On the list of things that annoy me.
If you like video games at all you're not watching Extra Credits, you should. If not because it's probably one of the best web series out right now, then definately because they are campaigning for the whole "games are art, treat them that way" angle. Which I love.
Recently they've been talking about the lack of true diversity in most games, and how more games really need to be pushing this. This culminated in this week's episode about sexuality in games, and a very in depth analysis of the only non-stereotyped gay individual that is not an author avatar or a sexual target for the player in all of gaming: Kanji Tasumi from Persona 4. It's a good episode, and really, the fact that they could only think of ONE character in ALL the games in ALL the world that was gay and treated like a real person really says a lot.
Of course the internet has responded with such thoughtful and well-researched criticisms of diversity in games such as:
- I'm not gay but I don't want to play a gay character because that would make me uncomfortable.
- We don't need diversity, character personalities only get in the way of the real objective of games, which is having fun.
- Sexuality is not important and any game that dares talk about it is wasting it's time.
- Real art never talks about sex or sexuality, that's immoral and dirty.
- I treat homosexuals like I treat vegetarians: they made their choice and I don't want to hear about it, let alone play a game about it.
- Games are not art, we should stop pretending they are.
Internet, are we going to have to have a talk about what it means to be nice to other people?
Okay, here's the thing about diversity that everyone gets wrong. Diversity is NOT about forcing you to physically experience another person's point of view.
Something that I hear a lot of in the teaching preparation field is that we should change our ciriculum around our students. Specifically you hear things like "an African American student is never going to relate to a play by Shakespeare, so if you have a class with a lot of black students, we should only teach the whole class things written by African American authors so those students get it." What they are supposed to say is "students need a more diverse body of work to learn from, not just stuff written by white British men," and that is very true. But the way it often comes off is that they don't think students can relate to any author except the ones that come from the same background as them.
This is a critical fail for diversity. The idea behind diversity is to offer up another view point. Maybe that means reading an author who is not the same nationality as you. Maybe that means having a movie with a cast and plot centered around a country you don't live in. And maybe that means characters in video games that are not white men. If diversity works, you shouldn't even realize it's happening, because it's a reflection of the real world where we all encounter people from different background all the time. If it isn't working... you get token characters.
What diversity is not doing is saying "yeah, see that gay character that you have nothing in common with? You're gonna spend the next 20 hours with him, and by the end YOU ARE GOING TO TURN GAY YOURSELF." Diversity might not even change your opinions about something, but what it should do is give you the opportunity to see something from the perspective of someone else.
Using the example of the "I would never play a game about a vegetarian" thing from above because I think it's hilarious, let's see if I can create a game idea that involves that concept.
Soo, let's make it a fantasy game. With lots of monsters. And since we're playing it from the vegetarian angle, let's make it so every time you kill a monster, they drop meat, or some sort of ingredient for an in-game cooking system. Let's pretend that every time you cook something, it initiates a cut scene (probably only a minute or two) where your party characters sit down and have a meal together. And let's pretend this cooking mechanic is semi-important to the game (like, your characters get too hungry, they won't fight), and involves making different foods to appeal to people's likes and dislikes that you basically must learn through trial and error. I'm sure this is overly complicated.
And let's say you put a magic using psychic in your party. Let's call him... Sven. Sven is polite and cheerful, but he's also not close friends with the main character. They met partially through the game, so you don't really have any connection to Sven, just a similar goal in mind. And just for kicks, let's make him... a member of a royal family. Also let's make his attacks mostly supportive and status-inflicting, so he has very few if any offensive attacks.
Let's say that whenever you have Sven in your party and you cook a meat dish, he doesn't eat it. Maybe he doesn't say anything and just pushes the meat around with a fork. Maybe he hands it right back to the player when you give it to him and says he isn't hungry. Maybe he just disappears from the area because he "isn't feeling well."
Well, if you're perceptive and if you've payed any attention at all to what I said, you would probably pick up that Sven is a vegetarian, but is too polite to say anything about it. Maybe he gets that rations are hard to come by and he doesn't want to sound spoiled. Sven is a nice guy after all, and realizes that he's come from affluence and might come off as a rich brat if he tells you that he won't eat meat. (BTW, this is just me projecting on Sven, not anything that would be explicitly stated in game).
Alright, so onto the diversity and understanding. Let's imagine a mission system that allows you to take on quests with specific characters. It doesn't have to be plot-central. Let's say there is one that the reward will be this magic crystal that will enhance the powers of any psychic that touches it, so you as the player have to escort Sven to the end of a mini-dungeon, let him touch the crystal, and then escort him back. And we'll make that dungeon full of monsters. So you kill a bunch of relatively easy monsters (you being the operative word, Sven just sort of helps you out), get to the end of the dungeon, and Sven touches the crystal and all his stats go up. Hooray! But then something weird happens and the player starts hearing voices.
And then you start fighting back through the dungeon and you, the player, can now understand what the monsters are thinking. And they are thinking very human thoughts. Wouldn't that be unnerving, even troublesome? Maybe if you go to kill a monster, they start thinking "OH NO DON'T KILL ME" or whatever. Then they die and drop their meat.
You get out of the dungeon and things begin to go back to normal, and Sven apologizes to you because he just lost control of his psychic abilities while you were in the dungeon because he got so much power at once. In other word, you were hearing what Sven was hearing, and Sven hears the thoughts of monsters. He says it won't happen again. He also asks you (the player) to not mention it to the other party members, and that even though he can hear the dying thoughts of monsters, he still wants to fight along side you because the Big Bad you're after is really evil and needs to be stopped.
Even if this power NEVER spoken of again in game, wouldn't it give a new perspective on things? Now you're killing sentient monsters you can't even understand. Even if you aren't a vegetarian, wouldn't this make you feel bad for Sven? Wouldn't it explain why he acts the way he does? Doesn't it make you feel a little bad for making Sven go through what he does? Maybe you feel bad for him but it's not going to stop you from going out and cooking a bacon cheeseburger at the next cut scene because "Sven made the choice to be a vegetarian because of his life experiences, and I understand that, but that doesn't mean I have to change my ways. I only have to respect his. I will make him bean soup."
THAT is diversity. THAT is the goal. YOU might not have changed anything about your behavior, but you saw something from his perspective and gained a new understanding of what it means to be in his position. And THAT is what we need to want to see more of in story-driven media.
Recently they've been talking about the lack of true diversity in most games, and how more games really need to be pushing this. This culminated in this week's episode about sexuality in games, and a very in depth analysis of the only non-stereotyped gay individual that is not an author avatar or a sexual target for the player in all of gaming: Kanji Tasumi from Persona 4. It's a good episode, and really, the fact that they could only think of ONE character in ALL the games in ALL the world that was gay and treated like a real person really says a lot.
Of course the internet has responded with such thoughtful and well-researched criticisms of diversity in games such as:
- I'm not gay but I don't want to play a gay character because that would make me uncomfortable.
- We don't need diversity, character personalities only get in the way of the real objective of games, which is having fun.
- Sexuality is not important and any game that dares talk about it is wasting it's time.
- Real art never talks about sex or sexuality, that's immoral and dirty.
- I treat homosexuals like I treat vegetarians: they made their choice and I don't want to hear about it, let alone play a game about it.
- Games are not art, we should stop pretending they are.
Internet, are we going to have to have a talk about what it means to be nice to other people?
Okay, here's the thing about diversity that everyone gets wrong. Diversity is NOT about forcing you to physically experience another person's point of view.
Something that I hear a lot of in the teaching preparation field is that we should change our ciriculum around our students. Specifically you hear things like "an African American student is never going to relate to a play by Shakespeare, so if you have a class with a lot of black students, we should only teach the whole class things written by African American authors so those students get it." What they are supposed to say is "students need a more diverse body of work to learn from, not just stuff written by white British men," and that is very true. But the way it often comes off is that they don't think students can relate to any author except the ones that come from the same background as them.
This is a critical fail for diversity. The idea behind diversity is to offer up another view point. Maybe that means reading an author who is not the same nationality as you. Maybe that means having a movie with a cast and plot centered around a country you don't live in. And maybe that means characters in video games that are not white men. If diversity works, you shouldn't even realize it's happening, because it's a reflection of the real world where we all encounter people from different background all the time. If it isn't working... you get token characters.
What diversity is not doing is saying "yeah, see that gay character that you have nothing in common with? You're gonna spend the next 20 hours with him, and by the end YOU ARE GOING TO TURN GAY YOURSELF." Diversity might not even change your opinions about something, but what it should do is give you the opportunity to see something from the perspective of someone else.
Using the example of the "I would never play a game about a vegetarian" thing from above because I think it's hilarious, let's see if I can create a game idea that involves that concept.
Soo, let's make it a fantasy game. With lots of monsters. And since we're playing it from the vegetarian angle, let's make it so every time you kill a monster, they drop meat, or some sort of ingredient for an in-game cooking system. Let's pretend that every time you cook something, it initiates a cut scene (probably only a minute or two) where your party characters sit down and have a meal together. And let's pretend this cooking mechanic is semi-important to the game (like, your characters get too hungry, they won't fight), and involves making different foods to appeal to people's likes and dislikes that you basically must learn through trial and error. I'm sure this is overly complicated.
And let's say you put a magic using psychic in your party. Let's call him... Sven. Sven is polite and cheerful, but he's also not close friends with the main character. They met partially through the game, so you don't really have any connection to Sven, just a similar goal in mind. And just for kicks, let's make him... a member of a royal family. Also let's make his attacks mostly supportive and status-inflicting, so he has very few if any offensive attacks.
Let's say that whenever you have Sven in your party and you cook a meat dish, he doesn't eat it. Maybe he doesn't say anything and just pushes the meat around with a fork. Maybe he hands it right back to the player when you give it to him and says he isn't hungry. Maybe he just disappears from the area because he "isn't feeling well."
Well, if you're perceptive and if you've payed any attention at all to what I said, you would probably pick up that Sven is a vegetarian, but is too polite to say anything about it. Maybe he gets that rations are hard to come by and he doesn't want to sound spoiled. Sven is a nice guy after all, and realizes that he's come from affluence and might come off as a rich brat if he tells you that he won't eat meat. (BTW, this is just me projecting on Sven, not anything that would be explicitly stated in game).
Alright, so onto the diversity and understanding. Let's imagine a mission system that allows you to take on quests with specific characters. It doesn't have to be plot-central. Let's say there is one that the reward will be this magic crystal that will enhance the powers of any psychic that touches it, so you as the player have to escort Sven to the end of a mini-dungeon, let him touch the crystal, and then escort him back. And we'll make that dungeon full of monsters. So you kill a bunch of relatively easy monsters (you being the operative word, Sven just sort of helps you out), get to the end of the dungeon, and Sven touches the crystal and all his stats go up. Hooray! But then something weird happens and the player starts hearing voices.
And then you start fighting back through the dungeon and you, the player, can now understand what the monsters are thinking. And they are thinking very human thoughts. Wouldn't that be unnerving, even troublesome? Maybe if you go to kill a monster, they start thinking "OH NO DON'T KILL ME" or whatever. Then they die and drop their meat.
You get out of the dungeon and things begin to go back to normal, and Sven apologizes to you because he just lost control of his psychic abilities while you were in the dungeon because he got so much power at once. In other word, you were hearing what Sven was hearing, and Sven hears the thoughts of monsters. He says it won't happen again. He also asks you (the player) to not mention it to the other party members, and that even though he can hear the dying thoughts of monsters, he still wants to fight along side you because the Big Bad you're after is really evil and needs to be stopped.
Even if this power NEVER spoken of again in game, wouldn't it give a new perspective on things? Now you're killing sentient monsters you can't even understand. Even if you aren't a vegetarian, wouldn't this make you feel bad for Sven? Wouldn't it explain why he acts the way he does? Doesn't it make you feel a little bad for making Sven go through what he does? Maybe you feel bad for him but it's not going to stop you from going out and cooking a bacon cheeseburger at the next cut scene because "Sven made the choice to be a vegetarian because of his life experiences, and I understand that, but that doesn't mean I have to change my ways. I only have to respect his. I will make him bean soup."
THAT is diversity. THAT is the goal. YOU might not have changed anything about your behavior, but you saw something from his perspective and gained a new understanding of what it means to be in his position. And THAT is what we need to want to see more of in story-driven media.