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dougeff wrote:It was going to be more subtle...

The ninja is rescuing his 'girlfriend', if he took off his mask and revealed to really be a woman, I was going to leave it to the imagination what 'girlfriend' means.

I think that's often the best way to do it. Ambiguity leaves room for people not to be offended in any direction and still lets you show what you want to. One of my favorite things about Shovel Knight is the open-endedness of the player's relation to Shield Knight. Hell, you don't even know who Shovel Knight is under the armor.
...which is also why the gender swap mode was a really bad idea on Yacht Club's part.
Anyways, I find that most of the time the sexuality (sexual identity? gender identity? I'm not up to date here) of a given character in a given game doesn't ever come into question. If the sexuality is ever brought up unprovokedly it can leave a sour taste in the player's mouth whether he's bigoted or not. See Borderlands.

I'm glad this topic is being brokighet IP.

Here's a (IMO) good article on skin colour and biased dynamic range. How do you think it compares the palette choices made for third/fourth gen consoles?

WheelInventor wrote:I'm glad this topic is being brokighet IP.

Here's a (IMO) good article on skin colour and biased dynamic range. How do you think it compares the palette choices made for third/fourth gen consoles?

The comments section on this article is hilarious. I have no idea how much I believe any of these people. Conversations about prejudice are so impossible.

Reminds me of a Star Trek anecdote re: the Orion girl in the pilot. Majel Barrett was used to test the makeup, and apparently the photo lab wasn't informed that she was supposed to be green, so the camera tests kept coming back colour-corrected. The studio assumed the makeup was the problem and kept making it greener, until finally someone thought to phone the lab and ask what the deal was...

oops, sorry for the foreign autocorrect in my previous post

Believe it or not, I was considering doing a Metroid reveal at the end of my game, to show that the Ninja is secretly...some kind of minority, perhaps trans-gendered or gay or something, but I still feel it's a bit disingenuous.

Since I'm a transperson, i might be able to help you with an insider perspective and info if you decide to go for it. For starters, i'd say lightheartedness isn't wrong in itself (it's actually an in terms of representation pretty needed balance to all the tragic trans portraits, if done well), while uniformens use of trans identities as novelty often comes across badly, especially given the current conditions of everyday life for many of us. Is that what you feel hesitant about? I'd like to detail this but i should wait until i'm back at my computer. Can't realt speak for other minorities even though i'm in the lgbtq scene.

I wonder if the yellow slimes behind keyboards feel that they are underrepresented by green and blue slimes...

I understand the complaints about Race, and I'll get to that later, but about sexual identity... pardon me but this is fucking stupid. Even FIRST NAME is somewhat irrelevant for a good portion of NES protagonists. Who the hell cares if the guy from Contra is gay? What relevance does that have to a game where the amount of exposition given to the player is "You're a guy with Guns shooting bad guys and aliens up up down down left right left right B A select start gogogogogogo". It feels forced because it is. Maybe in an RPG but why should the sexual preference of the character be it's main personality feature?

About Race: an ok question to make, but it feels empty when you do it just to check boxes a la Power Rangers. This is even worse if you force it to a setting alien to the "race" of the character. Why not design something in the proper setting or make a creative new fantasy one where characters actually have a purpose to be?
Not only that but how do you represent proper Race representatives with so few resources? Maybe Lance from Contra is actually Armenian. Or Polish. Or even South African? Who knows. How do you make sure you don't offend anyone?

End of rant.

Samus could have been anyone until she took her helmet off.

dougeff wrote:

tepples wrote:Is this just about race and sex, or also about sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability?

I would say 'all of the above'.

Then I guess that gives me a leg up with this Pygame tech demo.

(Oh wait, that might have been insensitive.)

Guilty wrote:Anyways, I find that most of the time the sexuality (sexual identity? gender identity? I'm not up to date here) of a given character in a given game doesn't ever come into question.

"Gender identity" is the sex role with which you identify, especially if it is trans (not matching the gender assigned to you at birth). "Sexual orientation" is whether sex that you prefer as a romantic partner matches your own.

I guess it might take a gay writer to write a set of believable gay cutscenes if you want to keep it respectful and at the PG-13 level of subtext, rather than the NC-17 level of its anagram.

But seriously, on the NES, if you set brightness on a scale from 0 to 6, there's usually enough contrast if two adjacent colors are two units apart:

• 0: $0F
• 1: $01-$0C
• 2: $00, $2D, and $11-$1C
• 4: $10, $3D, and $21-$2C
• 5: $31-$3C
• 6: $20

So how would $0F outline, $17 skin, and $2x clothes look?

tepples wrote:leg

Pffaaaahahhaha.

Puns aside you also bring up the subject of palettes, which gets me thinking as well; colors are a commodity on the NES. Balancing the available sprite palettes can be a tricky act if characters have multiple skin tones. Having a few villagers on screen at once could be a problem unless each one only uses three colors.

I am a fan of the art style seen on many gameboy color games; especially Capcom's Megaman Xtreme/2 and the Zelda Oracle games: Each character gets only three colors and they are all of the same hue. It may be monochromatic but something about it just appeals to me.

...but that kind of gets confusing when you try to apply ethnicity to it. I mean, when a character's skin is cherry red its more or less impossible to tell their family history. Given the resolution it's also difficult to tell whether or not they have ears. Neither of these are important to the game though, at least in the case of Zelda or Megaman. I can't think of any games where ethnicity would come into play, unless the game is purposefully set in a social climate that it matters a lot. I think that video games aren't a great place to talk about race or genders/sexualities though. I mean, that seems like the kind of subject that doesn't lend well to interactive media... Maybe I'm narrow minded though.

rainwarrior wrote:Samus could have been anyone until she took her helmet off.

...and then she stripped as a reward for the player. Although likely corrected in later entries, the original Metroid is a poor defending example of gender representation in games.

Also, I've frequently referenced the randomly generated player-mechanic of Lizard as inclusiveness done right... and the similar randomization in Super Russian Roulette (where everything except the character's complexion is randomized) as a blindly missed opportunity. That has a large part to do with why I backed Lizard and not the latter.

Punch wrote: ... Even FIRST NAME is somewhat irrelevant for a good portion of NES protagonists. Who the hell cares if the guy from Contra is gay? ...

I don't think anyone would make the argument to state the orientation of a character in a game like Contra, but in a game where romantic interest is overtly presented (even if it is the uninspired trope of "save girlfriend"), sexual orientation is often one of the small handful of traits implied about a protagonist.

Punch wrote:This is even worse if you force it to a setting alien to the "race" of the character. Why not design something in the proper setting or make a creative new fantasy one where characters actually have a purpose to be?

Does there need to be a purpose for race? How many settings are really alien to even a moderate range of skin tones? What settings would you consider justify the white unless proven otherwise?

dougeff wrote: ... [Power Rangers] made the Red ranger Native American, the Black ranger African American, the Yellow ranger is (a girl) from East Asia ...

It most definitely was a problem, and is referenced pretty regularly. Key and Peele had a fairly entertaining skit about it as well. Also,the new movie changes everything you mentioned except the pink player being female. Using it as an example of "newly created fictional characters should default to white if the creator is white" is not really a valid argument though.

dougeff wrote: The ninja is rescuing his 'girlfriend', if he took off his mask and revealed to really be a woman, I was going to leave it to the imagination what 'girlfriend' means.

Is the ninja's girlfriend just a pink ninja? If so, giving the player the option of selecting the pink or purple ninja at the beginning, having the other one kidnapped, and never revealing gender of either would probably be the most interesting way to handle the subject, especially considering that purple has no implied gender association. You could take a step further and also use another gender-neutral color, such as yellow (pretending the NES actually had a yellow in its palette) for the second ninja.

Or, the player could play as the purple until the ending, where in the ending, the purple character is "kidnapped" and the player controls the previous hostage for 2nd quest (higher difficulty level, palette swap for character playthrough). This could actually be a rather interesting way to turn the trope on its head.

M_Tee wrote: Is the ninja's girlfriend just a pink ninja? If so, giving the player the option of selecting the pink or purple ninja at the beginning, having the other one kidnapped, and never revealing gender of either would probably be the most interesting way to handle the subject, especially considering that purple has no implied gender association. You could take a step further and also use another gender-neutral color, such as yellow (pretending the NES actually had a yellow in its palette) for the second ninja.

Love Story did some of that?

M_Tee wrote: Or, the player could play as the purple until the ending, where in the ending, the purple character is "kidnapped" and the player controls the previous hostage for 2nd quest (higher difficulty level, palette swap for character playthrough). This could actually be a rather interesting way to turn the trope on its head.

Not a bad idea.

M_Tee wrote:"newly created fictional characters should default to white if the creator is white"

There's kind of a Morton's Fork here, between "only has creator-type" and "cultural appropriation"...and "properly" including a culture not the creator's costs time/money/influence, and may still bring cries of cultural appropriation, even if

M_Tee wrote: Also, I've frequently referenced the randomly generated player-mechanic of Lizard as inclusiveness done right... and the similar randomization in Super Russian Roulette (where everything except the character's complexion is randomized) as a blindly missed opportunity. That has a large part to do with why I backed Lizard and not the latter.

Now consider if/when the generator spits out what amounts to blackface, a result not very possible with the small, indistinct faces in Lizard.

WheelInventor wrote:Here's a (IMO) good article on skin colour and biased dynamic range. How do you think it compares the palette choices made for third/fourth gen consoles?

Well, I feel it was less of an issue for the fourth generation, but the limited palettes of the NES don't lend well to visual diversity in any way. The palette situation for the game I'm currently programming is very tight. I need a palette for skin tones, and two palettes for pants unless the players are going to be the same colors and nearly indistinguishable. So that's three palettes to which I'm permanently tied. If the characters varied in ethnicity, then that's four palettes for the entire game. As it is, even, three fixed palettes and one variable seems like it will be hard to manage. But I suppose Contra did it.

Another issue with NES palettes are that a black person, if drawn with an outline, would need to be outlined in black, or lack a color for shadow, as far as I can see. This would limit backgrounds to being non-black. A lot of NES games tend to use a lot of black in the backgrounds to hide details and seams.

I wouldn't imagine that anybody here is fundamentally opposed to including people of other races in their games. There are undoubtedly considerations from a development end worth discussing. Since this topic began I thought about doing some mockups of different ethnicities if someone doesn't beat me to it.

tepples wrote: But seriously, on the NES, if you set brightness on a scale from 0 to 6, there's usually enough contrast if two adjacent colors are two units apart:

• 0: $0F
• 1: $01-$0C
• 2: $00, $2D, and $11-$1C
• 4: $10, $3D, and $21-$2C
• 5: $31-$3C
• 6: $20

So how would $0F outline, $17 skin, and $2x clothes look?

Out of curiosity, here are the possible results using the nestopia palette: (Also, Mario's sprite is simply used as a commonly available example here. This is not an argument for changing Mario. I couldn't care one way or another about pre-existing characters. The discussion for the creation of new NES characters, which many of us are doing.)

Actually, #27 is dark enough that it can be interpreted a number of ways, save for any conflicting official box art. Lode Runner is a good example of this. In the above, the middle palette is what was used in LodeRunner. Either of the side palettes would be acceptable as well, IMO.

Below are some alternate palettes I would consider for Contra, the middle of which use #27 as a skin tone base, the bottom of which is likely what I would use if I had to make a call.
I seem to recall reading an article (sometime around 2007~2009?) about designing playable characters with a vague ethnicity, so that the largest range of players can identify with them, and #27 seems to be that point on the NES.

I will do a proper reply once I get to an actual computer with keyboard but needless to say the sprite work you made is awesome, M_Tee. That really helps to visualize the topic at hand.