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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 6702623">This is why I think focus on cultural appropriation is such an issue. I think building fences and treating culture as IP, just seems like highly misguided notions to me. Things that would divide people more than anything else. Like I said before, being respectful of other cultures, not engaging in cruel stereotypes, is something I think we ought to strive for. I work toward this all the time in the stuff I design (and like to think I've been improving more as time goes by). But cultural appropriation concerns seem more about creating barriers between cultures, resulting in a chilling lack of mixture or interaction. I think this approach would ultimately result in a world where the blues never became rock N roll and where Umbran never gets to take a Bento box to work. I also think that the first step toward understanding another culture frequently begins with clumsy and inaccurate handling of cultural features. I know a lot of my initial interest in the middle east was inspired at first by early encounters with things like Al Qadim. Later, I ended up studying Arabic and middle east history in college. Still no expert but my understanding now is far greater than what it was when I was running Al Qadim. Also I think we have to be careful about cultural accuracy because it has a weird effect of objectifying the culture itself. I am working on a wuxia game and one of the things you see when you watch movies from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere is that these are living genres, that they often borrow as much from our culture as we borrow from theirs. They also borrow from surrounding cultures. So if you make a game set in ancient China and limit it to a "purely Chinese" culture from that time that is historically accurate, you end up leaving out a lot of the innovations that have come to it by way of directors like Tsui Hark and King Hu. Sometimes they also develop their own inaccurate shorthand for the past in films. Accuracy just doesn't seem a good measure of harm or lack of harm. I think we are much better off thinking in terms of whether something cruelly stereotypes or is clearly insensitive, than in terms of appropriation.</blockquote>

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