Evil Races are Bad Game Design - Bioessentialism & Worldbuilding - Extra Credits
Added 2021-03-30 17:30:01 +0000 UTCIf you want to learn on the origins of orcs, check out James' blog here: https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/1/13/orcs-britons-and-the-martial-race-myth-part-i-a-species-built-for-racial-terror
Don't take philosophical lessons from the space marines.
Comments
Excellent episode, which got lots of undeserved flak because apparently recognizing "the designer/moral authority" labeling something evil is the same thing as "the society the events happen in" labeling evil
Paolo Torelli
2021-04-10 11:55:40 +0000 UTCLooovvee ittt! I'd love to nominate ArenaNet's Charr species as an example of doing it well as they are originally painted as the "evil race" in the first game only to surprise the player with some "we have to work together" moments and then even "wait it makes sense that you attacked us now" moments to make the player question how much of the villains these guys really were. Then all the way to becoming a fully fledged playable race in the sequel that has some of the richest lore in the game showing the good and bad internal factions of the race and how that's changed and continues to change.
Kov
2021-03-31 19:02:07 +0000 UTCI like your arguments. Morality as a function of bioessentialism does definitely have it's place when applied to elementals, maybe even demos/devils Fae and similar creatures based on the setting. Also, as you point out, Good and Evil are not objective qualities, but the product of the ethical framework that we use to evaluate actions. From the perspective of the Hadley's Hope colonists, the xenomorph may be a capricious, cruel and evil creature coming to kill them simply for killing's sake. To the xenomorph the colonists are raw materials to build a hive. Thus painting entire populations as 'Evil' or 'Good' in broad strokes is not inherently bad, as it simply defines what information is available to the observer and what ethical system they use. Much like basing a miniature or a painting, it is a useful starting point upon which to add further details to flesh out a setting/story.
Adicitus
2021-03-31 14:56:47 +0000 UTCI think this argument is very myopic and misses out on all kinds of interesting concepts from fantasy and scifi. And possibly also confuses hostility to the player with being evil? Like, the joke in 40k is that the Imperium is at best the least evil, if not just as bad as everyone else. But it's not a flaw that Tyranids just want to eat you. We don't need good Tyranids. Or even 40k Orcs, they are most interesting and funny when you commit to and push their whole violent soccer hooligan bit to 11. Another example alluded to in the video is Xenomorphs. You can argue, probably correctly, that they are not "evil" any more than a lion or a tiger is evil for wanting to eat you. But that's not the point. On the contrary, the fact that they are not a human-like intelligence that you can negotiate or relate to is part of what makes them scary. Moving on to fantasy, you have fantasy races that are natural species like humans, which orcs generally are. And frankly orcs and the like haven't actually been 100% evil for decades? Drizzt was created in the 80s. I bet every evil race has shown up as a good or neutral npc in some adventure module at some point. That said, I think that the idea of good and evil as physical forces that only mostly align to our ideas of ethics is the most interesting and unique aspect of DnD as a setting. Demons are literally made of order and evil, they do not make moral decisions like mortal races do. A fire elemental is not just a race that happens to be made of fire, it is fire personified and will act like fire acts. In fantasy in general, fae that are just people with pointy ears are boring compared to fae that look like people but are not and operate by inscrutable arcane logic that makes sense to them but not us. Like a spirit of a river or a mountain cares about what rivers and mountains care about and not all what humans care about. And to us this can seem antagonistic but really nature just doesn’t care about us (that’s the metaphor).
HamHamJ
2021-03-30 20:19:32 +0000 UTCBefore I've seen the video, Elder Scrolls rectifies this after Arena. In Arena, Orcs were originally just an enemy to be fought in dungeons. When Daggerfall, its sequel, they're retconned into another playable race whose lore directly reflects that of a marginalized group.
The Deaf Mans Lands
2021-03-30 19:38:38 +0000 UTCI kind of liked Phoenix Point’s take on this. The enemy troops are all former humans infected by a virus, that walked into the sea and re-emerged as mutated monstrosities making to murderise all mankind and their mothers. One of the human survivor factions spend the entire game debating the ethics of forcing their own survival and killing what might or might not be humans. So instead they invest in stealth, paralysis and fear weapons to make all the enemies run away rather than fight (as best the engine can handle). They’re portrayed as idealistic and naive, but they found a good moral solution to the problem.
Adam Fairris
2021-03-30 18:11:48 +0000 UTC
