Yes, a game with a Colombian-American perspective would be good. Why shouldn't we have that?
Because capitalism. Video game makers want to appeal to the largest market possible, and in the United States that's white men.
That's an answer to "why don't we have that?". It's not an answer to "why shouldn't we have that?" There are plenty of profit-based (or profit-rationalized) reasons for why video games are the way they are.
Gnarles Bronson said:
A) Cool, I'll agree limited perspectives are a bad thing. What's the solution?
More diversity among writers/designers. White writers/designers willing to do the research and push themselves to write about things they don't know (or think they don't know) -- there are tons of resources about Writing The Other. Publishers willing to push more diverse video games/take a risk.
Gnarles Bronson said:
B) "The consisten erasure of a part of history" is something we'll have to agree to disagree about. It seems like your main evidence for this is two period games which "barely" mention it, meaning it does get mentioned, just not enough for you. If it exists, they're videogames man, they follow rule #1 which is it must be above all fun. I'm not convinced that's something that is actually happening though.
My evidence is all video games I've ever played, basically. I only named two examples, but it's present (or rather absent) in nearly every video game. There's a reason for that -- the same reason that many Westerns took up the "Former confederate soldier who totally didn't support slavery but gets attacked by evil union soldiers" trope. For many white people it's uncomfortable to talk about race, to insert that history into your cultural narrative. So they kind of write around it -- it's not in their worldview, so it gets ignored. That's how you get Colonization with no slavery, a faux-19th c. London with no black people (Dishonored), an exploration game set during the American Revolution taking you all over the east coast, but with almost no slaves (Assassin's Creed 3), a post-apocalyptic setting with slavery and exploitation and oppression where every single character seems to have completely forgotten about centuries of race-based slavery and discrimination (Fallout games), a Western set in late 19th century Texas with no racist forced labor or segregation (Red Dead Redemption). It's why even when a game does include racial discrimination, it does so through the lens of white people (Bioshock: Infinite), but as flawed as that entire story was, at least they
tried.
Hassknecht said:
Whatever. I'm all for more diverse video games. It's just that there instances when cramming another explicit reference to american slavery or whatever will sound out of place. I think Fallout is one of those instances.
Fuck, Fallout 3 literally has an Underground Railroad freeing slaves! How much more explicit do you need it in a setting where historical knowledge is limited by which books are not burned?
Yes, Fallout 3 had all of these things they took from the history of slavery -- but the game never connected those things to the actual history, nor to the racial backgound. "Yeah well the history books got burned" is a rationalization of the situation, not a reason to design it that way. It would have been perfectly plausible to have that slave leader talk about being inspired by his ancestors (hi oral history) instead of being inspired by a mangled version of Abraham Lincoln which conveniently forgot about the centuries-long oppression of black people.
