Video games without people of color are not ‘neutral’

Saying that a game is 'diverse' because it has a character with a different skin color is like saying that "I cannot be racist, some of my friends are black".

but what does it say about games that the thought of a non-white character instantly makes people declare tokenism? why is white the default? and if you really are against tokenism, then please tell me you are also against the mass of shitty white characters who serve no other purpose than to portray some random stereotype.

honestly, what really gets me is that "omg tokenism" is claimed pretty much anytime someone brings up including non-white male characters, but nobody seems willing to explain exactly what tokenism is to them.

will you explain what you think "tokenist bullshit" is and what "true cultural diversity" is? what do you feel is "the story of black people"? because in a lot of media, "the story of black people" is a black person dealing with racism that ends up making a white character change for the better.

I'm sure that some of the people that make these claims for superficial diversity would get angry if they get a game about the Roma, and don't see any black characters.

if it's a fantasy game that includes mythological references that didn't originate or don't have any significance to the roma, zombie babies, and magic, then yeah...there's not really any defense for not having african characters, asian characters, native american characters, etc.

if it's a game made by roma developers and focuses solely on roma culture, then I'm fairly certain nobody other than straw men and confused teenagers who don't really understand what they actually think would be angry.

I mean, Sleeping Dogs had white people in it and a black character, and that game was explicitly set in Hong Kong. somehow, that didn't ruin the experience whatsoever. Persona 3 and 4 were both set in Japanese cities and I don't recall either of them having black characters, middle eastern characters--the only non-japanese-native character I remember in either of them is the french foreign exchange student in 4. yet I don't remember anyone getting "angry" about that, because the games were explicitly set in modern-day Japan and 4's story was based explicitly on Japanese mythology involving a Japanese god and goddess.

what about Final Fantasy X? were the black characters you see on some of the blitzball teams just tokens to you because they didn't have a full-fledged story? should the devs remove all black people from games and make sure every background character is white unless the black character is the main protagonist? what about Pokemon ORAS? the only black characters I remember were on Team Aqua. should they have been white since their story wasn't "the story of black people"? are they "tokenist bullshit"?

that's the think with the "tokenism" claim is that anymore, it's used to say that there shouldn't be any non-white characters in a game unless the game is about a non-white character.

and that's bullshit, because that's making white characters the default for every single individual in a game, including NPCs and background characters.

people say that "including a non-white character in Witcher would be tokenism and blah blah poland" but...doesn't the game reference a lot of non-polish things that wouldn't exist in that fantasy world that isn't poland? I mean, I've heard it references Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction isn't polish heritage, polish mythology, polish culture, none of that.

so references in a medieval setting to an American-made movie are ok, but having even a single background character model that isn't white would be tokenism?

smells like bullshit to me.

and yeah, sure, if a dev puts two black background characters in a game containing 25352234 white characters and says "we're diverse" then yeah, that's dumb. but at least they did more than other games, and I don't find that to be a reason to declare that those two black people shouldn't have been in the game.

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