Re: Concern about racism and sexism in Supertuxkart 0.9
Vincent Lejeune <vljn.ovi@gmail.com> writes:
>>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.
>
Thanks for this summary of your position. I absolutely agree with your
point of view. The question is if this is reason enough to ban the game
(or parts of the game) form Debian. IMHO this should be discussed (as
it's done now) with upstream and the Debian Games Team and it should
ultimately be their decision to take. That's IMO how Debian works.
I don't see the content as problematic enough to warrant a Debian wide
ban against the maintainers will. This should be left for very extreme
cases. If it's possible and someone is volunteering to do the work I
would appreciate if the sexualised content would be removed from the
Debian package once the version containing it is being packaged for
Debian.
Gaudenz
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