Many visitors to the cultural center, for instance, are surprised to see that Mohawks didn’t live in tee-pees, when they in fact lived in longhouses. Mohawk village concept art, courtesy of Ubisoftĭeer said those generalizations are what bother him most, and he’s witnessed the effects. And when they do appear–as with characters like Nightwolf from Mortal Kombat or Tal’Set from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter–they’re often boiled down to generic, spiritual people. Native American video game characters are particularly rare. “We don’t have a switch in our heads that says ‘real or unreal’ like we think we do,” Dill said in an interview. Although people may think they can recognize stereotypes in games and separate them from reality, Dill said, studies show that people tend to base their perceptions on media, especially when they don’t have much interaction with minorities. They were seldom shown to operate computers or serve in the military.įielding Graduate University professor Karen Dill, who co-authored the latter study, said those types of depictions can be damaging. A content analysis of games from roughly the same time period found that minority male characters were portrayed as more aggressive than whites, and were often relegated to athletic or violent roles. population, and that Native Americans and Hispanic main characters were nonexistent.
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That attention to detail isn’t always a given in video games, which like other media has been known to under-represent minorities, and to rely on clichés and stereotypes for non-white characters.Ī 2009 study of games released between 20 found that the most popular games had a greater percentage of white male characters than even the general U.S. “It seemed like they went above and beyond in trying to get the community involved,” Deer said in an interview, “and I don’t think it was really so much to cover their butts, just that they wanted to have a real, authentic product that stood up.” Even Connor’s name had to be cleared for use–in Mohawk culture, each name must be unique–and Ubisoft’s lawyers agreed not to trademark it. He advised them on which types of clothing and jewelry to use and which types of spiritual music were off-limits. When the team asked about including ceremonial masks in the game, Deer warned them that any visual depiction of the sacred masks is considered offensive. The consultant, Thomas Deer of the Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center, helped steer Ubisoft Montreal away from errors. Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center “We didn’t want to make mistakes, even well-intentioned mistakes.”
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“There are people from all over the world on our team, but we’re very aware that we’re still pretty much a bunch of early-middle-aged white guys,” Alex Hutchinson, Assassin’s Creed III‘s creative director, said in an interview.
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The team also worked with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk community near Montreal and contracted some of its residents to help translate, sing and voice act for the game. The team was running into too many faux pas and factual errors, so around April of 2011, Ubisoft Montreal hired a Mohawk cultural consultant to be on call at all times. On their own, that turned out to be too difficult.
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Ubisoft had the concept for a half-Mohawk, half-British assassin named Connor, who would fit the role of an outsider during the game’s American Revolution setting. But the last thing they wanted was a collection of clichés and stereotypes, so they began digging into the intricacies of Mohawk culture to make Connor more authentic. Follow one year into the making of Assassin’s Creed III, the team at Ubisoft Montreal realized they needed help with their protagonist.