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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8619995" data-attributes="member: 7030755">1. If someone was making a game that was very deeply inspired by the folk lore, culture, and natural environment of, say, Scandinavia, then I do think the project would benefit from people who were more closely connected to the culture.  Many Free League games, for example, have a sensibility that would be hard for a company like wotc to capture2.  There are other geographies other than strictly national ones.  The United States was obviously an English settler colony and dominant American culture is inundated with European cultural references.  We read english literature in school, learn about European history,  learn European languages (often poorly, but still).  Politically, America is part of the "global north," and culturally associates itself with the geography of "the West."  3. Historically, "the West," including both Europe and the United States, has viewed the economies, cultures, and peoples of the rest of the world through an extractive lens--taking land, enslaving populations, but also taking the stories and culture of people from around the world.  Sometimes these cultures (including languages, mythologies, histories) have been outright destroyed, sometimes they have been put in museums in the west to be viewed as artifacts, and sometimes these cultures have been turned into very reductive stereotypes.  That last bit is known as exoticisation and orientalism.4. So when people in "the West" create something, they should be aware of the above history and the way that it allows for and impacts what they do, both for the sake of producing a better product and for having an ethical relation to their creators and audiences.  Game companies should consider whether they have minorities on their staff, not just as writers but in all areas.  They should consider hiring writers from the global south who both have more knowledge of their cultures (and access to knowledge through their knowledge of language) and who face structural obstacles to making a living as a game designer.  And they should consider how audiences--all audiences--might receive their product.</blockquote>

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