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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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What is the dog that didn’t bark here?

They inserted a black character into a Japanese story why? Could they not find a black story tell and have the setting in black civilization.

A fun game would be to get the woke upset that Ubisoft thinks so little of black civilization that they insert black characters into other civs instead of doing a game based on black history.

The anti woke shouldn’t be attacking the cultural appropriation of Japanese culture by inserting Hollywood’s preferred racial balance they should be autistically demanding a black story and accusing Ubisoft of racism for refusing to do that.

I genuinely want more content in an Ethiopian setting. They had a really interesting civilization, with good aesthetics, that's underrepresented in media. On the other hand, I don't play this kind of game, so my opinion doesn't matter much.

A fun game would be to get the woke upset that Ubisoft thinks so little of black civilization that they insert black characters into other civs instead of doing a game based on black history.

The slightly humorous explanation for that is it would entail a black character running around incessantly killing other exclusively black characters.

Maybe they could get away with setting it during the "Scramble for Africa" colonialism period. But they'd have to pull some explanation out of their butt for why Africa was so fundamentally undeveloped BEFORE the Europeans arrived, i.e. why did the magical illuminati people ignore it until then?

Imagine if they added in some reverse diversity and allowed you to play as a white dude running around killing exclusively black people. The volume of seethe generated would probably be considered by engineers as a novel energy source for electricity production.

Especially if he were aided by a slim black female love interest with a pretty face and long, straight hair. The collective seethe might just blast a hole through the fabric of the universe.

I'll grant you it's been a while, but this game does exist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/19900/Far_Cry_2/

Resident Evil 5, too. That one got criticized even at the time, but these were before Obama's second term when things really escalated.

The slightly humorous explanation for that is it would entail a black character running around incessantly killing other exclusively black characters.

You could have the protagonist kill Dahomeys and their trade partners from France, England and the Netherlands. Except this would entail a black character running around incessantly killing strong black women.

Unironically, it seems to me that Mansa Musa would fit well with the other "power and political intrigue" settings in the AC series, although I've only played a couple of the early titles.

Not terribly relevant, but Mansa Musa has some of the most interesting game mechanics in Civ 6. Come to think of it Civ 6 does racially diverse leaders in a fun way that I don't remember anyone really bitching about.

People do occasionally bitch about the leader selection, but I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped. Easy to avoid critiques from either side about 'inclusion' when the whole point is to represent the entire gamut of global civilizations and to faithfully represent each one as its own unique racial, social, and technological mix of traits.

Leaving aside the running gag about Ghandi being a nuclear-armed terror.

Some complaints about picking lesser-known leaders from a given nation's history in order to prevent a complete sausage-fest.

Hell, STALIN was a playable leader back in Civ 4 (also my favorite to play as incidentally), I dunno if they'd be able to get away with that today, even though he is probably the one leader most Americans could name from Russian history (okay, they COULD name Putin but lol that's not getting included) Note they also completely removed reference to "slavery" as a mechanic post Civ 4.

Probably also a reason that South Africa has never and will never be implemented in the base game.

I don't think there's ever been a point where a given leader was race or gender-swapped

A half-example: the female Zulu leader in Civ 2 was a gender-swapped Shaka.

https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Zulu_(Civ2)

INTERESTING.

Never played the first two games, and I pretty much started with IV.

Civ 1 is very primitive and silly, but I really like the balance of simplicity and immersion in Civ 2. For me, it was the best balance of those two in the series (and in strategy games in general) though I never had time to properly learn Civ III onwards, because by that time I was a postgraduate student and I had very little time to learn new games that I might not enjoy.

The Zulu were a faction in 3.