Sense, Sensibility and Nonsense: A Sensitive Inquiry About Race and E:D Idea of the Future

YinYin

YinYin
Well - it happens quite naturally in unmixed development teams.
Even if they have a good amount of employees of all kinds of ethnicities, they clearly only tried to make it diverse - but didn't have anyone taking enough time to consider how the line up would look from all kinds of perspectives.

Most studios are still learning this. (edit: or in fact afraid of learning it because of the sometimes violent backlash :/ that's the worst thing about it to me, being caucasian myself ...)

Terry Bruge-Hiplo said:
I have wondered what people think of Archon Delaine as, to me, he seems like he has all the characteristics of a person of colour, but with albinism. Like, you could say that it's a perfect example of "white washing", but then again, Krondon from the hip hop duo White Boiz has albinism and looks a lot like him. Thoughts?
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Yeah. Slapping albinism onto a character isn't really a reason to scream white washing. But looking at the whole line up one is still left to wonder why he or Felicia for example didn't simply get an extremely dark tone.
We are stuck with it for now though.
 
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Armour

A
I'd rather just see a lot more Powers introduced. There's plenty of room for that IMO.

Perhaps we could get many thousands of "Minor Powers" as well, courtesy of the character creator. They could be a result of expansion of a Minor Faction into multiple systems, or they could be a figurehead uniting multiple separate Minor Factions into a power bloc. Player-made factions could even create their own figureheads. The Minor Powers could be local bosses under the banner of a Major Power, or they could be independent. It would be cool if they could be promoted to Major Power status with sustained expansion via player help and luck - and perhaps Major Powers could be demoted if they collapse sufficiently (causing a power vacuum that is filled by the underlying Minor Powers, who immediately start jockeying for position to take over the whole operation and fighting amongst themselves whilst the other Major Powers circle like vultures...)
 

Faybs

Faybs
GilliganTX said:
but I feel they were white-washed to some extent Delaine is snow-white/albino!
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I have a hunch that Delaine was initially more traditionally African (going for a Caribbean pirate theme), and then someone said "are you seriously making the obviously bad guy black?", so they did a quick palette swap :)

Not that I really care all that much. It's a video game, and, like said, it's all the same behind the helmet.

*shrug*
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This thread is evidence that some people do care very deeply about this sort of thing, and there's no good reason to exclude them.
 

GilliganTX

GilliganTX
MelBrennan said:
I felt myself early on stretching to see Patreus as potentially that way as well, then I thought about the way in which Frontier have demonstrated their intention all across the remainder of the game, and gave them more credit than that. That is, if Frontier wanted to show us a dark-skinned Power person in the game experience, they simply would have done it, clearly and unambiguously. My guess is that I'm expressing a stream of thought-experience that maybe they've not thought about in quite this way, and that's no judgement, just a potential insight.
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Bold and underlined for emphasis.

That's basically what I'm seeing. There's three characters that are *almost* clearly ethnically African. But they're all three drenched in layers of ambiguity, as illustrated in the quote below:

Faybs said:
I have a hunch that Delaine was initially more traditionally African (going for a Caribbean pirate theme), and then someone said "are you seriously making the obviously bad guy black?", so they did a quick palette swap :)
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Which, GET OUT OF MY HEAD.
 

YinYin

YinYin
Armour said:
I'd rather just see a lot more Powers introduced. There's plenty of room for that IMO.
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My feeling too. We just need a good PP update during horizons :D

Faybs said:
I have a hunch that Delaine was initially more traditionally African (going for a Caribbean pirate theme), and then someone said "are you seriously making the obviously bad guy black?", so they did a quick palette swap :)
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Haha, that might be exactly what happened.
Should push that as a question for a future AMA/stream or the like. I'd really wanna know how character designs came to pass.
 

Zed

Zed
I'd imagine that by 3300 the majority of the human race will have averaged out to a nice healthy medium brown. Or we'll have found a way to choose exactly the shade we want to be.
 

CaptainSeriousFun

CaptainSeriousFun
Terry Bruge-Hiplo said:
...I have wondered what people think of Archon Delaine as, to me, he seems like he has all the characteristics of a person of colour, but with albinism. Like, you could say that it's a perfect example of "white washing", but then again, Krondon from the hip hop duo White Boiz has albinism and looks a lot like him. Thoughts?
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I thought potentially the same thing, but have chosen to give Frontier more credit than that...I do wonder about their development process here, and what the meetings were like... :)
 

CMDR Corlas

CMDR Corlas
MelBrennan raises an interesting point, and I'm happy it was raised. I think it's all to easy for people in a position of social dominance to let other groups, however they might be defined, be ignored. I don't think it's intentional at all (at least not usually anymore), but it's just a byproduct of human's ingrained tribal mentalities. We focus on our own "tribes" however we define it, and by necessity of brain function, end up paying less attention to others. To help combat this tendency, I think it's important and healthy to have people raise questions about it from time to time when things are questionable. :)

I always considered Patreus to be Hispanic, myself. As while this is only slightly relevant, I've always found it interesting: I am half-Hispanic half-generic-white-guy, but by looking at me, you'd think I was just all generic-white-guy. When making game avatars though, I almost always end up making a much darker-skinned version of myself. It's sort of like my brain sees me as that, and not the pasty-white blob that I am.
 

Kicks

Kicks
Zed said:
I'd imagine that by 3300 the majority of the human race will have averaged out to a nice healthy medium brown. Or we'll have found a way to choose exactly the shade we want to be.
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Given the proximity of some orbital stations to the sun, there's probably going to be a new race everyone else just calls "Utterly Toasted"....
 

CaptainSeriousFun

CaptainSeriousFun
Faybs said:
I have a hunch that Delaine was initially more traditionally African (going for a Caribbean pirate theme), and then someone said "are you seriously making the obviously bad guy black?", so they did a quick palette swap :)
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My hope is that this didn't happen. Black people can be "bad guys" too. :)

- - - Updated - - -

By the way, thanks very much for the reasonable ongoing discussion, ladies and gents. Appreciate it.
 

YinYin

YinYin
Kicks said:
Given the proximity of some orbital stations to the sun, there's probably going to be a new race everyone else just calls "Utterly Toasted"....
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I love this :D

MelBrennan said:
My hope is that this didn't happen. Black people can be "bad guys" too. :)
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Obviously. But imagine the only power play pirate figure to be intensely dark, while everyone else stays the way they are now? Ugh.

edit: either way the swap doesn't really help it at all
I would feel comfy with a very dark Winters and Delaine.
But not retconning them ...

Best to introduce new powers/leaders in 2.x! :D
 
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Red Dirt Nurse

Red Dirt Nurse
This is a valid and interesting topic. Thanks for bringing it to the forum.

I personally don't believe in race. I never have - although, I feel compelled to describe myself as caucasian, when asked ... what does that even mean? Conversely, I do believe in culture - that the customs, stories, and belief systems of a shared group, bind that group together in their culture. I don't feel pride in being caucasian, but I do feel a sense of pride in my culture.

(Believe me - I'm not trying to NERF race here) ;)

Frequently however, I find myself looking at games, advertisements/commercials, movies & television shows, and challenging the lack of diversity - I'll ask, "where are the role-models for minorities?"

The PowerPlay characters seem to be engineered in such a way that there's someone in there that anyone can identify with (almost). When I look at the characters, there's a couple that get my gay-dar going as well - no disrespect intended - it's all part of my immersion.

Even people with disabilities are represented: clearly Aisling Duval is sight impaired:

Photographer: "Look at the camera, Ms Duval"
Aisling: "Hows' this?"
Photographer: "A bit more to the right..."
Aisling: "How about now?"
Photographer: "No, your right!"
Aisling: "How's that"
Photographer: *sigh* "That'll do"
Aisling: "Lovely"
...
*click*​

When I look at the list of characters though, they're all so .... so, very .... stereotypical. No gingers though :eek: They must have been bred out. At this juncture, one of you who has more lore-knowledge than I, can explain the lack of gingers in the future :)

Look at them...
Power-Play-Characters.jpg

A friend shared this video with me the other day. Many of you would have already seen it. It's compelling, and I'll just leave it here...
[video=youtube;q0qD2K2RWkc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qD2K2RWkc[/video]


Addit:

I just noticed this quote...

Kicks said:
Given the proximity of some orbital stations to the sun, there's probably going to be a new race everyone else just calls "Utterly Toasted"....
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Kinda explains the lack of gingers.
 
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Stupid_hippy

Stupid_hippy
After 1300 years of interbreeding and extra-solar settlement I'm not convinced anyone would be black or white anyway. In fact any so called pure bloods by this time would probably turn out to be racists,whatever shade their skin is as they would have had to go out of their way to keep that bloodline pure by discrimination against other shades of people.
 

CaptainSeriousFun

CaptainSeriousFun
YinYin said:
...Should push that as a question for a future AMA/stream or the like. I'd really wanna know how character designs came to pass.
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YOu might be interested to know that I did submit a question similar to the topic thread in the last stream, http://streamq.azurewebsites.net/: the question was "Are their dark-skinned humans (black people) in the Powerplay future of Elite? Will they ever be seen in prominent roles?" It was voted to the very bottom (scroll all the down on the above link); maybe because the general topic of the stream - Collectables - was seen as substantively different from the question I was asking, which is part of the reason I extended and "re-asked" it here.
 

CMDR Corlas

CMDR Corlas
I actually thought the concept of "palette-swapped black guy" was kind of cool. I sort of assumed that this is what the design was, but I took it as intentional, not a reaction to a potential point of offense.

Thinking in terms of genetic mixing in the far future (and from a very much laymans perspective), it seems to make sense that we'd see people with a mix of "racial" features to the point that skin color wouldn't match up to what we expect facial structure to look like. I just took Delaine as an intentional sci-fi nod towards this.
 
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