Little disturbed by killing minorities in MM6

What is up with MM6 being full of *people* to kill? And not just people...
minority groups. The black cannibals, indian(?) men and women (followers of
baa and the cutpurses), lotsa women including the magyar (which if you don't
know is a hungarian race), and celts (druid women).

I don't want anyone to think I'm saying the game should have been more
"politically correct," but it's a little disturbing that none of my
characters in my party can choose a minority race picture.

As it is now, the "whiteness" of the game strikes me as being predjudiced.
I'm sure it wasn't a conscious decision, but that doesn't change the fact
that it's there.

Whatever happened to killing MONSTERS in games? Did they make most of the
opponents in MM6 human because they were influenced by making the game look
like Quake? Or was it just easier to get the art for the people because you
could just digitize the pictures as opposed to actually creating new sprites
for monsters.

BTW, to sum up what I thought of the rest of the game:
1. Dungeons with a 100 monsters per room are lame. The strategy of lloyds
beacon in, kill 3, town gate back to temple, get healed and go back is
soooooo lame. This is like "padding" a film. The designers seem to figure
out they could add "hours and hours of gameplay" by making rooms with a 100
monsters in them.
2. Free 3d movement causes way more problems then it adds to the game.
Shooting monsters through doors, Ring of Fire through walls, all lame.
3. Don't include spells in the game that don't work!
4. Town's were super-annoying to map, hard to navigate around. Make better
automap if your going to have towns like Freehaven.
5. I like the middle of the game the most... it was great till I got to the
dungeons whose only puzzle was how you were going to keep from going crazy
killing all the monsters.
6. I like the skills- the master and expert system I thought was pretty
cool.
7. The end game with instant eradicate monsters and break equipment every
hit monsters were hella lame.
8. Fix the damn spell casting interface!
9. Fix having to use the dang mouse AND keyboard! Make options for all of
the one or the other!

I think so far, M&M 4 and 5 were the pinnacle of the series... they had tons
of puzzles, tons of gameplay, interesting story and they did it all without
the padding of thousands of monsters and repetitive clicking of items to fix
them....

Don't worry, there plenty of opportunity to "kill whitey" too. All the
swordsmen, sorcerors, apprentice mages, thugs, veterans, etc.

--
"I realized, sitting there, that I was a nut." Philip Dick, Confessions of
a Crap Artist
John wrote in message ...
>Some thoughts on MM6...

It's even worse than you think, the Magyars were actually a tribe of
nomadic horsemen from central asia. Also known as "huns". They settled
in "hungary" after their invasion of europe stalled. So those magyars
are Asian women being persecuted. And how about those mages? They
don't look too aryan to me, they look kind of heavy featured and
swarthy. The only white guys in the game are the clerics of Baa, but
the followers of Baa are all women and minorities. What are they
trying to say?

Sure you can, there is an asian guy you can pick. And how about that
"choose me or suffer" guy? He's got to be gay, I'm sure of it, so they
get PC points for that, right?

True, but I'm not sure it's deliberate. Maybe they were trying to be
politically correct by including so many different ethnicities in the
game. I can't think of many CRPGs I've played where virtually all of
the humans in the game were not white, good guys and bad.

I think that's exactly what you are saying, isn't it?

I think that was due to space limitations. There are only
12 faces to choose from anyway. I'd rather have elves,
dwarves and orcs before anything else anyway. I wanted more
females to choose from myself. :)

Give me a break! "whiteness?"
Umm what about the priests of baa? The master swordsmen?
mages? Thugs? rouges? To me the Followers of Baa looked
like old white guys.

It's a game not the U.N.

???!?!?!

Are you sure you are playing Might and Magic 6?
How about Dragons, harpys, spiders, goblins, eyes,
agar's abominations, minotaurs, hydras,
ghosts, liches, oozes, titans(just tall white guys :)
lizards, drakes, lizardmen, ogres, werewolves,
dwarves (just short white guys :), rats, elementals,
sea serpents, skeletons (just naked white guys :)
medusas, cobras, etc.
there are far more monsters than humans in this game.

Then there are the generic humanoids: monks, veterans
cuisinarts they could be minorities under those hoods
and helmets but if we can't tell are we still racist
for killing them?

I agree to some extent. Although all the M&Ms have been
like this. I don't mind the hordes if there were tougher more
unique boss monsters.

Those are just problems that I'm sure they will work out.

Agreed. Some of the spells only work in real time.

Agreed.

Ditto. Except for diplomacy, what was that supposed to do again?

What? not up for a challenge? I agree but by the end game
time most characters are so powerful you need some insta
death monsters. The repair thing was just annoying before
I got master repair for all my characters.

Agreed.

Agreed.

Ummm, I don't agree. This one had a better interface even
with all the quirks. Much more game play. I would have
liked to see more riddles. I love riddles, but some people
don't. Better graphics. Bigger world. More quests. I
definitely liked this one better than Xeen.

--
John M Clancy aka MeleKahn aka Poison
"Where ever you are in life, that's where you
want to be"

>"politically correct," but it's a little disturbing that none of my

I can't believe I'm even responding to this crock of a post...but..
I do recall a hispanic looking guy in the face portraits. In addition,
theres *plenty* of minorities to choose from when it comes to hiring NPC's.

"The Republican Party...the first assembly that sounded in its camp was a call
to sacrifice, and not to spoils. The emancipation of a race, under the
proclamation of the first Republican President, has forever immortalized the
party that accomplished it."

Just like I'd want my mongols, asian and my huns, aryan (or whatever).

RayRuenes wrote in message
<199805272324...@ladder03.news.aol.com>...

You kill people with black skin, white skin, yellow skin, green skin, purple
skin...every kind of person imaginable. You rack up a body count in the
thousands. You kill people because they worship the wrong god (Fanatics of
Baa), because they're poor (thieves living in the sewers) or because they're
the wrong species (goblins). And then, you loot the bodies for gold and
equipment.

Kill enough people, and you become 'saintly'.

That's the nature of the game. Don't like it, go play "Happy Bunny's Forest
Frolic".

(I miss the old Wizardry games, where you actually got the total each of your
PCs killed.)

A. X. Hughes

Look at it this way, its equal opportunity killing instead of just killing
white men.

Joel Mathis

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==-----
http://www.dejanews.com/ Now offering spam-free web-based newsreading

I am no whitey, as is sooo apparent from my name, and I
*don't* care. Frankly, this PC business has no place in
this industry, at least I hope it doesn't. Forget about PC,
if it makes sense, do it. If not, who cares? Might as
well flip a coin in deciding which skin colors the baddies
or the player characters have. Hell, why don't we give
all the guys neon skin colors? That will dodge any PC issues.

Later...
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
K I R A T I L A I S A T H I T kir...@u.washington.edu

> character in my party can choose a minority race picture.

They claimed they did this because they didn't have enough character
portraits to represent all races. This is pretty lame to me ,they
could have put some variation in there.

There are stereotypes in the game that would seem as racist,
Followers of Ba almost look designed to reinforce anti-islamic
tendencies, cannibals are like the old cartoons that danced round the
cooking pot with the vicar in it, in the days when it didn't occur to
anyone that Africa had any worthwhile culture. I can't see that these
images in any way improve the game. If these are intended as send ups
fine , nothing wrong with a little irreverence . But shouldn't they
be balanced with some killer hillbillys and evil mormons, or perhaps
that would be offend someone and marketing wouldn't like it.

I love this game to pieces and don't really think any prejudice was
intended but then I'm not black or Islamic.
--
/~~~~~~~~~ LOL ~~~~~~~~~~~\
\ ddr**ddrrdidrrdldroidr /
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not that the two are synonymous. Islam is as missionary a monotheistic
religion as any, and has many voluntary believers of all races. And the
majority of Christians in fact are non-white when you adopt a global scope.
To suggest that any one particular race in the game was protected seems to me
groundless. And what makes you certain the denizens of the Silver Helms
outpost weren't killer hillbillies?

I haven't killed those guys on account of the reasons you mentioned. I have
because they simply started sneaking up on me, shooting me through mountains,
and just basically reacting with sheer hostility whenever my team approached.

In a letter Christopher Columbus sent to Lord Raphael Sanchez, treasurer of
Aragon, on March 14, 1493, he noted:

"Thus, as I have already said, I saw no cannibals, nor did I hear of any,
except in a certain island called Charis, which is the second from Espanola on
the side toward India, where dwell a people who are considered by the
neighboring islanders as most ferocious; and these feed upon human flesh. The
same people have many kinds of canoes in which they cross to all the
surrounding islands and rob and plunder wherever they can; they are not
different from the other islanders, except that they wear their hair long, like
women, and make use of the bows and javelins of cane, with sharpened
spearpoints fixed on the thickest end, which I have before described, and
therefore they are looked upon as ferocious and regarded by the other Indians
with unbounded fear; but I think no more of them than of the rest."

That should verify that cannibalism isn't limited to any particular race.
That, and Dahmer, of course.

> Some thoughts on MM6...
>

> characters in my party can choose a minority race picture.

I agree about killing monsters not people in general in RPGs.
Especially if you are even considering allowing young children to play
the game. Using monsters makes it very easy for them to understand this
is a game not a description of how to interact with others (violently).
I am not sure about the racial bias thing. It might in fact be
subconcious, or it might reflect the reported fact that the majority (by
far) of computer users and presumably CRPG players are white males -
thus just making the game comfortable to the majority audience in the
US. BTW - when did Druids become a separate minority race group?

John

Anybody who really cares about this can check out www.urbanlegends.com for an
extensive discussion on canabalism. Basically, there are no societies, and
there have never been any societies that practice canibalism. Canibalism has
only occured in cases of extreme desperation (the Donner party and soccer
teams) or insanity (Dahmer).

Because they weren't dressed in Dungarees and weilding banjo's

> Laurie said,

Yeah, but you saw them in their work outfits.

-s
--
Copyright '98, All rights reserved. Peter Seebach / se...@plethora.net
C/Unix wizard, Pro-commerce radical, Spam fighter. Boycott Spamazon!
Not speaking for my employer. Questions on C/Unix? Send mail for help.
Visit my new ISP <URL:http://www.plethora.net/> --- More Net, Less Spam!

Get over it. It is a fucking GAME.

I can understand if you are a minority player, it would make you feel better
to play a minority character, especially since they used actors. But the
large majority of people who are going to be buying this game are going to
be light skinned, so that is probably why they did it.

As far as the "monsters" being minorities, that is nutty. All the peasants
are white and I kill every single one I can.

olaf

Uh, no, the group of pictures you have to choose from is probably not
representative of anything more than the people who showed up at the
casting call. Yeesh.

To respond by email, remove "blort" from the front of my email
address.
blort...@ou.edu
Jason McCullough

"Aiiiigh! My Wood Termites!"
"My Lice!"
- MST3K

I'm amused because the guy I called "Bro" has so far been described
here as hispanic and as asian. Obviously we all see him as
non-Caucasian but we're not sure what kind. <grin> Personally I
don't care. He was presentable looking which was better than the one
with the eye patch and the weasal-faced one with the scruffy beard
hairs.

--
Sandra -> http://www.netins.net/showcase/slink/
GEEK CODE Version 3.12: GS>AT !d(++)@ s:+ a+ C+++($) !U(C/H$) P(+)@
L E? W++ N++ o? K? w(++)@ O !M V(+) PS+() PE(++)@ Y+ PGP? t++@ 5? X?
R+ tv-- b++(++++)@ DI++++ D G e++++ h+(++)($) r+++ x+++

>John wrote:

Around the later part of the Roman invasion of Britanny perhaps?
Someone did sack Mona after all.. :)

Anyway I do resent killing the cute assassins girls. Not to speak of
the poor peasant that strayed into the line of fire.. No monsters EVER
hit bystanders! POUT! (yet?)

Wish for new spell: summon little spirit to collect the gold from all
dead corpses littering the environment after a reset of map for
example.

Oki, off to my home cpu doing guess what..

SL.

We just took photos of the people that showed up for the photo shoot for
the player characters. As far as I know the NPC faces are stock photos
that allowed us a much better choice since there were hundreds of them
available.

--
George Ruof gr...@pacificnet.net
Senior Programmer New World Computing
I speak for myself, not my employer.
Please do not repost this message without prior permission.

AB wrote in message <6ki92j$2gk$1...@newsfep4.sprintmail.com>...

Yes.

If I remember correctly, cannibalism wasmost common in the Pacific,
with some in S. America, and Africa. So they should've been Indonesian
or somesuch.

Huns ARE Mongols.

Eh you leave my heros alone !

what do you mean they don't even chew straw and I haven't found one
banjo in the loot!

I'll kill any minority that tries to kill me. Be them black cannibals,
indian, male or female, cutpurses, hungarian, druid women,
black-white-red-blue-green-yellow etc. I don't care what color the
"minority" is, if they try to kill me I'll Ice Bolt them ;-)

K

>You kill people with black skin, white skin, yellow skin, green skin, purple
>skin...every kind of person imaginable.

Eh? What are you saying? Goblins are people too?! HELL NO! Goblins
are responsible for all the world's evils! We must CLEANSE Enroth of
the Goblin scum that has infested it! DOWN WITH GREENY!

>You rack up a body count in the
>thousands. You kill people because they worship the wrong god (Fanatics of

But mainly because they get in my face or throw things at me.

And then they just disappear! NWC gets bonus points for ecology here!

> non-black cannibal tribes in this world? Maybe some S. American tribe? In

Actually, there are scholars who argue that cannibalism as a routine
practice may be entirely a myth, that no human cultures practiced
cannibalism regularly. Even those who argue that there are a few examples
of "cannibalism as a lifestyle" in human history agree that there are only
a few such examples and that its occurance was greatly exaggerated by
Western explorers who had a major obsession with cannibalism. Most reports
of cannibalism in explorers' accounts turn out to be thirdhand reports by
some local people about their enemies in the hinterland--which is sort of
like trusting early Reformation propaganda about transubstantiation being
a form of Catholic cannibalism. If there is anything consistent about
cannibalism, it is that it is a favorite bit of human propaganda about
enemy societies.

In any event, the few arguable cases of routine cannibalism *don't* come
from Africa, actually: several are Amerindian and others are from Papua
New Guinea. Virtually every report of cannibalism in Africa comes from
openly racist explorers repeating hearsay, or in a few cases I know of,
deliberate mischaracterization of public executions of criminals in order
to build a case for imperial conquest--as if a foreign observer called the
execution by lethal injection in this country "cannibalism" in order to
encourage an invasion of the US.

I confess I found the appearance of the MM6 cannibals rather off-putting
for this reason, though I guess I wouldn't make a federal case out of it.
I don't think it's "political correctness" to feel a bit weary at the
game's reproduction of a pernicious myth.

>fine , nothing wrong with a little irreverence . But shouldn't they
>be balanced with some killer hillbillys

That would have been appreciated. They'd ride in on big, dilapidated
Fords and spit big ol' wads o' tabaccie at ya.

>and evil mormons,

Baa was close enough. MM7 should really bring back Bark, though.
Temple Bark in MM5 had some about the funniest parody writing of any
MM I've played (which is all but MM1).

What about all the cannibals' victims being voluptuous white women?
Yeah, yeah, they were white because they were dead. Likely excuse.
:)

olaf

Timothy Burke wrote in message ...

Is there anything that you politically correct liberals won't attack? I think
I will suggest a game where the object is to dust as many panty wastes as
possible.

You're right....killin's too good for 'em.

Gee, what tribe was he from?

Killing monsters won't work either because some stooge from P.E.T.A would
complain about cruelty to animals!

OK, so how many times are you going to post this. All this whining about
killing minorities and no one has mentioned that the Silver Helm gang is about
as white bread as you can get.

Sorry Joel but that is the dumbest thing I have ever read. Easter Island was
inhabited at one time by cannibals and just about everyone who knows anything
about its history knows this. If you don't believe me then check out anything
written by Alfred Matraaux of the Oxford University Press.

Archaeologists are convinced the Anasazi in Colorado were definite human flesh
eaters. There are fossil remains that prove it beyond a doubt.

BRAVO!

No, actually they didn't spend two seconds on such a stupid conjecture.

That's not true. There were numerous cultures throughout history that used
cannibalism as a ceremonial way of taking their enemy's strength. As
recently as a few decades ago there was a tribe in New Guinea who practiced
ceremonial cannibalism, until the Government forces them to stop.

-Krud

>In article <199805280536...@ladder03.news.aol.com>,

In this case, www.urbanlegends.com is _very_ wrong (it's actually wrong
a fair number of times - that site is not inerrant). Numerous societies
practiced cannibalism, generally in a religious/ritualistic sense
(believing that consuming body parts of a vanquished enemy gives you the
power of his spirit). If I had my anthropology textbook with me, I could
name about half a dozen different tribes.

Ye gods. Has political correctness progressed to the point where we
forget the _reasons_ racism is wrong?

Killing an evil goblin and killing an evil human have no moral
difference. As if it's wrong to kill something that looks human but you
can slaughter anything with fangs or scales no problem!

>> Whatever happened to killing MONSTERS in games? Did they make most of
>> the

WHAT RPGS?

I loved the AD&D Gold Box games... where who you killed varies, but was
always at least 1/4 human and many areas were almost entirely human. In
fact all of the AD&D games were like that, plenty of humans to kill.
Then there's Daggerfall and Arena... where probably 1/3 to 1/2 of those
you kill are human. In Fallout, there are also plenty of humans to kill.
The vast majorities of CRPGs have veritable legions of humans to kill.

Am I the only one who remembers that most RPG worlds are based on
medieval Europe, home of the white people?