The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Capitalism and Diversity

Daniel Vavra’s got some commentary on diversity from a slightly different slant from Adrian Chmielarz‘ bizarre critique of the social critics who dared to even start a dialog about race in WItcher 3, and games in general.  Note; questioning the artistic vision is just fine when you ask why the art direction seems like a massive step backwards, but if you say ‘hey, guys, this game sure is…. white’, then the perpetual outrage machine suddenly gets as thin-skinned and easily offended as the SJW armies they’ve blown out of proportion in ther imaginations.  Still, I like Vavra’s piece a lot more than Chmielarz’, though I still disagree with much of it.  Let’s take a looksee.

Only along come the crusaders for social justice, ranting that the game is racist, because it’s not ethnically diverse enough, due to the fact that there are only Polish-looking people in it and the Poles have the “misfortune” to be white.

Again, the critics in question gave it a solid 8.0 and called it “one of the greatest games I’ve ever played”, so apparently these critics didn’t feel they were TOO horrible, but hey, what do I know, I just actually read what they wrote.  Still, what can you say to someone who compares people who disagrees with him about video games to a Communist regime?

The communist regime also “meant well” and their rhetoric was almost identical to that we hear today from the likes of Jonathan McIntosh and other American progressives.

Right.  Meanwhile, from my point of view, I wonder why these people don’t like money.  Because at the end of the day, that’s what the push for greater diversity is all about CAPITALISM for those of us MAKING games.  Getting more people to get their hands on our games – more non-gamers to play, more gamers from other demographics to play, or more gamers from new, emerging markets to play the game.

Only along come the crusaders for social justice, ranting that the game is racist, because it’s not ethnically diverse enough, due to the fact that there are only Polish-looking people in it and the Poles have the “misfortune” to be white. That’s an issue for the activists, because an African American, for example, might not be happy about playing a white Polish hero.

Certainly there is good reason for activists to want more diversity from playable leads – the handcrafted badasses that we painstakingly character design, write dialogue for, and market the industry around.  But that wasn’t the point.  The point is that viewers and game players of all sorts tend to respond favorably to portrayals, particularly positive portrayals, that they have personal resonance with.  Which is to say, if you want to have a large-scale breakout hit which penetrates many multiple markets, you increase the odds significantly with greater in-game diversity.

Vavra veered into comparing the games industry to the music industry – suggesting that Britney Spears should play death metal, which was amusing.  Similar complaints on Twitter to my article about Rescuing Princesses in Arkham Knight suggested that I thought that all straight porn should have a gay scene.  While amusing, no.  Extreme diversification of content for small, indie games is fine (though we need more, despite Vavra’s statistics).  However, AAA games are far more similar to big budget movies in their financial statistics, and guess what? Hollywood is big believers in diversity once they start hitting 9 digits (a number we’re starting to hit as well).

Joss Whedon gets 100M+ to make Avengers movies because he puts female butts in seats (and yes, sometimes he trips up).  Movies at that scale are not perfect, but compared to games they’re fanatical about putting in strong female and black characters – and not just in token roles, but in meaty, significant roles.  Even more telling, it seems almost every summer blockbuster explosion porn extravaganza has at least one major scene in Asia (see: Battleship, Pacific Rim, Transformers 4, Avengers 2) – that’s not an accident.  It turns out that Asian audiences are the audiences that eat these sorts of movies up the most after American audiences, and they like to watch Hong Kong get destroyed just as much as we like to watch the Hollywood sign go down.

Vavra would no doubt argue that this is not a very ‘diverse’ thing – to see every action movie find a way to wander over to Hong Kong for a pivotal fight scene.  And this is true.  Meanwhile, Transformers 4 is the top grossing movie of all time in China, so hey, maybe this isn’t just pandering to American communists who ‘mean well’.  It’s also pandering to Chinese communists who spend very real money, which is pretty important if you’re spending ridiculous amounts of money creating your artistic vision.

What I like about The Witcher is its very “Polishness”, and I’m certainly not the only one. The very fact that the “diverse” Dragon Age Inquisition, set in an indefinite fantasy world, sold less copies in Japan in one year than The Witcher did in two weeks proves my point.

It’s equally absurd to demand that a European stick elements of foreign cultures he doesn’t understand into his games. As a Czech, most foreign games and movies set in my own country seem to me at best ridiculous, because foreigners can’t even manage to capture properly the look of this country (Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid 4, Forza 5 etc.), never mind our mentality and culture.

Comparing game sales solely based on the diversity of their casts is — well, not very useful, to say the least.  A LOT goes into whether one game does better than another.  Still, he has a good point buried in here – games that try to mimic a culture they’re not familiar with frequently fail to resonate with their intended audiences, producing results that feel alien or sometimes even insulting to the cultures they’re attempting to reflect.  One of the things you learn early in this industry is to always contract your Asian architecture in particular out to Asian art houses, because Americans can’t get it to feel right.

That being said, I do think that it’s bizarre to think that the defining feature about Polish culture is, somehow, it’s whiteness.   And I wonder if Witcher 3 might have sold even more copies if it had been more inclusive in its character designs.  It would have been as simple as including a Zerrikanian, (such as Azar Javed from an earlier Witcher product), in the game, preferably as a meaningful character.  Having badasses reflect you, the player, in a game helps create the sense that you belong.  And that increases appeal to people who might not otherwise.  People who are white and male don’t actually appreciate how rare that is for others.

To go back to the movies, Norse mythology is ALSO lily white.  However, the makers of Thor saw fit to include Idris Elba in the key role of Heimdall.  Did this somehow hurt the ‘Norseness’ of the movie?  Not particularly – that’s not what’s important about Norse mythology, and the only people who were upset about it were the sort of despicable white supremacists who call Stormfront home.  Meanwhile, the movie probably sold more tickets than it otherwise would have (the Thor movies both did over $180M gross, despite the fact that it’s based on a relatively second- or third-tier Marvel book).  Which means that a larger, more diverse audience were introduced to Norse mythology.  Which, if you care about preserving and promoting Norse culture, is way more important than ‘everyone’s white’.  Marvel Comics is being far more forward and bold in this regard, of course, and clearly something’s working for them as they’re continuing to trounce DC in their books as well as their movies.

After this, Vavra posted a lot of numbers.  I’m seeing different numbers where I’m sitting – I’m looking ahead to where things are growing.  I’m seeing more devices in more countries and more games going international.  I’m seeing more money from more sales to audiences outside our safety zone.  I’m seeing, for example, and RPG audience that has shifted radically towards women.  Which is good, because the truth is that AAA budgets are growing at paces that outpace the audiences that buy them today.  There aren’t a lot of outs to solving that problem, so many companies are hoping that capitalism will save us.  Through diversity.

34 Comments

  1. ace

    How do you (assuming this is your view) deal with the obvious rejoinder of hypocrisy: why are you criticizing say Glory for giving a lead road to Matthew Broderic? Why complain when a white girl is cast as the native american love interest in Pan? Presumably because you actually agree with Vavra that there actually is something lost when you don’t allow for more diversity across media (inter) instead of in them (intra-diversity). but another way: a world with BYU and Vassar and say Ohio state is better than a world with three Ohio States and you actually agree with that.

    “Getting more people to get their hands on our game”

    notice how this runs into the same quality critique: you don’t think say a Spike Lee film would be better if he was forced to write about say the Korean immigrant experience in Berlin’s Chinese suburb. Works transcend in part because they are rooted in something real and local and messing around with that too much endangers that art even when you don’t want it to (essentially this is a david brooks article from 2 years ago with the hook i think being springsteen). Sometimes it’s better to risk leaving money on the table with PR checklists and instead trust the artistic/development team. You don’t get the multimillion dollar career of Springsteen or Bob Dillian or even Nintendo by playing to the safe generic money making checklist. your argument assumes away that.

    The Witcher 3 doesn’t do the now common thing and let you create your own customized avatar and thus introduce a fake diversity into games that is in no way recognized by the actual code, instead it tries to build a legitimately rooted character. would throwing in a famous black actor help sales? sure you can find a way to do that but you now have a new thing in the script to balance and write around you didn’t have before. of course you can always pallet swap some randos but how does that actually help anyone artistically? your solution is to add a new character of a nonwhite race which is fine but this sort of pileon can easily hurt movies and tv shows as well as games. The problem isn’t “throwing in a black guy” (and thus opening up correctly a critique of tokenism) it’s your argument means not stopping there. why black when we need Koreans, Japanese, Irish, but you can’t stop with vague ethnicities you need say a version of basketball to hook sports fans. i don’t see this as being anything other than a weak argument.

    “where is the black character” can work (but remember that other countries are going to have vastly different issues of identity politics than America: see for instance europe’s fitful relationship with islam and even intra european splits) but it’s a much weaker critique of specific games than you seem to suggest. questions of representation should be viewed over say a random collection of AAA games not each individually where the arguments trend towards a forced homogenization (because the identity politics critique obviously doesn’t stop at race and extends to things with actual story weight).

    “Hollywood is big believers in diversity once they start hitting 9 digits”: inter/intra arguments. yes, and it’s artistically pretty horrible to have to shoehorn in an asian plot or special scenes for chinese audiences which don’t really help the rest of the plot along (see similar critique of forcing all marvel films to build their own universe).

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/opinion/brooks-the-power-of-the-particular.html

  2. Doc

    Whedon include butts because they are f***able. Others too. That’s why Meghan fox is in transformers and not whoopy Goldberg. Nobody wants to have sex with Whoopy.
    Also There is no Asia in Jaws or Shindler’s list.

    So many game diversity critics want zuckerberg to be played by a female in social network. Or include a female soldier into Saving private Ryan. But they are doing it for clicks because this is heated subject and brings comments and shares.

    Anyways I support them. The faster we come to shared dressing rooms and showers the better.

    • Biggie

      Most of them aren’t doing it for clicks, they’re doing it *Gasp* because they care about it.

      It’s completely asinine to equate two historical events/figures (Normandy beach, Mark Zuckerberg) with wanting plausible representation *in your fiction.*

      Since you’re apparently incapable of using your imagination, let’s have some examples. The Social Network, as it is telling a story that actually happened, might not be the best case (you couldn’t turn male founding members of Facebook female, for instance) but how about Saving Private Ryan?

      OK, so the GIs who storm Normandy are male, almost all white, thanks to the segregated army units at the time. However, as the unit pushes inward, they join up with a black man from another unit who’s gotten separated from his company as well as a female member of the French Resistance who cares mostly about liberating her country but is willing to help them find this “Private Ryan” if it suits her needs.

      Boom. Characters of color and women in a work of fiction.

      It’s *lazy* to claim that there’s no way. It’s just really fucking lazy.

      • ace

        that sort of ideologically mandated railroading can also be lazy and bog down works of art. yes it can work but the logical implication of OP is EVERY WW2 film would have to awkwardly shoehorn in black characters and then deal with 1940s race issues in the middle of the unrelated film. that’s the problem with OP’s argument it’s stupidly arguing for a quota system assuming away any potential artistic problems

        that being said Doc’s argument is lazy.

  3. Vetarnias

    Damion,

    The number of times you use the word “movie” in your post: 12.
    The number of times you use the word “film” in your post: 0.

    There’s a telling point of semantics in this. Whedon doesn’t put female leads in his movies (that’s what he makes, not films) because he’s a nice progressive individual who feels like making his movies inclusive. He includes female leads in his movies because it makes the movies sell better.

    Likewise, all this setting of scenes in Asia because that’s where the money is, whereas a good old American audience would have been satisfied with, um, Cleveland? Or, if it’s somewhere to be destroyed, Paris.

    What place is there, in your discussion, for serious films, those that earned the medium the distinction of being regarded as a legitimate form of art? None. Instead, it’s as “ace” above me pointed out, it’s all a question of demographics and big bucks, to demonstrate not that “diversity” (or any such word) is morally desirable but merely that it is commercially profitable. And when you say, “here’s your black/female character, now buy tickets”, it does sound exploitative and profoundly insincere, a means to an end, and not an end in itself.

    Your text also conveniently leaves out the corollary: that a film that attempts to be commercially profitable must absolutely avoid offending anyone, whether it’s the almighty consumer or something a little more concrete and final, such as Chinese censorship (which goes unmentioned in your text).

    “Don’t they like making money?” you ask, as though it were all that mattered. That might well be what they told Melville when he decided to write that whale story instead of continuing to write crowd-pleasing travelogues. Because ultimately that’s what it leads to: the will of the artist subdued by the diktat of the market.

    How exactly is this — are you — different from Gamergate? Because, for all your grandstanding against the movement, that’s exactly what they think, they and their “consumer revolt”. Sure, they hate people and make death threats, etc, and their attempt to deny it or point the finger at someone else only makes it worse. But this aside, in the end, it’s not on a point of morality or ethics or anything else of a metaphysical nature that you now appear to disagree with them — it’s on which approach will yield a better return on investment. That’s what Gamergate does, pretending to hold game companies by the cojones by saying “we are your main demographic, do not offend us”. And you’re here, saying, “no, there are vaster riches to be obtained by being inclusive”.

    There’s nothing more disgusting, nor more dangerous, nor more fickle, than this sort of morality by pocketbook. I remember all those people in one conversation who tried to dismiss slavery not on any moral, ethical or religious grounds, but only because *it wasn’t as financially profitable as a free workforce*. What if the opposite were found to be true tomorrow? But that’s the kind of corner you might well be on your way to painting yourself in, because there’s always something more despicable to be done to make even more money — like giving a veto to the Chinese government on any new script to be written for a large-budget movie.

    At least Gamergate, “ethics in games journalism” notwithstanding, doesn’t pretend to be moral.

  4. Larry Brunder

    You can’t really be comparing people that are upset about a lack of artistic integrity to racists, now can you? That’s neither kind nor fair.

    I can’t say that I was upset by Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall. I was more amused because I saw it as blatant trolling. When you pick a black guy to play “the whitest of the Aesir”, you’re certainly doing it to provoke and get a laugh at the expense of the people who do care about the source material. I think the joke really turns back on the makers of the Thor films though. ‘White’ doesn’t really have anything to do with race here, it refers to Heimdall’s body being formed from the sea foam that resulted as his nine wave giant mothers crashed upon the world’s edge. That casting was smirk worthy, not rage worthy.

  5. Dawk

    You have an extremely American way of looking at things, which I can understand, you being American and all. “Never mind about art or any artistic merits or anything that sort except sales and money and the amount of customers, really, here’s how you can stick more money in your ears and swim through fivers. The American Dream!” But please try to remember this when you’re commenting on articles written in other parts of the world (they do exist!). Not everyone thinks about money first (and pretty much full stop there, really, no need to think about other things) like you guys do.

  6. Dahakha

    Man, I can’t decide whether that ‘whoosh’ I hear is Damion’s point going over their heads, or the wild swing and miss attempts at counterarguments.

    • Vetarnias

      Except that what he’s saying here is really nothing new when you compare it to what he’s been saying before (and on which I remember making remarks before). That would be in his Channing Tatum article a few posts below this one. His reduction of film — sorry, “movies” — to entertainment, for instance. If it’s art versus entertainment, entertainment wins every time.

      Here’s what Damion wrote there: “We have video game aisles that are still too narrow in their depictions across the board. We have comic book stores where daughters cannot find a magazine they feel like is aimed for them. The diversity and experimentation that we do have is buried away in Steam. Which is a real problem – as games get more expensive to make, we need to sell our games to broader, wider audiences. Joss Whedon gets to spend $200M making Avengers films because he puts female butts in seats for what are normally male-oriented flicks. Now that our AAA budgets are crossing the 9-digit mark, it’s high time that the industry started to think the same way, or the AAA game will soon head the way of the dodo.”

      It’s exactly the same thing he’s saying here. And it’s what I already object to. I don’t mind diversity, but not at all costs, and not, above all, if the only reason it’s there is to make more money.

      Vavra’s article quoted here is, to say the least, unpleasant, a feeling compounded when you read more about the person in question. Still, there’s a good point buried in there, about how America is trying to project/impose its own insecurities on the rest of the world, on matters it has either very little to say or about which it doesn’t really care, never mind if it means riding roughshod over traditions just for the hell of it.. Like that discussion, on a certain forum I make it my duty to chronicle, featuring so many bien-pensant Americans deploring the absence of women in kabuki. No, seriously. How many of them could understand Japanese? How many had actually seen kabuki performances? Probably none. But you can picture them, on street corners in Everytown, USA, passing on a petition addressed to the Ambassador of Japan strenuously demanding that Something Be Done about the Pitiful State of Women in the Kabuki Theater.

      All that talk of diversity bothers me precisely because of that. It’s little more than barging through doors just for the sake of barging through doors (some of which were opened long ago). Like that time someone suggested Idris Elba as the next James Bond and the only person found to complain about the suggestion was Rush Limbaugh.

      Idris Elba is a good actor. I remember him in “Luther”. The plots were lousy, but I remarked at the time that this was clearly a British show, because it was perfectly natural for him to have a white wife and a white mistress (an American show would either have treated this as taboo or as the pinnacle of door-barging-through), and the series wasn’t laden with a Brooding Meditation about Race. Here was a black guy, nobody cared what skin colour he had, and he just did his job as a white person would have. Heresy in the US, that would have been, where not seeing race is a crime second in magnitude only to being a card-carrying member of the Klan.

      Could Elba play Bond? Certainly; he has the charisma and the talent for it. But if there’s a better actor who happens to be white, the part shouldn’t go to Elba just to score a few diversity points as with having women in kabuki.

      • Aretia

        I have to disagree. The part should go to Elba if he’s good enough to play the role. It’s okay to say that these things tick diversity boxes AND bring in more money AND are the best things for the franchise. We don’t have to pretend that we can only have one of those things.

        I think largely this is my main issue with your response – Damion doesn’t appear to be saying “only do this because it’s good for bank”, he’s saying “do this because it’s a good idea, it won’t ruin games, it could actually make people feel represented AND it’s good for bank”. So why not do it? There doesn’t seem to be a good reason not to.

        You remind me of someone who replied to me on a different site about FIFA 16. They were protesting the inclusion of women’s teams in the game:

        “Why would they do this? To score political point? To say ‘hey our game is really progressive’? To capture untapped customer? Because there are huge demand for such a feature?”

        To which I replied that these are all very good reasons, in isolation or together, to include women’s teams. This is not a zero-sum exercise by any stretch of the imagination – why don’t we try to keep as many people happy as possible? Not only do you then get more audience, but more people are happy!

        • ace

          people are going to honestly disagree on the Elba point.

          “There doesn’t seem to be a good reason not to.”

          except there is. His argument seems to have a pretty blatent flaw of assuming executive meddling to make films more profitable carry no risk of backfiring…and the simple fact is forcing scorecards and checklists down each work of art’s throat does carry problems. Look at the crap Iron Man 3 China scenes for an example of how a film is made worse by hamhanded diversity mandates. On some level we should want “artists” to be able to tell the story they want to tell and evaluate that story. a story from a polish studio isn’t going to be nearly as interested in american racial politics than an american game and an overly sensitive button checking approach can ruin creativity. It’s not that polish-Thor has to fire elba it’s that it’s not a great sin to not include it any more than it is a great sin for spike Lee not to make a movie about slavic folklore.

          It also can hurt the game/film in an anti-progressive way: why do you think people criticize “white savior” narratives or “white protagonist” narratives in minority films? don’t they realize this means the studio gets more money?

          “fifa 16”

          i agree it’s probably the right move and i actually support it…but your argument seems to imply opportunity costs don’t exist. How much of bioshock infinite’s bad gameplay could have been fixed by redirecting resources from the beautiful art team and would it be worth it? i don’t know but it’s not the self evident no you’re assuming. For fifa new pretty popular teams are probably worth more than fiddling with ball control movements but that’s not always the case.

          • John Henderson

            Do you think it unnecessary to attempt to cross cultural divides at the risk of a blockbuster film maybe not sit properly with some “classic” fans of the property it was based on, for the benefit of trying to cross into new markets?

            You’re right of course that there were producer mandates in IM3. However, IM3 was good. Really good. Way better than 2, which had no China, and any awkwardness were parts where super-powered Guy Pearce decided to wreck a shipyard were not in China.

            As for Black Heimdall, Penny Arcade already quashed that debate 4.5 years ago. There is nothing left to talk about. Having nonwhite characters makes a movie look like the world, instead of just white America, and “just white America” doesn’t pay the bills anymore. Don’t like it? Watch more indie films made by white people, I guess.

            http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/12/20/

          • ace

            henderson (since i can’t figure out how to actually respond to you)

            Black Heimdall: THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT (come on, principal of charity). What was i talking about? well perhaps i was responding to the other person? no, that’s crazy

            “I have to disagree. The part should go to Elba if he’s good enough to play the role. It’s okay to say that these things tick diversity boxes AND bring in more money AND are the best things for the franchise. We don’t have to pretend that we can only have one of those things.”

            essentially that statement is “if two equally talented actors are available hire the black one”. I disagree with this statement but people can easily agree to disagree.

            “Do you think it unnecessary to attempt to cross cultural divides at the risk of a blockbuster film maybe not sit properly with some “classic” fans of the property it was based on, for the benefit of trying to cross into new markets?”

            I think it’s wrong to criticize a film for not trying to upend the formula and attract new audiences via identity politics (come see explosions in China!!!!). we actually are pretty terrible at cranking out multiple high quality blockbusters because creating artistic works really does have a high rate of failure/risk. Thus we should be very skeptical of the idea that “if we just tweak a b c d e and f we will triple sales for the foreseable future (indeed it’s this sort of skepticism that the late head of nintendo endorsed and lead him to create the wii and shun stuff like celeb endorsements.

            sometimes identity politics checklists actually help films just as sometimes product placement helps artistic works (see 30 and snapple) but it’s always a tightrope, a tough balancing act with an infinite number of tiny “improvements” that different interest groups can offer that can overwhelm the actual game/film. i think you’re misreading me: there isn’t a problem in itself with adding new stuff. there is a problem the problem is the assumption that not taking that risk which uproots the franchise is the only viable option.

          • John Henderson

            The fact that you’re using the “identity politics” term makes me question your base, but:

            I think most of the ways to mess up a good franchise rarely have anything to do with pandering to demographics. The Star Wars prequels weren’t trying to get anyone in particular interested in Star Wars, though after the fact Lucas claimed it was for kids (which is why all the choking and lightsaber murder in Episode 3 got it a PG-13 rating.)

            I think we can agree that taking an established franchise in any direction is an inherent risk, and must be taken on for more than one reason.

          • ace

            henderson

            I think most of the ways to mess up a good franchise rarely have anything to do with pandering to demographics.

            non-sequitor much? yes

            i’m also a bit confused: the arguments for ethnic representation in games are based on identity politics spuring growth. Indeed i just finished reading an article about white identity politics and middle ages fantasy games from a strongly academic left wing perspective. Why would it be wrong to use the exact same terminology in the exact same way?

            again my point is refutng a “to be successful you must do this” or “broader playing of identity politics necessarily increase sales” both of which are bad arguments in my opinion because as we agree art is hard to get right.

          • John Henderson

            Art and entertainment are always judged on two axes: merit and appeal. Appeal is necessary for commerce. Art is necessary for the artist, and in general so society is not drab, boring and predictable.

            Art is not the only reason why anything creative is made. This isn’t meant as a non sequitur, but a line of reasoning you don’t seem to be considering.

            The arguments for better ethnic representation are about better ethnic representation. It is unto itself a goal, because if the same sorts of people are the only ones making games, eventually you build internal structures around keeping anyone other than “your people” in the circle of opportunity. The industry is very insular, and sometimes described as incestuous. If you walked into an interview and realized that everyone there didn’t look like you, what would you think your chances of being hired were?

            See what I did there? I just took your notion about “actors being equal, hire the black one” and turned it sideways. See the difference? No? Then good for you, that’s your privilege not to get the point.

            Secondary to ethnic representation is that video games in general are getting bigger in scale and up-front costs. So there are necessarily concerns associated with scale that will include questions such as, are there things in a game that will prevent us from the game being marketable in certain areas of the world? And if we say we don’t care about those things, are we also saying we don’t care what certain people think about our creation, from both a commercial and a creative standpoint? And are we prepared to answer for that in public?

            The gentleman quoted in the article that started all this used the term “communist” to describe those that would question creative decision making in a game. Damion rightly said that is nonsense, because game development lives in a capitalist world. That to me is the only reason bringing up commercial concerns right now, because that article didn’t paint with quite as broad a brush as I’m reading in your replies.

            Creative freedom and commercial appeal are not the only things to consider. This is not a black and white world, and cultural acceptance of difference takes effort that many do not want to expend. But if we don’t try now, we might find ourselves as individuals on the wrong side of history. So no, I disagree with your point of view on the subject at hand.

      • Ira Shantz-Kreutzkamp

        Yeah broldtimer, sweeping social problems under the rug that is the public unconscious and blindly accepting traditions is the TRUE path of film. I’m sure the Ainu and the myriad of ethnic minority groups that got stamped into the “Han” box will be happy to know they have such bold visionaries plotting the course of forgetfulness.

        The reason Luther didn’t make a deal about Mr. Elba’s race is because a) he’s a Black Londoner (intelligible! talks so we can Goddamned understand him!), and b) he’s not Pakistani or Punjabi or Sikh. Those have kind of a way, way worse time of it in Great Britain. As late back as 2011 a Black guy getting shot by the police under sketch-tastic circumstances was enough to ignite racial tension, and that was nothing compared to the Brixton riots in the 1980’s and 90’s. There’s a viable political party whose primary platform is “fuck those non-whites & non-natives”. To say the least, racism isn’t exactly dead outside of America. That’s not going into my native Canada, where things are nowhere near as lovely and trouble-free as we try to make it look to outsiders.

      • Meredith

        Luther’s wife, Zoe, isn’t white, she just isn’t black either. The actress who plays her is Indira Varma, who’s half-Indian.

        Personally, I think Elba would be a great Bond, but since he’s said he doesn’t want it its a moot point.

  7. Cadfan17

    I’m reasonably certain that Thor movies grossing so high has a lot more to do with constantly shirtless Chris Hemsworth than black Heimdall.

    Which does, of course, have relevance to our conversation on diversity. And on feminism.

    I mean, I don’t have consumer data or anything. Just the reactions of my acquaintances who watched the movie, and my general feel for human nature. But I’m pretty sure shirtless Chris Hemsworth is putting in work.

    • ace

      yeah the author is greatly overvaluing Elba’s contribution…but he’s still a pretty famous actor who even as a supporting character brings people into the seats.

    • Meredith

      You’re underestimating how many of us are living in hope of shirtless Idris Elba. 😉

      (You’re also underestimating the number of truly obsessive Tom Hiddleston fans. They are many and utterly terrifying.)

  8. Mizahnyx

    When Idris Elba was casted as Heimdall it was stated that Marvel’s Valhalla was not identical to Norse Valhalla, that in Marvel Universe the Norse Gods were an alien race with an advanced technology that resembles magic (And that is also the way its represented in the last Marvel movies).

  9. Nick

    “Which is to say, if you want to have a large-scale breakout hit which penetrates many multiple markets, you increase the odds significantly with greater in-game diversity.”

    This would be cool if true, it would let us actually have dev-marketing conversations where we could put estimated increased reach from diversity up against the dev costs of additional models/textures/voice actors/etc. but is there any evidence of this anywhere? (I don’t look at the general industry research exhaustively, but I don’t recall ever seeing this from any of the standard games research culprits)

    This seems like it might be one of those things that, all other things being equal, people say they want (like original IP or creative point and click adventure games) before completely ignoring it when making purchasing decisions that make CoD14 and GTA8 the best selling titles that year.

  10. nash werner

    All the drama, clickbait, and Rebecca Black, couldn’t change the simple fact that I am so thankful to have been born in the Age of The Internet.

  11. Doc

    Add women for business? Tale of tales added a black and a woman to sunset basically a double down – a black woman, but where is the money Lebowsky?

    Adding other races or colors will not make content better or sell more. I am sure people from your network were advising sunset. “Add black woman. You will make more, make sure she is American and not native so USA audience connects more and buys more of your game because diversity, also make her a cleaner, because cart life and papers please were popular or something. Also add Instagram colors. But remember main point she must be black and a woman. Because who else will go be a cleaner in Zamunda”

    If you don’t like race selection in witcher ask for a refund, an artist decides what he wants to show you. Not the consumer. Adding women does not sell more games. Alien isolation would be same great game with a male protagonist.

    • Ira Shantz-Kreutzkamp

      Please don’t be obtuse. Games that are designed and hewn from flesh to have more mass-appeal than an indie game concerned with art over mechanics could be even more successful without the unthinking reliance on making the main actors white. It’s not a get-rich-easy scheme, it’s recognizing that people the world over like to imagine themselves as the clever/powerful protagonist, and the easier it is for them to project themselves onto the main character the more interested they’ll be.

      Sunset didn’t sell because it was too simplistic, stiff and hampered by having more ambition than skill or money to sell its concepts and conceits. Don’t forget marketing, the only reason any game ever is “successful”. If nobody had ever heard of Shadow of the Colossus or Ico, or the marketing hadn’t depicted it well, it wouldn’t matter how good the game was. The games industry has a strong reliance on things being recognizable, because gamers are as stupid as they are tight-fisted and quick to take offence. Skyrim is a terrible game in almost every imaginable respect, but it’s sold well so obviously it must have done something right/be an objectively good template. The Witcher:.:.: piggy-backs on that almost as much as it does Welsh/French mythology and American action movies.

      • ace

        “it’s not a get rich-easy scheme”

        i agree but the author of the piece oversteps himself and tries to essentially argue it’s always a get rich quick scheme. it’s a pretty bad response because it wants us to just forget executive meddling can impact quality and quality really is important in selling stuff (skyrim does look gorgeous). I think the author is trolling over the communism line which was by far the weakest part of the original piece.

      • Vetarnias

        “Skyrim is a terrible game in almost every imaginable respect”

        As someone who’s been tempted several times to perhaps buy Skyrim, I’m really curious about your statement and would like more details.

        • Ira Shantz-Kreutzkamp

          Gladly, as I’ve played around 250 hrs of it and don’t regret the experience for an instant. For disclosure purposes I have only played the ‘vanilla’ version, out of the box with no mods besides one for colour saturation.

          It all comes down to one thing: Skyrim is BORING. It’s tedious, banal, monotonous. Part of why I love it.

          It’s a huge, collection of things to do, but all of them are variations on fetch-quests and “go to [location] and kill [entity]”, delivered to you in a way that’s both overblown AND painfully dull. People talk like they’re reading aloud passages from a fantasy novel that’s contemporary with The Worm Ouroboros, full of archaic language that suddenly reverses to modern idioms in ways that honestly feel like mistakes. Your only agency in the stories it offers are “how will you kill and with what?” and that is curtailed sharply by the narrow focus of how you’re able to accomplish the very limited selection of busywork it has. There are several times where it outright tells you how you have to deal with a given threat or obstacle, not just through in-character speeches but in enormous letters right at the top of the screen.

          You can go anywhere, do anything, but no matter where you go you find dungeons, caves and ruins that don’t just look the same or have the same tone, but effectively ARE the same. The ‘important’ ones are constructed like theme-park rides, with back-door exits at the ‘end’ that remove the old games’ tedious back-tracking but make the world feel fake and stagey. Traveling the world takes long enough to be tedious, but not long enough to feel consequential unless you absolutely don’t use fast-travel, and even then you pass the same landmarks and fight the same meaningless monsters and Bandit Army Regulars 101st Division. No matter where you go, from the tundra, the mountains, the icy coastlines, the steaming sulphur-heated pools or the forests, things are never distinct. Everyone is vapid, dull and foolish if they’re not nasty and cruel.

          And when I say ‘do anything’ I mean it. You can know all of five spells and become Grand Master Wizard because they hand you a plot device that lets you contribute no matter what kind of character build you have, you can become Guildmaster of the Thieves Guild and only actually use stealth once, or possibly twice. Not because you’re smart, but because you can just kill people in straight-up brawls and get the same result as if you had a cat-like tread. You can hand your soul over to demonic powers about five times just by wandering around and doing random side-quests, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you got something that maybe gives you more numbers.

          This is a game that has one of the best framing devices for opposing factions I’ve seen yet, a wonderful piece of various background lore-bits about burgeoning nationalist sentiment, a theological question hinging on attempted genocide of the human race, survivor’s guilt and bureaucratic apathy. And it’s all used to set up two nearly-identical series of places for the player to kill certain numbers of NPCs and stand around while NPCs to trigger sound files at each other. You can broker a truce and it doesn’t matter, it just puts the war on hold until the player decides to get back to it.

          The game’s central mechanical conceit, magical voices and words of power, is about the most desultory and ‘video gamey’ thing I have ever seen. Besides the ones that just give you superpowers, the Shouts are flags that progress the plot. Which ends with you killing Dragon Satan and forestalling the end of the world.

          Skyrim is a game that manages to take the idea of the Norse afterlife, of Valhalla and a great hall full of battling, carousing and feasting warriors from song and the legendary past, and make it boring by having a bunch of NPCs wander in a very large room and go through canned animations that are indistinguishable from the rest of the game. This game makes fighting dragons boring and routine by making you fight a bunch of them to make your Shouts good enough, until their roars that split the heavens become just another part of the ambient soundscape. It manages to make a past of submission to beasts who transcend time and whose language is perceived by mortals as the clash of titanic forces, and seeing the last battle that brought an end to their reign through a rift in time filtered by an artifact forged in the creation of the universe, a chore you must suffer because it’s an in-engine cutscene with an awful bunch of filters slapped over it.

          You can buy a house in any of the pre-set locations, and arrange your McMansion to your heart’s sickness. You can marry any of the empty, one-dimensional NPCs that have been assigned to that purpose. You can kill anyone except for people the game decides are too important to ever die, such as the most obnoxious and badly-written mafia boss in the history of Elder Scrolls games. Skyrim wants you to explore its content. That’s it. Skyrim is a void into which you put time in exchange for…ultimately nothing. Not even emotional satisfaction or intellectual stimulation. I got more out of reading the wiki at UESP and seeing how the story fit together and what it all “meant” to the wider universe than while actually playing the game. The game has books, random snippets of lore, any five of which are more engrossing than the stuff they put so much money, time and care into and try so hard to make you see.

          I’m sorry to write so much in reply to such a simple question, but I figured it would be best to write it out in full.

          • Vhaegrant

            ‘That’s it. Skyrim is a void into which you put time in exchange for…ultimately nothing. Not even emotional satisfaction or intellectual stimulation.’

            That’s true of gaming as a whole. It’s a leisure pursuit, a pastime for most. It’s time you can afford to spend doing whatever you want.
            The emotional satisfaction/ intellectual stimulation, is highly subjective. I need a game to distract me, help me unwind after a hard shift at work, Skyrim was a decent enough distraction and more than worth the investment (With the 3 DLC about £50 for ~700hrs distraction and still playing).
            Intellectually, well it depends what you are seeking on that front as well, I see many calls for harder games (another aspect that will narrow down your audience) and yet most are then trivialised by the abundance of online guides and tutorials. It’s a pet peeve of mine that some puzzles seem to be only solvable if you go online to look at guides (I suspect it is a move by developers to encourage community participation, they actively put content in that needs to be hacked from game files because they know there are people in the community with that skill set).

          • Vetarnias

            In other words:

            Beautiful world, but ultimately empty. Full of characters, but with no soul. Plenty of places to go to, but not worth it. Something that attempts to create the illusion of a persistent world, even as you know it ceases to exist as soon as you stop playing.

            In other words, the same limitations I encountered in Oblivion and to a lesser degree in Morrowind.

        • Vhaegrant

          Lured out of hibernation by the mention of Skyrim 😉

          Like pretty much every other game out there, what you get out of Skyrim will largely depend on what sort of games you like to play. So, what sort of games do you like to play?
          If you have the money to spare, and I think it’s going cheap on Steam during Quakecon, then it’s worth a purchase.

          There are a lot (and I mean a lot) of things wrong with it, but there are also some big things it gets right. I’ve sunk ~700hrs into it, but then most of my games playing is focused around the same mentality people play solitaire. It’s not the challenge per se but rather a distraction (and cheaper than alcohol).

          Visually the game world is stunning (considering it is 4 years old) and offers a sense of diversity across the games zones. This is perhaps the biggest draw for me. Wandering randomly across the map wondering what I can discover, an abandoned tent on a riverbank with a journal talking about exploring the depths of a near by tunnel… while meaningless to the grand plot, brings the feeling of a larger world to life.

          Mechanics wise ESV:Skyrim is a dud. There are too many systems integral to the game that range from outright broken to buggy.

          But, there are moments where Skyrim has drawn me so far into its clutches I don’t care about the flaws and imperfections. And I think that’s a testament to any game, that despite so many flaws I am still playing it four years after release.

  12. Daniel Minardi

    Projecting all of the criticism of Witcher 3 onto Gies’s article is just silly. That and similar articles just serve as an unintentional dog whistle for the twitter crusaders of every stripe.

    But, yeah, be inclusive if its not a sacrifice of your artistic vision. Witcher 3 didn’t need Asian tourists in Poland in the middle of an active war zone. Make Star Wars as diverse as you want without significant lore limitations on ethnicities.

    Unless you’re just trying to sell toys, art should still be the priority. Diversity of artists and diversity of artistic creations are more important than the intrinsic diversity of each artistic creation.

  13. Vhaegrant

    The encroachment of mainstream into what was previously a niche market.
    Is there any wonder that those who felt themselves in a small clique of elitists is disparaged to find the club doors have been opened to anyone… even women!!!

    Mainstream products need to appeal to the widest audience possible. First of all they tend to be large projects so need to sell a lot to make their money back. Second they need to make the argument that our culture is inclusive and progressive (and I realise there is still a lot of work to be done on that front)..

    Niche products need to appeal to their audience. That’s it. They can say whatever they like and be judged on it accordingly. The trouble is this niche audience is unlikely to be large enough to support the sort of AAA budget expected.

    The trouble that seems to be brewing is what happens when a niche product can challenge mainstream ideology because of large global audiences and the relative ease of distribution.

    And, if it appeals to a large enough audience on its own merits can it still be considered ‘niche’?

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