Tokenism, Character Development and Writing

[eliasfrost]

As some of you know, I'm making a game and I'm the writer, musician and graphical artist. But I want to talk about writing for a second, I've never been too keen on writing stories in text, but I've always been interested in telling stories through pictures, visuals, movement and feelings so I'm not here to talk about traditional writing like how to setup a story, the dramatic archs and all that jazz. I want to talk about writing characters, tokenism in game writing and how to approach the art of creating characters.

I hold the philosophy that the main role of the writer is to make the characters interesting, engaging, believable and overall relatable or at least understandable, but recently I've been thinking about the other end of the spectrum when it comes to writing characters: tokenism, tokenism is basically the false inclusion of a minority to make up for eg. opression, discimination and/or other types of exclusions.

While I was thinking about this, I realized how often writers, film makers and game developers include black people, gay people, women and religious people (other than christians heh) just to make a point, to make sure that they won't be looked upon as discriminating or excluding other ethnicities, sexualities, genders or religions: the false inclusion.

It is a double edged sword, if you include people just for the sake of them being there to avoid the label of discriminating minorities, you lose depth, substance and coherence and the character falls flat. But if you exclude people of minorities, you get the label. Huh.

I think it's very easy for people to say, "well just write a positive gay character, or a positive female character, or both. What's the big deal, you're a writer right?" Well, that's where the issue reveals itself, I don't write characters to make a point, or try to include character just for the sake of them being oppressed or part of a minority. That would mean limiting my creative freedom and ultimately leave me perplexed because the character is developed based on external forces and not from something I can grasp from within myself as a writer, and thus I end up writing a character that is shallow, flat and one dimensional, because the quality that defines the character is forced and in a sense requested rather than a natural property of the character.

I think the key to successfuly writing a character is to throw things like that out the window and ask yourself the question: "What will make my character interesting" and not "how do I write a female character" or "How do I write a gay character" because those properties are seconday, even third in row, the core of the character is who it is, strengths, weaknesses, interests, problems and struggles, dreams and ambitions, what (s)he is, is unimportant when it comes down to it and I don't think it should matter as much as it does today.

If someone wants to write a character that is male, short hair in his 30-ish then ok, do that, but I want him to be interesting, give him qualities that makes me want to meet him in person, learn more about him and feel engage in his personal development throughout the story and narrative, the same goes for any other type of people, women, gays, blacks, religious, it shouldn't matter as long as the character feels interesting and engages the player to want to learn more.

The way to achieve good character writing in games is to forget about the external voices about "you need to include this or that otherwise you might seem like a bigoted asshole", you know what I think? I think that very mindset breeds bigotry, because it treats things like ethnicity, religion and sexuality as a tool instead of a natural property of the character, the tools should be her interests, struggles, problems and dreams, the very properties that set up the reasons why the characters acts the way she does, her being female is not a reason to act a certain way, neither is her skin color, they are just natural properties of the character and should be treated as such.

Wow, that was a lot to write but I think I got my point through. I'm curious about what you think about and I'd love to hear your opinion in the matter.

Thanks for reading.

















I think this would work better as a blog post...