I would argue this is an attitude that leads to bad art and not very entertaining media. Again having lived through the 80s when this stuff was coming at us from both the left and the right, I just can’t get behind the idea that art has a social responsibility like that. That isn’t to say it ought to be actively bad. But efforts to constrain art and entertainment under a moral framework, never seem to go well for art, artists, writers, designers or the audience because so often the people who are in charge of making those moral judgments don’t see nuance and completely miss the point
After reading this entire thread over the past few days, I've noticed you keep making this same argument over and over, that the "quality" of the art/media is bad if it is inclusive. That if we don't include things like racism in the game, it leads to boring design and forces artists to make terrible, derivative art...
And that's just false? Like, completely false.
The first example I can think of off the top of my head is slightly NSFW, but there is a series (comic and show) called "Interspecies Reviewers". This series has little to no racism in their world. Just... it doesn't exist. No one calls elves "twigs" or "knife-ears", no one calls the beast folk "animals". But there is ONE bit of almost racism that exists, and it is actually the part I want to talk about.
In the setting "fiends" are seen in a negative light. Not like denied services or insulted or anything, but they have a bit of a negative association, people don't seek them out as partners, ect. We only know this because a member of the fiend political party that is trying to raise votes for their platform contacts the main characters and asks them to review a fiend brothel (the entire premise of the series being an ecchi journey of reviewing various brothels). And what they find, almost immediately, is a little known fact about fiends... they take contracts literally. Even spoken ones. So, a man who proposes to a fiend woman and declares "I will make you the happiest woman in the world" gets pissed at the guy if she is not the happiest woman in the world, because they made a deal and he is breaking it. And they spread the word of this, and that misunderstanding is cleared up.
But the world isn't boring. The world is fascinating, with tons of interesting takes on various species and how they can use their special abilities. The only reason the almost milk toast racism of "hmm, fiends have nasty personalities" exists is solely to show this really interesting take on fiends. And I would argue it isn't even really a racism, just a stereotype.
And this isn't the only world I have encountered, made by an artist, that doesn't use racism or some of these other "negative qualities" to be interesting. You don't have to be offensive to be interesting, or to make good art. I mean, would the original Star Wars trilogy be better with more racism in it? It doesn't have any that I can think of, no one treats chewie as less than a person because he is a wookie. And as a writer and creative person... I don't see it. I don't see this NEED to include these things. You can, if you want, but it isn't NEEDED. There are other ways to be interesting, especially since to be interesting, you usually need to be doing something new, and having people hate other people based on superficial qualities of race/species isn't new. It is old, well-tread ground.
One of the things I really like about Level Up is how elegantly it handles the whole mixed-heritage thing.
