Racial Ambiguity in Games, Muy interesante Options

[HeartlessCloud]

"Jade Is Black?!": Racial Ambiguity in Games

Pretty interesting article, a topic that I've thought about a couple of times.

[davus0]

Why you find few black characters in games probably goes back to who makes them.

[x_shinigami_x]

interesting i guess.. but i think there comes a point when it makes a difference to actually fully flesh out a persons race in games. like in GTA IV.. the racial background of the antagonist Niko Bellic and the racial backgrounds of all those he meets.. the jamaican rasta, the irish IRA, italian mob bosses, russian KGB.. it certainly adds "colour" to the game.

the problem with racial ambiguity is that it leads to very shallow characters. next we're gonna have sexually ambigious characters where the player plays someone they can't quite tell is male or female.. i dunno bout you, but i dont want that.

[HeartlessCloud]

the problem with racial ambiguity is that it leads to very shallow characters.

Does it? Jade is considered one of the strongest character in gaming, although her fan base is pretty limited because Beyond Good & Evil sold like crap.

[davus0]

I think it is actually one of the more important things about games, part of the roleplaying aspect.

All in all I tend to take an opposite tack from shinigami. While all the little jewels of real world culture are nice I feel like that is little more than a production value these days. It adds color but not real savor. Moreover a game like GTA can have lots of "color" because character development is of no real importance. Moving away from GTA to Final Fantasy, say, you'd find that racial cliches quickly flatten the plot where showing kinds of racial or ethnic influences on the people is a key story element. You can do more with an Italian mobster than a Timber yokel (FF8) because the cliche of the former is real. But it doesn't mean that the device is at heart any different, just that it's had more time to ferment in history.


But I think it is kind of silly to wonder abstractly, Is Jade black or Asian; is Dumbledore gay? IT is like a parlor game of thinking who you would cast in the movie version of a book. It's not in the original material so it's just this pastime for fans exploring a so-called game or book universe.

[mavrick_45]

everybody's pink and squishy on the inside

[newbiesucks]

Just ask the creator of the racially ambiguous Jade.. LOL