By all accounts, the latest PS4 game, Horizon: Zero Dawn, made a pretty damn good attempt at being non-offensive and socially progressive.
The game had a strong, self-reliant female protagonist and was incredibly racially diverse. The world Guerrilla Games created was essentially, post-gender and post-racial, with the characters not even acknowledging differences or resentment between genders and races. Besides the post-apocalyptic warfare and deadly robot dinosaurs, the world of Horizon seemed like a pretty harmonious place.
But unfortunately, the politically correct honeymoon came to an end with the publication of a Medium article that labeled some of the game’s elements as “appropriation” of Native American culture.
The writer of the article, Dia Lacina, made clear the piece was not a “call out” but was written to push the gaming press to start asking these questions of the games they cover.
In the Horizon story, humanity is wiped out and started afresh. The new tribes that inhabit the land are all amalgamations of older cultures. Some are Aztec/Romans, while others look like Germanic barbarians.
The criticism in Lacina’s article surrounds Horizon’s Nora tribe, whose dress and culture appear to have influences from Celtic, Viking and Native American cultures. The protagonist, Alloy of the Nora tribe, is white, but the tribe consists of a diverse group of people of all colors.
‘Horizon: Zero Dawn has been described as taking place in a world ‘where life has seemingly reverted to the tribal-like ways of the past,’ a phrase that erases how many indigenous peoples still associate as tribal communities and governments, and despite colonialist demands for assimilation, actively live their cultures in much the way they always have,” Lacina wrote.
She also took issue with the Nora tribe’s use of the word “Braves” to describe their warriors.
Vice’s Waypoint asked Horizon’s narrative director John Gonzales what he thought about the criticisms. He responded saying the developers took great care to determine the vocabulary that would be culturally appropriate. He also noted they took bits of culture from tribal cultures around the world, throughout history.
“That said, with the kind of culture of the Internet that we have right now, it’s impossible to predict what it is that may offend,” Gonzales said. “Certainly we were not intentionally being insensitive, or to offend in any manner.”
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