> It's not about 'offending' people, it's about consistently and invisibly leaving people out.
The trouble is, this isn't something you can solve on an individual level as someone developing a single game - you have to leave some people out, there's simply not space - and yet, as the article alludes to, there's this pressure to meet everyone's expectations around inclusion.
(Even when the people being included don't actually exist. There was this big, screwed up gaming media hoo-hah a while ago about how a game and its developers were racist because they hadn't include any black people. It was set in a time and a region when they didn't exist - and from what I recall, the developers actually did the research on this, they didn't just assume everyone was white in their setting.)
The trouble is, this isn't something you can solve on an individual level as someone developing a single game - you have to leave some people out, there's simply not space - and yet, as the article alludes to, there's this pressure to meet everyone's expectations around inclusion.
(Even when the people being included don't actually exist. There was this big, screwed up gaming media hoo-hah a while ago about how a game and its developers were racist because they hadn't include any black people. It was set in a time and a region when they didn't exist - and from what I recall, the developers actually did the research on this, they didn't just assume everyone was white in their setting.)