| wilco said: Having not played the game I can't say whether Sarkeesian is exaggerating the issue. She certainly makes it sound as if ALL the npc's are white. For historical accuracy I would expect at least a small smattering of non-whites, maybe a few pockets of asian communities, but yes, mostly white. On this point I actually take issue with something Sarkeesian said in the review. Having a trans gender being "normalized" in that time period doesn't make sense. I prefer honest portrayals over idealized ones. I liked the fact that Black Flag didn't shy away from the race issue in that game, that was honest. I would prefer syndicate to be honest with their portrayal of minorities as well, but that is just me. |
The issue there is that if there were (and may well be) pockets of darker skinned npcs or foreign npcs they would be unlikely to display them in the video for fear of disproving their topic line. My issue with the series is that they have, multiple times in the past, been shown to cherry pick portions of gameplay, strip the events of their context to imply ulterior intents, and in some cases splice in audio and try to pass it off as occuring naturally in game.
"Normalization" of a trans gender npc may well gain favor with her but it's inaccurate to the game, she points out that the story of the game and the notion of fighting against the templars isn't exactly realistic either, but then neither is robin hood but they still go out of their way in robin hood films to portray characters and environments correct to the period.
So i agree that the portayal of trans gendered being normalized isn't accurate, but in the end it essentially boils down to nit-picking.
I feel her videos would hold a lot more weight if the context-trickery and off hand audio splicing didnt happen, and that she focused less on ragging on games and more on improving them, as her twitter feed each time a new game is released, along with her partner johnathan is one of questionable negativity each and every release, often ignoring the reasoning for the things they find issue with, or giving the developers/designers the benefit of the doubt.
