nesdev.org

Well, drag me out and shoot me, hoss. Ironically, I wouldn't be the first (or second) person in my family to be shot in a street.

I'll also have to add that to my mental note of Garfield's depth of character: hates Mondays, likes lasagna, takes naps, and is a Trump supporter, apparently.

Getting back to being insufferable: multiculturalism was a pillar of my undergraduate studies, has long been a vital issue in my occupation, and moreover, is ever-present in my day-to-day life as a member of a multicultural family. So, I've got some dogs in this fight, so to speak.

As creators of globally-spread media, like it or not, we have a responsibility in the material that we produce. We pretty much have three choices: intentionally spite that responsibility (those that do this are loud enough about it that I feel it doesn't even warrant further discussion), ignore it (default to white male, perpetuate tropes, etc.), or take it into consideration (and likely produce more inclusive, and more unique, products while doing so).

What I can't understand though, is why one would feel that it's "politics" to even consider this, or how you could respond to "Have you thought about depicting non-white people in your game?" with "Thinking about that is nonsense that would kill my joy and apparently result in a not-lighthearted game."

I've thought about it and I believe if I was a person of color who enjoys retro games, I'd probably be, not offended persay, but annoyed at the lack of representation in the medium. It's easier to imagine why things were this way during the production of commercial NES games. Hell, I don't even think it was common to see a mainstream film at the time with a black protagonist without an equally important white partner.

On the other hand, I think there's a flipside worth considering, and that's the difficulty in creating a game for the NES, and in writing characters and stories which are unique and good. To be fair, I've loved video games as long as I can remember, and I feel like a video game with a good plot is few and far between. Even the games with better plots, imagine taking the video game control out of it, and do you really think you would read that book? I can't think of many which I would. And I don't think this is a bad thing, because the fun in a video game is in playing it, and I think often times the most effective video game plots are solely made in service of gameplay. Contrast this with the modern gameplay trend of interactive movies where you get "games" like Heavy Rain wherein the gameplay consists of responding to button prompts to call your son's name. Give me a break.

So if someone makes a generic platform game that uses a lot of (potentially offensive) tropes like, a white male protagonist rescuing a damsel in distress, but the gameplay is solid, would I think they should be chastised? Definitely not. How many people try and fail at making a platformer and how many don't even try at all? This forum is about NES development, and I think the effort should be congratulated here. There are surely forums where a person could go to get chastised for not being politically correct if they wanted.

I think the topic is beneficial to bring up as a constructive comment of something to keep in mind. Even if the only personal validation you might have for including more diverse characters is potentially reaching a wider audience. What I wouldn't want to see is either side of this discussion putting up walls. I don't think it's helpful to deride someone's hard work if they don't necessary have diversity in their project. Also though, I don't think it's helpful to be offended at the suggestion of including more races/genders, as long as it's a suggestion. We're all here just to simply give one another suggestions on actualizing our own projects, not pressure one another in any way.

M_Tee wrote:and is a Trump supporter, apparently.

What?

The only thing I have to say about character diversity is I hate when something is trying to be realistic, but it also unrealistically tries to include an equal number of males and females and tries to shoehorn in every ethnicity on the planet.

However, for fun, (these games often don't try to be realistic anyway) if I ever made a beat em up or a fighting game, I'd want to have some female characters that aren't the fast but weak type, and have a couple that are more well rounded, with possibly even a heavy character. Women can use steroids too.



Apparently, a new comment came in...

I just looked at Heavy Rain. God... And it got a 9.0 from IGN. I would have thought they'd criticize it for having "too much water."

Apparently, it's one of the dozens of PS3 games to games to get a "remaster" on the PS4. Funny thing is, I actually kind of like the look of the PS3 version better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oADuwnGQBi8

You know what I think is hilarious? Games seem to be less inclined to use pre rendered cut scenes, but newer games have so many QuickTime events that they could easily be made Dragon's Lair style. The games are big enough for Christ's sake.

I liked Heavy Rain.

What other things do you like, rainwarrior...?

Espozo wrote:The games are big enough for Christ's sake.

They could be even bigger on one of these:

This has to be the pinnacle of gameplay though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5GoDAsYMUs
There are reasons I still play NES games.

darryl.revok wrote:This has to be the pinnacle of gameplay though:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5GoDAsYMUs

At least the Infinite Warfare trailer is still racking up dislikes. Don't forget to contribute.

What I can't understand though, is why one would feel that it's "politics" to even consider this, or how you could respond to "Have you thought about depicting non-white people in your game?" with "Thinking about that is nonsense that would kill my joy and apparently result in a not-lighthearted game."

My sentiment exactly. Disney, as an example, and especially when Disney himself lived, often got vigourosly defended on the basis that critizising 'child culture' was political and joy-killing. However, disney products in itself is as political as it gets. There is no neutrality or special authenticy or sacredness to entertainment or cultural products designed for children, it just sometimes appears so because we see everything but the point from where we look. If that point of view happens to correspond with the bulk of popular-cultural production, that generates the perception of 'neutrality' or 'non-politics'. Entertainment is inherently not-neutral. Everything is a positioning, whether intentional or not. What is arbitrarily seen as 'political' shifts from time to time as the discourse moves around.

I'm agreeing that homebrewing should be personal, just as a rule of thumb in writing courses is to use one third of self-experienced material in your fictional work. But a good writer also thinks about the impact of the written word. Of course, we sometimes overcredit the content of a medium - people have a certain agency to act upon cultural artifacts and messages and make what they want with it - but that is also limited by discourse, reoccurence and hegemony and material or other structural relationships; what is readily and easily thinkable, and what requires more effort; and is thus structurally unfavoured compared to the established order of things for the time being.

An interesting case with skintone in NES era games is that it very well reflects the media landscape of the time. People with dark or black skintone are restrictively (and in the case of nes, i think, only) represented in athletic contexts, especially boxing, or as in the many street beat 'em up-styled games, are tied to a street gang cliché. The problem here is that these are the only canals of reprensentation in videogames of the time. This is a schoolbook example of power through representation.

Another point i want to make even though it may seem obvious when spelled out: Skintone is not equal to ethnicity. That can be used to an advantage when designing characters.


On a half-related note, i train roller derby. It's really cool to see how that sport has evolved from the 70's era of tv showmanship to a true sport (ie not staged), mainly by women, for women, and with a healthy diy/punk ideal and strong focus on athletism, through the organization of WFTDA. If anyone wants to make the first good NES game about roller derby (there are two, but one is plain bad and one is a beat em up rather than anything like the sport ever was), i have a note block with design ideas, on-track experience with the sport itself, and the will to draw graphics. As a member of a wftda league, it might even be possible to try and get it officially sanctioned, like Jam City. Oh, and on the note of climbing out of the 'weak but fast' trope: Here's a poster of top skater Suzy Hotrod (nsfw because of 'artistic nudity'). Strong like hell, balanced and fast. One look at that pic is all i need to up my training motivation. Edit: we've not only got noms de guerre - we've gotwar faces, too.


Edit 2: Some more elaboration on the concept of neutrality vs politics in nes era games.
I enjoyed strider and rush'n'attack as a kid, and still do. Today, i can see how they were fueled by and in themselves reinforcing an already unhealthy russophobia, but in the context and direct aftermath of the cold war, they must've seemed pretty harmless or neutral in comparison, especially as the ones targeted was a very distinct 'they' which the west-block didn't readily associate with. Kind of in reverse, the game 'guevara' was cencored to 'guerilla', even though gameplay made it pretty obvious it was about the cuban revolution. Likewise for contra -> probotector (even though aliens are behind everything). I know this is sometimes attributed to the german market, but you also need to weigh in that if the real-life contras caused controversy in the US, it had an even more bad ring to it in Europe. These are all examples of games using fresh political events as a backdrop (or in the case of contra, just a little), though. But i also think they show how fragile neutrality as a concept is.

I don't feel the need to participate in a reams-of-text-pissing contest as is so popular on forums like these, but I'll just say this:

I have in fact already thought about creating a video game about a black man. Was I thinking about diversity and how black people feel about their current representation in video games? No. It was because I grew up thinking this particular black man was really awesome, and would make a great video game character. Therefore, it was genuine. I didn't have to write reams of text thinking about the issue first as though it was the most important thing in the world. The idea that video games would have been about white male protagonists for all eternity unless we write reams of text about it until we're blue in the face is, itself, nonsense.

I acknowledge racism is a real problem in the world. But thinking about it, diversity and multiculturalism, for me personally, maybe not for you, doesn't have a place in video games. I've been able to preserve my childlike joy in playing and creating video games which is totally devoid of anything an adult would think about---and I intend to continue to do so. You're all quite welcome to take yourselves overly seriously and introduce volumes and volumes of text about things totally unrelated to video games if it makes you feel smart, accomplished and moral, however, more power to you.

M_Tee, I hadn't realized at first you were the artist working on Isolation. That game looks great---keep up the good work sir. Don't mind me and my opinions, I'm just one person and a very strange one at that. I don't fit in anywhere, maybe I should be the star of your game.

If you by 'reams of text pissing' mean my attempt to consolidate a few persistent lines of thought within the tradition of cultural studies, that's one thing. It's just a view on these matters, nothing else. And i think they have much to do with video games, since one of the objects of cultural studies is to approach popular culture and look at it at different angles. I don't think the joy of playing video games gets destroyed simply by testing video game phenomena against various thoughts. It wasn't meant as an attack on your or anybody's personal preference when making games.

Some may feel these things are important, some not. For me, the actual question isn't if it is, but what to do if you feel it is. What should be done is always trickier to answer than what can be done.

Thanks for the compliment. Perhaps in the future, not stating that someone should be murdered for starting a conversation that didn't particularly interest you could be a step in the right direction for introductions.

That said, I appreciate you taking the time to join the conversation. I'd love to pick your brain and find out why, exactly, the topic disgusts you so. I'm also sure that for a game you've been developing since childhood, that you have put more thought into character design than you're leading on. I'd be interested to hear that as well. But I don't know how to converse with somebody when their input boils down to "the topic shouldn't be discussed" and then insults the people discussing it for doing so.

I don't necessarily feel the need to justify my character choices with paragraphs of text, although I definitely do put paragraphs of thought into them. As I said, I'd feel it'd be irresponsible, and at least bad creator practice to do otherwise.

For example, many of us may default-to-white-dude when it comes time to design a character. Pyronaut is an example from myself. Optomon had pitched the idea that the character should be "a working joe, not predestined hero" and I really enjoyed that concept. My first design I pitched to him was a young-Ron-Howard-inspired goofy kid (early 20~something). In retrospect, I might have gone back and changed it, but he had expressed a particular affinity for it, so I stuck with it. I also still like it because in script, we make him very non-heroic, far out of his element by having to fight, and I think that turns enough tropes on their heads to justify it. I did, then, make sure the supporting NPC cast was racially diverse, and named them in a way that showed a cultural melting pot of a future, again, important to me personally, as when I have children, their names will reflect their varied parentage.

Also, you can ask Kevin to confirm, but everything I say is in reams of text. I have no idea how he sifts through it all

M_Tee wrote:Thanks for the compliment. Perhaps in the future, not stating that someone should be murdered for starting a conversation that didn't particularly interest you could be a step in the right direction for introductions.

If his PMs are anything to go by, it's best to simply ignore Gradual Games. He's kind of an ass.

M_Tee wrote:Also, you can ask Kevin to confirm, but everything I say is in reams of text. I have no idea how he sifts through it all

That's not surprising, creative types always have a lot more to say, to convey information to others. Their "artistic vision", so to say, even in a simple conversation. It's the same as body language, when speaking.

As for diversity in my games? It's generally quite minor. There's more cultural diversity as you would travel from country to country, with foreigners more likely to show up in or near the capital city of any given country. That's my rule of thumb for balancing this out. At least, in an RPG setting.

Most of my work has furry characters, so any human culture is much less relevant.

I do try to approximate which characters fit a given "culture", going by where the actual animals live in the real world. So that's a thing, too. Certain species also get variations based on each new culture I incorporate into the world, which is also fun to play around with.

For a human character, I'm less-likely to do this, just based on how the internet has been, lately.

Of course, sexually on the other hand, my work is quite inclusive. Including a ton of gender, and sexual orientation differences, to appeal to a wider audience.

Espozo wrote:Can we have striptease with a male character please?

Does a futanari character count?
If not, I've still got that covered in my own current project, with some male NPCs.

Drag wrote:More crotch bulge plz.

Dude, I've totally got this covered! Un-cut, and uncensored!

Alp wrote:

M_Tee wrote:Thanks for the compliment. Perhaps in the future, not stating that someone should be murdered for starting a conversation that didn't particularly interest you could be a step in the right direction for introductions.

If his PMs are anything to go by, it's best to simply ignore Gradual Games. He's kind of an ass.

Says someone who quit an entire community after someone complimented you on how cool your game is that it could be funded by kickstarter. You're ridiculous, and I was calling you out on that. I accept being called an ass when someone's as nuts as you are. I still greatly admire your work and hope you release it eventually.

I love when people put emojis at the end of insults, I guess to avoid being insulted back? Another anthropomorphic animal lover that isn't Khaz is also a fan of it.

Alp wrote:Including a ton of gender, and sexual orientation differences, to appeal to a wider audience.

Alp wrote:Does a futanari character count?

I'm not sure that's appealing to a wider audience.

Also, I've never had any problem with GradualGames.

perhaps appealing to a more varied audience. or an altogether new one, like blizzard did, which caused plenty of hate from people who thought they were/world be the target audience. Surprise: blizzard wanted to broaden its market.