Tokenism, Character Development and Writing

[eliasfrost]

I think the setting should dictate the types of characters above all. If you're making a WWII movie set in Nazi Germany then you clearly cannot cast non-Caucasians as SS soldiers. You just cannot. It's got nothing to do with racism - the ground rules have already been established and the fact that there are only Caucasians is consistent with the story and setting. It makes perfect sense and has no hidden agenda behind it.

After re-reading my post I realized I forgot to mention this. I agree with what you say and I think it's important to let the setting and theme dictate the characters and their ethnicity, sexuality, gender and religion. For example, if the central theme of the game is about racism, then of course black characters will be included, and that's because they have a purpose to be there, the same goes with your example about nazi-germany.

But I think that when the ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion is insignificant to the story, setting and theme, then I don't see the reason to include them on the grounds of tokenism, in my game, the lead character is female, but I don't let her gender define her character the way tokenism does. The character just so happens to be a white woman because I felt that's what she is, it's the first thing that popped into my head, but the real qualities that defines her character is her personality, problems, issues, how she handle stress, her history and everything related to that.