Video games, like other artistic media, actually do both. They're a product of culture that can also broadcast messages of their own. The message could reinforce existing attitudes, or it could rock the boat and diverge from them.
Why are there still so many white men in video games
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Video games, like other artistic media, actually do both. They're a product of culture that can also broadcast messages of their own. The message could reinforce existing attitudes, or it could rock the boat and diverge from them.
Yeah, would be a lot more interesting to see what kind of positions these women actually have within their companies.
We do know that treating non white non-males as second grade, exploitable beings is deeply ingrained into the dna of capitalism, but you know, some people don't like it.
When the deplorable stance to treat the bigger chunk of the market, blacks, females, hispanics, asians as second tiers is acceptable for you, you should learn to accept the human stance.
Defeatist attitude in a way, you can certainly take some proactive steps toward change.
It's already proven that more diverse characters can be prominent and the games will still sell.
No. Not under corporate reigns. Not even close. They represent whatever the CEOs see as being most profitable.
Video games are not art. Not in the sense you are misapplying. Not in today's clime.
And the change shall not happen due to video games. Not even in any small part. If and hopefully when it happens, it shall in all probability affect how video games are developed. But social change shall come first.
Orthogonal
Member
Huh? Economic systems have no racism ingrained in them. People have it ingrained in them as it is passed down from their parents and/or culture.
Well, I'm a published writer, and I disagree with you. There's a ton of stuff we write that has no basis in reality. I've never met a Harvest Goddess who uses the blood of dying men to stay alive, and yet I've written that story.
But that doesn't actually have anything to do with what we're discussing, because every writer on the planet knows how to write women and non-white characters, because they know how to write human beings. That's all women and non-white people are -- human beings. They don't need any special knowledge to write.
No one is asking for a white suburban kid to write the definitive black novel. You don't have to write about the "black experience". You just have to write about a human being, doing what human beings do.
What you don't seem to get is that this idea that women and non-whites are "other" is the actual problem here.
And yet we have the San Andreas example.
And yes they are certainly art, restricted sometimes sure, but they are art.
One could suggest that you could make that an allegory or metaphor, which is where the grounding would be. There's almost always some kind of real world link, because we need something to relate to for the story to affect us.
Sorry, that's twisting it a bit, but you get what I mean I'm sure.
I disagree with this part though. I could write a much more believable male than I could a female, at this moment in time at least. Were I to decide to make the protagonist of my next story a female (which would be a first for me), I would need to do some research. Ask the opinion of other female writers, or read some specific books. I don't feel I'm educated enough on the female perspective to make a true character that wasn't just an extension of myself.
I think you certainly need special knowledge to write from a perspective that isn't familiar to you, but that knowledge isn't hard to come by. I'd say many writers wouldn't even consider it, which is probably the bigger problem than the ability to learn how.
But you can only right what you know. And if you don't understand the female perspective deeply enough then females are "other" to you. Same with sexuality, and ethnicity.
Again, if you put in the effort to understand (or your upbringing and experience shaped it in a way that made it possible) you can, but the ability to understand is not there by default.
not directed at you (and probably off topic) but this is something that irritates me to no end. We, in fact, are all the same race with said race being human or homosapien. The word you were looking for is ethnicity.
"And the change shall not happen due to video games." I might be not the first to ask you this in your life: What is wrong with you? What gives you the right to speak that way?
More inclusive movies/books/videogames are social change. And it is happening. Not enough in the videogames-industry, but it happens.
Seriously, what is up with your concern trolling? Why do you feel the urgent need to define what shall come first?
silvermember
Banned
Whether a creation is based on something was not really the point of his comment. I don't how you manage to take what he said and turn it into a debate about the creative process. We can all agree that in other for a world to seem real authors have to relate it or pin it to things we might be familiar with aka taking our wold as a template and changing it to create his world, but that wasn't the point of his point.
Ultimately, what you said has no real point. Watch Dog might be based on something or a fear of the future, but does it really matter what the protagonist race or gender is ?
I think they feel having less white male characters takes away something from them. I think some of the reasons given is that it is more easy for them to relate to a white character since they are white, which is funny because a lot of the time the protagonist barely has a personality.
Change happens because people take first steps.
A change in the games industry has as much chance as becoming a catalyst as in any other place.
This is just simply not true. It's simplistic writing advice given to people who don't know how to write. Writers write things they don't know constantly. Seriously, if you can't imagine yourself as a character who is different than you, you're probably not a very good writer.
IncandescentPrecept
Banned
TLoU: Left Behind - Female
Dark Souls - You create your own character
Transistor - Female
Child of Light - Female
Atelier Escha & Logy - Female
Toukiden - Character Creation
Soul Sacrifice Delta - Character Creation
Dead Nation : Apocalypse - Male and Female
Lightning Returns - Female
Elder Scrolls Online - Character Creation
Hardly a male face. That's not to mention the non-human characters.
I think that's incredibly unfair.
How are you supposed to imagine the perspective of a gender if you have no prior understanding or real insight into the gender?
You can't imagine something real from nothing, you need experience to build on.
You do realize how big these IPs are?
Well, one assumes that A) You've met and known women and B) You are aware of what it's like to be a human being. So you're not imagining something from nothing. I guess, if you've never spoken to women, dated women, or hung out with women, you might feel uncomfortable writing a female character, but at that point I'd suggest you have bigger issues than the versimilitude of your writing.
This is a thing done by virtually every novelist. Even if the main character isn't female, it's rare to find a book without any women in it. What magic is this? Men somehow discovered they could make the mechanic working on a boat in chapter four a female? He must have studied and researched for years before he could understand the unique female perspective on building boat engines.
silvermember
Banned
What you said is only true, if you assume the there is only one definition of the word "RACE". If this was a scientific debate and NOT a anthropology definition, you would be correct. In a scientific (biology classification) debate the concept of race doesn't really exist, but that hasn't prevented it from not being an issue.
In social science, race and ethnicity have a very specific meaning. A meaning that has made classification of race in America a very interesting and somewhat funny.
I don't think people are proposing the world should change via video game activism. Rather, I think they're just disagreeing with your claim that they reflect society, or more that they're not reflecting society well enough because they seem to concentrate on a privileged ruling class.
What do you mean by "no prior understanding or real insight into the gender?" Are you saying that these writers of male characters have never interacted with women to the extent that they'd have some basis for writing a non-male character? No wives, girlfriends, daughters, mothers, female friends, or coworkers who they can at least talk to if they had some questions or wanted advice?
Your average male video game writer probably isn't well-equipped to tell an emotional and personal tale about the suffrage movement and the history of feminism in the early 20th century, but that doesn't mean he should treat women as alien creatures he could never hope to understand well enough to portray them in a believable way.
Bigmac1910
Member
Man I was just about give up on this thread, but I need to reply to this one lol. I agree that most people can write a human being, but at the same time if you write about other races without any true knowledge, you'll loose the nuances and small perspectives that can be part of that character. It will also be written from your perspectives and biases which might not work well in other parts of the world, as there can be very different ideas about what is right/wrong or behavioral patterns. If you only talk about the west, maybe it's enough, but as soon you need to delve a little deeper, your audience will pick up on your lack of knowledge.
And just about your fantasy woman(Goddess), she is based upon reality just by the fact that she is a woman. So you see how difficult it is to get away from reality.
Life experience varies, maybe you were lucky enough to have had an upbringing that makes you feel experienced enough to write as a voice for both genders, that's good and I hope you make the most of it.
For me, and many others, I don't feel comfortable yet with my female voice. I was brought up surrounded by women, and I live with a women, and I have many female friends, but as a writer I've realised that I need to explore my experience a bit before I feel comfortable creating a lead women character or it just won't resonate.
There are going to be many successful writers who have never truly explored this and play it safe, you often read reviews of books where the reviewer critiques that the male author doesn't have a credible female voice. It doesn't seem to be a prerequisite to success that you even need this understanding.
But that's missing the point.
The point is that more writers in games need to have that understanding, and maybe we'd get greater diversity in characters while retaining a high quality. Currently we have too many 30 something brooding males and standard templates because either the writers are playing it safe, are working to a specific guideline, or simply don't have the understanding to write any better.
I think that last one is more prominent than you seem to be suggesting.
Well, when the issue is apparent that strong, well rounded, female characters with a credible voice are rare, then it seems to me that the writers are either being forced not to or are incapable.
You can be around women all your life and not understand them, and you don't need to understand women to be a successful writer (and vice versa).
My original point is that we simply need better writers, writers who either have that understanding or will take the time to develop it prior to writing.
Yes, exactly. Well put!
Bigmac1910
Member
It's exactly the point of it, he was arguing that you can create without looking at reality and just by basing something on history/reality, it somehow excludes ones ability to write a futuristic story. He is just plain wrong, you can't write anything without having a real life experience, or base it upon something like history or even fantasy novels which in turn also have their roots based in reality.
Not sure why you brought up Watch Dogs, but yes in this case it could be a male or female protagonist. But this has nothing to do with what I was talking about.
I'd be the first to agree that video games are filled with people who are just bad writers. And that's what we call people who aren't capable of inhabiting the skin of a variety of characters -- bad writers.
I was going to leave this alone, because it was such a poor post that it didn't really seem worth responding to, but you've doubled-down on it, so here we go.
I'm arguing that a writer doesn't have to experience the things he writes. You cherry picked that the character I mentioned was a woman, therefore I did have something to base her on. This is astonishingly dumb. It devalues your argument completely, because by the same token, anything you write is based on reality, because we're all familiar with matter.
If you put a person in a box from birth and only exposed them to masculine ideals and view points, they wouldn't be ale to write a female character well (or would only be able to write an extremely limited type of female).
And, unfortunately, there are people who live their lives this way (to varying degrees), and some of them become successful writers.
So yes, you can only write what you know. The ability to imagine that goddess would have come from information you've learnt about, maybe some form of religious text, or maybe just being a fan of Neil Gaiman or something, but it comes from somewhere. All ideas do.
Ok.. I never disagreed with that. Not really sure why you're writing it (if it's been a miscommunication on my part, I apologise). You wrote that "every writer on the planet knows how to write a female character", and I disagreed and reasoned why a bad writer wouldn't be able to. I even went as far as to paint myself as an experienced writer who needs to develop, but that we all have the opportunity to develop that experience.
You can't just write about something you have no idea about. Your idea for that goddess was derived form something else, it didn't just manifest entirely independently.
No kidding. The way I use terms I picked up from an anthropology class but, that aside, the way I always see it used to clarify between people of differing colors has always irked me. We're both human beings, why would a color swap suddenly make us a whole new type of the homo species? Makes no sense.
On topic: I don't see too much of an issue here. Being part of a minority here, while I wouldn't mind more games with latino characters, the ethnic part of this doesn't bug me. The gender part does; playing as a dude all of the god damned time is boring -_-
TetraGenesis
Member
Perfectly put, thank you.
You can't understand racism if you've never experienced it. If you're a white, middle class writer who wants to write a black character who's dealing with racism, and you don't have any direct experience of it, then you will need to research it to understand it and make your character believable,
Until you do they remain "other" to you, because it's not something you know.
So yes, we should move away from "other" because we should all educate ourselves, but the idea that you can simply imagine this up without the education is pretty silly.
The problem is that we have too many writers in the industry who are either conforming to a template because they're told to, or don't have the necessary life experience and understanding to write good diverse characters.
Bigmac1910
Member
Yeah you are right it was poorly worded, and I actually agree with the fact that you don't have to experience everything just to write. But, you have to have some knowledge, and whatever you write, it's always inspired by something other than plain nothingness.
EDIT: Connected the word whatever.
ab.aeterno
Member
Oh, you mean a question asking why games continue to predominately star white males as protagonists? I can see how you could confuse a question asked upon the underlying request for more diversity as being a demand to "divide a rainbow" such that every permutation of difference between human beings must be included in every game ever.
Just yesterday someone asked me why I eat so much Mediterranean and I responded "Christ, why do you want me to eat every single kind of food at each meal?"
Specifically, I was asking you to provide an example where people in this thread were arguing that we must include everyone in everything, as implied by your comment. Can you actually provide that?
Writers regularly write what they don't know. I've never murdered people for money, but I've written characters that have. The way you grow as a writer is by stepping outside the comfortable confines of yourself. It sells short the creative capabilities of majority creators by implying that they can't write or be comfortable writing minorities given time and practice. I can write majority characters I don't identify with; it doesn't seem unfair to expect the opposite of experienced creators.
And you don't have to write "other" characters being defined by or delving into the things that set them apart, they can simply be what they are in the context of the larger story.
And I'm not arguing you can't or shouldn't necessarily, but we need to acknowledge the problem created when the majority does and says the same with their creative endeavors, and are themselves the majority. And if you only ever write yourself, your writing won't grow.
A very poor assumption to make; I've been a creative writer since grade school, though your assumption to the contrary is both amusing and interesting as to why you would think that.
You're also missing the point of what I said badly. I'll let another poster's words answer:
faceless007
Member
Who's asking for anyone to write a story about dealing with racism?
Muppet of a Man
Member
I would say primarily focus-group based marketing economics are driving this. Their is a reluctance to take risks and/or offend the majority user base's preferences in any type of medium, not just videogames. Same could be said for Hollywood movies and tv shows. It sucks for consumers of the content who are not base, lowest-common-denominator morons.
As a writer as well, this is incorrect. Nearly every writer writes something they don't know about. I don't know what it feels like to get shot, stabbed, fly a plane, use magical powers, or be another race or gender. However the core of any character just requires basic human empathy to be able to write, the rest is research into the details to strive for authenticity but a good writer is absolutely able to write about things they've never experienced.
A poor writer only sticks close to what they know.
It's called an example to further a point, you need to read the rest too.
If you have never experienced racism, you would need to understand it before you wrote about it.
Saying "I wrote a murderer but I've never murdered" isn't proof itself.
Being a murderer is something anyone could be, so that in itself isn't a particularly difficult thing to imagine. We've all read and watched enough stories to have an idea of realistic reactions to murdering a person, and to apply that to a character we've made, but do we all understand what it feels like to be the victim of a racist attack for example?
I don't, so I couldn't just write that into a story without trying to understand it first. I could give it a shit, and maybe try and apply other experiences, but if I did some research into it, or conducted an interview, or read some very well developed black characters in similar situations, I would have gathered the experience necessary to fill my own creation with nuance enough to make them truly alive.
You really can only write what you know, that doesn't mean you have to be female to write female, it means you have to understand.
But you're drawing on experience you've read about. So you are writing what you know. If you've never ever seen a video or read a story about a person being shot, then your description is going to be extremely limited, You can't just imagine the reaction from nothing. Same with flying a plane.
The entire point of this is that to create a truly well rounded character full of nuance, you might need to put a little research in to develop your understanding.
I would say a poor writer doesn't do that, and thinks they know by default how to understand everything perfectly. I know if I were going to write a character who flew a plane, I would research flight a little so I could use correct terminology, language, slang, make them feel like they really do what they do.
RockTurtle
Member
Well, of course you do. I'm not suggesting that a tabula rasa baby could pop out and write a book. Everything starts somewhere, but we use our imaginations to build a bridge from what we know to what we couldn't possibly know.
My first novel involves the child of an angel and a french slattern. That's the main character. I'm neither French, nor angelic, but I am a human who feels pain and suffers, so it's not that hard to imagine what he'd feel like, deprived of his mother, forever barred from his father, unable to die, but unable to be with the rest of the world. I don't know what it's like to be him, but I DO know what it's like to be alone.
In the same novel, the second protagonist is a female Sheriff. I've never been a Sheriff or a female, but again, I've been a human. I know what it's like to be responsible for things, I know what it's like to feel like you're not good enough, and I know what it feels like to not be taken seriously by people.
That's what's needed -- empathy. Empathy is magical. It allows us to place ourselves in the roles of people wildly different than us, only to discover they really aren't that different at all. Fundamentally, everyone wants the same things. And a writer who doesn't understand what those things are has much bigger problems than writing female characters or people of color.
As for experience, writers have the best job in the world, because we can fake it. Don't know how to sail a boat? Go read a book on sailing. Don't know how an Enochian would summon Baphomet? Get a book. Don't know how women feel? There are roughly eight million books discussing how women feel in the modern book store.
I think this is going to be my last post on the subject, because we're treading a little far afield, but if you're a writer who feels uncomfortable writing characters who are different than you, you ought to be actively working on that, because it's an incredible weakness for a writer. Very few writers who lack the sort of empathy needed to write non-them characters ever make it. Even the hackiest of hacks manage to get female characters in their books.
If someone grew up knowing only white men, I'd be happy to make recommendations regarding books they could read to expand their understanding of humanity.
Not just video games-- movies, TV, comics, novel covers-- still. The people in charge of turning a profit in popular entertainment are mostly skeptical of deviating from the norm (that is, as Colbert said, the "American Neutral" white male) because they want money from racists and sexists, too. It kind of makes sense because while minorities and women in America are quickly outnumbering Caucasian men, white dudes still have most of the money by a substantial margin.
Which was exactly my point.
You cant write what you don't know, so you need to educate yourself so you understand it well enough to write it.
Then you disagreed with me, I'm still unsure why...
Wait, so anyone can understand the mind of a sociopath because we've read and watched stories involving sociopaths, but it's impossible to understand the hurt and emotional impact of someone being judged based on nothing but their race because many of us have been lucky enough to not have been victim of a racist attack?
You'd think it should be able to empathize and understand the pain of people under attack than sociopaths. That's sad to think it'd be the other way around for anyone.
Bigmac1910
Member
I reacted to this quote by you, Not all stories need to be rooted in reality, not should they. And pointing to a history predominated be exclusion to justify future exclusion is both gross and nonsensical.
I was just arguing that no matter what you create, it is always based on some form of reality or inspired by it, that is all.
My assumption that you are not creative, I'm so sorry, but I just perceive you as extremely shallow, are your creative writing skills any good, I wouldn't know. So sorry again, I just base this on the few comments you wrote in this thread. Don't take it too seriously.
Why do you have to be a sociopath to be a murderer?
You're changing the rules half way through the game.
Ohhhh, you meant caring, empathetic murderers
What about crimes of passion?
Anyone is capable of murder. My point was that attribute can be laid on any character, regardless of ethnicity or gender, it doesn't take a nuanced understanding to write the action of murdering, but it does to create the character underneath the action.
You're right, you don't need to be. Doesn't change the point that compassion should be easier to understand than murder. If you watch/read about murder and can understand and sympathize with a murderer, but can't see someone be attacked because of their race and sympathize and understand how they might feel in such a situation, then that's kind of messed up.
I disagreed that anyone doesn't know enough to write a female character, because we've all known women. You can write what you don't know. Research is nice, but it's not necessary at all to write characters who aren't identical to you.
Nymphae
Banned
I haven't written in a very long time, but I completely disagree with this. Ideally, sure, but men and women, and people from different cultures & backgrounds have very different life experiences generally, and it's not as simple to "write" the opposite gender accurately as you make it out to be. I'm reminded of the first few episodes of Seinfeld, where Elaine wasn't even a character, because there were no women on the writing staff, and Jerry & Larry David were having difficulty "writing" for women. This didn't change until more women were hired on the staff.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
Seriously. In some cases, it might matter. It'd be weird to have a black or white or Native American character in a Romance of the 3 Kingdoms game, for sure. But for the most part, race or gender wouldn't affect the "suitability" at all.
Yup, it's always "shoehorning" when it's a minority character, but it's never shoehorning when it's a straight white male.
I want to say, "this post is dumb because it states the obvious", but apparently, that obvious needs to be stated. Unbelievable.
The fact that one needs special knowledge to write a woman or a character of a difference race than one's own is mind-boggling. I can't believe this argument is being brought forward. It has to be trolling. Don't these people ever read books, watch movies or TV series? Do they think every member of a cast of character is written by a specific writer that fits the gender and race of that character? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Er.... How does one reach adulthood without having this "experience"? Are you suggesting most writers have lived in caves all their lives and never interacted with other people? WTF?!
George RR Martin is a 60+ year old white man raised in New Jersey. How does he manage to write from the point of view of: a 7 year old boy, a 9 year old girl, an 11 year old girl, a 13-year old girl, a 35-year old woman, a 26 year old dwarf, etc. so successfully? He must be some sort of wizard.
I'm not saying I couldn't imagine it, I'm just saying that were I to write a character affected by something like that every day type of racism (the looks certain people might give, subtle shits in tone of voice when moving from speaking to a whit to a black person, etc...), I can understand that but I don't really have anything equivalent that I've experienced, so I would research into it more to get a better understanding.
I mean, I've seen a bunch of films that deal with this, and Iv'e read some a few books, but it's definitely an area I would need to understand more before I could write it well.
I've been attacked before, I've been singled out for things, but there are nuances involved in the different situations I would like to understand more before I invest in writing them.
I would have thought most other writers would want to do that too, perhaps I'm not cut out for this writing stuff...
I know plenty of adults who have poor understanding of the opposite sex. My office at work is full of them.
We don't know what lengths Martin went to when writing his characters, so that's an unfair point. For all we know, he spent a few weeks researching female queens before he wrote Cersi because he needed to understand what a female in a position of such power in a supremely patriarchal society would act like.
ab.aeterno
Member
Then you've misunderstood what I was trying to say by taking the word in absolutist terms. Let me clarify.
Yes, everything created draws something from reality, but the notion it must also draw upon the ugliness of that reality, especially to justify exclusion, is nonsense. A children's book draws from reality; it does not, however, have to make authorial decisions based on reality being a place where murder and rape occur. Do you see where I'm getting at? Saying exclusion is OK in fiction because the reality fiction draws upon is exclusionary makes little sense when fiction often does not draw upon the totality of reality but whatever pieces it needs to tell it's story.
That's the best explanation of my thoughts I can manage at the moment.
It seems weird to say something personal like that and then also to tell me not to take it personally, but weirder still to perceive that based on a few posts. But to each their own.
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