directors or whatever wouldn't fit with the world.
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That long bit of rambling aside, I have to say your last "out of the blue" statement is one I sort of disagree with. If anything I think "whites" need to be taught to be a lot more violent and aggressive. Right now most things come down to a very moralistic, upbeat, message, about how you can win, survive, and succeed by doing the right and moral things, and how "the ends never justify the means when the means are unethical" and so on. I think right now we've become so generally passive and anti-violence that we're losing a lot of ground. Nations like China and Russia seem to be on the warpath because they do not fear retaliation from the US anymore, or that we will ever use our military and technology correctly. Why shouldn't they expand their territory if we're going to back down to jokes like Kim Jong Un? When the US has gone to war, like "The War On Terror" we've done so "morally" refusing to attack the people or the culture itself and fighting the symptoms. We did pretty bloody well for ignoring our tech advantage and largely going into someone else's back yard and fighting them rifle to rifle. Of course at the same time we accomplished nothing since the ideas survived, and once we relaxed, confident in our gains, another threat immediately rose (ISIS/ISIL) because we left the culture in the region largely untouched. Right now even if we defeat ISIS/ISIL, we're going to accomplish nothing as long as we refuse to target Muslim cultures and idealogy and break them (meaning lots of dead "civilians" simply because of the ideas they hold), it just means a reprieve before a new group appears, or an old one gets back up, since it's really not about the specific organizations, it's about the cultural ideas, while it will never be everyone, as long as they survive people will keep picking up guns, bombs, and doing what they can to infiltrate the infidel.
I personally believe the world basically sucks, and there is no real room for good guys in it's current state (maybe once it's unified entirely under one government/culture) it's always ultimately "us or them" and about choosing one degree of suck over another. I don't like what I'm saying above, but I see it as the bottom line. At the end of the day the US had some wars against relatively civilized opponents with nations and infrastructures similar to our own, when it was over the civilized people involved basically decided "you know, let's set up some rules to prevent this kind of devestation if we fight again". Those rules are fine as long as your not fighting over idealogy or trying to take someone's land away from them permanently, and work as long as all sides respect them. Basically if we had a war with say France over something that was within neither of our territorial borders, the rules would make sense, and we could both probably be expected to follow them, and would reach some resolution in the fighting. On the other hand when your fighting groups of people ruled by spirituality as opposed to reason, and who don't follow those rules your an idiot to think you can achieve anything by sticking to them.
I think it was Heinlein who at one point mentioned that codes of conduct like Bushido and Chivalry worked great until conflict with an enemy that didn't respect them. The Samurai were overthrown by mobs of peasants, and Chivalry arguably ended with battles like "Agincourt" when the flower of French knighthood took the field and marched out to claim a victory since by the rules they should have won easily, and got massacred by longbows when the British decided they weren't submitting to French rule based on some code of honor. There are apparently still some hard feelings about this today.
I've been of the opinion that video games probably need to teach people to be more pragmatic and less ethical when it comes to war, violence, and conflict resolution. Basically plot armor isn't going to save the day IRL just because your doing the right thing to earn your "Paragon" points or whatever. In the end it's what you achieve for your own side. It would be nice if people wouldn't fight at all, but frankly that isn't going to happen, and at the end of the day any conflict that is going to end, likely ends with the death of cultures and the massive massacre of civilians, women and children are going to die no matter what happens in a serious "all out" conflict, the big question is simply whether they are yours, or theirs. It sucks to put it that way, but that's the problem.
I bring the "white" part of it into this because you did, but also because as a general rule whites are a small minority globally. One third of the planet is Indian, one third is Chinese (roughly) and we form a fraction of the remaining third where we aren't close to the most numerous (blacks and others outnumber us). When you look at the racism and such in China, India, The Middle East, Central and South America and other things, places where they make few bones about their own perceived superiority, you'll notice it's white guys that seem to be pretty much the only ones trying to say "hey, let's all try and get along" and talking about morality. For the most part it seems when other peoples bring it up, it's for political reasons involved the dominant world powers who for the moment are white (though as China has been demonstrating this is changing... and notice that with it's rising dominance the first thing it's doing is trying to expand it's territory and sphere of military control at the expense of others).
There are games like "Special Ops.: The Line" which go along the lines your talking in terms of message in a hard core fashion. Others tend to simply use "plot armor" to reinforce in people's minds that doing the right thing ethically pays off even in nasty situations. As a general rule a lot of games for example reward players for choosing other solutions than violence, and as a general rule there isn't any real backlash for it. It acts like in 15 seconds of making heroic speeches you can change everything. I think what we need is some games that take a more realistic, and dare I say pragmatic, view of the whole idea of violence, war, and conflict. You see this infrequently, and honestly on the few occasions where someone tries to make that point on TV series like '24' for example there tends to be backlash due to how heavily indoctrinated people are in the other way, and really I suspect for our own survival we need some far less moralistic messages when it comes to conflict. Basically no invisible game master, or piece of computer code, exists in the real world who is going to make everything come up roses when you don't mass murder the enemy, reality is that they might smile and play submissive while your boot is in their neck, but since they believe they are the good guys as much as you think you are, it just means these guys will be back out fighting your side when your gone, or continue believing and preaching the same things that they did beforehand, which lead to their culture going to war.
Very dark and depressing, but that's my thoughts. Nothing I haven't said before though.
