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.
So re how that applies to games: I think if you're depicting cultures from other parts of the world it's important to understand them well and write them sensitively, and there are several routes to that depending on your available resources. I absolutely wouldn't be as hardline as "if you're in the west you can't make a game set in India or China" - research is important, sensitivity in writing matters, I'd say that if a company can afford historical & cultural consultancy on a culture they're depicting then that's a very good thing to have, and I'd like to see more support for independent developers worldwide to maximise the diversity of stories we're getting. These things will always be complex though - for example, an ethnically Chinese Singaporean or a Uyghur or a dissident from Hong Kong might have views on China and its culture and history that are not generally popular in China, but they absolutely should be able to tell those stories (see also, recent issues around the Hugo Awards). I think what we need to dismiss is bad dominant perspectives, which may correlate with particular groups and types of writer but that's symptomatic more than causal. A focus on telling people they shouldn't write certain things rather than telling them that they should seek support and write those things better, and highlighting people from a wide range of cultures who already are making those ideas work well creatively, tends to be unproductive in my view. The idea that we can turn cultures into these little perfectly sealed bubbles that can only be handled by their true heirs just doesn't make contact with reality very well.
I guess another way to put all that is that "did X have the right to do Y" isn't a question that interests me a lot: this isn't an area where rights and legalistic frameworks apply well, and I'd rather spend more time on "How could this have been built better (more kindly, sensitively, creatively, justly)? Knowing that, what can we build that actually
is better, and who do we need to include to make that happen?"
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?