Are Games Actually Getting More Diverse? | Extra Punctuation
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- Опубликовано: 8 дек 2021
- This week in Extra Punctuation, Yahtzee examines whether mainstream video games are genuinely becoming more diverse, using old Zero Punctuation videos to collect data points.
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"Feel free to debate it further somewhere that isn't here" is a sentence I love with all my soul
I am definitely going to steal that one...
@@jeronimo196 I don't know if its fair to level charges of flawed methodology onto internet personalities...
Had to stop the video thumb up at this moment.
I cracked all the way up at that one. :D
I literally paused the video and scrolled to the comments to see this one.
Hearing Yahtzee talk about his "editor" was like a blast of ice water to the face. It somehow never occurred to me that after all these years he's not still doing all this on his own.
i'm pretty sure he still edits zero punctuation on his own, an editor helps him do extra punctuation
Are you sure that given the context, the editor isn't just a pseudonym for Yahtzee? haha
@@tysonsflag o oh
pretty sure the "editor" is Yahtzee.
Maybe extra punctuation is more challenging to write, so Jesse taking more time and let's editor do the support work.
The Phantom Thieves would be so proud that they're wreaking such havoc with the system.
Too bad they chicken out on sexually minorities
Things get muddy when diverse characters are confused with an actual sense of diversity. You can have a cast of diverse characters from every corner of the globe, but if they are explored too thinly or only serve a very specific purpose in the plot, they’ll feel hollow (or worse, just there to put in the box art). I like it when games go beyond the surface, and let the cast of characters think or interact differently with the things around them in a way-even if that means friction between a character or getting a little uncomfortable. It hints and winks at the fact that maybe this character grew up differently than what you’re used to. In turn, maybe you can see things differently by following them on their journey
Then there's all the "diverse" characters that are merely just stereotypes which doesn't count
I think the Wolfenstein "new" series does diversity really well because it _really_ wants to talk about race, religion, and other types of oppression, regardless of whether or not mainstream gamers want to talk about it.
A fair point, though that might be for a more niche audience should a game’s story need diversity to matter. Adding a Black, Latino, gay or autistic person to say a Mario-styled platformer is far easier for the PR departments to handle/market than say…a FPS in a war-torn environment like Sudan or Iraq or the Vietnam War where the character you control would have to deal with the political strife within their own country while also having to repel the invading forces of the typical protagonists of most traditional war shooters that’s called in to “make things better” for themselves.
Yeah on point. Diversity isnt only about skin colour, but also experienced and everything about them. I guess its hard to write good characters lol, and thats why we see so much cookie cutter bullshit from AAA games.
the problem is ppl think diversity occurs on screen when diversity needs to occur in the jobs and structures that create the things on screen. if the ppl workin on the game aren't marginalized ppls how are they going to create characters that are representations of marginalized ppls?
Serious question, since Vanguard was a recent release: Has there been any WW2 shooter with an Indian character? Like, even nameless extras, let alone a named character? It was only the largest volunteer army in all of human history.
Vanguard has an Indian character, but for extra woke points it's one from the Axis-aligned Indian National Army.
Silent Storm (S2) does.
There are Sikh soldiers in Day of Infamy although it's only multiplayer avatars
What gets me, especially when it comes to the discourse around ethnic diversity in WW1/WW2 games is that for example, in Vanguard, they achieve diversity in the cast by having you play in this fictional multi-ethnic Dirty Dozen-style rag tag team. But that if someone actually made a game completely dedicated to depicting historically accurate campaigns of non-white soldiers. There would be so much potential in delving into that untapped perspective in a war we've played in video games a 100 times
It kind of upsets me how underrepresented India is in both WW1 and WW2 games and Movies.
These People were fighting on the front lines, and lost so much, Especially in WW2, and were one of the primary reasons we the Allies won the Damn war.
Yet no-one wants to tell that story. We just see the Omaha Beach Landing for the 40th time.
"The Shark from Maneater" legit did a spit take lol
"That's creative accounting, baby" I think Jack is rubbing off on Yahtz.
thanks jack
In a bad way.
...I remember The Conduit. Mostly for how every major video game outlet kept blurting about how its the Wii's first game for a "hardcore gamer audience", but I remember it.
I remember it because Yahtzee’s review had him go ‘bDee bDee bDee’ for ags
Remember everyone touting it having unreal graphics? Rivaling the PS3, but on a Wii? Those times were fun.
I remember it for "has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?"
Bonus if you remember it got a sequel and played it.
Conduit and Madworld were always linked together & I think it was because they were both made by Sega. Maybe they wanted to bring out both at the same time. Like Volcano & Dante’s Peak
Yahtzee referencing the Sergeant from Perseus Mandate and even visiting the F.E.A.R. wiki was fucking bizarre. It’s like some forgotten door in my mind got kicked down.
Absolutely. Who even remembers the F.E.A.R. series nowadays xD
@@faustlican5566 Those who value a good fps
Came here to comment that. I mean Jesus, I even tried speed-running that back in the day
@@faustlican5566 I remember the first one for having some really amazing enemy AI and some sections I considered quite scary. But don't remember anything from the next two games aside from tidbits.
To complicate matters further, is Stella from Spiritfarer an adult? You'd think no, but the backstory does reveal she was a nurse, right? So then Stella's an adult, but the Stella you play as isn't, so she's like the manifestation of Stella as a kid, so...
I don't have an answer I'm just here to confuse everything further. You're welcome.
As far as I can tell, the game is "All a dream". The characters she meets are just what she remembers of her patients at the hospice.
Makes sense to me. Perhaps it's base more on self-image than her realistic appearance.
Maybe she's just short.
I just assumed she’s a small adult. Like, there are full grown people who are 5’2” and 105 lbs.
I think I can recall from the dreamsequences (within a dream, it's all inception baby!) that we get to see an outline of Stella at different points in her life. At some points she looks more mature than her in-game avatar. Ergo, the playable Stella is most likely a kid (I'd wager something like 14-16).
JRPG fans will rightly point out that most video game protagonists are, in fact, schoolgirls and that they've a staggering diversity of hair colours.
Blue hair in RPG: Red flag
Blue hair in JRPG: Hot
To make the "do we count Japanese people in Japanese-developed games" argument even more complicated; there's a term of art in Japanese for this: "mukokuseki", or "countrylessness". Remember back how in the 90s everyone wondered why everyone "looks white" in anime? That's why.
Of course mukokuseki isn't universal. Brock from Pokemon was meant to be vaguely south-east Asian, for example. There's plenty of anime and games that have stereotypically *American* characters, too. I'm going to assume Yahtzee either didn't encounter this or filed them as "non-white".
The most egregious instance of this is really racist right-wing propaganda comics from Japan. The ones that deliberately draw the Japanese characters in mukokuseki while the Korean or Chinese characters are drawn to be very ugly racial stereotypes of east Asians.
So in racist Japanese comics, non-Japanese Asians have, like, slanty eyes, buckteeth and yellow skin, while the Japanese characters have the typical manga look? I.e., pro-Japanese racist imagery in Japan would work equally well as pro-white racist imagery in the west? That's interesting... might that say something about which vague cultural sphere they see themselves in? Just a thought, I don't know that much about Japan tbh.
I strictly remember this exact thing happening in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, where the Chinese characters were drawn as asian stereotypes despite the show being made by Japanese people and the Japanese characters that appeared later were portrayed normally.
It's not complicated, if an anime character or similar has a Japanese name and is Japanese in law then whatever they look like they are Japanese.
Yahtzee is just superficial and his interest in diversity is quite literally skin deep.
High quality comment. Your efforts have not gone unappreciated.
@@Mentyr The phenomenon remains true in the past, but with a different look for the Japanese that is, nevertheless, much more potentially universal than the fucking goblins the other Asians get depicted as. If you want to see some _shit_ in this regard, look up "Sino-Japanese War propaganda", and I highly recommend you do it on a search engine that isn't going to feed that search into an algorithm it can then ruin your life with.
(It's also worth noting that this was very much a two-way street, and the Chinese in that war did exactly the same thing to the Japanese, because the Second Sino-Japanese War was a bottomless pit of horrors.)
If you're going _purely_ off of visual observation, which is entirely subjective and also ironically the best metric to use because bigotry is always disgustingly shallow surface-level shit anyway, even in the 1930s the Japanese in propaganda depicted themselves as much closer to "white" than other Asian countries. Exactly why this is the case is a question that I am not willing to answer without a thorough research attempt and analysis, compared to the basic searching and extant knowledge that built the rest of this comment.
Absolute mad props to the editor for taking the excuse to literally fill the screen with Dead or Alive Extreme screenshots immediately on cue from Yahtzee giving the green light.
i really did almost fall out of my chair laughing. Fantastic stuff! :)
I’m torn on him counting Faith as white.
On the one hand being mixed race is a wholly unique experience.
On the other hand as a mixed race person this is the first time I can remember someone counting a half-white person as white instead of 100% nonwhite.
He also missed another mixed race character. Morgan Yu from Prey 2017. Who is confirmed to be Chinese/German
@@thewielder3445 Well, Morgan Yu is a bit more of unique case given the game's ending.
she's very visibly Asian to the point where no one would mistake her as white.
For the benefit of proving the point, it sometimes helps to deliberately weigh in the other side's favour. Even WITH Failth counted as a white woman, there's still a large portion of non-whites represented here.
One drop rule. Exhibit A, Obama.
"theres no reason he isnt" is basically the motto for all the fanfics out there
I would honestly LOVE to look at the entire data pool and how they're divided. Any chance the whole data set could be published?
Idea: Just look at the first two years and the last 2 years of Zero Punctuation and compile the data yourself
@@tuckermatis1572 idea: he might not want to do all that work.
@@timbuktu777 True. Still, point is the dataset kinda already *is* published, man. Both the raw data is easily accessible, and some analyses provided by Yahtz himself.
Well he did say that he massaged the data a bit. It's not like he's running a Bechdel test or anything, using an oversimplified metric will give oversimplified results.
@@nocturnal101ravenous6 @Nocturnal101 Ravenous this is flawed because white people in a white system decided to label themselves as all encompassing white. No one did that but white people themselves to strengthen their social position. You are no longer Italian or German or English you're white and it was done so to intentionally consolidate power. A whole power structure was created around this language along with a class system based on skin color which was then spread to foreign cultures. So it's not the same as being ignorant and calling a Chinese Korean because the intent and context is different. Europeans intentionally created the label and the language around it, it wasn't forced upon them. So no grouping white people together is nothing like grouping Asians together or Africans together.
Again, I'm loving this Extra Punctuation thing. Hell, in some ways I kinda like it more than Zero Punctuation.
Don't get me wrong, ZP is good tasty fun, but EP has this "wholesome" vibe to it, like chunky Ardennes-style pate on a slice of wholemeal toast.
It also seems way more sincere. Yahtzee put together a coherent viewpoint and provided his evidence and thought process. In several ZPs he’s admitted that a game is fine, or even good but being mean is funnier so he’ll veer towards that.
If you like it he has a LONG back catalogue of these in article form on the Escapist site
@@nykcarnsew2238 I agree, its just..well, when you can passively hear something, its..easier
which is why audiobooks are popular
@@spikejrb7572
Saying Japanese characters are white people is coherent how?
It's also somewhat reminiscent of another video game focused web series starting with Extra
I always thought diversity is best tackled in one of two ways.
#1: center the struggles of the character around their identity. Give conflicts that arise that are unique to their identity. It doesn't have to be the main focus of a plot, but it should be used as a condition or complication to it.
#2: The complete opposite solution, have minorities simply exist and be proper representations (not just stereotypes) of their minority and have the other characters treat them as equals.
It should NOT be used as a means of ticking a check box for "diversity" merely to say you have it when it's just white in different colors.
Funny how Star Trek Deep Space 9 did both
I would always suggest #2.
Games featuring white males are not about the social and political struggles of a white male in near future America lamenting how little has changed, they're about shooting aliens.
The struggles of an African American are absolutely alien to me in the UK, and to suggest that I should relate to that on the basis of skin colour alone is kiiiiinda the problem in the first place.
To be honest, it matters far more to me that a character is a huge, muscle-bound brute than their skin colour ever could. Show me a character with a backscratcher in his inventory who constantly bashes his shoulders into doorways/wall mounted stuff, can't run for more than 10 seconds, takes 5 minutes to assess which t-shirt removal method works best when changing out of new gear, while he insists he doesnt really feel that big yet. I'll relate the shit out of that, not sure that's a particularly large gamer demographic though, best to just have the big guy smash stuff really.
@@garjian0 Yeah any game that isn't a Hardcore period piece or #1 should be #2 at this point anyone who makes games doesn't have an excuse to not do it
@@garjian0 “The struggles of African American are absolutely alien to me in the UK” Do you hear yourself?
@@GAPIntoTheGame I really don't see what's wrong with that. It's alien to him, it's alien to me too. It's only ever gonna be alien. We're not gonna be living it to understand any time soon.
Listen you may think you understand what it's like being a peasant working for a landlord in feudal eastern europe because you got a history lesson once, but by all means, you really don't have a fucking clue. You barely even understand your own parents. Of course a subset of american culture is gonna be alien to a european.
Loving these extra punctuation videos. They remind me of the
"let's look back on a industry that never learns anything tee hee hee"
videos which I love.
@@arkgaharandan5881 Whoa now, the gaming industry is terrible because of their predatory microtransactions, loot boxes, awful crunch culture etc. It has nothing to do with putting diversity into new titles.
And Ben failed.
What videos? Can you name or link some?
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb Zero Punctuation Occasional Guide To Moments In Gaming History, it’s called.
@@arkgaharandan5881 granted, the question was "is gaming more diverse now," not "is diversity in games well thought out now".
"There's no reason he isn't" is really what's fuelled the LGBTQ+ fandom and video games for years
And fanfiction. You can never forget about that.
I'm glad he mentioned that the lack of LGBT+ representation was often just because the games never touched on sexuality anyways, and I'm glad they don't a lot of the time. Outside relationship driven RPGs and any games that kind of focus on family, a lot of the time, sexuality would be pointless fluff tacked onto the game.
Nobody really needs to know if John Zombie-killer is gay, straight or otherwise as he carves through the undead hordes, after all.
Having the characters of Gears of War all look gay porn stars from the 80s probably fuels the imagination of many fanfics.
If someone isn't explicitly specified as straight, then in my mind they're gay, bi, etc.
its a rather long line
@@MrShukaku1991 Fanfiction mainly written by and for straight women, that is.
Technically undead characters are neurodivergent, in that they're ostensibly deceased and have no neurological activity to speak of. That's certainly isn't neurotypical. So that would mean every Dark Souls protagonist is on the spectrum... kinda.
So what you're saying is the chosen undead is literally me?
I dunno. statistically speaking at this point most people are dead, it's us alive ones who are the weirdoes.
It's honestly beautiful to see you still going after all these years honestly.
Fantastic work as always
Faith ought to count as non-white, since she definitely looks more Asian, and we're looking to see if there's any variance from solely white.
I thought the same, but since Yathzee does admit to some elements being prone to interpretation or arbitrary decisions, that's fine.
@Mister Mister Possibly to sell her to certain Asian markets where a splash of foreign genetics is seen as exotic. That said, the only people who know for sure are likely the ones who were present at the board meeting that decided it.
I agree that Faith and Jade from Beyond Good & Evil are non-White. But their half-Asian features don’t really matter from a gameplay/story perspective as they could easily pass as White without ever having to mention that they’re supposed to be mixed.
@Mister Mister She doesnt sound Asian. If she was born there, she would have some accent. So maybe is so they can use any VA to do the job
@@aztn19 Id put Jade in unspecified, she’s just too ambiguous to just say non-white.
Unspecified adds agency and gives every player a unique experience, but it hardly shows diversity imo. Especially when you want to look at how supporting characters in a cast of a videogame. Think of a female or unspecified protag with their diverse cast of ragtag whatevers saving the world and see which ones are cartoons or actually are humanized.
Well, I don't really agree because the character creation (if you talk about that part of unspecified MCs) depends on the developers as well. Like In the past your character creation would stop on choosing between the white guy or white girl and maybe you could choose one of 5 hairstyles or faces for them. Nowadays, as Yahtzee said, some games, especially indie ones, allow for a very wide array of races, choose your gender with some extra options, and sometimes even pro-nouns, as well as generally allowing both genders to date romantic interests of any gender, which again counts as allowing for a better player expression. Not saying things are perfect, but things certainly were moving in the right direction even in this category.
Same time, the explosion of unspecified could be a hint that writers are trying to enable a broader array of players to immerse in the role.
And if the point of this exercise is to determine the level of representation we're seeing from all of human society, I don't see the point in including non-human characters.. Who are they representing?
@@rainjaydd8213 Representing people isn't about looks. It's about types. Cultures.
The point isn't "We need to see more white people" or "we need to see more black people" or whatever. It's "we need more representations of the black experience" or whatever other group.
Spartan Locke isn't black representation. He's a character with dark skin. His representation is more like "dutiful institutional leader" than "black guy."
Plenty of us see ourselves in him, even if we're not black.
Nathan Drake likewise isn't white representation. He's a character with light skin. His representation is more like "daring, charming, swashbuckler" than "white guy."
I'm sure plenty of people ID with that, even if they aren't white. I don't, and I am white.
Meanwhile, non-human characters are all based on real-world personality types and cultures.
Their added benefit is that they don't distract our basic monkey brains with "look like me so must be like me hoo hoo ha ha." We think about who they are, not how they look.
Unspecified is the way games have come up to make the player feel like they are being represented while it is only in their individual experience that happens and essentially does not add to actual diverse representation. For example; a white dude will create a white dude as his playable character, a black dude will create a black dude, etc.
Quite interesting even if the data capture might be a little rough, but honestly its good enough so nice job!
Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball WAS AND IS progressive. all diverse races, all female protagonists, all sizes represented *of bust size* and therefore hyper inclusive and hyper PC. REMASTER THIS MASTERPIECE GAME
@@aturchomicz821 because of that it’s twice as diverse!
There was nothing progressive about it. Although the stupid boob physics were hilarious.
"feel free to debate this further...somewhere that isn't here"
Yeah... the comments is where its at!
**Grab pitchfork on one hand and a debate hammer on the other**
I genuinely love the expressions on yahtzee's avatar. The eyes are so simple but so perfectly expressive
I spent this entire video thinking about Warren from The Surge, and how, despite being the straight white male, he is more diverse than many other game characters because of the fact that he can't walk, and you brought up that kind of diversity at the end and it warms my soul
It would be interesting to look at the two groups of games in terms of talking roles/. As Yahtzee said a lot of the characters in those early games were silent protagonists. It would be interesting to see if the same clear gender / race split is the same for games featuring characters that are actually... well, characters.
Probably not. Thing is, the "white male" protagonist only really dominates when you don't really want anything but a mute player avatar. After that's over, even the devs get tired of Whitey McWhitersons really quickly.
Assuming the suits don't intervene, eventually either they add customization or they just start varying it up.
That's more correlation than causation, and I'd argue the same for the amount of unspecified characters. It primarily reflects the shifts in technology and genre towards player choice, rather than conscious intentional representation.
I love that you put this together and can't wait to see it done in another 5 years or so. Especially now that you have the data for the previous time.
Y'know, I think there's a fair case to be made that you can have a game who's female protagonist can show off some jibblies but still get full points for diversity. Bayonetta springs straight to mind. Make it clear that this is a decision made for fun and just as much a part of the character as it is done for the sake of the viewers enjoyment. Like yeah Shantae ain't wearing much and likes to work that thang. But also she seems incredibly confident, proud of it, and enjoys her dancing moves that allow her to work said thang. Compared to most anime-esque examples. Where the fanservice is often worsened by making it voyeuristic, not enjoyed by the cast, and not equally represented. Whereas if you have equal parts sexy boy, girl, and other, and unsexy boy, girl, and other. And in-universe they acknowledge that yes, the characters are sexy and that's just nice for the eyes ain't it. You basically get a free pass to have a good time. (Which ironically Dead or Alive wasn't far off from, but that was before the series hit it's current dark age)
I would love a broad range of experience and stories in games but instead we get copy pasted pallette swapped characters for the most part. The failure of diversity in gaming is that its a byword for lazy or poor writing.
@@StrazdasLT Naah, when It's a shitty game with a White Male protagonist, people just call it 'a shitty game' but when it's a bad game with let's say a Black Female Protag, people go 'well, if only instead of spending time on colour they spent the time on writing' or 'forced diversity reeee'
It's so stupid, Diverse things doesn't have to be brilliant or deep for them to be diverse.
@@the_crypter people that complain about forced diversity are a loud minority and you’re cherry picking.
"Don't be racist, be like Kung Fu Panda; white, black and asian" :D
This may come as controversial, but diversity is not the same as representation. If we go by "amount of representation" in Ghost of Tsushima, There are Japanese and Mongolians, all Asians, while Call of Duty: MW2 has Caucasian and Hispanic protagonists, and the game features, South Americans, Russians, North Americans and Afghans, so it's more diverse than Ghost of Tsushima, but Tsushima gets the better rap because the main character isn't a white dude. And that's totally fine, I'm not criticizing Tsushima or CoD, I'm just pointing out that diversity doesn't necessarily equals representation, and vice versa.
Going back to Ghost of Tsushima, it's a really good example of representation, a story that could only have been told in Feudal Japan, and the medium will definitely be better of it, without needing to worry about being diverse. And, Games like CoD Vanguard can tell stories in which the race or gender of the one pulling the trigger makes no difference and use that do be diverse and inclusive if you will.
I would also say that diversity is bad when it is for the sake of virtue signalling, worse even because people are sick of that shit. It's fine when it's an original work, but if you are adapting something the source material has to be respected and so you shouldn't go around fiddling with the race and gender of your characters just to prove you are diverse.
This is a good point when it comes to individual games, but I think this study was more about the entire medium as a whole. Back 20-odd years, almost every game had a white protagonist, overwhelmingly male. This has been less and less the case as years go on (although white dudes are still in the majority). Yes, the individual games themselves often feature a very limited cast when it comes to race and gender, but the _medium_ itself has become more diverse.
Call of Duty aint that diverse, you're still blowing up brown people for the most part
@@brandogg974 that's not what I said. I said that compared to a game like Tsushima, CoD comes as more diverse, to point out the difference between diversity and representation. Shooting brown people is more related to the representation, not the diversity side, I think.
@@nocturnal101ravenous6 look, we all know that companies are doing this whole shebang to give themselves a better image for the sake of sales. I'll never argue that the way diversity and representation is treated by the big boys its fallacious and a terrible publicity stunt. But, the point I'm going for is that there's no inherent harm in trying to add variety to characters backgrounds, especially in games where it makes no difference.
Yeah, companies have been treating diversity as a trend, but that's not s problem with diversity itself, its a problem with how the big boys approach it, and I'll be the first to say they have a lot of work to do, before they do something remotely acceptable.
How about ageism? I've never seen an adult female protagonist that wasn't in her mid 20's. Because once a woman is over 30 years old she ceases to exist, of course.
I've been thinking of tabulating this information myself for a while but was turned off not knowing how to account for the nuance. Excellent video, thanks for the data.
Whenever this discussion comes up, it's always a blast to listen to people try and address the panda in the room:
_"Do Asians count as diverse...?"_
It depends on context really. In a game made in Japan with characters in an anime style that most westerners will view as white, it's not diverse in Japan because they're representing the majority ethnicity, and it's not diverse in the west because most players don't really identify them as Asian.
It's tough to say, if the publisher is asian then no, if it's asians in a non asian game then yes. Blame it on japan for being a gaming/anime superpower for so long
@@tieflinglesbian so then a white character in a game made by an African studio would be more diverse and not white than if they’d made it a black character?
@@mr.j7444 I'd say if the game's setting has most of the population being non-white, and that is explored atleast to some degree, that would be ''diverse'' in it's own way. It's a reality that isn't usually explored with interesting social dynamics
@@DarkLordToturials so diverse means not white then got it. got a feeling thats what you racist nutters meant.
"feel free to debate this further, somewhere that isn't here" -Yahtzee 2021
i think the real trend that we can get from the data is that customized characters will eventually over take all pre written characters
Its already happening.
Not gonna lie, after completing it, it always brings a smile to hear spiritfarer come up
Spiritfarer is ❤️
Kinda, but the ending changes with one of the updates made it worse. Can't say why, spoilers, but they turned into a hoary cliche that made the whole experience feel pointless.
Holy handbrakes, you really went far with this study only to explain diversity. Thanks!
Have a friend who thought Yahtzee was crap because they really like Bayonetta and hated his video on it.
Sending him this video to show that the dude isn't just an edgy swear jar.
Why does your friend disagree over Bayonetta? I can see why if it's the hypersexuality but I always thought that was a weak ass reason people didn't like it because they keep attributing it to the male gaze, but never thought about how much the protag owns her character, and that sexuality is just a human trait where it's up to us as individuals to own it in our personality and charisma or just clutch our pearls whenever someone else does.
@@LeBellmont basically the fact that there was a lot of depth to the character that he really liked that he felt was being overlooked and, to him, were key to enjoying the game.
Only watched about halfway through the episode before wanting me to stop. If I had the chance to do it over again I woulda had him watch the NiNo Kuni 2 review entirely because of President Kickass
That's an old grudge
@@WOLF36554 well, I showed him the video around 2018 I think.
I say I think because COVID and lockdown has really messed up my memory.
...did Yahtzee even give a negative review of Bayonetta?
It's been so long since I watched it but from what I remember he appreciated the action/combat, hated the music, despised the quick time events (if there were any), and was completely indifferent toward the protagonist.
That sounds like a lukewarm review to me.
This video is a great example of how conversations about "diversity in gaming" are often arbitrary, superficial, and pointless. Yahtzee even makes a joke or two to that effect.
It really is. "If Japanese make a game with Japanese protagonist - it should count as "white" because it's a predominant race of their country". So... if studio from predominantly black country makes game with a black protagonist - they would also count as "white"? And if they make a game with white protagonist - he should count as "diverse"?
This who conversation is indeed incredibly arbitrary and dumb
@@NekoiNemo It also doesn’t make sense because the average consumer won’t notice. They don’t look into the studio or care about their thoughts, all the pay see is the game presented in front of them. As they’re all vying for their attention in the same marketplace.
Of diversity is important, than other countries should be propped up rather than Western countries making imitations of those countries. After all, in the Japanese example, who would better represent Japanese culture and lifestyle better than the Japanese? It would be one thing if foreign countries games (like Japan) never got released in the West… but they do. Almost all Japanese console games do, except for the very fringe. And they even *sell better* in the West than they do in their country of origin.
@@NekoiNemo but does Persona count as white though? the character are Japanese but they look western and is not like the creators have a warped sense of reality and when they look themselves in the mirror see a western man/woman. They are representing themselves in some ways (culture) and representing something else in others (appearance). If anything I'd say is taking diversity a step further and mixing races and cultures... sure it's done out of tradition (anime) but still it is diverse.
Arbitrary? Yes. Pointless? Hell no. Diversity is hella important and conversations should be held until it is achieved and some time after.
@@NekoiNemo
Ben is not as smart as he thinks he is.
This was a fantastic video. I love this new series and the work that Yahtzee did in this one.
This was a good watch. Thanks, Yahtzee, appreciate that you took all the time to do this and explained largely how you got the conclusions you did.
I take issue at "Japanese games that are set in Japan" counting as "white". The true spirit of diversity is to present a cultural viewpoint different from the presumed white western "norm". So like in the Yakuza series there are a lot of aspects specific to Japanese culture that you wouldn't get in a crime game set in the U.S. Though yeah, "splitting hairs, unscientific data" etc etc
It’s not splitting hairs, because they all end up in the same marketplace. Why is the goal to pressure American companies to cover non-American perspectives, when we could instead just prop up developers *from other countries* in the first place? That would be more progressive because you’re not just supporting the same giant companies that already exist. Plus, Japan will be able to represent Japan better than an American, so why wouldn’t I put more value in their perspective? Same goes for any other country. You’ll never encapsulate it better than the native population.
“Oh well the American companies are the big ones” so what? Why give up and give into them more when we can help other studios grow? Change takes time.
@@mrshmuga9 We can do both. Multiculturalism requires work from everyone.
They count as white.
What a high IQ take from Ben.
@@ravenfrancis1476 Hell yea! It's the ghost of Tsushima thing all over again. Non Japanese made a game about Japanese history that the Japanese loved! That means a lot, and I hope Japanese, British, south African, could tell stuff about American history idc, if it's done well I'm excited!
I don't think that's the one and only "true spirit of diversity". That's one kind of diversity, but I think a lot of people consider it a really important point - if not in practice even *the* most important point - of diversity to represent people and their perspectives whose life and experiences differ from the "standard" majority's in significany ways, but rarely get (or rarely got) shown, so might as well not exist in the work.
If you limit the idea of diversity to the depiction of different cultures (not saying you advocate anything like this! just illustrating my point), you could have a world of games representing every culture from every single country in the world, yet within those, only always the dominant group within that culture.
This scenario would fit the "trur spirit of diversity" you talk about, yet not give representation to a single minority perspective within any culture.
How did The Great Ace Attorney figure into your calculations, given that it is made by a Japanese team but set in both Japan and England?
Would we count Nero, Sekiro, Raiden, Bionic Commando, and that guy from The Surge as disabled? They're more able than I am tbh
In my opinion, Raiden and Bionic Commando aren't really disabled because the tech makes up for or even enhances what was missing.
A similar thing could be said about Wolf (Sekiro), but in his case, he could have done most if not all the shinobi prosthetic abilities with other tools. There is also the possibility of pain due to phantom limb so I think he has the best case but I would say it's right near the borderline. Oh and I guess all that could be said about Nero too.
I am a neuro diverge man and I love playing games since kid. My favourite protagonists are the silent ones. Because it feels like me. Passing through a harsh time alone and without spliting a single word. I am not playing God of War because kratos and atreus DO NOT SHUT THE FUCK UP.
I'm loving this slow and pensive Yahtzee, it's honestly interesting how his mind works
This has been my favourite extra punctuation to date, I've studies inclusivity in education for quite a while and really resonated with so much of what was said here. To also focus on the contextualised positive change that is happening instead of still framing the industry in its current deficits is something in inclusive theory that really becomes encouraging. Voicing anger and frustration is understandable but not a productive indevor, taking some cool headed prospective and trying to encourage change where it's being made always has a bigger difference. Yhatzee and y'all at the escapist thank you for hilighting this and trying to encourage more positive change in doing so.
DC Superhero Girls: Teen Power has six female playable characters, featuring two non-whites in the form of Wonder Woman and Catwoman.
However it was also panned by audiences when it was announced during the Nintendo Direct for being a game targeted at young females... so that's the reaction you get when you go for a diverse cast of non-adult females.
Makes me wonder. Which is worse?
A game full of teenage girls marketed to teenage girls?
Or a game full of teenage girls marketed to adult men?
@@torgeirstrnnes6487
I mean, I actually really enjoyed the game mostly because they applied old school game design theory and hid collectibles (and an entire side quest) in places that required you to exploit wonky movement physics to get to. The game devs clearly actually played their game and were enjoying the game which can't be taken for granted anymore.
I think most of the initial panning was just people misjudging it as shovelware.
I love these videos! Hoping for more longform videos from you
Why is Dead or Alive not progressive. Look at the physics progression. These are the titles that have moved gaming forward. Remember triangle boobs? Now they can glimmer in the sun as well as bounce.
Because it relies on tired tropes and stereotypes
@@MrAsaqe tis sarcasm
@@MrAsaqe I'd argue that most other games that were counted as diverse on the list also heavily relied on tropes and stereotypes.
So even if I ignore the fact that you missed the joke, your counterpoint is moot.
touhou has an all female cast but 'racially diverse' might be pushing it. most characters are japanese, with a few notable ones being vaguely european. theres a couple of chinese chracters and one character is allegedly persian, though she has pale skin and blonde hair (green eyes too but that's probably a trait of her species?) theres not a ton of variety in skin tones (this depends on the artist somewhat; series creator zun has an art style that ranges from "crudely drawn" to "rough" so fanartists have a lot more say than usual in this sort of thing). still having a cast of well over a hundred characters with only like 3 of them being male (a turtle who acts as a mount, a cloud creature that acts primarily as a support to another character, and a noncombatant shopkeeper who only appears in supplemental print works)
Diversity of thought is the most important kind. You can have every color of the immutable rainbow, if everybody thinks the same and the medium is only viewing things through the lens of one set of ideas, then it fails to be diverse.
Yahtzee, you have way too much free time.
As a professional duck I am kind of insulted that you mentioned goose eggs while showing a picture of a duck. Are we waterfowl all the same to you mr Croshaw? Joking aside, thinking this diversity debate over I noticed how many of my favourite games have an unspecified character in the main role. Probably because I like fantasy allot. I also wonder what the data would look like if you would separate indies from triple a when it comes to diversity. Indies probably have allot more options to offer for race, gender, age, background or neurodivergency. You can find a game for pretty much whomever you want to play as or whatever the game let's you engage with. For instance: I know of many indies that try to respectfully talk about mental illness and convey it's effects on that person's life. Can't think of many triple A games doing the same. Anyway hooray for the industry making progression.
I think counting asian characters in asian games as white is kinda a wrong choice, the question "are games getting more diverse is posed by someone who's probably from the west so to them, japanese people are diverse since they aren't white. If you get what I mean
The thing is that most people in the west identify anime style characters as white
@@tieflinglesbian do they?
@@tieflinglesbian That’s a bold assumption to make. When you have a location like Akihabara/Tokyo or names like Kyoko, Arata, and Nokia, do you *really* think the white people playing those games think those characters are white? The Japanese influences are abundantly obvious and that’s before they even mention it explicitly takes place in Japan, lol. You don’t exactly see shrine gates in suburban America, lol.
@@tieflinglesbian no they don’t you just pulled that out of your ass.
Ayy nice Douglas Adams reference there
"if you only ever hear about perspectives from you and people like you, then you're thinking becomes stagnant"
Absolutely...and the thing that gets my goat is that no one talks about how this is a two way street
This can apply to EVERYONE in equal measure
I get what you mean. This is a big part of the social divide. There's just no bridging the gap between peoples ideologies anymore.
raises a good point about the difference between diversity in race and diversity in thought.
It does but a leftist/progressive type probably feels like it doesn't apply to them cuz their ideology is recent/new. Stagnation doesn't come to mind then
Well said, it's especially prevalent on the internet where the algorithms will basically give you an echo chamber of the same opinions as you
Full Metal Furies is a great game that has a diverse human all female cast (at least on the heroes side of things) with some really clever puzzles and tough combat, highly recommend
Wait but for the whole "persona 5 is white" thing because japanese is the main race, would that then make snake and mario non-white characters as white people would be the minority in japan.
Mario is light-skinned, but he's an Italian in a magical world. He somehow ended up as an immigrant, and is clearly working class. Another interesting thing is that he is always relied on to save the day. I'd argue he is non-white because of this.
Snake is an American though, and the story is very much inspired by Cold War spy movies. It could go both ways. The creator didn't hesitate including 2 prominent Japanese characters, one of which ends up as a protagonist. So you could argue that Japanese is the dominant framework of the story, and consider Snake non-white on that ground. But at the same time, Kojima is pretty western-oriented. Why not both?
I think it's good to _explore_ a diverse range of stories, to see the life of this person and that person as they had diverse experiences, but I very much object to "whitewashing" history, of making it seem like racism didn't exist and every period of history was a friendly multicultural melting pot where everyone got along. That's just dumb. If you're going to set a project in a historical period, then accurately reflect that period, at least from a cultural perspective, don't just pretend that they were 2010s New Yorkers/Londoners who lived in a historical time.
Gotta disagree dude. We all know the history and reality of these events but games are fantasy. take for example call of duty vanguard. That game has so much historical inacurracies but being able to play a story where people from many different nations and genders team up to take down the enemy is just more fun than a bunch of samey dudes doing the same thing. Every nation involved in that committed atrocities in the name of defeating the nazis but I don't want to play a mission where I'm forced to play as the dude that dropped the atom bomb. Let's let these games take liberties so they can tell more inspiring/inclusive stories. we all want to see ourselves represented in the media we consume and there is nothing wrong with that.
@@pabloemilionoescobar6074 "We all know the history" is a hopelessly optimistic statement. People are _dumb_ these days. A lot of zoomers think a BBC production set in historical periods is actually an accurate representation of that period. There's nothing wrong with representation, so long as it is _accurate_ representation.
@@timogul But how come only social things must be accurate but you're alright with the countless OTHER inaccuracies in media regarding historical representation? Additionally, you're not in anyway accounting for the context of the project: who is the audience and what is the tone of your media? RDR2 was very historically accurate, because it was a game focused on realism for adults, but Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" had an interracial couple because it was a movie about talking dogs for children, who are not capable of understanding complex socio-political issues surrounding race... and showing them examples of diverse people and families helps them normalize what is traditionally shunned. So... while I appreciate where you are coming from, as I too appreciate the nuances of history, I also recognize the element of "fantasy" in most media as most of it is *not* dedicated to being educational.
@@someinternetweirdo6953 Really depends on the context. If it's explained or at least explainable, then that's often easy to roll with. If it's just presented as "not something unusual" within that historical setting, then I feel that's something off. I feel that "fantasy" should not be applied to human behavior within a historical setting. I mean, consider another Disney example, Song of the South. That is often criticized as being "during slavery," even though it's explicitly set post-slavery, but it does still depict characters of that general era, and the black and white characters get along in a believable manner, and yet it is often slammed _because_ it presents this believably friendly relationship, yet if you instead shot a movie that is meant to take place in the 1700s and people of all races and genders are associating on modern social standards, that would be viewed as "perfectly fine."
I would prefer that _unless_ these changes to history were an established and central _theme_ of the story, they should try to maintain the state of the world as it actually was, warts and all.
@@timogul agree to disagree I guess. I'm glad to read that you think representation is good though. we disagree fundamentally on the your opinion that we cant have some historically inaccurate aspects in media. these things are made for us to have fun and not educate us. I made another comment on here i think you might agree with if you wanna give it a read. thx for keeping the convo respectful :)agree to disagree I guess. I'm glad to read that you think representation is good though. we disagree fundamentally on the your opinion that we cant have some historically inaccurate aspects in media. these things are made for us to have fun and not educate us. I made another comment on here i think you might agree with if you wanna give it a read. thx for keeping the convo respectful :)
4:12 - The Pyro actually self-identifies as a mmhf-mhhp
Final Fantasy X-2
has three female central characters and its japanese... so it counts?
As says wikipedia: "Final Fantasy X-2 was the first game in the series to feature just three player characters and an all-female main cast."
Seems a bit odd to count Asians as white just because those games were made in Japan. It doesn't seem right to call Kazuma Kiryu from the Yakuza games a white male protagonist. Should William Adams from Nioh not count as a white male because the game was made by a Japanese team? I know these examples aren't exactly in the samples you chose, but I think they're worth considering when you look at where you draw lines.
@@umwha Go to therapy
It’s ridiculous because the Japanese influences still seep through. You can’t say “well the characters are light-skinned so they don’t count” when your game is about giant robots (Gundams) or includes typical anime stereotypes that only exist in Japan, or literally have real-world Japanese locations and names. Sure the characters in my Digimon game are “white” but with names of characters/locations like Arata, Nokia, Kyoko and Nakano, you’re not fooling anyone into thinking it takes place in a Western country. And those environmental influences have a greater impact on representing that culture than the skin tone of a single character (the protagonist).
Why is it better if an American makes a Japanese game and a Japanese person makes an American game? As an exception there might be something interesting to it, but on a whole, people born and living in that culture will be able to better represent their own environment than someone looking in from the outside.
@@planetdustbowl4825 True but yahtzee did use the term WASP for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. ' A specific type of people.
i think he meant they are white as in they are a "dominant culture" in their games.
@@azzzanadra in my opinion, the right solution would have been to exclude eastern studios entirely. Japan doesn't care about diversity in games. Diversity is a western issue. Not to mention that Japan is practically it's own entire market. Games used to take months, years, or would just never get a western release. It's only in recent years that games have started to release internationally all at once.
4:17 Skullgirls? Does that count?
It would if it wasn't for Big Band or Beowulf. Plus some of the girls have a partner that's male like Samson for Filia and Peacocks whole gang.
the protagonist of the surge is disabled, until they screw an exoskeleton on him without anesthesia, that counts...
Cheers for doing the maths, my next social gathering won’t know what hit em
isn't the shark from maneater a "great white" (thank you, thank you. I'll see myself out)
The other graph that's relevant to this is the one where the number of people complaining about lack of diversity has gone down while the number of people (racists, incels etc) complaining about diversity in games increasing has gone up
Racists think race is important. Racists only feel represented by their own race. Racists push diversity in games.
Touhou comes to mind as a popular video game series with an all-female cast.
Diversity in media is good, diversity in media does not make it good.
An interesting thing is, when you mentioned that diversity was "not exactly representative of history", you showed the photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Funnily enough, one of those five young men, Ira Hayes, was Native American, from the Pima tribe in Arizona. History is often much more diverse than most media has portrayed it, to the point that modern attempts to accurately show correct demographics are decried as "forced diversity"
Problem is, if Ira Hayes was portrayed in a modern war movie, he'd be handsome, stoic, wear his hair in a long braid with a feather tucked in, have a medicine pouch you'd regularly see him hold, smoke a peace pipe instead of cigarettes and probably have a war bonnet in his locker. Ira Hayes Represented, he didn't caricature, and caricatures aren't representation, nor much appreciated in an otherwise serious production.
@@c99kfm literal strawman
@@bobbywojak4778 ...how is that a strawman? I described how Hollywood tends to portray minority characters, using stereotypes rather than actual character, in an attempt to explain why the cries of "forced diversity" tend to be raised.
What most protests about forced diversity are really about is how the way most movies portray minorities break immersion by being closer to caricatures than to real people. Or by just being superficially grafted on top of an otherwise cohesive narrative. ("Token black friend" syndrome)
Every minority character should not have to embody the personality traits most commonly associated with that minority. Especially not only the positive traits, and none of the negative, or vice versa.
Represent as appropriate, don't caricature or tokenize, and you won't hear the same complaints. Well, won't hear them as much, because bigotry.
@@c99kfm Because if you don't tokenize them then you realize their race doesn't matter and if their race doesn't matter there's no reason to even bring it up. You just have a person who happens to be a native Indian. At which point it stops being interesting because you could just replace him with a white dude and have the same result.
The real question is, if you really want diverse representation then where's the line in how much you tokenize them? I like to think that line is something people will have a very different opinion of. Because if you make it to subtle people won't really bother to notice, but if you go to far the cancel culture brigade will break down the doors of whatever studio decided it was worth going that route.
I myself sometimes enjoy extremely tokenized characters because if they were just normal people I would have never actually bothered to give enough of a shit to actually want to learn more about where they come from.
this x1000
I want to do an adventure game playing as a dog
Apparently one exists, called “Dog’s Life” on PS2. And to a lesser extent, Tokyo Jungle has you play as a Pomeranian, as well as other animals.
I would say the tf2 cast are culturally diverse rather than Racially diverse. I mean look at the line up
Engineer: White, American(Texas)
Soldier: White, American
Scout: White, American
Medic: White, German
Heavy: White, Russian
Spy: White. French
Sniper: White, Australian
The only non white characters are.
Pyro: Unspecified,
Demoman: Black, Scottish
I love this series more than the reviews. Pls more!
Just for fun....portal, everyones fav:
CHELL
Her ethnic background is somewhat ambiguous; she appears to be of Latin or
multiracial descent, and Valve concept artist Matt Charlesworth
described her.
This is actually a pretty strong sociological/cultural presentation. Showing how you got the data and making justification for your coding was professional and winning. Now we just need to work on a literature review (and change the pie charts into column graphs)
@@isodoubIet he's saying white to mean the dominant group of that area not literally pale people, learn the sociology speak.
Thanks for the work, it was really interesting
What about games like Mass Effect, where you can customize, but the version they put on all the box art is a white male?
Race is definitely a theme in Hamilton. It's certainly more deftly handled than by the work place abusers at Activision, but it is a theme.
I always said 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand was a landmark game ahead of its time and peopled laughed. Well who's laughing now.
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting on this. Keep up the good work.
I feel like Yahtzee had fun with this one, it's nice.
Thinking about the Persona folks, I realized that I hardly even notice that anime people are white, even with blue eyes and blond hair. They are just anime people, or different flavored Japanese people to me, since most of them are from Japan and speak Japanese. Even the dark-skinned ones, I can't see them as anything other than dark-skinned anime people unless they are explicitly black or called black.
Yeah, I dunno about you but I don't see many white people with aquamarine hair and pink eyes who are also teenage vampires who eat rice for breakfast. I just made that up on the spot but then I realised I almost described an actual anime that already exists.
It might be worth mentioning that if your goal with diversity is to give the player an experience different than their own then the 'unspecified' category may actually lead to stagnation. I'm assuming the bulk of this category is customizable characters, and from my experience what I have seen most people do with customizable characters is just to make in-game copies of themselves. This may be entirely wrong, but it's a thought.
It's odd, been watching your stuff for years, but these and your dev diaries might just be my favorite, if not second only to your books. I love actually getting into the nuts, bolts, and philosophy of games and their creation
interesting analysis. good work!
The thing is, AAA games just don't seem to have any interest in characterisation. There's a few notable exceptions, but they're intended to focus entirely on gameplay, with the characters just being a medium for it. In that sense, there can be no diversity in AAA games, simply because diversity is far more than having a non-white or non-hetero character. On the other hand, these are also the games with the most reach, so just having someone of a different race on the box is diversity in the sense of reminding white men that they aren't the only type of person who exists.
Indie games are generally better at this, since they tend to be labours of love from a smaller team or individual, they will inherently put more effort into characterisation. The fact that they are more likely to have diversity amongst their creators then means that the characters being written are more likely to have a different viewpoint or background to the usual cis-white males. For instance, there's no way you could get a trans person as the protagonist of a AAA game, simply because it gets focus tested to oblivion, but a game that is written from that perspective from the ground up can tell a story that relies entirely on the protagonist being trans, and so explore what that diversity means.
Basically, I don't think it's fair to look at AAA and indie games in the same way when it comes to diversity. The way they're made, and the approach that gives them to characterisation just makes it impossible to compare the two.
To be honest i make games and diversity isnt even a thought to me. I care about fun gameplay. And the characters i make them to look cool.
Diversity is also contextual. If every character in your game is gay, then that is not diversity.
Ultimately, these are computer games we're talking here not real life. There doesn't have to be some arbitrary quota.
Except your ignoring actual diversity. You are looking at skin deep differences not the differences of the experiences individuals have. You only see color and arbitrary traits no on controls not actual life experiences.
I thought I should qualify my initial statements, since people seem to have misunderstood my focus.
The issues I see in diversity in the AAA space aren't unique to it, just an inevitable consequence of the publisher mandate and size of the developer teams.
The requirements of publishers are that the games be diverse enough to sell, but not infringe on 'politics' as some people see it. The size of the development staff then compounds the issue, because you end up with multiple people writing a single character, this loses the consistency needed for writing true diversity.
While it absolutely isn't the case that these problems are unique to the AAA industry, they can't be avoided in it, unlike in indie development where they can. This leads to tokenism in larger games and the potential to focus on a truly diverse experience in indie games.
@Hunter Rayna Reminds me of stories how BioShock Infinite had to put a dude on the box or "it would not sell" or Black Widow was asked for YEARS by fans but Marvel stonewalled since "female lead movies make no money."
And then that same Marvel had the audacity to call the fans sexist.
The shark from man eater isn't unspecified. That's a great white shark, leaving female-unspecified with zero.
To answer the question if anyone recognizes The Conduit: I actually do! I played it when I was a kid all the time. I remember being pissed at the complex and stupid way the studio tried to issue a sequel that didn't have Mister Ford's same VA, and the one that had the Duke Nukem VA for some reason. And the mobile game.
Now that I think about it, games nowadays usually have a more streamlined sequel cycle than they did around a decade ago. The medium as a whole feels more streamlined as well.
God I feel old.
Wait why is Faith white but Alyx isn't?
Question. How do you decide that a female character is there to be ogled at? Are there any male characters that fit that description? :)
Depends on the intended audience and level of sexualisation
Buff dude in Sex and the City = oggled at
Buff dude in Spartacus (the overlooked ultra masculine tv series) = wish fulfilment
“Whatever benefits my position better.”
@@Oldhandlewasabitcringe the show with the gay but fingering in an orgy? Yea sure that totally was targeted at manly men and not house wife’s who where still to ashamed to watch porn.
There is no female gaze, only male gaze. Also lesbians do not exist, until they are useful for my agenda, of course.
That about sums it up.
Not getting the clotshot
I had to scroll down a depressing amount to find this ... The sheep are still asleep.
Great video! Loved it
4:15 would Skullgirls count? I haven't played it, but at a glance it seems diverse. If not, the only other games I can think of that fit the bill are stuff like Senran Kagura, which is just Dead Or Alive but with more anime.
Historically, the more diverse a country is, the better off everyone is.
Source?