Context Is Key

Inspiration & Cultural Appropriation In Game Design

Nat Dish
Nat Dish
Aug 28, 2017 · 9 min read
Image courtesy of Sloclap/Devolver Digital

Absolver is gorgeous. Indie developer Sloclap’s first project has a distinctive presentation with beautiful, ruined environments and a deep wardrobe full of stylish customisation options, all folded into a martial arts punchventure.

The ‘warrior monk’ trope is a central feature of Absolver, as robed wanderers kick, punch and meditate their way to martial victory. It’s neither new nor uncommon for video games, but this shallow fictional worldbuilding is casually damaging to real cultures and people.

As a Prospect, you’ll wander the world getting into fights, learning new combat techniques, teaming up with other players, duelling them and developing your style to determine whether you are worthy of becoming an Absolver — the elite fighters of the fallen Adal Empire.

Players can learn combat techniques from four different combat schools — almost 200 techniques in total. Moves are mixed and matched to build combo sequences that completely customise your fighting style.

Some combat techniques shown in this developer commentary gameplay preview reference existing martial arts or video games. They include:

  • Meia Lua A reference to Meia Lua De Compasso, the hand-springing spinning heel kick found in Capoeira, from Brazil.
  • Tetsuzanko A fictional technique from the Street Fighter series. Inspired by tieshankao in the Bajiquan martial art, from China.
  • Dwit Chagi A back kick technique in Taekwondo, from Korea.

In addition to those listed above, forms from Muay Thai, Wing Chun and Zui Quan ‘Drunken Boxing’ styles are shown. It’s unclear how many different martial arts are referenced, but they’re all bundled together into Absolver’s fictional setting — a setting that doesn’t contain the cultures they belong to.

By including these techniques but divorcing them from their sources, we aren’t creating opportunities to help players understand the real-world history behind them — we‘re being told these cultures are interchangeable.

Absolver’s Stagger Style and Jackie Chan in ‘Drunken Master’

One of the combat styles in Absolver — Stagger Style — is shown off in this demonstration video. The distinctive movements of the ‘Drunken Eight Immortals’ style are immediately recognisable, and are usually attributed as being popularised by the 1978 film Drunken Master, starring Jackie Chan.

The Absolver narrator’s intro is as follows:

“Legend has it that the style was invented by the monk Dongbin ages ago…”

Dongbin is named after Lü Dongbin, one of the Eight Immortals worshipped by Daoists. He’s a poet who carries a sword that can dispel evil spirits, and his character flaws are part of his story — he’s fun-loving, amorous, partial to bouts of drunkenness and quick to anger in the early days of his immortality.

There are eight forms in the Drunken Eight Immortals style, each imitating the character of a different immortal. With Lü Dongbin’s form comes the deceptive sloshing footwork and the clawed guard, as if raising a cup to toast. Absolver takes a real-world style of Chinese martial arts with deep historical context, imitates the forms and techniques, renames them and attributes them to a fictional monk named after the immortal deity who inspired them.

Alongside the Daoist style of drunken martial arts popularised by Jackie Chan and referenced in Absolver’s Stagger Style, there are smaller, self-contained Buddhist forms practised by Shaolin monks. One of these Shaolin forms is Luda Zuigin or ‘The Drunken Stick of Luda’. It combines sloshing footwork with big, expressive staff displays, imitating the drunken movement of Lu Da — typically depicted as a large, broad man.

In Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, Lu Da accidentally kills a man while drunk and flees town, taking refuge in a monastery. While there, he becomes a monk and is given the name Zhishen, though he struggles with the monastic oaths throughout his life. Lu Zhishen’s story is one of loyalty, strength, brashness and violence.

If you’ve played Diablo III, you might recognise him: the monk class is heavily based on artistic interpretations of Lu Zhishen. His shaved head, large beard, prayer bead necklace and staff (originally a monk’s spade) all make an appearance in the character design.

The 108 Heroes of the Popular Suikoden #39: Kaosho Rochishin’ by Utagawa Kuniyoshi — 1830 (Left), Diablo III Monk Concept Art, Blizzard Entertainment (Center), and Lu Zhishen statue in Liuhe Pagoda, Hangzhou, China (Right)

In case you’re not familiar with Diablo III, here’s a primer on the monks:

“As the militant arm of the Sahptev faith, the Veradani monks are priest-warriors who follow the divine injunctions of their Patriarchs, the rulers of Ivgorod.”

The Sahptev faith is presented as a blend of Hindu and Buddhist ideology. Followers worship a pantheon of 1001 deities are divided and balanced against elements of Order and Chaos. When one of their Patriarchs dies, their soul is released and they’re reborn anew.

These martial artists are monks with a religious ideology, but reducing them to warriors who build resilience and power through physical trials creates a shallow fiction estranged from real-world inspiration. When we only interact with the militant arm of the faith in play, it takes the robes and the prayer beads and makes these significant cultural references meaningless.

While we’re talking about the risks of distancing meaningful visual elements from their origins, let’s talk about frogs real quick.

Ranno Concept Art from ‘Rivals of Aether’ (Left), Wu from ‘Gigantic’ (Center) and Greninja from ‘Pokémon’ (Right)

A few weeks ago, this tweet debuted concept art for ‘Ranno, The Poisonous Pacifist’, a martial artist frog due to be added to Dan Fornace’s Rivals of Aether later this year. Just before that, I’d seen Wu, the martial arts master, whilst streaming Motiga’s Gigantic. The oldest example of a martial arts frog character in a video game I could find is Greninja, from Game Freak’s Pokémon series, back in 2013.

Greninja — a portmanteau of Grenouille (‘frog’ in French) and ‘ninja’ — was inspired by The Tale of Gallant Jiraya, a tale from Japanese folklore about a ninja who used transformation magic to turn into a giant toad. It’s a common reference you can see in Persona 4, Nioh and Final Fantasy XIV.

While researching this piece, I saw this tweet from Ranno’s designer:

Ranno, then, is a worrisome example of visual elements being incorporated into a design without concern for their origins. Brightly-coloured monastic robes and a poisonous blob version of Buddhist prayer beads are applied to an anthropomorphic frog inspired by Japanese folklore who throws Kunai.

As creators, we have a duty to engage with our own work critically — to ask what it says to the people whose culture is referenced, and what it says to the people who don’t know the source of the references being made. If our visual language is separated from its context, we need to connect with real-world history and culture to be able to make work that’s less harmful and appropriative, and more interesting and engaging, too.

If our video game concept art designs come from other video game concept art designs then we need to start looking beyond video games.

For Buddhist monks across the world, the colour of robes is significant — they distinguish one sect from another, indicate level of study or progress towards ordination, change for certain ceremonies or indicate geographical and historical access to certain kinds of natural dye. In video games, we see the same orange robes used repeatedly. In Rivals of Aether’s Ranno, Diablo III’s Monk and Overwatch’s Zenyatta, prayer beads are shown alongside these robes to indicate calmness, pacifism or spiritualism, regardless of whether these characters practice a religion or their religion forms a clear part of their character within the game itself.

Zenyatta is confirmed to previously have been a practising monk of the Shambali faith, a fictional religion preached by some Omnics — artificial self-aware robots — in the Overwatch universe. They have a monastery in the Himalayas, much like the Tibetan Buddhists they’re emulating. Zenyatta’s name, and the name of his mentor, Mondatta (who you might recognise from the animated short ‘Alive’) come from the 1980 The Police album Zenyatta Mondatta. Band members have confirmed that the name is nonsense sounds strung together. Putting dad rock jokes alongside depictions of Buddhism is a fair indication of how seriously Blizzard takes this stuff.

Zenyatta and Ranno even go so far as to invoke the Hindu and Buddhist imagery of many-armed beings. In Hinduism, deities are depicted with many arms to show their varied traits or indicate immeasurable presence or power. In Buddhism, the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara embodies compassion. Both of their arms are shattered trying to reach out to everyone who requires aid, and they’re gifted a thousand arms by the celestial Buddha Amitābha with which to aid to those who are suffering.

Overwatch’s Zenyatta (Left) and Rivals of Aether’s Ranno (Right)

In Overwatch, Zenyatta is depicted with eight arms while his Ultimate ability is active, but Ranno’s eight-armed form isn’t shown in the reveal trailer, so it’s unclear what — if any — significance it has, or if it’ll be featured in the game.

By including this imagery but divorcing it from its sources, we aren’t creating opportunities to help players understand real-world cultures behind them — we’re relying on pastiche to teach players about a character, and we’re never connecting them to the source of this visual shorthand.

Absolver presents a different kind of risk — when we can’t see the orange robes or prayer beads or shaved heads or folded hands or multiple arms or any of the other visual elements that find their way into depictions of warrior monks, it makes it even more of a challenge to walk folks from their favourite characters all the way back to the history behind them.

Folding real-world references into a fictional setting says something. Drunken Boxing exists in the Adal Empire. China doesn’t. In Absolver, and in every “kung fu is cool” fictional warrior monk, psychological colonialism says Asian identities are one identity, that their folklore is just fiction to slot into your project and that making these connections has no lasting impact.

There are fantastic pieces of commentary, criticism and advice on depicting fictional cultures that carry the nuance and depth of real ones. When they’re invoked for aesthetic in shallow fiction, it shows, and it hurts people.

As designers, as artists, or as players, we need to be critical about the work we’re creating and consuming. We have to make an effort to understand the sources that our work draws from and how that facilitates or impedes our relationship to our world and its history.

Above all else, we need diverse voices — not just depicted within our media, but involved behind-the-scenes, creating and shaping projects.

Image courtesy of Sloclap/Devolver Digital

Nat is a non-binary queer streaming part-time on Twitch, usually talking emphatically or critically about good scenery, lovely robots and storytelling.

Find them at twitch.tv/NatelliteDish or support them at ko-fi.com/NatelliteDish!

Special thanks to Anna, who nudges me to write things I talk about writing, and to Beth and Jess, for their time and edits.❤

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Nat Dish

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Nat Dish

Freshly-baked bread in the shape of a human adult [They/Them]

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