Opinion: Cultural influence does not preclude diversity

June 12, 2015
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Whether you’re a triple-A dev or a dungeonmaster putting together a campaign for friends, research is one of the most fun parts of making a game. You find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of fascinating stories, histories, travelogues and more. Perhaps you’re reading physics papers to help with a sci-fi game, or you’re reading encyclopedia entries on an ancient civilization to help with historical recreations or fantasy.

The most blessed thing about it all is that the most seemingly innocuous little fact can send you on a creative blitz that fills in your game’s landscapes. One of my D&D characters clicked into place when I stumbled upon a certain line in the work of Immanuel Kant.

It’s a commonplace and normative experience in the world of both game design and gameplay to adorn one’s self with a pastiche of research. Sometimes one’s influences are less a collage and more a clear, naturalistic painting that dives deep into one particular period of history or one specific culture, however, and this is no less exciting. Most commonly, especially in games with a fantasy theme, that overriding influence is Medieval Europe (or, more often, a simulacrum thereof). But what does it mean for your game to be “influenced” by a culture or time period? What claims does that make upon your work, really? And what does it preclude?

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Of late there’s been a (to put it very delicately) acrimonious debate about The Witcher 3 and its lack of non-white characters. A significant and constructive contribution to this discussion was made by South African critic Tauriq Moosa in a Polygon editorial that touched off even more debate. At the heart of Moosa’s argument is the question of what “cultural influence” on a game means and what, if anything, it renders the game immune from in the world of criticism.

The Witcher 3 is, as has been trumpeted with ample justification, a distinctly Polish game-- and this is assuredly a triumph in a market dominated by Western European and American cultural influences. This does indeed mean that critiquing aspects of its whiteness should be handled with sensitivity to that reality, and in a way that does not delegitimise or disrupt CD Projekt’s chosen cultural influences. As Giant Bomb’s Austin Walker notes:

“Writing about diversity and The Witcher 3 is especially complicated because of the perspectives involved. Polish history is filled with outsider groups minimizing, controlling, ignoring, and erasing the nation's unique ethnic and cultural character.”

But as Walker goes on to note, critics of color like myself are put in an awkward position, not least because we’re told questions of “cultural influence” always trump our own cultural concerns and must, by default, exclude our existence and even our opinions on the matter. The backlash against Moosa’s article was severe, likening him to an imperialist and even saying he was acting on behalf of “American culture” and projecting a distinctly American “white guilt” onto The Witcher 3 (a blog post here on Gamasutra ascribed Afrikaner motives to the non-white Moosa for some reason, claiming he was projecting their white guilt onto the game).

Are the critics’ critics right? Are we being too uppity and stealing CD Projekt’s thunder by projecting our ineluctably American (or Afrikaner) values onto a Polish game?

No. It comes back to the question of just what “influence” actually means and does.

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“Influence,” by definition, does not mean carbon-copying. It connotes a distinctive flavoring of a wholly original product. Beaux-Arts architecture had clear Classical influences, but it was not merely a recapitulation of, say, the Parthenon. Nineteenth Century odalisques were both influenced by--and militating with--nudes from earlier centuries, producing a distinctive artistic style. The recent film Ex Machina’s cinematography wears very clear influences from 2001: A Space Odyssey, yet does not copy it.

And to take an example from gaming itself, Posthuman Studios’ excellent tabletop RPG Eclipse Phase actually provides a list of influences from science fiction and horror in their primary sourcebook, yet the game is an obviously original product of those myriad spices.

Again, “influence” does not mean “copy,” and attempting to use cultural influence as a bulwark against criticism about a lack of diversity is frankly disingenuous and borders on the insulting. It is also insulting to the source of the influence in question, as if something like  "Polish culture" can only be interpreted in one way.

The idea that “diversity” is a uniquely American value, for instance, would come as a shock to NIGDY WIĘCEJ (Never Again), a major Polish anti-racist organisation that campaigns for, among other things, “building a broad and inclusive movement against racism and discrimination, for respect, inclusivity and diversity.”

Influence is always malleable by its nature. One takes certain things and leaves others. As Luke Maciak, himself Polish, points out in his critique of Witcher 3:

“Yes, some of the names of the monsters in the game are indeed based on Slavic, and more specifically Polish folklore. But the rest is almost entirely made up. The Witcher novels on which the game is based are pretty standard Fantasy with some “domestic” themes and folklore thrown in… The books are standard Fantasy pulp, with very standard Fantasy elves and dwarfs imported directly from Tolkien.”

Incidentally, we wouldn’t have “Tolkien Elves” if the good professor had not been liberal with his interpretation of the Norse myths that influenced the setting of Middle Earth--they’d look more like Santa’s Elves--but that’s another story altogether.

So the question then becomes: if influence is so flexible, so very buffet-like, why are some infidelities perfectly acceptable while others are verboten? The question arises all the time with the much-vaunted “it’s based on Medieval Europe!” defence; we can be awash in dragons, goblins, wizards, and phantoms, but heaven forefend we dispense with the presumptive patriarchy and racism that must seemingly attend anything remotely redolent of Medieval Europe.

The actual sources we depend on as creators are immensely complex, themselves diverse, and the product of myriad cultural conflicts. Consider the beloved example of Japan, one of the few non-white countries to have left a major stamp on the settings of games. It is often used as the catch-all response to criticism of titles like Witcher 3. The aforementioned Gamasutra blog by Dave Bleja opened with a sarcastic rejoinder to that effect:

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