PERIHELION'S PROFILE

I agree that erasure of minorities in fiction is a serious problem, and it'd be great if more writers addressed it. But it's kind of disingenuous to say "just swap some genitals/skin tones/whatever and you're good," because it's a lot more complicated than that. It's actually really difficult to completely avoid negative stereotypes. As an example, consider the following scenarios with two characters:

- A is violent towards B.
- A is more proactive than B.
- B is kidnapped and then rescued by A.
- A is smarter and more rational than B.

These are all fine if A and B are both men or both women, but they become problematic if A is a man and B is a woman, because now you're reinforcing negative stereotypes about women. So if you're writing a story with both men and women, and you care about not perpetuating bad cultural ideas about women, there is suddenly a long list of things you cannot do. Same goes for race. If you have a character who gets killed off early in the story, it's problematic if they're the only minority. Or if you have a character who's a thuggish and uneducated drug dealer, you better be very careful about what race you make them. Many things that are fine in the context of a story reinforce bad ideas when viewed in a broader cultural context, and it's important to keep that in mind as you write. Having gone through this experience myself many times, I can see how it's tempting for people to just write white men all the time. White male characters are judged as individuals, but a minority character will always be viewed as a member of their group, and anything they do reflects on other people like them.

As for protagonists, there are some surprising pitfalls when writing about minority groups you don't personally belong to. Specifically, when those groups face difficulties and discrimination, you have the option of either glossing over them or trying to address them, and neither option is great. It's bad to pretend that serious issues don't exist, but it's also extremely hard to write about, say, racism faced by African Americans when you're white and have zero firsthand experience with it. I've been wrestling with this issue lately because the protagonist of the story I'm working on right now is gay (not that you'd know from the first installment), and I'm really not qualified to tackle the issues of gay people. I'll probably end up just not addressing them at all, but I suspect a lot of people will be unhappy with me for that decision.

In conclusion: representing minorities is important, and people should definitely do it, but it's disingenuous to reduce the problem to "just include more women/PoC/LGBT in your work and everything will be great."

Whoa, nice! I love all the intricate detailing and the design of the scene. Creepy and cool.

Thank you! :) Here's another.

author=Liberty
For all that is good and holy, don't use unity or other game engines of the like if you're going to make RPGs which are designed with normal RPG systems. I'm playing a Unity game that is an RPG and there are so many issues with the menu systems - it's clunky as all hell, for one, and it lags when trying to load choice menus for another.

Say what you will about RPG Maker, but at least all the systems are by default smooth and work.

I've worked on several games in Unity, and I'd have to strongly agree with the recommendation to use RM instead of it for a 2D RPG. There aren't any built-in menus, so I'm not quite sure what you're talking about with menus lagging, but it's a huge pain in the ass to have to do all of the UI coding yourself. It also doesn't have a tile map editor built in, although there are probably third-party solutions available.

That said, Unity has a lot of strengths. It deploys to more platforms than just about anything else and has good C# scripting. I'm making a visual novel in it right now, in fact.

Anyway, CYBERLOUS, we can't give you informed recommendations without knowing more about what you intend to make and what your skills are. Different engines have different strengths and are more or less programming heavy. There's no one choice that's the best for all people in all situations.

A couple more.