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In a more formulaic and low stakes corner of the culture War Ubisoft has announced "assassin's creed Shadow". The series is known for offering open world exploration set in various historical locations and times from the Nordic to ancient Egypt. This installment is appearantly a popular fan request in being set in fuedal Japan.
The culture War angle is that the game has two main characters, a female assassin and a disputed historical black warrior named yasuke. Now I haven't played one of these games in over a decade and am not particularly invested in this title but the response has been a fairly clean case study in marketing by controversy and I think it might be worth dissecting.
In my corner of the web I first learned of the game's existence from the preemptive "man, racists right wingers are going to hate this" posts. And indeed if one looked it was not hard to soon after find right winger racists filling their niche in this tired dance. One can always find bad takes that isn't what is interesting about how this kind of thing develops.
A trap seemed to be set, I don't know which end first broached the topic of "historical accuracy" but because it took the form of what legitimate criticism might look like the culture War quickly fell into a groove of progressives defending the historical existence of yasuke being a real samurai and pointing to other popular media depictions of him as well as pointing out that the assassin's creed series includes other widely disputed historical claims like Benjamin Franklin's possession of a magical golden apple. The anti-progressive backlash is in a hard place because I think there is something legitimate there but the shape of the discussion is not condusive to making the argument.
I think most of the anti-progressive front probably doesn't have an issue with a black sumurai in a game made by people they trust to have making awesome games as their first master. There's something itching in the back of the head of the backlash crowd that the reason we have yasuke isn't because a black guy in Japan makes for interesting segments of blending into crowds but because the people making the game have an anti-majoritarian view. The same thing that gave us yasuke is what motivates someone to put on a "fuck white people" shirt.
This is a feature of the culture War I'm seeing more and more. Proxy battles that few people care deeply about but have features that make them better or worse to do battle on. This game seems like favorable terrain from the woke angle and it's tempting to just give them it but I understand the impulse to fight on the terrain anyways.
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.
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.
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.
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