Alright, split these posts into a new thread. Please keep it civil.
Diversity in video games and whatnot
- Thread starter CT Phipps
- Start date
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
Smart move.
Though I think everyone moved over to the Civil War controversy canard.
Though I think everyone moved over to the Civil War controversy canard.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
Great job Hassknect, this is a good idea.
Mr muggyman 3000
Lover of coffe cups
You know I have been thinking bout how feminism/sjw arguments are so fucking flimsy and easy to counter. For example based on sjw/feminazi logic that people can't give consent when drunk. if i get drunk and masturbate, since I'm to drunk to give myself consent wouldn't that make me a rapist AND a rape survivor?
Sorry you fucktards live on the wrong side of the globe so you argue when I'm asleepGood thing this discussion that was already done and over with hours ago got split into a new thread before it got out of hand.
Anyway, I don't mind diversity. It's weird when it's forced, but usually it's not something that makes a game or movie worse if it's well done. For example, I don't mind it in the new Star Wars movies as the movies are competently made and it's not all unbelievable. Nor in Mafia III, seems to work fine.
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RangerBoo
Resident Schizo Poster
I am just going to go out and say this. As a women and someone who is multiracial (Hispanic on my grandmothers side) I am really sick and tried of this forced diversity and diversity representation crap. The problem is that writers (at lest North American writers) have no idea what subtly is and seem to believe that a characters race, sex and/or sexuality should be the most important characteristic to that character. These characters also have to be perfect, noble and without any flaws or faults. Why if they did have faults and flaws then that would be racist/sexist/homophobic/ect.
Whenever they do that the character is just bland, boring and one dimensional. Those characters are more or less Mary-Sues. My youngest brother(who is gay) absolutely hates it when writers do that with gay characters and I too hate it when writers do that with female characters.
New Vegas did a good job with their diverse characters. Arcade, Veronica and Christine felt like normal everyday people. There are women who serve in the NCR armed forces(several of them being high ranked members) and, again, its not made a big deal of. I would love to see more games like New Vegas in terms of diversity but sadly many North American writers just don't know how to do it without coming off as some pretentious, whiny preacher.
Also @CT Phipps, I am going to call into question the type of games many of these so called "gamer girls" play. Many of these "gamer girls" play casual games. Angry Birds, Candy Crush, The Sims. Games like those where there is no real story, conflict, violence, or protagonist. These games are easy to play, they don't need a expensive console or PC to play on and most women have a modern phone or IPad where they can buy and play the games. As a female gamer myself, I have long realized that female gamers like me are a minority and I have never had a problem with that. Most of the games I have played stared a male protagonist and many of those games I count as some of my faves. Male or Female, I could give a rats ass what the characters gender/race/sex is so long as the game is good.
Whenever they do that the character is just bland, boring and one dimensional. Those characters are more or less Mary-Sues. My youngest brother(who is gay) absolutely hates it when writers do that with gay characters and I too hate it when writers do that with female characters.
New Vegas did a good job with their diverse characters. Arcade, Veronica and Christine felt like normal everyday people. There are women who serve in the NCR armed forces(several of them being high ranked members) and, again, its not made a big deal of. I would love to see more games like New Vegas in terms of diversity but sadly many North American writers just don't know how to do it without coming off as some pretentious, whiny preacher.
Also @CT Phipps, I am going to call into question the type of games many of these so called "gamer girls" play. Many of these "gamer girls" play casual games. Angry Birds, Candy Crush, The Sims. Games like those where there is no real story, conflict, violence, or protagonist. These games are easy to play, they don't need a expensive console or PC to play on and most women have a modern phone or IPad where they can buy and play the games. As a female gamer myself, I have long realized that female gamers like me are a minority and I have never had a problem with that. Most of the games I have played stared a male protagonist and many of those games I count as some of my faves. Male or Female, I could give a rats ass what the characters gender/race/sex is so long as the game is good.
CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
The question of the causal gamer versus the more serious one is one which is, to me, an artificial one as it's entirely possible to play Jade Empire on your phone now. Angry Birds is no more a causal game than Super Mario Brothers was at the beginning. No, it doesn't possess the epic storyline of the original Fallout or Baldur's Gate but it is representative that demographics are changing.
But, IMHO, not fast enough.
I'll get back to that.
One of the more interesting cases to address is how the Final Fantasy series morphed when the developers discovered the majority of the players were becoming less and less males and more and more women. By Final Fantasy VII, they started developing the series with the idea they would be marketing toward women every bit as much as men and now the latest edition of the game was designed with female gamers primarily in mind.
When I bring up issues of diversity in gaming, my primary concern isn't that it should serve some artificial quoa but it's my belief that games will simply benefit from mixing it up a little. Take for instance those venerable institute of Mario and Zelda. In the 1980s, Princess Zelda had a action hero period as part of a cartoon.
There was also SMB2 which had Princess Peach as a playable character option. When I ask for the option to play them, it's primarily simply because I think it would be fun and I don't see any reason why said games should not exist. One of my favorite characters in the Resident Evil franchise was Claire Redfield and I really enjoyed playing her in RE2 and RE: Code Veronica. I didn't see a reason why the character's gender was a big deal but she was fun to play.
There's been literally thousands of video games which have the premise of "someone has kidnapped your girlfriend, go rescue her." This isn't even a bad thing but falls into the issue of gaming which is the fact the biggest problem in video games with diversity and sexism isn't that game developers are racist but they're LAZY.
The Assassins Creed franchise has had two female protagonists in the entirety of its career with Aveline regulated to a side console and Evie, a significantly more interesting protagonist than her brother, taking forever to get some decent screen time. The games are paralyzed at the prospect of mixing it up with Assassins Creed V being the horrible sucking tumor it was because of the attempt to redo Assassins Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations over again with its Ezio-rip off protagonist and a swashbuckling conspircay story which is the absolute worst thing you could for the french revolution.
Why was Arno a better candidate than Elise, Aveline, Adewale, or even Connor? Beause the game industry wanted another Ezio and didn't want to take risks.
Customizable characterization has certainly opened things up but New Vegas summarizes what I want more from the gaming industry and it seems determined to be less. Fallout 4 has a female protagonist option but it was clearly made as a slapdash add-on since the beginning of the game opens with the MALE protagonist talking about HIS grandfather in WW2. Which has jack all to do with the female character who isn't even a soldier.
It was just assumed the female character was going to be played less than the male so they half-assed it.
We can do better than JUST generic brown-haired white guys.
https://www.destructoid.com/brown-hair-and-stubble-the-new-face-of-modern-videogames-178442.phtml
But, IMHO, not fast enough.
I'll get back to that.
One of the more interesting cases to address is how the Final Fantasy series morphed when the developers discovered the majority of the players were becoming less and less males and more and more women. By Final Fantasy VII, they started developing the series with the idea they would be marketing toward women every bit as much as men and now the latest edition of the game was designed with female gamers primarily in mind.
When I bring up issues of diversity in gaming, my primary concern isn't that it should serve some artificial quoa but it's my belief that games will simply benefit from mixing it up a little. Take for instance those venerable institute of Mario and Zelda. In the 1980s, Princess Zelda had a action hero period as part of a cartoon.
There was also SMB2 which had Princess Peach as a playable character option. When I ask for the option to play them, it's primarily simply because I think it would be fun and I don't see any reason why said games should not exist. One of my favorite characters in the Resident Evil franchise was Claire Redfield and I really enjoyed playing her in RE2 and RE: Code Veronica. I didn't see a reason why the character's gender was a big deal but she was fun to play.
There's been literally thousands of video games which have the premise of "someone has kidnapped your girlfriend, go rescue her." This isn't even a bad thing but falls into the issue of gaming which is the fact the biggest problem in video games with diversity and sexism isn't that game developers are racist but they're LAZY.
The Assassins Creed franchise has had two female protagonists in the entirety of its career with Aveline regulated to a side console and Evie, a significantly more interesting protagonist than her brother, taking forever to get some decent screen time. The games are paralyzed at the prospect of mixing it up with Assassins Creed V being the horrible sucking tumor it was because of the attempt to redo Assassins Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations over again with its Ezio-rip off protagonist and a swashbuckling conspircay story which is the absolute worst thing you could for the french revolution.
Why was Arno a better candidate than Elise, Aveline, Adewale, or even Connor? Beause the game industry wanted another Ezio and didn't want to take risks.
Customizable characterization has certainly opened things up but New Vegas summarizes what I want more from the gaming industry and it seems determined to be less. Fallout 4 has a female protagonist option but it was clearly made as a slapdash add-on since the beginning of the game opens with the MALE protagonist talking about HIS grandfather in WW2. Which has jack all to do with the female character who isn't even a soldier.
It was just assumed the female character was going to be played less than the male so they half-assed it.
We can do better than JUST generic brown-haired white guys.
https://www.destructoid.com/brown-hair-and-stubble-the-new-face-of-modern-videogames-178442.phtml
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The characters have to be well made is all I'm asking for. The grizzled brown-haired stubble-soldier is just easy to make and the most generic character template; it's a character that can be easily made to be believable in all sorts of situations because it's such a generic background. It's inoffensive and you can do basically anything to it, because you can't offend white people, all clichés are allowed.
If you do a diverse character you have to be more careful, because people will be offended. Look at Mafia III: Great, a black character! But people complain because he's a criminal, yiddayadda bad black people cliché.
You can do a female bad-ass action hero, but you have to be more careful to make her believable. You might be tired of brown haired stubby soldiers, but I'm also tired of cutesy little girls being able to throw around men twice their size with ease. I just don't believe it. I believe characters like Vasquez from Aliens or Sarah Connor played by Linda Hamilton, but I don't believe Sarah Connor played by Emilia Clarke.
People tend to think that video games are some sort of high brow art form these days because there are some titles with good writing. But most of them are not. Especially AAA action games are still basically 80's action movies that you can control from time to time. The big titles have to play it safe to appeal to the mass market, so they go for the most generic character possible. Which is the stubbly white dude, because it can't offend anyone. I'm sure many writers would love to make their cast more diverse, but it's just very risky and hard to pull off. If you want to make your minority character bad or morally grey you have to be much more careful because somebody WILL be offended because it WILL be treated as a transgression.
Of course there will also be the white dudebros being offended by any diverse cast, but while they're loud on the Internet they're not actually all that many. The Force Awakens was a huge success despite a few people complaining. Rogue One will be a huge success. Aliens was hugely successfull, goddamnit. It can be done, if it's done well. But that's hard and risky, and with the amount of flak the video game industry gets for sexism and racism anyway it's understandable why the producers would rather not take the risk and just have another white stubble-soldier instead because nobody cares about those.
If you do a diverse character you have to be more careful, because people will be offended. Look at Mafia III: Great, a black character! But people complain because he's a criminal, yiddayadda bad black people cliché.
You can do a female bad-ass action hero, but you have to be more careful to make her believable. You might be tired of brown haired stubby soldiers, but I'm also tired of cutesy little girls being able to throw around men twice their size with ease. I just don't believe it. I believe characters like Vasquez from Aliens or Sarah Connor played by Linda Hamilton, but I don't believe Sarah Connor played by Emilia Clarke.
People tend to think that video games are some sort of high brow art form these days because there are some titles with good writing. But most of them are not. Especially AAA action games are still basically 80's action movies that you can control from time to time. The big titles have to play it safe to appeal to the mass market, so they go for the most generic character possible. Which is the stubbly white dude, because it can't offend anyone. I'm sure many writers would love to make their cast more diverse, but it's just very risky and hard to pull off. If you want to make your minority character bad or morally grey you have to be much more careful because somebody WILL be offended because it WILL be treated as a transgression.
Of course there will also be the white dudebros being offended by any diverse cast, but while they're loud on the Internet they're not actually all that many. The Force Awakens was a huge success despite a few people complaining. Rogue One will be a huge success. Aliens was hugely successfull, goddamnit. It can be done, if it's done well. But that's hard and risky, and with the amount of flak the video game industry gets for sexism and racism anyway it's understandable why the producers would rather not take the risk and just have another white stubble-soldier instead because nobody cares about those.
Zerginfestor
dear god, the scrapping
Basically, the people who find everything offensive are literally the people responsible for making AAA's playing it super safe on every product and essentially dulling the market into a boring snoozefest that might actually be hurting the industry. Thanks, general audience. Assholes.
Jogre
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
>Puts one of the greatest game series in the history of forever in to the same bracket as Angry Birds and Candy Crush.
RangerBoo
Resident Schizo Poster
RedLetterMedia in their Mr. Plinkett TFA review brought up something that caught my attention and that was the term "corporate diversity". What they mean by that is that corporation, like the AAA game industry, will add in "diverse" characters in order to appeal to an audience that normally wouldn't give the product they are trying to sell the time of day. They could care less how said character is written so long as they have something to attract said demographic. Its kinda sleazy if you think about it and characters who are only added so they can fill a diversity quota and attract as many demographics as they can makes those characters suffer from bad writing and characterization. Then again this type of garbage isn't a big surprise with corporate industries. The AAA gaming industry is no different.
Hey I love The Sims too but there is no arguing that female Sims players outnumber the male Sims players and that the game is as casual as they come.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
Sims... torturing innocents since 2004...
Jogre
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
Point taken, but I'd say Sims is nowhere near as casual as the other two games, as it encourages creativity and can be a mini-hobby, as opposed to Angry Birds and Candy Crush which are notorious as time wasters.
D
Deleted member 93956
Guest
SOMA's "companion" character, Catherine Chun. She is an Asian woman (Taipei, TW) that acts and acted most of the time in a shy and antisocial way, as supposedly had no friends at all. Despite being brilliant at her work, she is mostly apathical about people's lives, not minding or even encouraging hurting other people in a certain condition common in that game.
So we could call her a shy asocial Asian chick.
But what is the problem with that? That she is a human being and not a walking (kinda) cliché. So that those traits are just to justify her actions and understand her in how she treats people.
She hasn't an aggravating accent, doesn't swear in her language time to time and doesn't say "Oh you can't understand meh"
Like we've said, as Veronica and NV characters, it shouldn't be "She IS Gay, rejoice!" but "Well yeah she is gay, but is more beyond that. Say, belongs to BOS but tries to change their lifestyle, a mentor abandoned her (iirc), has a lost love and a love for punching."
http://soma.wikia.com/wiki/Catherine_Chun
Do not go much further than some paragraphs in the Biography part to avoid serious spoilers
So basically, indeed "representing" "ethnics and minorities" is fine, but unless the choice to do so is given to at least decent writers, you probably can rip those brave black guy's faces and find a white dude with a voice modulator under the mask.
So we could call her a shy asocial Asian chick.
But what is the problem with that? That she is a human being and not a walking (kinda) cliché. So that those traits are just to justify her actions and understand her in how she treats people.
She hasn't an aggravating accent, doesn't swear in her language time to time and doesn't say "Oh you can't understand meh"
Like we've said, as Veronica and NV characters, it shouldn't be "She IS Gay, rejoice!" but "Well yeah she is gay, but is more beyond that. Say, belongs to BOS but tries to change their lifestyle, a mentor abandoned her (iirc), has a lost love and a love for punching."
http://soma.wikia.com/wiki/Catherine_Chun
Do not go much further than some paragraphs in the Biography part to avoid serious spoilers
So basically, indeed "representing" "ethnics and minorities" is fine, but unless the choice to do so is given to at least decent writers, you probably can rip those brave black guy's faces and find a white dude with a voice modulator under the mask.
So I consider myself to be fairly progressive, so when it comes to this topic, I have a rather split opinion.
I believe it should be up to the developer to do whatever they want, not the publisher or the audience.
So I don't mind if there's a bunch of white guys being main characters.
That being said, it does get rather boring and when it's a franchise (like COD) it starts to lose any sense realism the games should have.
Even through COD isn't meant to be taken seriously, it still grounds itself in some kind of reality. So when I find that in the COD Universe, all the main events were because of a bunch of white guys, it starts to lose credibility.
I'm not asking for Companies to start pandering as that's the worst thing they could do, but instead change up tired tropes and such.
It's like if the elder scrolls made it so that every protagonist was a Nord, the series would be rather boring as the main characters just sort of blend in together. It would also take me out of the universe as a World with so many races, it would seem rather unrealistic for one race to be the recurring heroes.
RPGs can get away with this kind of thing as most of them allow character customisation.
One of the issues I have with Fallout 4 is how the game pretty much forces you to play as a white male, even with the options of another gender and being allowed to play as a black character are right there.
I guess I'd rather see some sort of logic in my games, especially long running IPs. Some get away with this (like metal gear where every character is meant to be like one another or Bioshock which explained it all).
A bit of diversity helps just add a bigger universe.
It always gets me how in a film series like Harry Potter, every main character is white (I want to stress that I think the actors did a really good job and I can't imagine anyone else in those roles) yet you one to the UK and it's a very diverse country (in places).
It just sort of takes me out of the universe a bit and makes me question the realism that is appearing here.
I believe it should be up to the developer to do whatever they want, not the publisher or the audience.
So I don't mind if there's a bunch of white guys being main characters.
That being said, it does get rather boring and when it's a franchise (like COD) it starts to lose any sense realism the games should have.
Even through COD isn't meant to be taken seriously, it still grounds itself in some kind of reality. So when I find that in the COD Universe, all the main events were because of a bunch of white guys, it starts to lose credibility.
I'm not asking for Companies to start pandering as that's the worst thing they could do, but instead change up tired tropes and such.
It's like if the elder scrolls made it so that every protagonist was a Nord, the series would be rather boring as the main characters just sort of blend in together. It would also take me out of the universe as a World with so many races, it would seem rather unrealistic for one race to be the recurring heroes.
RPGs can get away with this kind of thing as most of them allow character customisation.
One of the issues I have with Fallout 4 is how the game pretty much forces you to play as a white male, even with the options of another gender and being allowed to play as a black character are right there.
I guess I'd rather see some sort of logic in my games, especially long running IPs. Some get away with this (like metal gear where every character is meant to be like one another or Bioshock which explained it all).
A bit of diversity helps just add a bigger universe.
It always gets me how in a film series like Harry Potter, every main character is white (I want to stress that I think the actors did a really good job and I can't imagine anyone else in those roles) yet you one to the UK and it's a very diverse country (in places).
It just sort of takes me out of the universe a bit and makes me question the realism that is appearing here.
Dr Fallout
Centurion
I wonder if the black guy in Battelfield is British (he appears to be in a British unit) which is ridiculous, French (because he has an Adriatic helmet) which is ridiculous or US (which makes sense), but they were in their own independent units that fought with the French because the Americans didn't really like them. They had French gear and tanks.
He's apprently part of a US regiment that had a couple thousand black troops so clearly he needs to be the main narrarator and poster child for World War I where there were multi-millions of White European soldiers in a European war.
EDIT: Not to mention the multiplayer where it gets really out of control with that shit.
EDIT: Not to mention the multiplayer where it gets really out of control with that shit.
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CT Phipps
Carbon Dated and Proud
That was actually a character of mine in a Call of Cthulhu game. A Black US soldier who stayed in France after the war because he'd felt much better appreciated there than he had been in the United States. I've always meant to research that period of history to learn more because WW1 and WW2 are my least general known historical subjects.
Zerginfestor
dear god, the scrapping
phoning in Diversity just to stroke sjw dicks because of their massive, frail egos is embarrassing. It's unnecessary, and should only be added to the game if it fits the setting, otherwise it can fuck right off. It's sad how AAA have to do this shit because of the drones refusing to play the game based on skin color/culture. How fucking hilarious that these people point at others for being racist, yet don't realize they're the kettle.