Re: Concern about racism and sexism in Supertuxkart 0.9
>From: Brian Gupta
>Addressing the question of age-inappropriateness and speaking as a
>parent of a young boy and girl, who tries to be vigilant for
>age-inappropriate content, I see absolutely no issue with this game,
>and would consider it appropriate for all ages. (This is by my own
>relatively puritanical US moral compass.)
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 don't know how "extended" Debian Diversity Statement is but IMHO
it's not that far streched to consider "welcoming everyone" as also
ensuring that packaged video game assets follow this rule and ensure
that
video game are equally playable by girl and boy with the same level of comfort.
Regards,
Vincent
2015-04-30 23:05 GMT+02:00 <beuc@debian.org>:
> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 09:26:23PM +0200, Vincent Lejeune wrote:
>> To be honest I'm hoping a bit that having downstream discussing the
>> representation in STK may make they change their mind.
>
> While I much appreciate the concern for the way a kid-oriented game is
> depicting the female figure, I feel like this is exporting a debate.
>
> I personaly don't want Debian to become a new Apple Store, as in
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Apple#Newspaper_and_magazine_content
>
> Debian has already quite its share of heated debate around sexism,
> enough for me to unsubscribe from various lists to keep my sanity, so
> I'd like to keep this debate where it belongs: upstream.
>
> Save for legally-sensitive material such as recently-discussed
> pedophily, every Free game is welcome in Debian IMHO.
>
> --
> Sylvain
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