I honestly don't know what shocked me more: Hearing the title, "Enslaved: Odyssey to the West", or seeing the box art depicting two white people.

I mean, what is the proper approach in that situation? The obvious solution is to name your game something else, but no, we can't do that; that would be self-imposed censorship. Do we make the game sensitive to the issue, elucidating the real-world horror of the slave-trade for a younger, ignorant generation? Well, no again, because such a game could easily be misconstrued as offensive, most people would rather just forget about the subject, and I suspect that such a game would not sell very well.

So f*ck it. White slavery in the future it is.

This is not what I really want to discuss. It's not even a good introduction. A better introduction would be this video, as it was the impetus for me to write this piece. It's from a series of critiques that, I feel, sets a new intellectual standard for the discussion of videogames, and I fear that I may be linking to them and rebutting their arguments with increasing frequency moving forward. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you.

If you took the time to watch the video (please do), you might have noticed that they approach the rather broad subject of diversity from a sociological perspective, and, to a lesser degree, a business perspective. I am here to supply the perspective of a consumer, and, to a lesser degree, a writer trying to figure out how to incorporate all of the proposed 'politically corrective' changes into a cohesive narrative structure. Trust me: It's not as simple as they make it out to be, and I aim to tell you why.

First up: Gender discrimination. They say, "it needs to go." I say, "it doesn't need to go right now." Specifically, we are talking about the skimpy outifts and gravity-defying anatomy that are usually tallied up by people who are embarrassed to be caught playing such games as "sex appeal". Let me tell you something: I come from a family of feminists. I have a great deal of respect for women. But, at the same time, I'm a guy. I like the sight of exposed, supple flesh as much as the next person with a Y chromosome. We are biologically programmed to seek out the thrills of sex and violence, and it is no coincidence that sex and violence are videogames' bread and butter. It's not just the objectifying of women in videogames that is alienating them - it's the blood, gore, and the whole sub-culture of high-tech, instant gratification, complete with its own masonic language and behavioural norms. There are so many social appurtenances to gaming that need to change before we can even BEGIN to talk about including women, it's staggering.

I don't buy games that push sex for the same reason that I don't buy porn in a supermarket. My guilty pleasures are MY guilty pleasures - no one else has the right to know what I like to do in my spare time. I suspect that there are a lot of gamers who feel the same way, and that this demographic will force some changes in videogame-marketing strategy. I see movie-marketing as the most probable model moving forward. There is certainly no shortage of movies that revel in T 'n' A, but the movie industry as a whole is less exclusive to male consumers than videogames are. Why? It's a little thing called "discretion". Put the exploitative crap at the back of the store; stop plastering **** front-and-centre on the box art. For me to advocate a paradigm shift towards maturity would not only be unrealistic, it would be hypocritical, but for the love of god guys, stop shoving it in our faces, would ya?

As for having a "feminine perspective" in a game's narrative, the video suggests the application of the Bechdel test: To have a feminine perspective in your story you must have at least two female characters who at some point talk to each other about virtually ANYTHING other than men. The problem with applying this test to a videogame is that the player has their character - ONE character - from whose perspective they view the whole story. Exceptions are made only rarely, and only in extreme circumstances. (We are in agreement that the Mass Effect games have noteworthy narratives, yes? Consider this: Only four times in ME1 and ME2 put together have we ever departed from Commander Sheperd's point of view for longer than 10 seconds. That includes cinematics.) If we leave our character too often, for too long, or for paltry reasons, we begin to lose our emotional connection to the character, which is fatal for a form of storytelling that demands so much of our time. What this means is that we cannot cut away to a chat between two NPC's unless they are a) talking about the main character, or b) saving the world in the main character's absence, in which case I should hardly imagine there would be much dialogue at all, resulting in a distraction that proves nothing. What about a female main character, you ask? Sure, that would work, but then you risk alienating male gamers, and you would lose more than you would gain. Even if you don't mind playing a female character once in a while, imagine if every single game you played solved the "feminine perspective" problem in the same way - with a female main character. It would get old, fast.

In the video, they acknowledge the difficulties in applying the Bechdel test to videogames and suggest modifying it, but they give no thoughts on appropriate revisions. To me, this feels like a cop-out: "We propose to solve the problem by proposing that other people argue about it until they find the solution for us." So here's my suggested revision: A female character saves the main character's life, and they maintain a professional relationship. No shagging, no snogging, and no flirting. A narratively significant, in-no-way sexualized female character. This seems to me to be in keeping with the spirit of the Bechdel test. How would you change it?

Second: Ethnic diversity. I find that white people are conditioned our entire lives to feel guilty and awkward whenever this subject comes up. I'm sick of it. I have never owned a slave, I have never refused to hire someone on the grounds of their race, and I have never treated a black friend any different than a white one. And these "African American", "visible minority" labels are only compounding the problem. Calling me white is no different than calling me tall or short, fat or thin: All that those words do is describe a person's appearance - nothing more. Ultimately we are all the same, and attaching too much significance to a description is the first step towards forgetting that. White people are white, black people are black, but first and foremost we are all 'people'. This seems so simple to me that I cannot fathom why writing ethnic characters into one's story is still an issue.

Let me explain how offensive characters get written. I call it the "Caricature Cycle": 1. The writer feels bad that they only have white people in their story. They then set out to DELIBERATELY write an ethnic character into it ("deliberately" is in caps because this innocuous indicator of intent is actually the root of the problem). 2. They write in an ethnic character, but their ethnicity doesn't play a significant role, so it might as well be another white person. The new character is just a "token". 3. If the writer hasn't stopped himself by now, he's an idiot. Granted that he's an idiot, he's not going to stop himself here. He will invariable use other idiots' ideas about how non-whites behave. By the time he's writing "dayamn," and "fo' sho'," we have another offensive caricature, courtesy of another jackass who thinks that he can write.

Here's a lightly battered and deep-fried golden morsel of succulent writing advice, on the house, sans snooty Maitre d': You want to write an ethnic character? Here's how: You see all those white people running around in your story? Pick one of them (not the sidekick), and make that character brown. That's it.

That little twinge you just felt was your inner racist shouting "No! Don't make one of your good characters into one of them! You'll ruin it!" Do yourself a favour; b*tch slap that little punk 'til he shuts up. We all have that spiteful little bastard somewhere deep in our psyches, indecently proud of a simple melatonin deficiency. The trick is to keep him on a short leash. ...Alternatively, that twinge could have been creator's pride. You've created your characters, you're proud of them, and altering them seems somehow perverse. They feel like real people, and you can't change a real person. Well, they aren't real, you can change them, and if you don't want to change them, don't. There's no law that says you have to put a black guy in everything you write. As long as you're careful not to get caught in the Caricature Cycle, pretty much anything you do is okay.

Third: Sexuality. Okay, this one has me annoyed. Listen, nobody wants to play Brokeback Mountain: The Game. Making homosexuality the central thrust (pun definitely intended) of the narrative is a non-starter. The logical way to approach this is with characters that are, you know, just gay – they don't try to hide it; the subject simply never comes up.

I'd like to illustrate my point with a rather silly yet jaw-slappingly obvious example: Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem from Army of Two. Sure, lots of people have made the joke that they're gay but honestly, have we seen any evidence to the contrary? They are big, macho guys who, despite the obvious excesses of testosterone, never show so much as a fleeting interest in the fairer sex. They're happy with making rather more contact with each other than is strictly necessary. The nature of their relationship seems fairly clear to me. Do we need to have a sex scene before it counts? 'Cause I gotta tell ya, I know lots o' gays, and I have never seen them f*ck. I assume they do, but they're very private about it (like any other normal person would be). The bottom line is, if you want to figure out someone's sexual orientation, you just gotta pick up on the little things.

And this is where the matter gets infuriating: When you see them walking down the street, homosexuals are indistinguishable from heterosexuals. If at any point in a story a gay character's sexuality becomes relevant, it immediately consumes the narrative, or at the very least gets us pointlessly sidetracked. Trying to write an openly gay character into a story that has nothing to do with sexuality is just a bad move that smart writers will avoid. Period.

Geez, how am I going to sum up this marathon of a blog? I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is too easy to try too hard. If you wanna write, you need experience. You need people experience. Writers need to like people (understanding and interaction are optional). Seriously, the key to writing is to fall in love with the human race. Once you have that, gay straight, black, white, male, female...it all just falls into place. Setting yourself an arbitrary quota for diversity just distracts from creating sympathetic characters and compelling conflicts. I'm not saying that it's cool to have a homogenized cast – I'm saying that a good writer will instinctively branch away from such uncreative characters. So how about instead of setting a bunch of standards, we just get some decent writers making our games, eh?

(I wrote this post some time ago, but never got around to posting it. By now, the video people have probably expounded upon their original points in further videos. It's worth checking out. I just had to post this anyway because, well, come on, it kicks ass.)

[tags: diversity, enslaved: odyssey to the west, extra credits, exploitation, women, Bechdel test, mass effect, ethnicity, caricature, sexuality, writing, characters, narrative, army of two]