Twilight of the White Boy Club

the_jake_1973 wrote: I would like to see what a fantasy adventure game developed from an Indian point of view would look like. Would that play different than something done in America or Europe? A tribal expansion game in sub-Saharan Africa maybe? Even seeing stuff like this in my mind, it is all still entrenched in Western concepts.

Yes, THIS! Though I'm not interested in Euros so much at this point. Looking at my shelf the only thing I can see that isn't Anglo centric is futuristic (Battlestar Galactica, Alien Frontiers) or abstract is Ghost Stories. That was designed by a bunch of Europeans. Admittedly my collection isn't too large though.

the_jake_1973 wrote: I would like to see what a fantasy adventure game developed from an Indian point of view would look like. Would that play different than something done in America or Europe? A tribal expansion game in sub-Saharan Africa maybe? Even seeing stuff like this in my mind, it is all still entrenched in Western concepts.

One of the reasons I seek out Japanese boardgames is that they have very different design sensibilities from American or European games. In fact, it's one of the things I enjoy about boardgames: It allows me to see works by cultures I barely get to know or enjoy.

Think about it. How many Eastern European, German or Italian media do you consume? Chances are you never see any movies or listen to any songs created in these countries. You might read a book, perhaps, but that's about it. But boardgames by them are not rare.

@ubarose Thanks your response, and that matches my feeling on the topic. (It is good to have an Indonesian designer, with Indonesian artists and Indonesian characters.)

Concerning the main point of the article about the end of the white boy club, I do think that there are some challenges that will take time to overcome. As an example, US Men's soccer is not that great, despite the size of our country. We joined the party late, and we don't have the large network of trainers and schools and whatnot to generate top talent. I think that other countries face the same thing with regard to board games. With the internet and the relative accessibility of games, this is not as big of a hurdle as it could be, but great designs require playtesting, and that means that there must be some sort of community.

Additionally, and on a related note, there is the problem of wealth. Simply put, much of the non-"white" world is poor. Brazil is crazy about pauper Magic because it is what many of them can afford. A board game here in Indonesia is a huge chunk of most people's monthly incomes (minimum wage is less than $300 a month here). There are almost certainly more board gamers in the Dallas/Fort Worth Area (population ~7.5 million) than in all of Indonesia (population 270 million). There are only a handful of board game stores here.

So I think that there are some factors out of our control as boardgamers when it comes to having new voices in the field of design.

Concerning representation in board games, I do still have a question though. As I said, I am a white American. I have designed a game that I would like to set in a little fantasy world I have designed. This fantasy region is fairly small, and the human population has been living there for a long time. Even if the people had come from different races initially, by this time most people would look similar. I don't care what their skin color is represented as, but it just seems logical to have all of the characters in the game have a similar color. As I am living in Indonesia, I would like to just have the Indonesian artists make all of the characters look Indonesian. How would you all feel about that? I don't think there is a clear answer in the article, having reread it.

Finally, I would also like to address why I mentioned the first paragraph. Michael directed a harsh attack at an Italian game for sins that some of his favorite games also have. It also seems a bit hard to hold other cultures to our cultural standards. Additionally, it is still relatively recently, in the scheme of things, that Italians have become "white" in America. Italians faced a fair amount of discrimination for a while in the US.

Concerning the use of "he", I do think that companies should be doing a better job of that. I don't know anything about the game company to know if they have an in-house translator or not, but that fault may not lay at the feet of the designer or publisher, if they are not fluent in English. (On a personal note, I have been using "she" by itself for a long time, both in my papers and in my games - you can check the rulebook and cards for my pnp games on BGG [same username] if you are interested.)

@Sag I'm not sure what "Ask a Papuan" means. It seems a rather snarky reply to an honest post. I have seem racism against Papuans here in Indonesia. My post stated that other countries are dealing with these issues too, though they use different lenses to categorize people than we do in the US. I think that racism is wrong. I am a Christian. I believe that I ought to love even my enemies, and I try to live by that (thankfully I don't think I have any personal enemies). I also look forward to Revelation 7:9: After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

As far as my personal relationship with Papua, my church here supports a doctor there who gives free healthcare. We also support refugees that have come from places like Afghanistan and Iran. Our pastors are businessmen who don't make any money from the church, so over 50% of the money the church receives goes to these ministries. My wife and I contribute a fair amount of money each month. However, I have not been to Papua, and I am not sure that any of the Indonesians I have met have been from there.

I am a quite confused by your short and snarky response, as I respect you as a thinker and writer, and you are the main reason I made an account at this site.

Whoshim wrote: . As I am living in Indonesia, I would like to just have the Indonesian artists make all of the characters look Indonesian. How would you all feel about that? I don't think there is a clear answer in the article, having reread it..

Given the title of his opinion piece, i don't think it would be unfair to say that Barnes' would have no objection if Last Aurora had an all black (or asian, or indigenous) player roster. I doubt he would have mentioned the gender division at that point either but he can comment on that.

I think the split opinions about the criticality/seriousness of this issue stem from the POV of being a reviewer versus just a player. I will never see even a fraction of the games the staff here do, so I don't have the perspective of row after row after row of "white designer/white folk in the art" outrage that they do.

It's kinda like long time film critics that are forced to watch hundreds of hours of Michael Bay popular blockbusters that all have the same explodey muscley punchy skimpily dressed damsel style to the point that they throw up their hands in disgust and start aggressively pushing art house fare about a blind thief trying to plan heists while living with an amnesiac cop trying to solve said heists and they are both dating the same girl (who has face blindness). Dramatic romantic comedy hijinks ensue!

I'm very curious about the forthcoming standards and just how many "big" games get passed over because of them. I suspect real publisher games won't have much of a problem because they are already looking for broad appeal. I think it will be the KS darlings with a very small creative team and a tightly focused theme that will "fail" at this since they usually have a target sales number in the hundreds to thousands, quite frankly they just don't need to do much more than appeal to a very specific core audience.

Gonna be a tough go for historic games though. The "i dont need historic accuracy (with respect to player character ethnicity) in my historically based games" isn't a widely held opinion yet, i don't think. I doubt we will see an asian Shaka Zulu, an aboriginal Ghengis Kahn, or Pakistani Alexander the Great in any game anytime soon. Nor will we see many "non-historical" characters in a game with those time period settings mix it up like that either.

Have you had the opportunity to play a lot of Shaka Zulu themed games lately? Has that come up? Did you play Zulu or the Mhkize? The Sithole? The Thuli? Did you just go military? You'll get rolled by the Qwabe unless you wait for the late game.

I don't think this game exists. Why doesn't this game exist?

More likely the game was about the Voortrekkers or the British. Maybe you get to be Michael Caine's character!!

The whole point here is that even other cultures are viewed through this prism of whiteness and maleness, even when it doesn't make sense. You should be tired of it. It is boring and limiting.

I want to recommend a book (I knooooow). THE NAME OF WAR by Jill Lepore. (She's got her own issues, but this one is good). It's ostensibly about King Philip's War, but it's more about why on earth it's called King Philip's War. His name wasn't Philip. It's Metacomet. And his secret name may have been said aloud, which prompted the whole thing in the first place. We'll never know, because Cotton Mather and John Winthrop decided how the world works and told us. Even the other guy's name is in the dustbin, because it doesn't match up with Cotton's and John's narrative. Why is that the ONLY narrative?

The whole idea of games is to explore the space of possibilities. Create a limited set of rules, put it in a setting, and see what's possible. The argument of a lot of folks in this thread is that the settings and the rules of games can be expanded to include SO MANY MORE possibilities. Don't view this as taking away, no one is losing anything. It's just being more inclusive.

Whoshim wrote: Concerning representation in board games, I do still have a question though. As I said, I am a white American. I have designed a game that I would like to set in a little fantasy world I have designed. This fantasy region is fairly small, and the human population has been living there for a long time. Even if the people had come from different races initially, by this time most people would look similar. I don't care what their skin color is represented as, but it just seems logical to have all of the characters in the game have a similar color. As I am living in Indonesia, I would like to just have the Indonesian artists make all of the characters look Indonesian. How would you all feel about that? I don't think there is a clear answer in the article, having reread it.

On a per game basis, the progressive goal is to maximize diversity in representation in each game. But with respect to the big picture of heavy over-representation of white males, it also considered acceptable for an individual game that over-represents any group except white males. This may feel like an contradiction due to the shift in focus between a single game and the overall game market. Just picture 5,000 games a year getting published these days, and the fact that a large majority of them still present mostly white male faces, and then try to do something different than that.

jeb wrote: Have you had the opportunity to play a lot of Shaka Zulu themed games lately? Has that come up? Did you play Zulu or the Mhkize? The Sithole? The Thuli? Did you just go military? You'll get rolled by the Qwabe unless you wait for the late game.

I don't think this game exists. Why doesn't this game exist?

More likely the game was about the Voortrekkers or the British. Maybe you get to be Michael Caine's character!!

The whole point here is that even other cultures are viewed through this prism of whiteness and maleness, even when it doesn't make sense. You should be tired of it. It is boring and limiting.

I'm probably thinking most of the leader icons in games like Civilization. AFAICT they try to depict the specific leader visually as historically accurate as possible while placing them in a totally ahistorical (or not, depending on the scenario i suppose) situation. Why have historic leaders or even civilizations in those games at all (disregarding the name)? But i have "Zulus on the Ramparts" (though i don't recall if Shaka is actually represented) which, as you say, has the player in the british POV.

Seems simple to me. These types of games (4x, wargames, etc) have a varying level of actual historic research behind them. But they all usually recognize and play to the pop cultural hooks in the intended audience. So Civ games pull from a lot of well known cultures that really just differ in a few nonsense stats and technologies for a game that requires none of it but where the audience expects it.

Wargames have the problem that in order to have ANY historic accuracy they have to draw from some type of source, and that source has to be in a language the game dev can read. So we get a lot of euro centric (and i throw rome/greece in there) game topics because that is what is written about and translated into english, italian, german, or french so the game dev can use it. A european had to witness and record the conflict or at least translate a book about an unwitnessed (by europeans) conflict in order for a version of it to enter our vernacular.

I'm sure there are entire rooms of chinese military history with which to base games on but if most of it hasn't been translated into a european language then its kinda hard to use, or everyone just defaults to the few translations that are available. Which is why we see a fair amount of Japanese military history stuff but not Indian (pre-victorian england) chinese (pre-ww2), vietnamese (pre-vietnam war or at least french involvement), etc.

But since the bar to entry for wargames is very low there is probably a wargame about any and every military conflict for which we (western civilization) has any knowledge of, whether or not a european force was involved.

Are there a bunch of awesome Ming Dynasty board games in China? Probably. But if they don't get translated into english its a tough sell to get an american/european to play it. And if most americans/europeans are ignorant of the details (and let's be honest, most EVERYONE is ignorant of the details to most EVERYTHING) then it is a hard sell for a western dev to theme a game on a topic largely unknown to the intended audience, even if the die hard jaded reviewers wish it so

To circle back around to Last Aurora. If that game was set in the southern tip of South America with accurately represented Chileans/Argentineans escaping north, do you think it would have done even a fraction was well on KS? Probably not, unless it was set on the Faulkland Islands, FUCK, white people are EVERYWHERE!! (that is a joke people, we are just talking games here!)

jason10mm wrote: Are there a bunch of awesome Ming Dynasty board games in China? Probably. But if they don't get translated into english its a tough sell to get an american/european to play it. And if most americans/europeans are ignorant of the details (and let's be honest, most EVERYONE is ignorant of the details to most EVERYTHING) then it is a hard sell for a western dev to theme a game on a topic largely unknown to the intended audience, even if the die hard jaded reviewers wish it so

I'm reading this one day too late to ask my local staff as the Chinese New Year holiday has just begun. I know there are countless video games, novels, movies, TV shows and other media about both the Three Kingdoms period and the start of the Manchu dynasty. Hell from Journey to the West alone there are two Monkey King movies on Netflix not to mention a video game on GamePass right now. There is enough in that epic sprawl that every Chinese speaker watched in the mid 80s to fill an adventure game a la LotR Journies in Middle Earth. I don't recall seeing anything more complicated than card games about those conflicts but even that was in Essen a few years back. Board games just aren't really a thing over here at all.

But. . . all that it would take is for a second generation American from Chinese descent to get the design bug and we would see a Three Kingdoms board game. I think the problem, and this is what some folks here are alluding towards, is that the market is oversaturated with white designers creating white games. Between that and the lack of diversity in presentation it makes the space unwelcoming.

Hell, a dry Knizia game about the Dragon Boat races would be a simple filler card game to pull off. So why doesn't it exist? Is it the lack of designers, the gatekeeping of publishers, or the lack of interest in the market?

I suspect it isn't the lack of interest in the market. Except for peaks of interest in zombies most people are willing to try new things.

While I am not a Kickstarter aficionado, I get the sense that it isn't a sales platform for inexpensive dry Euro games. And listening to a few interviews with some designers a decade back or so it seems the publishers will push themes on otherwise agnostic Euros. So this pushes my vote to gatekeeping from the publishers.

jason10mm wrote: its a tough sell to get an american/european to play it.

That’s because there aren’t any characters in the game that westerners can relate to.

Sagrilarus wrote:

jason10mm wrote: its a tough sell to get an american/european to play it.

That’s because there aren’t any characters in the game that westerners can relate to.

Most certainly that is an issue I've mentioned before and is pervasive across all media. But all it really takes is a few cross-cultural events to light the fire. For example, there are oceans of japanese centric non-european oriented games, because that culture is well represented in western minds. Just how accurate they are is questionable, but in video games at least they can be wholly domestic products just ported into english and i certainly remember Milton Bradley's Shogun game from the 80's so its been around quite some time.

So i don't see why a Three Kingdoms game couldn't do the same, in fact i have seen a few (one of the total war games IIRC). I'm sure Borg will do a Commands and Colors:Sun Tzu given enough time and even a modicum.of interest.

I don't see why there isn't more variety and diversity on KS. I would have thought that by now there would be a thriving indie scene churning out ziplock bag games (like what the old Victory Point Games used to do) by the dozens with a million different themes far removed from "Two-six europeans and maybe an american go to war/farming/brewing/zombie hunting/aviking etc."

But i think board games (as we know them here) are just not a thing, AT ALL, in many other cultures. So to expect them to suddenly jump in on this foreign leisure activity just to make stuff for our amusement is a tall order. So to hold publishers responsible to finance games to try to create a market there in order to foster future game design is lot to ask of what are mostly small companies with thin margins.

www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/21149/wa...resistance-1937-1945

Sort of proving the point here, this is one of the few major attempts at the Chinese Civil War that saw big release. Made by, if memory serves, a Singaporean person of Chinese descent with access to Chinese language sources.

Was poorly developed and crashed and burned re: sales, i believe. I have a copy of it for novelty of topic reasons.

I could name a dozen poorly developed American games that crashed and burned. What does this prove?

Warriors of Japan is a game by a Japanese designer about an era in Japanese history, and it sold well in the U.S., particularly in light of its publisher's well-known incompetence with product promotion.

If anything, I think this conversation, well off topic has just proven the original poster's point -- a game of Chinese or other "foreign" origin likely needs characters that are relatable to the market where it is being sold. Without that they don't gain traction. This is precisely the OP's point, that modern board games should attempt to relate to a broader segment of the population.

I appreciate this thread has more or less worked itself into one individual holding court, and I shouldn't even bother to participate. But good Lord, recent posts indicate the wisdom of the original thesis.

My point is that there aren't many games on a historical event pretty central to 20th century history, and it was produced by someone with more access to native language sources in Singapore and not by some white guy. Representation in game design leads to different subjects, etc. I was supporting the original thesis. The poorly developed part was just exposition about how it turned out, since I happen to own it.

edit: to be clear, in lieu of that sort of the more aspirational situation, I completely agree we can at least reflect diversity in characters and art.

I've played, and been overwhelmed by, most of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. I really like them, but the console format ends up bleeding my interest away. I'd like to see that ported to cardboard.

Dynasty Warriors would be a cool IP to explore in the 'games-with-pounds-of-plastic-minis' segment. And, yes, I can hear so many of you groaning at the thought of it. LOL

Borg did a Samurai Battles in the C&C range and the Medieval C&C tackles, in part, Byzantine conflicts. Perhaps further expansions to the Medieval C&C will move east to India and other parts of SE Asia. There doesn't seem to be any reason that, given the amount of current C&C product out there, that a fan made mod of the ruleset could be made for Chinese conflicts.