I rate video games using simple criteria: Is it fun? Does it turn into a chore? Are the story and characters interesting? Does the gameplay feel repetitive? Is the game dominated by 12-year-olds who play like professionals because they have too much time on their hands (ahem Black Ops 6)?
These criteria are not terribly different from how one would judge a board game, novel or TV show, except for that last one.
One such game series I have discovered recently is Assassin’s Creed: a famous stealth action-adventure/RPG (role-playing game) series in which the player takes the role of an assassin of justice, infiltrating various locations to hunt bad guys and retrieve important items, whether it be by parkouring across rooftops, dodging from bush to bush or simply breaking down the front door looking for a fight. The newest game in the series, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, was supposed to be released last month but was delayed until February, much to my chagrin.
The reason for the delay? Community uproar. Numerous gamers took to the internet to disparage the game before its release. Some of it was valid criticism. The game, which is set in feudal Japan, had a fair amount of Chinese architecture. An artbook intended for release with the game featured the flag of a real Japanese re-enactment group, included without their permission. Most atrociously, a toy featuring the main characters poised next to a half-torii gate – which is a symbol of the atomic bombings, not the feudal era – was set to release.
What has rubbed me the wrong way, though, was the backlash over the inclusion of Yasuke as the game’s main character. According to historical records at the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, Yasuke was not just a servant, but a samurai of African origin employed by the daimyo Oda Nobunaga for his services as a warrior.
I get that Japanese players were miffed at the opportunity to feature someone renowned and instead have one of the most obscure, least documented samurai (a non-native Japanese man, no less) play the role of a main character in a game advertised as being uniquely Japanese with its setting. Therefore, I could see that Japanese gamers may feel inadequately represented; however, I would argue Yasuke’s obscurity makes him more attractive since you can tell his in-game story in any way you want, unlike with famous samurai whose stories are well-documented.
Instead, players – disproportionately American ones – have criticized the inclusion of Yasuke as “woke, DEI nonsense,” or a symptom of the woke mind virus. I know gamers are a community known for toxicity, but the repetition of this line to explain how Yasuke’s presence is ruining Shadows is symptomatic of a lack of critical thinking. I would agree Yasuke ruined Shadows if a) the game had already been released, b) I played a fair portion of it and c) I found him to be a flat or bland character.
Besides my earlier caveat that Japanese players do not feel fairly included, I do not really care what a character looks like or what his real history is (Assassin’s Creed is a franchise that had you fist-fighting the pope in a lair made by aliens at one point). I care if the game is fun, and when you call out a game for one extremely specific reason while ignoring much larger, glaring issues, it makes me question critics’ motivations.
It is also telling of the larger movement – the “anti-woke mind virus,” if you will – that has arisen to criticize anything that smells of diversity, even if that diversity is incidental, or even if that diversity does not itself negatively impact the attributes of a product or organization. It’s time for us to go back to the thing these critics claim to care about most: merit. A game’s success should be decided on its merit, not its colors.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
