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Forum Games - The Beer Cellar! / Re: Word Association
« Last post by Tusky on March 19, 2024, 08:10:48 AM »Fried
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on cultural appropriation in game design - would you say the same rules apply? I'm no expert on the Total War series but I know the Three Kingdoms game - set in 3rd and 4th century China - was seen by some as an attempt to woo Chinese gamers. Did Creative Assembly, which is based in the UK and Australia, have the right to make this game? I don't know if they hired experts from China itself, but is this compulsory these days?I think that's a topic slightly for another article, but broadly my view is that we think about cultural appropriation too much in terms of appropriation, as if this was about ownership systems, and not enough about harm. The problem of making a game about, say, Chinese history as westerner is not so much that China has sole ownership of that history, it's more that if you do it without thinking about it you're likely to repeat common lazy & bad tropes about China. I think there's also an argument that it's wrong when the economic & cultural benefits of using cultural tropes disproportionately go to people outside that culture, when the people inside a culture don't have the chance to do that. But again, that's really a question of creative platforms, opportunities and resources not a question of initial ownership, which is a thing that just doesn't apply well to cultural symbolism because cultures are inherently fuzzy, messy, things.
Another thing for game designers is keeping the mechanics consistent with the setting. I played one board game where the castles had a negative defensive value - they only served to make the attackers stronger! It lost me at that point.Yeah, that would seem to defeat the point, both literally and figuratively. Why was that decision even made ludically? Why call it a castle at that point?
"It's a remarkable thing, your grace, but the researchers do seem to have created something that allows it. Travelling through time, I mean."
"We hadn't thought it possible. They've actually built a proof of concept?"
"Yes, a hyper-toroidal space folding in three other dimensions: it moves everything within through time at a consistent rate."
"Ha! And what does one even call such a device?"
"I think... I think they call it a 'universe', your grace."