Re: Concern about racism and sexism in Supertuxkart 0.9
2015-05-01 18:39 GMT+02:00 Vincent Lejeune <vljn.ovi@gmail.com>:
> Actually it is not inappropriate in a age rating perspective.
> It's rather : a game that was presented as a family game and which had
> a non human cast for years is now adopting the stance of an
> heterosexual male point of view.
> It's virtually accepted everywhere in the world since 95% of the video
> game industry does it, actually Nintendo does it since their first
> console after the video game industry crisis around 1985.
> It also happens that since Nintendo did it, the number of women in
> STEM slowly decreased to the point where it is now virtually accepted
> everywhere that it's a male only field.
> I strongly thing both phenomen are tied, I personnaly got interested
> in computer science because I was curious about how the game I played
> worked and wanted to reproduce and modify them.
> And I think I'm not the only one. Actually I think most people in STK
> dev team are in this case...
>
> Of course having 8 women in bikini in a track doesn't prevent a little
> girl to play the game and enjoy it, and working in STEM later but she
> will have more difficulty to feel welcomed by the game.
>
> It also happens that the video game community that grews with gendered
> games is currently harassing female video game developpers to make
> them resign and threaten developper that want to use their artistic
> freedom
> to introduce non sexualised female or "politically correct" playable
> character in their game.
I absolutely agree with you here. I'm not sure if there's an easy way
to fix it at the moment. Some people are slowly starting to get it,
but even talking openly about these issues usually comes back with
severe backslash, at least for women who complain. Just remember last
year's #GamerGate.
In any case, at least from my personal perception, it doesn't seem
that free games are really reaching actual kids, outside of some
particular families and social contexts. None of the schools I know
work with free games at the moment, and most of the kids I have around
(which are a lot) kind of play either with tablets or game consoles.
School games are usually provided by some educational company and its
contents are usually well taken care of.
I'm definitely no fan of closed source games, or programs in
particular, and there are many commercial games which are obviously
also sexist, racist, etc. But most of the games targeted at the same
age and social group as supertuxkart seem to, at least, not include
sexualized girls in bikini where they don't belong. Most of the
parents I know wouldn't like that too much, anyway.
Greetings,
Miry
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