NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 7831272" data-attributes="member: 59082">There was a whole thread in the Media forum that deep-dived into cultural appropriation and was, perhaps inevitably, closed due to veering too far into the political. But this is a very relevant topic for game design, so hopefully this thread won't face the same fate.Anyhow, I think it is important to point out that cultural appropriation is an idea, a perspective, and one that is not agreed upon by all. It is an academic contstruct derived from culture studies to explain certain phenomena around colonialism and post-colonialism. But what constitutes cultural appropriation seems to vary, depending upon who is using (and defining) the term. And of course not everyone buys into the concept at all, or finds it very useful. One of the big problems with the concept is that it is very difficult to draw a line around distinct cultures. Is there such a thing as pure or authentic, original cultures? Probably not, at least not anymore. Maybe in Papua New Guinea or the Amazon, but even then those cultures probably assimilated elements of other cultures. Especially in today's global context, cultures bleed into each other.Furthermore, who owns culture? Does anyone own Japanese culture, or Samurai culture? Does a random Japanese teenager on the streets of Tokyo have more claim to Samurai culture than a Western scholar of Japanese history? Who gets to decide these things? But if we put aside the concept and ask what we really wish to address by using it, my guess is that we can come to common ground: being respectful, not being exploitive, being as accurate with your representation as possible, etc. Of course we're still going to come back to the questions around what is and is not respectful or exploitive, and in the end I think it comes down to every creator (or game designer) to decide what seems best to them.In other words, to say something is wrong because it is cultural appropriation, assumes a lot of things that cannot necessarily be assumed: that people agree on what is and is not cultural appropriation, or even whether it is a useful concept in the first place. A person may not find it very useful at all, but still be interested in being respectful and not exploiting other cultures.</blockquote>

Verification