Is Catering To Women, Homosexuality and Minorities Restricting Game Developers' Creative Freedom?

[Qwark]

Psychotic said:

Qwark said:

One individual or group might believe his view/point is superrior to that of the artist (which makes the game,) but that doesn't say it actually is. The artist must produce within the boundaries in the law, but not including a race in a game isn't by defenition racism or discrimination, unless that person says I didn't put a female gay black etc. in my game because I hate them. In this case the artist remains superior since he has the power to do whatever he thinks is best for the game. I f a certain individual is not going to play it, that would be his loss as sometimes forcing a certain character in a game negatively affects the story and reviews resulting in more then one thousand less copies sold.

If the artist simply says this type of character didn't fit in my vision of this product, he shouldn't be (profesionally) critisized for that, that some action groups do, that is there right but an artist shouldn't be in any right obligated to bow for them and addapthis work to their vision. Imagine a God of war with censored boobs or a partly black cast in lord of the rings or partly white Africans in Resident Evil 5 (oh wait they did do that). By adding things that seemingly don't belong there, you get kicked out a game which sucked you in at first. Sure later on you get sucked in again, but why should we get kicked out in the first place, an atmosphere must seem natural at all times. Having some races which don't belong somewhere is almost  as bad as putting a rainbow and colourful flowers in a Bloodborne area.

if we take lord of the rings for example a black elf, or even Aragon, Boromir, Frodo being black would be disturbing at fist, we might grow to love or hate them but at first everyone would be a bit dazzled for the first 10 minutes, which is something an artist shouldn't want to. Games are eventually an art form and at no point art should be restricted to political corectness which would limit the hard fought freedom of western countries in which most devs are making games anyway. So even if a group might think they have to by law and otherwise they are discriminating, we can still say they are luckily not. 

I can agree with everything in the first paragraph. But only a very small minority of people are accusing developers of racism, homophobia etc. right away. Most simply question why some design decisions were made. For example the Tomodachi Life fiasco - most people were simply asking a very rational question why would the developers not include same-sex relationships in a game that is designed to mimic real-life relationships. They had to specifically decide not to include them and it was actually more work to exclude them than to include them. I think asking why the hell would they do that is justified. If they gave any acceptable anwer to that, I would even give them the benefit of the doubt, but they didn't. And as things stand, it looks like they exluded them, because they didn't consider them "kid-friendly", the implications of which are... bad.

The second paragraph is more questionable. I don't think anyone "forced" Capcom to add white people to RE5's Africa - they simply saw the reaction was negative and they changed it. Maybe they didn't care enough to stand by it? Some people didn't like it, it wasn't important to the designers, so they changed it. If it was a big deal to them, they wouldn't. Are you saying an artist can't change his or her work in a minor way if the reception is negative and the change doesn't impact anything at all? BUT I do agree that there is nothing inherently racist about a white guy killing a bunch of black dudes in Africa and the uproar was out of proportion. But.. what did you say about not assuming my opinion was better than someone else's?

I think that only racists would be dazzled by a black Aragorn - I don't know if his skin color was ever mentioned in the books, maybe we just assumed he was white anyway.

BUT THE MOST INTERESTING THING IN YOUR POST WAS:

It's strange that you think artists shouldn't be limited by people moaning about race (in RE5)... and then you do want artists to be limited by people moaning about race (in LotR). The only difference I see is... the people moaning about race in RE5 aren't... you.

Depends if there was a lord of the rings in Africa or brasil or another fantasy series in the medieval I would have a issue with a white protagonist even in most greek movies I think a white guy doesn´t fit to well he shoudl at least have a light toned skin. Why, because it doesn´t fit in the fantasy not because one is white and the other is  black. I also have issues with the white jesus sonce obviously he would look arabian like considering he lived in Israel and god is Morgan Freeman ±p.

I would have issues with historic inaccuicies which limit the possibility to get sucked up in a fantasy, like those awful english speaking germans in WW movies. So I took them more as an example which sounded fitting but those wheren´t the smartes choises after all.