Re: Claims of racism and sexism in Supertuxkart 0.9 on Debian mailing lists
For what it's worth, this is what upstream has to say. They forgot to Cc
d-d-g@, but asked me to forward it.
Ansgar
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Hi,
I'm from the SuperTuxKart development team and some people will probably not care/twist what I'm about to say.
However I think it's important to clarify some stuff.
It seems a lot of people criticized without even playing the game.
The character Sara is one of the many playable characters in the game. She isn't the only woman playable. Several others are present.
* Suzanne (Blender's mascot)
* Xue (XFCE's mouse)
* Amanda (A panda and the mascot of windows maker)
Sara isn't just for background decoration. In fact she has an airport (Princess Sara Airport) an airline company (Royal Cupcake Airways) and many other things.
Focusing only on her bikini or the number of time she is in a track is narrowing the character to only one aspect.
Also the character in STK was mainly designed by women (including the bikini).
* Her airport https://i.imgur.com/wd1mckn.jpg
* A warning for a networking antenna https://i.imgur.com/ubSk8ug.jpg
* The following picture https://i.imgur.com/fNo3HDj.jpg is a bug and this should be reported. Her face should not have a strange blue artifact.
For the beach we will add men in swimming suit. It was planned but unfortunately the guy who worked on it had some delays, so the release was done before it could be finished.
http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=6325
SuperTuxKart is in constant development and we will improve it in the future. We are expending STK's cartoon universe. Each character will have a track.
That's the reason Suzanne (the monkey) is presents in Cocoa Temple. For instance Puffy (OpenBSD's fish) will be in the underwater track.
There is no real life country in stk (and we are working to remove if they are presents in track). We use a fictional universe with fictional country so you can't pretend it target something specific. We also are a cartoon game not a realistic depiction of ancient civilizations.
Working on all those details take time, we are a volunteer project so we can't aim at a polish like a commercial game. So we progress slowly and we have a lot of work to offers to players the best experience possible.
That being said I think nobody wants to censor something.
* A lot of other games, animation movies, comics, etc use similar tropes
* When vlj raised the issue basically nobody in the SuperTuxKart team find something wrong with the poster (and the vast majority of people are perfectly okay with it). He wanted to put himself on a strike and that is right.
* Like in other game a warning for instance (Comic Mischief) could be included.
* It's virtually impossible to please everyone . If we remove something we have equally protest from the other side of people who wanted.
* The game main target audience aren't white men but simply Humans .
Kind regards
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