On Tokenism

Hidden among Adrian’s tirade against Polygon for the mindcrime of daring to care about SJW issues, is this chestnut.  This is not a particularly new argument, but Adrian captures it more eloquently than most.

Note that I am not sure that adding “strangers from the strange lands” to the game would solve anything for the chronically offended. Based on everything I learned about them in the last year, and I learned a lot, if you put a person or a few from any non-white race, they would be called “token characters”. It is the Token Minority trope after all — and, as we know thanks to the megaphoned dilettantes, tropes are bad, mmkay?

The only way to please the outrage factory would be to have every race, every gender, every minority imaginable represented equally. As long as the hero, Geralt, is not a straight white male. And whoever replaced him, they would certainly not be allowed to be nicknamed The White Wolf.

If you think I am exaggerating, then you haven’t been paying attention lately, have you? I so envy you — and I’m not even kidding.

TLDR: We shouldn’t care about adding diversity to games because it’s hard.  And it’s hard because you can’t make those blasted Social Justice Warriors happy anyway.  I’ve seen many variants of this discussion point over the last few months – often in much more profane terms, I proffer, and as such have had much time to reflect on this point.  Here are several thoughts that spring in counter to thoughts similar to these.

1) Tropes are not inherently negative.  Tropes are simply tools in the toolbox for writers to use.  Some tropes are inherently negative, and some are positive.  If a concept is so frequently used it is considered a trope, then there is the risk that your storyline will be considered cliched – sometimes massively, if those tropes are heavily overused (women as damsel, for example, or henpecked husband are both massively overused in our culture).  However, all stories rely on tropes on some level, because viewers need some anchors of familiarity to act as a foundation as the writers explore the truly unknown in whatever experience they are attempting to deliver.  That being said, few things delight a viewer more than when a trope is subverted.  Tropes are fun to play with, and anyone who comes away from cultural criticism saying that ‘tropes are bad’ is clearly not paying close attention.

2) If your writers think that adding more diverse characters is hard, you should hire better writers.  The writers I’ve known (and I’ve known many as a BioWare alumni) find creating rich, interesting characters who defy expectations to be one of the most interesting and satisfying parts of the job.

3) The supposed difficulty in pleasing those who care about these issues has been massively overwrought, particularly the baloney about how all classes, races and other minorities need to be treated ‘equally’.  While I’m sure they’d be happier with a 50/50 split, most feminists were quite happy with the Avengers, which had one (arguably a token) female member, but were unhappy with the second Avengers movie, which had twice as many female team members (as well as a very strong female non-superhero character in the Asian doctor), due specifically to how one storyline was treated.  Most racial critics were fine with Idris Elba’s portrayal of Heimdall – in fact, the ‘chronically offended’ in this case were the racists trying to defend the purity of European mythology.  Yes, there will always be extremists on the far ends who demand the impossible.  These extremists exist in every direction, and part of being a designer is learning the art of synthesizing this feedback, and deciding what alterations to make and what doesn’t fit with your vision.

4) Will your work continue to be examined and criticized even if you make a good faith attempt to be inclusive?  Well, of course it will.  Culturally relevant works are ALWAYS criticized, and criticized endlessly, as the creators and consumers of ALL forms of content continually try to push the state of the art forward (where ‘forward’ is in a direction that suits their own personal tastes).  This is not limited solely to ‘social justice’ issues.  Two of my favorite video series on the net right now are pretty much exclusively criticisms of films — and they’re great, even when they fillet their subject matter.  Check out  Every Frame a Painting (be sure to watch his video on Bayhem) and CinemaSins (Everything Wrong With Pacific Rim is a good place to start, but be warned, if you get started you could spend a long time down that rabbit hole).  These are critiques that mercilessly critique movies, in some case movies they love.  Critics will ALWAYS examine culturally relatively films throughout whatever lens they view as important.  If they aren’t examining your work, it largely means you probably haven’t created something culturally relevant.

5) Whether or not adding more diversity to your games is the right thing to do is ultimately up to the creator, but for the most part, not doing the right thing because its difficult and people might whine at you is not a very good reason.

6) Adding more diversity, and ensuring that diversity is consciously well-thought out and well designed- is probably the right choice if your game aims to reach AAA numbers.  Simply put, the budgets for AAA games have been rising faster than the populations that consume them.  If gaming doesn’t expand to reach new markets, we will see way more companies like Konami decide the economics just make no sense, and that they’re better off making iphone games.  Yes, yes, artistic freedom and all, but at some point if you’re making a game that costs 100M+ or more, you have to have a business model that makes sense in terms of making that money back.

The movie studios have already figured this out, which is why (for example) high-budget blockbuster movies nowadays always seem to find a way to involve incidental Asian characters or wanton destruction of Asian landmarks – see the Transformers film, Battleship, Pacific Rim, Avengers 2 just for starters.  It turns out that those markets will shell out to watch that for the same reason that Americans never get tired of watching the Hollywood sign or the White House get blown up.

This need to expand markets is why more and more game companies are inviting professionals like Anita to consult, in hopes of helping to broaden the reach of these games, not just within this country but abroad as well.  There are very good reasons why having more diverse representation of minorities in media is good for society (“Ellen”, for example, was a landmark event in the erosion of opposition to gay marriage and gay rights), but at the end of the day, there’s a very sound business case for it. “The Witcher 3” may be an excellent game, but it also dramatically limited its potential reach with its design decisions.  Simply put, the alternative to broadening the market for these hugely expensive blockbuster games is to increase their price (i.e. by getting more brazen with DLC and microtransactions than they already are, for example), or for these game to start shrinking dramatically in scope.  As one might imagine, most designers would rather sell more games to more people than pursue the other two options.

Now then, designers working on niche games will likely find this less important.  If you’re only spending a few million on a game, you can narrowcast on an audience and tailor your experience more narrowly to that audience, in many cases providing a superior experience to that narrowcasted audience.  By way of example, Lifetime Television and Spike TV make much narrower content for much narrower, highly specialized audiences, but they also make that content on much tighter budgets than NBC or Fox.  Even then, though, caring about demographics may matter more than you think – when narrowcasting, it’s much harder to break into a market where everyone is already competing.  If minor tweaks that don’t fundamentally hurt your core market or core design message can possibly expand your game’s reach, increasing the success of your game and the viability of your studio, why wouldn’t you do so?

People who complain too vehemently about tokenism on either side should really read up on the inclusion of Franklin in Peanuts.   I’d say more, but really the article is an excellent examination of how representation is important to members of a minority, and yet how challenging it is to do it well.