Twilight of the White Boy Club

ubarose wrote: It’s easy to determine if there is enough diversity. Without changing the age, body type or the manner in which the humans are portrayed, reverse all the genders and races in all the art, and then think about if you saw that game, without knowing anything else about it, would you think you were the market for that game, or would it give you pause. Would you maybe think, “Oh, this is a game for black people?” Or this is a “girl’s game.”Be honest with yourself.

It's an interesting thought experiment, but I'm not sure it addresses (if it was meant to address) my notion that rigid representation might find itself painted into a corner with the participants eventually turning on each other.

Because a fuzzy analysis like, "Just reverse everything and explore your feelings," will inevitably lead to feelings like this:

Publisher: "Okay, we had 10 white guys, but now we have 5 white guys and 5 black guys."
Gamer#1: "Not good enough."
Publisher: "Okay, how about 3 white guys, 2 white girls, 3 black guys, 2 black girls."
Gamer#2: "But where is the transgender representation?"
Publisher: "Okay, how about 2 white cis guys, 1 white trans woman, 2 white cis girls, 3 black cis guys, 2 black trans women."
Gamer#3: "Why no Asian representation?"
Gamer#4: "And why one more guy than girl in each race combo? That's misogynistic."
Gamer#5: "I couldn't help notice no one is disabled among the ten, why not?"
Gamer#2: "Trans suicide rates are sky high, it just makes more sense to depict them than any wheelchair-bound differently-abled person."
Gamer#3: "Asians have virtually no representation in boardgaming, we deserve way more than just being evil pawns in WW2 Pacific wargames!"
Gamer#6: "What about mental illness? It's a big issue!"
Gamer#4: "I would settle for a mature, black, transgender woman with mild depression, as long as she was depicted using a wheelchair."
Gamer#3: "It doesn't solve the no-Asians issue, and I'm not backing down! I'm tired if this non-inclusive stuff!"

And then they all bicker amongst themselves, because everyone has a different idea of what the "right" answer is, because people are being taught that if their sincerely held beliefs & feelings aren't being wholly satisfied, then the entire system needs placed upon the bonfire of the unacceptable transgressions.

TL;DR
One person "being honest with their self" might conflict (possibly substantially) with another person being honest with their self.

The slippery-slope argument has been used to justify the status quo for centuries. It's the king of don't-change responses. I don't know if that's overtly your intention, but it is the result of that sort of thinking.

At some point you set a new baseline and see what happens.

fightcitymayor wrote: TL;DR
One person "being honest with their self" might conflict (possibly substantially) with another person being honest with their self.

Two hypothetical gamers MIGHT have a problem in a future scenario. In the current situation, gamers DO feel disenfranchised, ignored, and marginalized.

I'd rather the publishers took steps to correct issues that do exist than sit on their asses due to scenarios that might happen.

I skimmed through the images for Last Aurora on BGG, and my serious question to Michael is: How it is different from Warhammer 40k? GW's games are often lauded on this site. Does Games Workshop get grandfathered in?

I know the White Scars have an Asian aesthetic, the Salamanders are now strangely black (obsidian rather than Black), and the Dark Angels originally had a Native American vibe before going Medieval Europe, but a family photo of the Primarchs and their Legions doesn't seem any different than Last Aurora. The Sisters of Battle and Silence wear body-accentuating armor.

I don't post on here much, so I will give a little background of myself and then a couple more comments about this topic.

I am a white American that has lived ~40% of my life abroad. I currently live in Indonesia. From an American perspective, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, etc. are "Asian", but that is not the perspective in Asia. One of my Filipino friends likes teaching in Indonesia because he feels it is about the only country in Asia that gives Filipinos any respect. Even in Indonesia, there are various cultural and ethnic groups, and there can be friction between them. When I was teaching in Korea, some students made fun of another guy because his skin was darker. I honestly could hardly tell the different between him and the other Koreans. I am not saying this to defend racism, far from it. I mention these things to say that the American perspective of race is not the same as the rest of the world.

If an Indonesian designer makes a game (like the pretty good Stockastic [an excellent game name]), do the characters need to include white and Black people, or can they all be Asian? Do they have to include the different ethnic groups in Indonesia? If I get board game art made by Indonesian artists for my fantasy world, can I have all of my characters look like Indonesians, or must my fantasy world have demographics that mirror the USA?

Questions like these posted by others above seem to have been met with criticism (slippery-slope, resistant to change, etc.). I am all for inclusion. I have had people from many countries sit around my table at my house to enjoy games, Bible studies, and Thanksgiving dinner. I have played soccer with people from many countries and ethnicities, sometimes as the only native English speaking person on the field. I ask these questions because I really would like to have some answers (particularly as I do have a game that I think is worth putting on Kickstarter, after more playtesting).

IDK the answer to Whoshim's question, but I'm glad he asked it. This is a challenging topic for a lot of reasons. A perspective from Indonesia is most welcome.

It is true that the concept of race and ethnicity varies from country to country or culture to culture, and each of these also grapples with diversity in respect to their own ideas.
The thought of American concepts being pushed here has some merit. I think Europeans have the same or similar issues to Americans.
As boardgaming is being more global, clashes of ideas are bound to happen.
This is actually where people should have conversation and learn from each other.

When I was younger, we learned that, quite simply, if you want people to address their own prejudice and learn that it is not ok, then you have to show diverse representation to them as normal.
If you see more people of various skin colors or other types of groups being represented as just part of the group, they begin to be accepted as part of the group.

Ask a Papuan.

When I was in college, one of my friends was from Denmark. He told me that he was considered unusual for liking garlic. Garlic was a food of immigrants and outsiders, strange southern Europeans who didn’t belong.

'Sleeping Gods' looks to be a great example of a diverse range of characters and by all early accounts is a fantastic game too.

WH40k is very bad about this, yes.

n815e wrote: When I was in college, one of my friends was from Denmark. He told me that he was considered unusual for liking garlic. Garlic was a food of immigrants and outsiders, strange southern Europeans who didn’t belong.

This is not the case anymore But that being said there is a lot of racism in Denmark aimed at people from the Middle Eastern region or more specifically moslems - some of the right wing parties in parliament are pretty vile.

But to stay on topic. I'm firmly of the school of opinion that we don't have true equality until you could have a game or movie or parliament with only, say, women and noone would think twice about it. Because that's how it has been for white cis-men like me for centuries. Excluding women and minorities has been the norm for so long that doing things differently requires an effort.

However, one of the challenges is the massive amount of backlash any attempt to change status quo is being met with. I know it sometimes seems like "the woke patrol" (and I include myself here) is overly critic, but it is nothing compared to the outrage if you have a women or a black person in a game or movie where the "actually don't belong historically". I've seen again and again how even the smallest discussion of something woke-related can be twisted by right wing pundits or by the media to be some sort of attack on freedom of speech or Danish culture. If someone dare to say "maybe we should make more stories with female leads" then the immediate answer is "do you want to prohibit filmmakers making movies about men?" As an example a newspaper in Denmark asked the municipality if they could consider changing stop lights to some picturing women. Some answered that yes, that could be something they would consider when they should be changed, and then it was written as this huge exposé about how woke politicians wanted to spend tons of money to satisfy feminist or some such. Every time someone dares to question if we could maybe be more inclusive, maybe show more diversity, or maybe not sexualize women, it's met with a backlash of people crying about PC police, censorship, and so on. Every time. That can make changing things difficult, but it also shows, I think, why even small changes like not just having white dudes in your game art can gradually make a difference.

wsmcneil wrote:

jason10mm wrote: Very true, and they are also a tiny minority.

In Nunavut, the Inuit population is over 30000 out of a total of 35500, or over 85%.

In the Northwest Territories, the the Inuit, Metis, and First Nations population are nearly 21000 out of a total of 41000, or 50%.

In the Yukon, the the Inuit, Metis, and First Nations population are over 15000 out of a total of 35000, or nearly 45%.

In Alaska, the American Indian and Alaskan Native population, including the Yup'ik, Iñupiat, and Aleut peoples, are 15% of the population.

In Chukotka, the Chukchi, Chuvans, Evens, and Yup'ik peoples are 35% of the population of 50000.

In Sakha, the Sakha, Evenks, and Evens peoples are 54% of the population of nearly one million.

In Nenetsia, the Nenets and Komi peoples are over 25% of the population of 44000.

These populations are not a "tiny minority". This takes five minutes to figure out. You seem to be inventing easily-disproven assertions to justify your arguments against diverse representation in board games. One has to wonder why.

Those are all great places I'm sure but none of them are in Scandinavia, or even Europe, which is where I'm guessing an italian set his "northern countries" game, so their demographics are irrelevant.

It's kinda hard to get the sort of racial breakdown statistics for scandinavian countries like it is for America but every source I've seen puts what we would consider a "white" ethnic group at 90+%. Even the Sami can look quite caucasian. If this game is actually set in Iceland then the inhabitants are virtually 100% white I think. Heck, the game could be set in Italy with folks trying to get to a ship to take them to Africa and the ethnicity would STILL be like 95% white. But I agree, if this game was set in Greenland then I'd certainly expect a very different ethnic breakdown, just like if it were set in China, Ecuador, or Jamaica. But it doesn't appear to be.

Regardless, if the benchmark is "significant visible minority in the player facing avatar options" then clearly this game falls short. Although I do think the red haired "co-pilot" has quite olive skin and probably could represent a POC and certainly there are a variety of other characters that appear to be POC as well, just not on the leader/co-pilot cards.

So a game art diversity test, kinda like the Bechdel Test might be helpful. Not that the test itself is particularly useful but at least if you run it and pass you are probably on the right track, if you fail then either you are straight up "euro-trash dudebro" or your subject matter is restrictive in some fashion.

But I'm curious if they had re-themed Last Aurora to "Escape from Wakanda" and just did a palette swap using stills from the Black Panther movie if anyone would have raised an eyebrow at the monoethnic demographics (assuming Claw and Agent Hobbit weren't shown on the cards). All the leaders being the, IIRC, all male tribe leaders and the co-pilots being the all female guard force (though the rhino and gorilla tribes didn't seem to have any women so maybe Wakandan politics, as represented in the film, is more complex).

mads b. wrote: However, one of the challenges is the massive amount of backlash any attempt to change status quo is being met with. I know it sometimes seems like "the woke patrol" (and I include myself here) is overly critic, but it is nothing compared to the outrage if you have a women or a black person in a game or movie where the "actually don't belong historically".

I can only speak for myself but for me a lot of the "backlash" (which is far too strong a word for how I feel about this issue) is how it is presented. It is all stick, i.e. "too many white men in this game, bad bad bad!!!" instead of "the art is very generic and won't appeal outside of white males" and no carrot "Hey this game over here has great art diversity and a setting that makes the diversity feel organic, let's praise it and just not talk about the games we don't approve of at all".

We are all familiar with how media, since time immemorial, uses a bridge character that represents the target audience (for us european originating english speakers that's white folks) to enter into a 'foreign' environment. You get Matt Damon in "The Great Wall", Tom Cruise in "The Last Samurai", etc. Is that device unnecessary now? I'd argue that it is. We can have an "Apocalypto" without the need to have a Conquistador to frame it for us, for example.

Even if the creator and production are euro-centric, the theme/setting can be wholly devoid of those influences. But the need for some sort of connection to the KNOWN is incredibly strong in my opinion and makes it a challenge to depict settings/eras/themes that aren't tied to european history/culture in some way.

Thus we get multi-ethnic shows like that Bridgerton series (well, at least bi-ethnic, not sure if asian, arabic, or indigenous peoples are represented) but hey, it's still set in tired, over-used, well worn England using historical characters that are familiar to the intended audience. Progress? Perhaps. But it is anemic shallow progress at best, which may be the only way forward for now.