[MUD-Dev] Re: Marian's Tailor vs. Psychopaths

[Damion Schubert]

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Wiggins <adam at angel.com>
>> 
>> excuse me? "whitie" and "darkie"?!?
>> the connection between RL racism and the traditional fantasy conceit of 
>> 'monstrous' races has never been expressed more clearly.
>
>Um, if racism bothers you, I'd say you'd best get the hell out of anything
>related to computer games.  I mean: your average fantasy book or mud is
>generally focused largely on warring tribes of varying races that don't
>get along too well.

This has brought up some amount of debate
in the commercial MUD space recently, when 
a developer from Asheron's Call told a webzine
that they would not have 'traditional races' in their 
game (i.e. dwarves, elves, etc), because they felt
that this racism in fantasy gaming was a black 
eye on the industry as a whole.   Their solution 
to the problem?  "Heritage groups", which were
fundamentally humans with different skin tones.  
I personally suspect they simply realized that, once
graphics are involved, it's a lot easier to do one 
race very well than to do more than one race in
a half-assed manner.  They also managed to keep
other differences between the races (i.e. stat bonuses,
etc) in the code, and downplay differences in art -
very clever, although the whole racism thing was
somewhat a bizarre path of thinking.

--damion