this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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The Elder Scrolls is wild because there's all these huge historical race wars and feuds but then you play the games and 95% of the time it'll be a Nord, his Dunmer wife, a Khajiit and an Orc co-owning a brewery or whatever together and vibing. Guess it's almost heartwarming in weird way.
this is a big failing, i don't know exactly how morrowind treats you if you roll an argonian but i suspect the game isn't made too much harder/impossible---the devs are too cowardly to put class/race into a game in a way that actually effects the player. oblivion is more cosmopolitan & apparently peacefully presiding over a whole continent with equality so it kind of makes sense.
skyrim is especially bonkers---"skyrim for the nords!" why yes of course there are a dozen elf-owned businesses and farms in stormcloak territory, we don't want it to appear as if the racism regime is racist! not just from not wanting to constrain the player, i think they tried to make the segregation seem tame so the player wouldn't be impacted by what segregation actually is like (and think something ought to be done). yeah there's a ghetto associated with the dark elves but they can leave whenever they like, there's 3 sympathetic nords to 2-3 racist ones, dark elves aren't barred property ownership. it's just the aesthetic of racial oppression without any substance, god forbid we make a player think or feel something about racism
Yeah true, a lot of games do pull punches when it comes to showing that sort of thing. Witcher 3 and Deus Ex Mankind Divided come to mind, where you're ostensibly playing a persecuted minority but they're still massive power fantasies where you can basically do what you want, it's kinda jarring.
The witcher 3 is especially ridiculous, you're a witcher a genetically enhanced human trained as a killing machine, you openly carry 2 fucking swords and the dumbass humans are openly racist against you and provoke you to fight several times.
It makes sense when the state guards are openly racist, they have power to back it up but it makes absolutely no sense when a couple of peasants in the middle of nowhere do it 😂
Rascism being stupid is historically accurate though
If you truly build that kind of systemic racial oppression into a game then it's incompatible with allowing players to choose the race of their character because you're basically building multiple games in one, at least one of which is about doing systemic racial oppression. Game development is a business after all, there's no market for doing twice as much work to sell way less copies (because who really wants to play a KKK orc instead of more fun escapist fantasy)
i dunno i'd have a lot of fun subverting an unjust hierarchy with ultraviolence, that's still power fantasy