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This stuff around the explicit pressure to have a white male alpha protagonist - and being punished for daring to suggest otherwise - reminds me of an email exchange I had on our staff mailing list shortly before I left Atari/Infogrames years ago...
I was a sound designer/programmer at the time so usually I didn't consider it my place (or tbh within the scope of my expertise at the time) to make comments or contributions concerning the current design or narrative direction.
On the rare occasions that I did it wasn't well received. e.g. e.g. when I noticed a balancing issue with a boss fight I mentioned this to the programmer concerned and our boss, overhearing, chimed in with "haha can she even use a controller?"
(Which, just to be clear, is a rather odd joke to make about a literal game programmer who is practically chained to a console dev kit all day, but whatever.)
But the time finally came (about 6 years into my tenure there) when I dared pop my head up to comment on something about the narrative. Or rather, a decision was made about the process for developing the game's narrative that I found... bizarre, to say the least.
The issue wasn't even really about the proposed content. I said nothing about the "asian reporter character so sexy you want to bend her over your desk and fuck her". (I wasn't in that particular meeting, so I didn't have the chance). No, it was a question of creative process.
My issue was that management had determined that the creative process the team was to follow for creating the (disaster themed) game's story was to spend weeks going through a list of the top 100 grossing disaster movies of all time (from IMDb) & identifying their common features
I don't know if the sexy asian reporter you want to bend over your desk and fuck was a common feature of these top-grossing disaster movies but I would have to assume so. There was only one exception made to this "find the lowest common denominator and put it in our story" rule..
And this minor deviation was the instruction to exclude the #1 grossing disaster movie of all time from this top 100 list. Because it was Titanic: a movie for chicks. We weren't making a girl game.
If anyone on the design/writing team questioned this process, I wouldn't know, as I wasn't in their meetings. Certainly, nobody said any comments or queries in response to the explanations of this process that were posted to the staff mailing list. So I thought I would myself.
I think I only used two sentences: I said I thought what made a film great was often the thing(s) that made it unique. An "x factor" if you will, rather than the lowest common denominator.
(What I didn't say was that I found the process reminiscent of the Royal Academy's scientific experiments as parodied in Gulliver's Travels. Particularly the one where they try to reverse engineer dogshit to create food.)
For more context, the narrative for this disaster game was being developed while the events of Hurricane Katrina were unfolding. We were all of us seeing on TV and online how real life communities react and survive, and how the state responds, in actual disasters.
But - and I found this surreal - the drama and tragedy of those weeks in New Orleans may as well not have been happening, as far as a team of game developers making a game about a contemporary natural disaster in the US was concerned.
I tried to raise it as something we should be paying attention to, but AFAIK nobody else did. I found that weird.
And when I'd ask questions (when e.g. doing the audio design for a riot scene) like "why are they rioting?" (i.e. water/food shortages? Arrests?) the reply was "because there's just been a natural disaster. That's what mobs do - they riot when that happens."
But now I should return to the point of this thread, which is supposed to relate to the "white straight male protagonist" obsession that AAA has historically had.
So as I said, I posted my reply on the staff mailing list - my critique of this lowest-common-denominator process.
So as I said, I posted my reply on the staff mailing list - my critique of this lowest-common-denominator process.
And our boss posts a reply back to the list. Quoting me and saying "if we let Katharine design this game we'd have a black one-legged lesbian as the player character".
And that was the end of that. Nobody else in the 120-strong studio dared say anything else about it.
And that was the end of that. Nobody else in the 120-strong studio dared say anything else about it.
The project was cancelled. So I guess we'll never know what happened to the white male hero of the game. Nor will we ever learn the fate of the Arab terrorists, their suitcase nuke, and the "Asian reporter so sexy you want to lean her over your desk and fuck her".
(To be fair to those 120 or so people, nearly all of them were scared - with good reason - of our boss. )
But coming back to the point, note that the focus on the characteristics of the protagonist were something my boss brought up without me raising it.
My issue was about how we make a great game - i.e. not boring game. Something that people want to play because it draws inspiration from and is relevant to their lives in the world out there, not a third-hand retelling of what's been done been before.
Which is a fairly obvious thing to think, or so you'd think. These dudes want to cling to the same old tropes as a way to - I dunno - further extend their childhood or something. Their fear leaves them creatively stunted. Their ability to achieve greatness is limited as a result.
