Character Generation: Questions on Race and Racism

@R.Lindsay Gotcha. I still have to go through the phase of "How close is too close" for the uniforms, for sure.

 

Also remember, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Sometimes offending people is a pretty good business move. It's far better to be hated by the liberal media, than to be unknown.

And for everyone of them you offend, you'll gain a friend who hates them.

 

Interesting question, but I think probably a high class problem. It's a game. Make some choices that fit the game. If a mash-up works, and the potential humor isn't going to be a detractor, go with it. Later, if the game is successful and you start to run into issues (like the whole "why are there only heterosexual relationships in Stardew Valley thing), then you can afford to invest more time/money into solving it more delicately. In the meantime, I think most of your players won't have an issue with what you decide.

 

Even though this was unburied by a spambot, is probably no longer relevant, for the sake of comleteness, I'll give my take.

Your approach for putting names for specific category groups is correct, however, what isn't correct is that you're correlating names with RACE. While you should be corellating them with ethnic groups, or ethnicitiy.

Ethnic group would mean shared culture, and shared culture would be determining given name. Additionally, ethnic group can have its own distribution of races.

At simplest implementation, you'd be implementing "Culture" or "Country of Origin", then each Culture will have its statistical distribution of names, given name, and races. It would make more sense for each group to have its own name list rather than trying to implement shared name list with checkboxes.

So, basically, when generating an npc, you'll be rolling against statistical distribution of cultures, and then culture would determine list of possible names. Racial destribution can be done either way - it could be either specified for each ethnic gorup, or it could be specified for entire world/location. Or both ways - the area you're generating would have its racial distribution, and some ethnic groups would override it with its own list.

 

I've worked on sports management games where this type of thing is commonplace.

As players retire a new young player is generated to take their place in the game world.
Their name is taken from a database of names each linked to a frequency for the nation and an assigned ethnicity.
(You obviously want first and second names as separate records).

You need quite a lot of accurate data to avoid repetition and keep a sense of realism in that type of game. Names databases can be tens of thousands of records. But this is perhaps the most in depth type of example you'll see in games, and a small scale version of that approach in most cases will be good enough.

 

I think this is a great opportunity. By randomizing things like that, how can there be racism? I wouldn't think of a name being only "appropriate" in certain situations or cultural settings, let alone in combination with a certain appearance.

 

Wow, I didn't expect to see this conversation revived. As @neginfinity said, I'm no longer actively working on this game, so it's not exactly relevant to me anymore, but I like the idea of these kind of topics hanging around as a source of info for others, so I'll share my updated thoughts as well.

I absolutely agree with you guys that ethnic/cultural groups seem to be a better way of grouping names, with race being another subdivision within that group. But I also agree that with the right setup, it wouldn't really matter. An Irish-looking chap named Mohammed Rajesh Jackson is a bit funny, sure, but it's also invites the imagination of the player to fill in the reasoning for their multi-cultural name. Obviously, if you're going for realism, you'd have to be a bit more careful to not trigger the "huh?" reflex.

 

Well, there was a spambot that responded to it and brought it up. The spambot has been already exterminated along with its post, but the discussion looked worthwhile enough for me to chime in with a description of a possible way to do it.

 

You shouldn't use the term race, it's not very accepted term here in Sweden for example, use ethnic group or similar.

We are all same race, crazy US still have the term in their passports

 

Fascinating. I was never aware of the difference between the terms before. In filling out forms, I'd seen the separation of the two (White/Black/Asian/etc for race, compared to Latino/Non-latino for ethnicity) but never put much thought into it.

They're both artificial constructs we use to try to categorize people. I guess the term "race" has a lot more negative connotations behind it based on misuse by... well, a lot of people.

 

Yes and it's dated since we are all same race.

 

I mean, it's semantics, really. We're all the same species, as evidenced by our genome. Like I said, "race" is just an artificial construct that tries to categorize people based on perceived shared similarities. So "we're all the same race", "there's no such thing as race", and "there are many distinct and overlapping races" are all true in their own way.

 

We're same species, not same race.

Claiming that all people are the same is denying their individual differences.

 

Its a made up term when it comes to humans, animals can be devided into different subspecies/races humans can not.

 

Humans are animals.
Subspecies are not races.

Like I said, trying to say that "Races do not exist" is the same as insisting that there are no clusters of humans sharing largely similar traits. Because that's what race is.

 

The term does not hold any biological meaning, zero. I can have more DNA in common with a Asian or African dude than a fellow European.

 

You also share 50% of your DNA with a potato, which does not make you a plant.

Race refers to phenotype.

 

No that is ethnic group. But we have discussed this enough.

 

Claiming that different races don't exist because (according to you) "we all are the same race", isn't much different than claiming that transgender or gay people don't exist because "we all have the same sexual orientation" or "we all are the same gender" (there exist people who claim exactly that, btw). How is that not blatant racism and why in the world do you think you are entitled to the right to deny anyone's right to identify their race?

 

You'd be surprised what people can find racism in when they are trying to find it. The outrage mob always finds it.

Must be a local thing to Sweden. In the US it is quite common to see "Race/Ethnicity" or simply "Race" on a wide variety of forms from both government and private institutions.

For example, for the United States 2020 census the question is phrased specifically: "What is Person 1's race?"
https://www2.census.gov/programs-su...onnaires/2020-informational-questionnaire.pdf

 

Well yes, maybe. But it should make it harder if you don't portray stereotypes in the first place.

Here in Germany, that's the same. Saying "race", referring to humans, makes you suddenly racist, even if you are just talking about differences, which, no doubt, are there. It's just a matter of how you think about it, though. The term, of course, is hated here for its historical misuse. Personally, I'd say different races are what makes the human species diverse and that's a good thing.
Just as has been pointed out before, humans are animals as well and I don't understand people saying 'races are something that animals have, not humans', trying to degrade any animal that's not human, trying to emphasize humans are a better species. But that just leads us away from racism to speciesism. Oh well, at that point the topic just derails.

 

Ethnic group is your culture. Phenotype is differences in your body. Differences in your body are result of your genetic makeup. It is not important what percent of genes correspond to the differences, as not all games have same significance. Our DNA has junk data which is largely irrelevant, and at the same time altering some individual can result in diseases.

Here's a good example of differences between Race and Ethnicity:

Spoiler

Those guys have same ethnicity but different race.
The left is Caucasian, and the right one is Black.
That's their races/phenotypes.

However, they have same ethnicity, as they're both born Russian. That determines their culture along with shared cultural knowledge.

 

I don't think the vast majority of people (least of all the people who will be most offended) have any concept of the difference between race and ethnicity. Have you heard of a joke about someone's culture that was not considered racist? These days even a vanilla personal insult is considered racist depending on who said it to who.

For questions about the appropriateness of this or that in games, I consider that people should do whatever they feel comfortable defending. In this day and age, the only other measure of right or wrong is whatever the mob believes.

 

Looking back at this, there's a part that immediately jumps out to me as being problematic. And it seems that this is being acknowledged in the OP:

What the heck does "regular" mean? If I'm from Brazil then Brazillian names are "regular" to me.

I don't know where the author is from, but their idea of "regular" arises directly from their own specific background. There's nothing wrong with that because everyone has a perspective and they're all going to be a little bit different. But when you're making stuff for other people then the implication that there's "regular" people and then there's "everyone else" isn't great, and promotes a certain world view over others.

I see nothing wrong with categorising people by whatever charactistics are relevant for your purpose. But do it neutrally and consistently. Don't call them "regular", use whatever term properly describes their category in comparison to the others.

 

Its pretty common view in entire Europe, but maybe more so in northern europe. For me its just an old dated term, I dont hold any grudge towards it. But might need to defend it to certain people if you use it.


Its like here in sweden we have something called chocolateball or coconutflanball its a pastry



Its old somewhat used name was n-word-ball (it was never wildy used atleast not in my day and age). There are still people defending the term. "n-word just referees to the color of it" etc, etc. Again why use a dated term

edit: at the same time I dont like this trend with removing films and books that contains old views. Its history revisionism and its plain bad

 

While there have been reports on this thread and the potential problems that can arise, I am going to leave open for the time being. Primarily because it an important topic that game developers should consider and discuss with other developers. And as many folks are single or small teams, getting external advice/input is very helpful.

BUT, let's make sure the topic stays firmly in the arena of diversity and representation in developing a game. Please avoid general diversity/political/ideological discussions and also please no hypotheticals. Keep the conversation about actual games.

 

Absolutely. I'm a straight, white, American cisgender male. About as plain as it gets. I do my best to read about and familiarize myself with other cultures, but there's only so much time in each day, you know?

Looking back, I regret how I phrased that 5 years ago. I think what I was avoiding doing was phrasing names like Christopher, George, and Jason as "white" names (Chris Rock, George Takei, and Jason Momoa might have issue with that...). Perhaps "non-ethnic" would have been a better choice of words?

I'm worried by the tone of your message suggesting I was being inconsiderate of others or promoting a certain worldview, when the whole point of making this thread was because how I handled representing ethnicities in my game mattered to me, and I was asking for help in how to handle that. As in all development tasks, it's worth noting that as a solo developer I'm also limited in how much I can reasonably accommodate (this page, for example, lists nearly 500 culturally-distinct ethnic groups in the world... I can't incorporate each of them separately!), so I was trying to find a solution that would be "good enough" to not be distracting and limit the potential for offending anyone.

I'm also slightly amused that since this thread has been resuscitated, nobody's actually offered real input on a solution to the problem I presented, and instead have been offering only criticism (whether it's against racists, perceived or overt, or those they deem too sensitive on the topic).

I may come back to this game some day, and I'd still love to hear input on how to handle name generation for a diverse set of NPCs, if anyone's got anything to say on it.

 

You don't need to. If you're, say, generating a city, you define cultural groups existing in that city. And maybe omit some uncommon ones. Additionally, your cultural groups don't have to be actual cultural groups. They can be cultures used in your game.

In general, in a computer games, there can be at least two other levels of npc management - "Area populace" and "Faction".

A "Faction" would be a role npcs represent. For exampel "Police", "Gang 1", "Pedestrians" and so on. It is also a fairly good idea to use factions to determine relations between npcs. For example, "Gang 1" and "Gang 2" can shoot each other on sight. Or you can get fancy and have factions like "Cyberdyne systems Janitor"

"Area populace" would determine likelyhood of this or that FACTION spawning. Basically, it is a distribution chart for any given area.

The faction itself would then have its own distribution of cultures/ethnicities, where ethnicity would determine race and possible name list.

This can be tweaked and made more complicated on multiple levels. "Faction" can have different cultural distributions in different areas of the map, and you could have, for example, a police outpost where every spawning npc will be a latinos. Faction can also override naming rules or add embellishment, for example, a gang member could be given a nickname.

Also, as you can see, this can quickly turn into matryoshka doll of complexity, and it is possible to end up in factions within factions within factions, and bazillion of distribution maps.

 

Yeah, I think that's why I ran into this problem in the first place. My game was a Star Trek-like starship command game, and I was generating a crew of hundreds of people intending to be representative of ALL of future Earth... Might have been a bit too ambitious.

But like previously discussed, I could have taken an easy out and just used a list of the 5000 most common names and applied them randomly. I'm sure the game would have been S*** on by a certain segment of players who spend a good deal of their time railing against SJWs, but that's not really a group I'm interested in pleasing anyway, so no big loss.

I was basically doing what you said anyway, though. I (foolishly? ignorantly?) called the property "race", but it was a weighted distribution (loosely matching current demographic percentages) of names and skin tones that could be applied to the Human faction. I still think that's the simplest method with fewest compromises, and likely how I'll approach it if I get back to work on the project. I'll just change the variable name to "ethnicity" instead.

 

Apologies, my intent was quite the opposite. That's why I highlighted that you had already acknowledged that. Seems like that backfired. Oops!

I did. Go ahead and categorise stuff, using neutral, descriptive labels.

Adding to that now, I'd do a bit of research to see what people call themselves, rather than what labels others have given them. Or if their background has an academically / historically accepted formal label, perhaps use that.

Those names aren't "non-ethnic", though. They're just the ones you've been exposed to the most, so you've probably never had to think about it. Everyone's background has a name.

Based on my little knowledge of history and a little searching, I'd hazard a guess at labelling your examples "Anglo-Norman" names. However, I'm not confident of that without further research. Here's some examples, though.

A solution for you could be to find lists of example names from different cultures and use them in your generator. Then use the names of the lists as your category names. If they come from a reputable source then they should have already solved this themselves.

 

No worries. I'm not happy with how I phrased it back then, either. I actually wanted to be slightly controversial initially to invite discussion, since many of my posts would get little community involvement and would just die out, but I think I could have done a better job, still.

You know what the most popular male names in Kenya are? John, Samuel, and Peter at the top 3 spots. I'm sure it's got a lot to do with the fact that Kenya is a heavily Christianized nation (85%), and those names are all of significant Biblical importance. They're also extremely common "Anglo-Norman" names, though for the same reason. Ethnically, the Anglo-Saxons and Normans were actually Germanic, but -- and I imagine this applies to nearly ALL ethnic groups -- that group itself was extremely diverse. But that's also not really relevant because while Aethelstan and Ecgbert were popular Anglo-saxon names, they died out post-1066 (in favor of the more heavily Latin-centric Christian Norman/Frankish influence). So maybe religion needs to factor in heavily as well?

All this to say I don't believe there is a simple answer to any of this. I think the problem is one better approached by a larger team if it needs to be handled in a specific way (I'm thinking Watch Dogs as an example), and the best thing we can do as hobbyists is to just try our best, listen to feedback, and try to be as considerate as possible.

 

You guys are overthinking things.

 

Seriously.. as well as trying to tip toe thru the tulips so as not to get bit by the inevitable snake in the grass. The convoluted twists we have to go through these days to say something simple it boggles the mind.

That being noted I would interject this based on many decades of noting the phonetics of languages worldwide and even within the animal kingdom vocalizations and the sounds of nature. Certain sounds make certain metaphysical connections. An example is the phoneme M. It is the only sound you close your mouth at the end of. It signifies matter, mother, matrix, death[as the symbol the skeleton] and frameworks. A final construction if you will. P is power or the holding of potential force for expulsive or explosive release. TH is the only sound that you bite your tongue in expressing and indicates separation [as in separation of the teeTH which also separates bites of food] , THis THat THe oTHer THing..Each sound has it's own inherent dynamic built into the 3D laboratory Universe. We can mimic these as we are constructed of a matrix of matter from which these dynamic interactions and subsequent phonetics arise and are built into our brain and vocal palette. Depending on a cultures understandings of relationships they choose to emphasize some and de-emphasize others. For example there are two islands in Oceania with two tribes whose language is almost identical except one is a matriarchal culture and one is a patriarchal culture. The matriarchal tribe does not use the phonetic P and the patriarchal tribe does not use the sound F in naming offspring. They substitute the sounds in names that are nearly identically similar, P for F and F for P.

Now in noting that, something I could write a book on, I would think that if one were to construct a naming engine that lists of syllables could be constructed and chained that would indicate an aggressive warlike culture by including those phonetic syllables associated with power, destruction, animation, victory and subduction or submission of an other. A magickal culture would have syllables associated with energetics, mystery, transcendentalism, force and knowledge. In this manner one could construct a naming engine with subsets of phonetics that are loaded based on keywords that would generate chains of syllables that our brains and its connection to the vocal palette would inherently understand through pronunciation to belong to a set of characteristics. Language is very complex. To write a book about it could be volumes in length and some are. But it is not so complex that by the age of two a child can inherently understand how to use its phonetic sets adopted by it's particular culture effectively to communicate its wants and observations and understand the wants and observations of it's siblings and parents. A paradox for sure.

 

I agree. If I call "Faction" "race" in my game and someone goes through all the trouble to dig this detail up and get offended, the fault lies with them and not with me.

 

The way I see it, there are two things going on:

1. Offence is in the mind of the beholder, which means that there's no guarantee of avoiding it no matter what you do.
2. The mob is looking for someone who is not prepared to give a common sense account of themselves and stand by what they say, but instead offer apologies at the slightest pressure.

That's why I say, do whatever you're prepared to defend and stick to your guns on, because just by doing that you're almost guaranteed to avoid problems, and at the end of the day, doing what you think is right is the only lasting form of satisfaction anyway.

Personally, I see the problem as being not with the people who highlight differences, but those who cannot live with them. The acceptance of the idea that the widespread acknowledgement of some racial characteristic would dehumanize a person has got to be the harshest form of judgement I can think of, and it's practiced every day by people pretending to fight racism.

 

In English language, the word race meant something like "lineage." Like, a person could be of the "Irish race," meaning they were of Irish genetic heritage.

Probably race shared roots with ray, trace, track ... all referring to a line. Also rey, royal, reich, regis, referring to king or king's lineage.

This is also how you get the other meaning of race, which is to compete for first place while traveling along a track. The track is a line, and you run or ride to the end of the line, keeping that lineal sense of the word race.

 

I definitely also agree with the "overthinking" angle.

If names are popular among multiple cultures then, no worries, include them in multiple lists. Your name generator isn't some declaration of ownership. Multiple groups can use the same things.

As for names which sound to old to be desired in your game, also no worries - delete them.

From a technical perspective the solution here can be a really simple one.

 

If you're making your own game, then use whatever words YOU want to.