Individual experiences vary, but it's a helluva better start than... you know... not.

Even with everyone involved having the best intentions, that task seems doomed to fail.

With this logic, I can make a game about the Belgians colonized the Congo, leave out all that business about slaves on plantations, maiming said slaves on plantations for not meeting their quotas etc., portray the Belgians as magnanimous bringers of culture, and then say "oh, well, we had British people involved in the making of the game so it's OK"

Did they say that?

Regardless of the end product, I'd rather support something that had the involvement of some of the subgroups involved that are depicted in the media, than support something that had the involvment of none.

We can debate up and down on the relative efficiency and whether there's a better way to achieve informed representation.

But I think it's a stretch to say involving more diverse viewpoints is worse than not.

> There's a lot of media that uses caricatures to vilify [Blacks], but there is relatively little uproar from [Blacks] about it. They don't seem to be very sensitive apart from a small handful...

I assure you, Christians are aware of how poorly they're portrayed by the media, and aren't happy about it. It seems to me that this is one of many factors that led many Christians to support Trump.

"Representation matters" -- indeed it does; and I'm not sure I've seen anyone on TV or in movies that looks like me or the people in my church. Even when they're trying to put people in a positive light, you can tell that it's someone trying to guess what it's like from the outside, not someone who understands it from the inside.

I agree that Christians are sometimes treated more critically in popular culture. But this is simply criticizing those in positions of power. It's hard to argue that ethnic or other minorities enjoy those levels of power in any of the places these games are made or marketed.

To quote a certain comedian: "Christians won the world. The Christians won everything. If you don't believe me, let me ask you a question. What year is it?"

https://vimeo.com/215910765

I quite agree. There can be no meaningful comparison between Blacks in the 50's and Christians in recent history.

> no such discrimination against Christians has ever existed in ... Europe

Well, it hasn't for a very long time, but it was pretty bad for quite a while: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...

Mostly I share this as an interesting historical tidbit; not to refute any of your points.

> I agree that Christians are sometimes treated more critically in popular culture. But this is simply criticizing those in positions of power.

Of course, like all groups (be they religious, racial, ethnic, gender, etc), Christians are incredibly diverse such that there are no real criticisms that generalizes well, and all of these criticisms depend on caricature and stereotype which are (by definition) inaccurate and hateful. Moreover, to target a group for being "powerful" when that power is merely "numerousness in a democracratic context"--without any sort of evidence that the group behaves as a class, conspiring to increase or preserve the power of the group and to distribute that power throughout the group (to give privileges to constituents merely for being part of the group)--is lazy at best and hateful at worst (theories of a Jewish conspiracies spring to mind).

> To quote a certain comedian: "Christians won the world. The Christians won everything. If you don't believe me, let me ask you a question. What year is it?"

Maybe this is an amusing joke, but I don't think it supports your point very well. Lots of different cultures have given us different conventions and standards. We tell time using a Babylonian counting system, but we wouldn't say "Babylonians won the world". Similarly, we use a semitic alphabet but we wouldn't say "Semites won the world". We use Arabic numerals but we wouldn't say Arabs won the world. I could go on and on and on.

Or, if we want more recent history, the Bosnian war or even the currently ongoing dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

If you squint, you might even be able to include sect-on-sect violence which seems like several hundred years of European history, to the point that a group of religious practitioners crossed an ocean to escape it.

"I don't like how I'm portrayed, so I'll validate their criticisms through my actions" doesn't seem the best solution. If they don't like their portrayal, it seems they would be better off to make the portrayal better instead of making themselves worse.

I guess a basic level of self-respect? It's one thing to be criticized, but one could say "that's not who I am". And it's not like Jesus didn't warn them they'd be prosecuted for him; there are many, many verses about this very thing. But once they start performing destructive behaviors themselves, suddenly: that is who they are.

There is no other way to define “Christian”.

You're preaching to the choir, as they say. :-) I think Evangelical support for Trump is incredibly foolish for a number of reasons.

There are a number of enormous, relevant differences between these two groups, but more importantly I don't see any good, enlightening dialog coming out of a comparison between the plights of Jim Crow era Blacks and anyone else. It's like the converse of Godwin's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law).

> I assure you, Christians are aware of how poorly they're portrayed by the media, and aren't happy about it. It seems to me that this is one of many factors that led many Christians to support Trump.

I don't think they're "happy" about it, per se, but rather they're not offended enough to object publicly to it. And to be clear, I'm merely observing that Christians aren't as offended (or don't express offense as much) as I think other groups would be. I'm leaving it up to the readers to interpret this as thick-skin or weak-will or something else (I'm certainly not intending to imply any particular interpretation).

Christians are facing the same problem Muslims had to face post 9/11. Some of the people in your religion are so absolutely terrible you become hated as a whole for it. Is that fair or right? Of course not. But like any other community with rotten apples, you need to work on shunning and expelling these people... not voting for them.

> But like any other community with rotten apples, you need to work on shunning and expelling these people... not voting for them.

I'm sure you didn't mean any of those things, but it might be good to clarify.

I assure you that Christians are not, as a rule, unfavorably portrayed in the media, and many Christians are excessively tired of those members of the single most favored, and socially and politically powerful, subset of America's dominant religion pretending to be persecuted whenever they experience the slightest criticism or restriction in imposing their ideology on others.

> It seems to me that this is one of many factors that led many Christians to support Trump.

Probably not significantly; it's more likely the reason that white evangelical protestants overwhelmingly supported Trump and white Catholics and white non-evangelical protestants also did so, though less overwhelmingly (whereas Hispanic Catholics supported, and Black evangelical protestants overwhelmingly supported, Biden) is that white Christians consistently have more to do with the correlation between views on race and religious affiliation. It's perhaps telling that the share of White Evangelical Protestant (78%) and, White non-evangelical Protestants (52%), and White Catholics (53%) that supported Trump (in an October survey, [0]) are very similar to the share of each (72%, 56%, and 53%, respectively, in an August survey [1]) that believed “police killings of Black men are isolated incidents”.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/13/white-chris...

[1] https://www.prri.org/research/racial-justice-2020-george-flo...

Christianity is a unique religion in that there's a lot of people who claim to be Christians, but who hardly practice their religion or follow what is prescribed.

This isn't unique to Christianity. Hypocrisy and indolence are common facets of human nature, so they're bound to be common to the adherents of any particular religion.

Being "anti-christian" is an issue, because it is always an issue when a society is against a group of people.

One has the right to make fun and criticize religions, but not a large group of people, especially solely based on their traits, be it religion/faith, sexuality, etc.

Islam is quite problematic in this aspect. AFAIK the current resurgence of political Islam stems from its very core. Maybe it could be reformed to be (durably !) compatible with a secular state, but would that reformed religion be still Islam, or would it be as different as Christianity is from Judaism ?

This is somehow fine as these are our official 'state enemies'. It is funny how the problem is when it is turned around.

CoD and BF both went back to WWI/WWII for some releases as well.

And whatever Fortnite and Overwatch’s settings are. Kinda-cartoon kinda sci-fi?

I don’t think there as many generic modern shooters these days.

Doom is kinda sci-fi and kinda killing actual demons from hell ¯\(ツ)/¯

In today's society, with emphases on unconscious bias, race theory and egalitarianism, we are generally not okay with this kind of tone.

You mean like every single Call Of Duty game? Because it is in fact regularly being done.

the franchise does have you spend a lot of time killing people in the middle east, but the games don't explore religious ideology. the context clues pretty clearly point to your adversaries being jihadists and/or soldiers for a fundamentalist regime, but I don't recall the games ever explicitly saying so. in COD, terrorists blow things up simply because they are terrorists, not because they have any sort of coherent goal.

this is not to say that depictions in COD are not damaging in their own way, but they don't have anything quite so blatant as what is described in TFA.

I think no religion or religious organization should be spared of critique, but realize that in the West, (Christians), have been exporting culture that's kind of about trashing other peoples.

Take a look at Call Of Duty or even something as innocent looking as Uncharted for how 'we' are treating other cultures.

Pretty sure all voices are impersonated as we didn't have the same recording tech about 1000 years ago.

I think you have the right idea with this claim. It's a statement of the diversity of the development team not a promise the content is perfectly PC or historically accurate to the smallest detail.

It might be the author's explanation, via standpoint theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standpoint_theory

https://meaningoflife.tv/videos/43188

But it probably started out how you said ("Let's not anger any muslims....") and turned into something else.

I would suggest, as the author seems to propose but not allow, many of the issues are there for the sake of game play: I am currently using a flail and questioning my choice every time I get whacked because the thing takes a week and a half to pull start. But it's the strongest one-handed weapon currently available to me. So it makes for interesting tradeoffs in a way "axe v sword" might not.

A similar case could be made for fudging the details about sexual equality among the old Norse. I doubt anyone is watching the game imagining Vikings were tender and considerate self-reflective modern males; it just makes the story flow better than having to watch a cut scene of 10 dudes throwing food at each other in conference.

Basically it was a batshit crazy collection of historical, religious, and political trivia that was used as the background for the game's narrative, but at that time there was so much potentially controversial stuff if anyone took it too seriously that it could become a marketing nightmare. Boycotts from Christian groups and/or right wing nutjobs claiming that the game would encourage children (gotta think of the children!) to become Islamic terrorists. That sort of thing. It was a complicated game to market in that atmosphere. All sorts of different groups could have latched on to it as the epitome of how video games rot kids minds and turn them violent. It doesn't require anyone to actually do anything violent, it's just fuel for a gazillion fearmongering rants for Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, etc. All they would have to do is describe the game and demonize Ubisoft for making it; instant ratings gold.

They've continued having that statement at the beginning of each game, at this point as more of a tradition I think. Once the franchise was established, and got out of the Crusades, it gradually lost its potential to be a lightning rod for politically- or religiously-motivated anti-video game criticism. Although let's not forget the later game in which you have a boss fight vs. a historical pope who ended up being the villain in that game. Considering how freaked out certain demographics got by things like The Passion of the Christ (the movie), it's not much of a stretch to imagine somebody like Glen Beck going on an anti-video game crusade (no pun intended), throwing gasoline on the fire by going on and on every night about how these evil Canadians made this evil video game where you play an assassin from an order that was historically Islamic, where you're literally sneaking in to the Vatican to kill a historical pope (albeit with non-historical superpowers). Therefore kids are being brainwashed by Ubisoft to become Islamic terrorists right before our eyes. You know, Glen Beck stuff.

So it's really always just been a marketing CYA thing to reassure everyone that the game wasn't made with any particular political/religious/historical agenda. Admittedly, "we've got Catholics therefore we're obviously not in favor of assassinating popes" and the like is the "but I've got black friends" excuse for racism, but FWIW the intention was to proactively disarm accusations of biases or hidden agendas. It was not to be some sort of diversity statement.

But of course, it goes without saying that even if it was a statement of pride in diversity (which it wasn't), WHO THE EFF CARES. People getting triggered by such things need to go back to their safe spaces on Parler or wherever. So much projection from the 8chan kids. Who cares.

Hail Caesar! Rabbi and Priests :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEiDRi4Itc