The Shadows of Angmar game just went into open stress-test beta, and last night my eye caught this phrase in the character customization blurb: “select region-appropriate color palettes for skin, hair, eye color, and more”.

What does region-appropriate skin color boil down to you ask? Well, if you happen to want to play an elf with dark skin, you’re out of luck. Right now I’m in the process of downloading and installing it, but I’ve played with the character creation widget on my boyfriend’s system.

I’ve been trying to explain to him why I think it’s wrong to have skin tone linked to the game designers’ ideas of what would “fit in”. Yes, Tolkien’s fantasy world was as whitewashed as they come, sticking to his original vision would imply limiting the available skin-tones to shades of Caucasian. Tolkien’s world even implied that the whiter you were, the more erudite, the more artistic, the more soulful, as he often praised the shining-pale Eldar elves as the world’s most perfect creation. All the beautiful women in his books were white of skin.

But here’s the thing, Tolkien was a white dude, someone who rode the road of white privillege his entire life and never had to worry about a thing. Admitting that his vision was limited, and very culturally inappropriate, should be the logical decision for creating a game in line with modern values. Perhaps no other white players may wonder why the most advanced race of beings in Middle Earth goes no darker than “slightly sunburnt”, but I worry about the messages the game designers are sending to people of color. ‘Sorry mate, you don’t fit in here.’

As soon as this three gigabite (!) download finishes I’ll be pushing to see if I can get my human characters into the major human cities to look around. While about half of the human regions feature dark skintones, I want to see how many NPCs were rolled up in shades other than lily and dear-Gawd-he’s-pale. Some days, I wish for Earthsea Online, then I remember how badly the Sci-Fi channel botched that one. *sigh*

I often think there’s some internal conflict in the company– I suspect at elast one of their writers is moderately feminist, but their marketers won’t stand for it, or something.

I think I’ll need to blog on Final Fantasy at some point. In the meantime, let me just say that towards the end of the game, it’s quite possible to make Rikku into a kick-ass fighter. Godhand is one of my favortie weapons, and since she starts with huge agility, all you need are a few strength spheres and you’re in business.

Not to mention it’s pretty damn insulting to the demographic, when you get down to it. This is something that I think it can be really important for allies to point out, particularly. And really, as I think we’ve all noticed at various points, it’s just downright telling that we’re the so-called man-haters, when anti-feminists and non-feminists are often much better at it than we are.

To the point, I’m not sure that game designers (show creators) don’t actively shy away from having a choice/variety of gender, race, or ethnicity for fear of losing their golden “target audience” because of misogyny or racism. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I continue to contemplate science fiction on television, and the never-ending phenomenon of white dudes saving the universe/world. (Yes, yes, Buffy, I know. Blonde white girl who saves the world. Yay diversity. /snark)

Then, as you pointed out with Fable, there’s the idea of designing a game to revolve around the creator’s love-interest driven story. Letting the player choose to make a female character would completely wreck this (un)original tale of love! The girl is there to be won, not to be the active person, or even *gasp* to pursue her own romantic interests! More and more I come to find that these bland tales of romance are written solely to make the games more palatable to men, sort of like Harlequin Romances with big dragons in them. Nobody ever thinks to ask the princess how she feels about having to marry the first schlubb who manages to skewer the rampaging dragon.

Catering to a demographic percieved to be racist, homophobic, and sexist and then using that perception of the demographic to defend your choices is the lazy way out for too many content creators and advertisers. Any other way might involve thinking or writing skills.

This theme is what made me struggle mightily with my principle that one does not throw library books across the room no matter how offensive or wretchedly-written, when I encountered it in Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With A Thousand Faces”.

Fortunately I was already *very* familiar with the use of tortuous sophistry and evidence distortion to justify male privilege (IRL as well as books), so I wasn’t at all *convinced* by the fool, but the fact that so many other people seemed to think he was God and had the Last Word on epics, quests, fantasy, myths, fables and folklore made me want to sic Bradamante on him…