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  jennybennycalls Registered User new member

  December 2012

  This episode really missed the mark in my estimation. For a series that deals so competently with and appears to have such a sophisticated and nuanced grasp of topical issues affecting the "gaming" world and beyond, it seems absurd that an episode about race and the distinct lack of appropriate representation in most of the medium should be glazed over in such a manner.
  
  Having a sensitive and intelligent discussion (regardless of if there are some repeats or references to earlier episodes or topics) is more effective than not having the discussion at all. Disappointed.

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  Pezmaster Registered User new member

  December 2012

  I disagree. Race (or gender, or sexuality or religion) is a subject approached in many ways, and not just by direct portrayal. It's also important to explore how such issues are handled from the outside. These guys obviously do their best to make each episode important and non-redundant. If they were to base this episode around an example of a strong portrayal of a minority, we both know how the episode would go.
  
  "Joe is a strong character because he is shaped by societal pressures about race rather than being a token, stereotypical character."
  
  They would say intelligent things specific to that character, but they would come to the same conclusions as the other diversity episodes.
  
  As different as each sort of discrimination manifests, the prescription for writing that type of character ends up the same as writing any character. Evaluate how they are shaped by society, try not to make them a cookie cutter caricature, make sure they interact realistically with those around them. It's not useful to keep making the same arguments when diversity is such a multi-faceted topic.

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  littlefaith Registered User regular

  August 2013

  This seemed like a pointless video. Why bother making one at all, if you're just going to cop out and talk about a single character's relationship to racial tensions, instead of making a proper survey across the industry or addressing more general issues. Then you do even that half-way, because you don't want to "spoil" the game for me. If you're gonna talk about something, just give a spoiler warning and go ahead and do it. If I don't want to hear the spoiler, I'll stop the video. But I'm not going to play every game you mention, and I'd rather hear the disucssion, right? And there's no reason I won't play a game anyway, even after I choose to hear a spoiler, if I think it might be interesting, just like I might read a book just to see how it was different from the movie.
  
  I highly recommend that you invite some guests to join you on this topic. Perhaps you haven't been able to find what you really want to say about racial diversity in games, because you haven't tried to access enough points of view on this. Just like in the gender diversity video, I was irritated that I don't feel like you bothered to actually ask any women how they feel about this. I have seen you invite guests for various other gaming topics, but these social topics are crying out for more input, and you are like the rest of the industry, leaving these topics untouched. Dare to dig into racial, gender issues, and actually say something meaningful.
  
  I am Asian American, originally from Taiwan. I have never seen any characters in movies or video games that look like me. I'm 39 years old now, short and heavy, with glasses. I think playable minority characters ARE important, and there aren't enough of them. I think body types in games are too limited, even though I understand that they have to kind of be interchangeable in many games in order to look right using all the items, moving around the artificial environment. I very much appreciated the Sims when they added body morphing features to let you change your waist size, height, and even age. Most avatar games that let you make some choices will let you change skin/hair/eye colors, which is simple enough to do, and I always appreciate that little nod.
  
  The politically correct way to deal with racial issues in games seems to be to just pretend they don't exist. Or you have races that are made up, like in WoW, and their issues are simply a matter of affiliation, and they don't tell stories about discrimination, domination, alienation, etc. Or they attach good and evil to the different races/species, and leave it a simple as that. One is meant to be killed, and the other is your own. These are very different from gender issues, aren't they? We don't generally have games that treat an entire gender as "the enemy" and you should eradicate them on sight like vermin? That would actually be an interesting game, a sci-fi flick where women just kill men on sight... haha, so wrong and what would be the reaction of the public to that one? Yet, we accept with little trouble a world where if you see a turban, shoot to kill. So if you were thinking truly critically, you would have completely issues to address here and not be repeating yourself from other discussions of diversity.
  
  Along with race, which can be attached to more visual cues, there is the issue of cultural diversity and identity in games. Besides colors of the skin, we also have a diversity of cultural and national background in which people think and feel very differently and react very differently depending on the situations. There is a lot of this built into the games that we play, because Americans make these games or a Japanese design team made these games. I liked how you mentioned in another video that if Brazil ever became the next great latin game production powerhouse, that we could get a different perspective, because they will have a different cultural bias. I think we can do a better job writing stories for games and incorporating stories into games that give characters a real cultural background and motivation for how they approach and solve problems. I saw you bring up D&D style alignment as the primary motivator for the way that the character acted in LA Noir... how in the world does that even relate to race, other than as a cowardly way for the writers to explain why he stands above racial issues? Alignment is something you can apply to an understanding of any character, but if that always trumps their decision-making process over racial and cultural ones, then we are living truly in the fantasy of the politically correct, where all people are interchangeable for each other, whatever your gender or age or race or background. But that is a false diversity and not telling the whole story. A lot of real people react very differently to a situation depending on whether they are presented with a black person or an Asian person or a white person. It definitely affects how likely they will be to choose to communicate, negotiate, command, attack, protect, or a myriad of other decisions.

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