Andy Hutchins
- Joined: Jun 30, 2015
- Last Login: Nov 2, 2021, 6:06pm EDT
- Comments: 20
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Comment 1 rec
You’re turned-off by a language issue in the game? Try driving a late model Nissan beater with a taillight out while being Latino – your whole life can be utterly ruined, friends, after the inevitable traffic stop.
Unless you would like to argue that the inherent danger in that situation is in being in the late-model Nissan beater and not at all in being Latino (and specifically a Latino in America), I wonder whether you have considered that the centering of people who are not Latino is a commonality to both the frustration of the former and danger of the latter.
So when I compare their lives to those of college-educated, white-collar, POC (or other) video game/pop culture journalists, I’m sorry but your complaints and outrages are simply hollow.
The author is from Argentina, a point he makes in the review. (He also lives in Argentina, which it does not take much searching to learn.) If, as it seems, you are trying to compare the suffering of those you work with with your imagined lack of suffering by that cohort, it is well wide of the mark to lump him in with it, as his life is lived outside of your context.
And to return to your thesis, as I see it:
I have to tell you, these folks have a legitimate reason to be focused on ethnic issues/discrimination, etc. – they actually experience these things you abstractly perceive.
The author is not "focused on ethnic issues/discrimination" as much as he is critiquing what he says is slipshod representation of the people and culture of a fictional place much like the real place he knows, something that is (or should be) at the heart of any critique of a piece of media that aspires to represent a place. While Yara is a fictional creation, it uses real language and clear inspiration from other aspects of reality, and it is well within a reviewer’s legitimate duties to assess that creation as immersive, insulting, both, or neither — and the assessment made was almost precisely that the depiction of Yara, for him, was exactly what was "sucking the fun out of the very medium you’re supposed to enjoy/love."
You and I might have very different reactions to this game, and ours could be just as valid as the reviewer’s. But you don’t seem to have genuinely grasped this review, and so I’d encourage you to read it again.
Comment 2 recs
This is a fair point, but it’s also a more germane bit of context applied to content created and/or set in Southern California or other locales adjacent to the Mexican border than it is to a game set in what seems to be (and has been widely received as) a lightly fictionalized version of Cuba and developed by people working in (deep breath) Canada, Ukraine, Germany, China, the Philippines, Hungary, India, and France.