hidden racist agenda

[Captain]

that title's meant to be provocative just so someone besides myself will read this.

consider:
after a certain amount of turns, people of foreign nationality in your cities become assimilated. they don't become integrated, they become assimilated. they lose their identity. their little face icons change. they've been bred out. their skin colour changes.

I don't like this. please firaxis, change it. don't assimilate them. leave them their ethnicity. I like the idea of having Greeks, Egyptians, Zulus, Germans, Chinese, Iroquois, etc... all living together in one city. let us encourage diversity, not a monoculture. perhaps this would make it easier to win the UN if you had large populations of foreigners under your benevolent rule.


yes, I understand that assimilation represents the transfer of loyalties, but why is this accompanied by the obliteration of their former identity? couldn't we just leave their faces the same? Or produce a new "mixed" nationality? Consider, former black slaves in America aren't lily white now, are they? and sure racial tension is a problem, but most blacks consider themselves american. they overwhelmingly support america, even though they are their own culture. integration doesn't happen because blacks become white, it's because they're accepted by the majority and given rights. the chinese flood of immigrants in vancouver doesn't culture flip to china. but they're not lily-white either. I want my New York to have people of all ethnicities, not one big white-faced crowd. (I use "white" here only because that is the dominant ethnocultural group of north america).

Unity is not equal to uniformity!!!


Admittedly this is not a major gameplay issue, just a question of offending my sensibilities. I cannot abide such overt racism, even if unintentional. I don't expect Firaxis to change any of this, they've got bigger issues at mind and I'm not sure they care, but I had to say it. Silence is compliance.



---
*even cooler would be that if you have a city with another ethnicity being dominant, if they were well-integrated into the empire, you could build their UU. example: cossacks aren't russian. russia wouldn't have that UU if the cossacks hadn't signed on with them. (IIRC the Germans swung cossack loyalty to their side in some war, military historians please correct me)

[zulu9812]

I don't think it represents a "change in loyalty" - it is actually the two peoples coming together and breeding. I don't really have a problem with this - it just shows one race being integrated into the new society over a number of years (it's not like it happns overnight).

However, you still get native americans in the USA, blacks and whites in South Africa, etc.. Would you be happier if the faces didn't change, but the lables did? THat way you'd know when the danger of rioting was lessened.

[Captain]

that would be much better. it would assuage my guilty conscience for obliterating entire people groups from the face of the earth.

I don't mind bringing them under my benevolent rule, just don't like the idea of "ethnic cleansing".

preferably, the labels would be different from both. let's say I'm Roman and I take some Greek cities. the Greeks living there would become Greco-Romans after some time, and even some Romans might become Greco-Romans. Some captured egyptian workers that I add to my cities become Egyptian-Romans. I capture an Egyptian city that used to be Zulu who had traded for a Chinese worker and added it to the city, would now become either Chinese-Zulu-Egyptian-Roman, or Mixed-Roman, or Multi-Roman, or Proto-Roman.

that would make me happier, but again, I know it's just a fantasy.

[Cyclotron]

Oh, please. How many people need to be reminded this is just a game? Take your sensitivities somewhere where it matters.

[Akka]

yes, I understand that assimilation represents the transfer of loyalties, but why is this accompanied by the obliteration of their former identity? couldn't we just leave their faces the same? Or produce a new "mixed" nationality?

Yes, let's add even more confusing stuff to the game.

The change in face represents assimilation and the change in nationality (when people cease to consider themselves from another country, but rather from the one that controls the city). You accepted that. Well, I find it much more easy to have just a look on the faces and see who has been assimilated and the presence or not of foreign individuals. Keeping the faces would just make the whole nationality system confusing.

[Jawa Jocky]

Somebody call Johnny Cochrain

[Captain]

Originally posted by cyclotron7

Oh, please. How many people need to be reminded this is just a game? Take your sensitivities somewhere where it matters.

Cyclotron,
generally, I respect your opinion. here your response seems somewhat reactionary.

It matters here because it matters to me. I am always concerned with the way certain things are portrayed, because they can affect our attitudes. Attitudes matter because they strongly influence our behaviour. The way in which we treat a person, depends on how we look at a person. dehumanizing, demonizing, and villainizing our enemies is what allows us to kill, torture, and oppress them without remorse. And the time we spend playing games, watching movies or tv, the types of books we read, the people we hang around and have conversations with... all of these affect the way in which we view things.

Consider that FPS are used by the military to train soldiers to overcome their inherent resistance to kill others (and it is proven effective). That is hard evidence. Anecdotally, I am sure you can find as many examples as I can of personal friends and acquaintances whose attitudes and treatment of other human beings is less than kind because of the type of movies they watch and games they play. I am not talking about the overreaction of authorities to blaming media and games for Littleton. I am talking about the reality of propanganda effects, especially innocuous, unconscious ones.

Remember, except for unrestrainable impulses, it begins in the mind, so don't be so shortsighted.

Is Civ 3 the harbinger of doom? no. but I know of at least one other person on these forums who said that when he heard of a recent war going on, he never stopped to think about what that war was doing to the people going through it. all he thought about was what kind of aircraft they were flying and the technical specifications. he stopped to think about it and doesn't like it. the person treating war as a chance to test equipment isn't the type of person he wants to be. many others haven't reach this level of awareness. they continue to play their wargames, and when real war breaks out, they think it's a game. and modern war is like that, blip on a screen, touch a button, another blip intercepts. flashing lights. buzz. hurray, we've destroyed the enemy. not, oh my god, I've just killed a thousand people. not, a moment of silence for the souls we've slaughtered. think of the recent Israel-Palestine conflict, can you honestly say you've been more concerned with the lives lost than of ways to accurately simulate this in a Civ 3 scenario? How about the battle of Agincourt? were their lives any less valuable?
again, this doesn't mean I'm against war games, I just think people should be more aware of how it affects their views.

Besides, I already said I knew this wasn't a big issue for most people. I just wanted to put it into the open so that, on the off-chance, someone might read it and think about it, not dismiss it outright. the entire civ genre of games has many educational aspects, it's one of the reasons I hold it on a higher level than a shoot-em up. As we suspect the game players of Civ 3 to be better "thinkers" than FPS players, we hold the game makers of Civ 3 to a higher standard than the rednecks of FPS. Firaxis doesn't have a duty to make a fair and non-racist game anymore than they have a duty to make an entertaining game, but criticism of either, is a fair response.

I have definitely made a bigger deal of it than I originally intended. Thank you for your response, because it made me more aware of the ignorance that is still so pervasive.

First, and hopefully last, "flame" I ever write.

Originally posted by Akka le Vil
The change in face represents assimilation and the change in nationality (when people cease to consider themselves from another country, but rather from the one that controls the city). You accepted that. Well, I find it much more easy to have just a look on the faces and see who has been assimilated and the presence or not of foreign individuals. Keeping the faces would just make the whole nationality system confusing.

fair enough. that's a good point. I shall instead argue for an more powerful editor so that I can make these changes myself, and everyone else can play the way they want to. I have no desire to impose my vision on someone else, just offering alternatives.
with such an editor, we would all me happier then, no? so please lend your voice to asking for a more powerful editor. thanks.

[zulu9812]

Originally posted by Captain
I know of at least one other person on these forums who said that when he heard of a recent war going on, he never stopped to think about what that war was doing to the people going through it. all he thought about was what kind of aircraft they were flying and the technical specifications. he stopped to think about it and doesn't like it.

A very good point - we, as human beings, sometimes need to stop and think about the human cost involved.

However, there is a certain detachment when playing a game like Civ3. This remoteness keeps us at a distance and thus we know in our heads that it is just a game and these acts are not justified in a real life context. I do not think that this detachment makes us callous or oblivious to human suffering, it just means that we are free to step back and decide - it's a TBS, hardly the blood, guts and irrationality of Quake.

[The Eliminator]

I just think its cool having people from different civs in your cities. I agree, they should not be assimilated, but over time they should become citizens of your empire, but their icons should not change. Great post, Captain!

[Bella Hella]

yeah, i agree that it would be nice to have them keep their cultural identity. i haven't played for very long, but i seem to remember taking over a large zulu city and they were all wearing yellow. why can't they just change into green to indicate that they're my little peeps now?

[nato]

Well I do not find this offensive or sinister like Captain does, but I would much prefer if assimilated population retained their original ethnicity.

I really love having diverse populations, and I really love having the people I conquered as part of my empire. In MoO2 I always made a point of having at least 1 pop point of each race that was in my empire on the capital planet, so everyone was represented. I also liked to move guys around so races weren't restricted to their own seperate planets.

Yeah its a game, but I found it really fun. I imagined it a diverse, accepting empire kind of like the Romans had, and it was a way to make my empire distinctive and more personalized.

Now if you're gonna make fun of me for stuff like that, you are wide open to being made fun of for pushing imaginary tanks around and everything else in the game.

I would do this in Civ3 by joining Workers to other cities, but they all turn into the same thing anyway.

I definitely don't think the current model is at all racist or anything ... that is being too sensitive. Its just a detail not represented; and after all it has no real game effect.

But I would love if it was changed! They went through all the trouble of making different ethnicities and different graphics sets ... why not let it stick around!

[Andrew Cory]

I wouldn't mind if they kept certain characteristics, and it might even be unreasonable to expect that 100% of all loyalties would be transfered to a new nation, regardless. But there does come a point where "African" becomes "African-American", and that point should be represented in the game...

Having said that, there would require an added level of complexity, and I wonder if it is worth it. To me, just having different color faces for a given civ just the sake of having "diversity" is meaningless without having the concomitment diversity of ideas and belifes makes a mockery of what diversity is suposed to be about...

[bignickel]

Actually, for anyone who's read Jarod Diamond's "Guns, Germs & Steel", they'd see that Civ3 is ANTI-racist.

It has been a common opinion throughout colonial history that various peoples were the conquered, rather then the conquerors, because they were inheritently 'unfit' or 'savage' or had 'predispositions to lower IQs' (whatever that means). But Jaron Diamond dispels such thinking in his book by pointing out how geography affects science and technology, food productions, resistance to disease, etc.

In my first Civ3 game, I found myself stuck on an island by myself. No matter how fast I tried to expand, sooner or later other nations would land with their superior technology and start planting colonies: just like our own world history, with Europeans landing on the Americas, already populated with people who hadn't developed sea-going technology to enable them to do the converse to the Europeans.

How did this happen? Because I had no one to trade technolgies with, but the other nations on their larger island did. They all could research different technologies, while I had to research them all myself one by one. Just as it happened in our own history. As a result, even trying to develop sea-going technologies first, and even with 20/20 hindsight insisting that I had to, I still got 'colonized' instead of the other way around.

To really make the game more realistic in this regard, 'farming' would be a technology, and it would allow you to grow more than 1 food per square. And it would only be initially discovered by the nation(s) in the most fertile part of the world map (aka "the fertile crescent"). For anyone else to get more than 1 food per square, they'd have to trade for this technology to in order to grow their villages into towns and then cities (thus increasing technology, money, more production to build military units).

bignickel

[nato]

To really make the game more realistic in this regard, 'farming' would be a technology, and it would allow you to grow more than 1 food per square. And it would only be initially discovered by the nation(s) in the most fertile part of the world map (aka "the fertile crescent"). For anyone else to get more than 1 food per square, they'd have to trade for this technology to in order to grow their villages into towns and then cities (thus increasing technology, money, more production to build military units).

I have been pushing that idea for a long time! It is my get-rid-of-workers plan. Instead of irrigation or mining, discorvering techs like crop rotation or strip mining increases output. No Workers or Public Works needed!

This is my very favorite civ idea! But I'm not sure what it has to do with the thread...

Another thing I'm not sure about, but that does have to do with the thread:

Akka and Andrew Cory, you both say keeping ethnicities would be too complicated ... I just don't get it, what is complicated about it? Seems simple and straightforward to me.

[spy14]

Whats the point? Its only eye candy at the end of the day, and a small minority population will make no differance to gameplay. Although race riots would be a interesting touch...