Dark Souls: A grim fantasy setting with a focus on death/rebirth/hopelessness. Set in Medieval period. No Christ figure. Very little obvious allusions to Japanese mythology. Pantheistic religion. Most weapons and armor styles are Western, but Eastern weapon and armor are available. Heavy prevalence of undead and demons.
Legend of Zelda: Set in Medieval period. A usually light-hearted fantasy setting with a focus on cyclical recharacterization and recurring motifs. Koroks and living spirits of places, similar to Shintoism. Heavy presence of undead. Goblinoid monsters. Psuedo-christian mythology focused on a trinity.
Civilization 5: The Japanese interpretation is based on Oda Nobunaga. Displayed as a highly militaristic leader with a propensity for declaring war and backstabbing his allies. Romanticization of the Feudal Period. His unique units are the samurai and “zero.”
Shogun Total War: Must research, haven’t played in forever.
Battlefield Games: Must research, have never played.
The Japanese made games seem much more willing to play with the canon of Western imagination while the Western games assign essentialist traits to real-life individuals.
The issue with game design and racism is complex. Inherently, players like to be rewarded for the choices they make and the strategies that they undertake. Yet, it is hard to make things different and rewarding without relying on baseline statistic and ability changes which reflect a view that certain races, nationalities, species, etc. have characteristics which make them better and worse at certain activities which, if arguably not “racist,” is certainly problematic.
Any games attempt to circumnavigate this issue by portraying the different options are character origins as being those of species, such as dwarf or elf or gnome, yet these species often come off as thinly veiled analogs for real-world races. This is especially evident in media where they are assigned speaking parts and accompanying accents. Perhaps this is a facet of the limitations on human imagination. We cannot conceive of things for which our own experience provides no basis. Although it is technically possible to create an accent from scratch, it requires a linguist to do so and to train a voice actor to reproduce it would be vanishingly difficult. However, the attempt is mostly not made.
When creating fantasy species, the basis is almost always things that the creator experiences in the real world, simply because that is where the seed of the idea originated, where the seed of all ideas originate.
In the examples that I have listed above, Dark Souls and the Legend of Zelda seem to be possibly problematic in their wholesale appropriation of Western Culture and their transformation of it for their own use. The Civilization and Total War games could be problematic in their essentialism and paternalism. How does one show respect when handling a foreign culture in the context of making a game? Is it better to remain historically accurate but treat people as a collection of essentialist traits or is it better to appropriate and mutate another culture into fantasy but, in doing so, giving respect to the ideas that are chosen to be represented?
