"why would a German game want to represent a US ethnic mix, and not for example a Chinese one?"

I think that's the real question here. Usually the answer to that question is the creator wanting to be as appealing as possible to make more money.

One of the byproducts of globalism is the largest markets also export their own "wokeness" and sellers wanting to appeal to the most amount of customers possible will conform to those trends.

In the US many Americans are complaining about game makers and media catering to the demands of the Chinese government while being completely ignorant that media has been US centric for a long time now.
 

I don't think it's a matter of mirroring the ethnic mix of any particular country. It's a matter of shifting away from the conceit that 'white human is the default human, others are an optional afterthought.' Which is a decent thing to do, all in all.

Anyway, wouldn't the paleolithic fantasy of present-day Germany involve recently-arrived African Homo sapiens with a sprinkling of put-upon Neanderthals?
 

I can accept anachronisms or ahistoricisms when it doesn't matter; you can do Julius Caesar without dressing the cast in togas. The Witcher material can cope with Netflix's meddling without being compromised too much, and that may be the price of bringing it to the current audience. As for Cowboy Bebop, my fingers are painfully crossed; at least the original is unassailable.

What gets my goat is people demanding black characters in games whose whole point is the recreation of medieval rural Bohemia, or TV companies removing comedy episodes or even whole series from a few years back because they have a few jokes that offend the super-protected categories.

 

"What gets my goat is people demanding black characters in games whose whole point is the recreation of medieval rural Bohemia"

The counterpoint to this argument is the decades, or really centuries if you include theater, of content where white male actors played all roles including minorities and women. No one was concerned about historical accuracy then.

Why is it that when the default is not White Male that all of a sudden historical accuracy becomes important?
 

Leaving aside the history of theatre in some places, I'm pretty sure that outside of comedy, female roles in film and TV have almost invariably been played by women. There have been more exceptions for different ethnicities, I suppose. If you need an Argentinian for your story, you may not have one to hand, and Joe Bloggs down the hall may convince better as a South American expatriate than as a femme fatale.

When you are purposely making a historically accurate game, historical accuracy is important. I don't see how anyone can reasonably object to this.

Nobody said the default has to be White, or White Male. Films and TV made in majority white countries do of course tend to star white people, of both sexes. Naturally, it is otherwise in India, China and Japan, to name some other countries with substantial film industries.
 

I can see the need of the customer of a media product to feel represented. But that should include the case that if the customers are white, the characters should be white too.

Historical accuracy is difficult. Nobody expects the characters in a board game about the stone age to be historically accurate. Tom Cruise as "Last Samurai" isn't totally historically accurate, but there were certainly some white people around in Japan in that period, and it's okay to fictionalize one. It does no harm to put a black guy into a Robin Hood movie, because that is clearly shown to be an individual, an exception. I objected on this blog in the past to Bridgerton, because "black representation" there went as far as to show a general acceptance of black people in the high society of England in 1813, when in fact England had only just stopped the slavery trade in 1807, in which they enslaved and shipped an estimated 3.1 million black people. At some point historical inaccuracy turns into a complete misrepresentation of the facts, not just a simple "we need to represent black people".

While the historical data on the paleolithic age are thin on the ground, there is some evidence that the Neanderthals were actually the nicer, more peaceful humans, who got crushed by the far more aggressive homo sapiens when climate change made the competition for food and resources tougher. You could make a movie about the nice guy always losing out, drawing a straight line from the Neanderthals to the dead of the political moderate today. But that would be a different story.
 

Unless a piece of media is trying to advertise itself as a historical documentary I don't see why any of that matters.

I don't know anything about Bridgerton so I can't really comment on that but in my experience most shows or movies based on history are often so inaccurate that changing the race of a character is the least of their problems.

The Last Samurai got so many things wrong about that historical conflict that the only claim it can make to being based off of history is that a conflict did happen and they got some of the notable names correct. So Tom Cruise being in it is whatever at that point as clearly the whole movie is a work of fiction.

Me personally I don't really care about representation in general media but I understand why others do.

I do agree that a documentary should try to portray events as they were including but not limited to casting actors that make sense.

In just about anything else though I couldn't care less as it's all fiction anyways.
 

Looking up the game, it appears that the goal is to paint a woolly mammoth. So, I think the characters should represent the type of people who would have interacted with those creatures. It appears they stretched across northern climates around the globe but went as far south as China in Asia.
Unless the game is set in some alternative universe, in which case the creators can decide on the diversity of the world in which the game is set.
The characteristics of the community where the creators live or the world in general should be one of the lowest considerations unless the game is set in the modern day.
 

> Tom Cruise as "Last Samurai" isn't totally historically accurate,

Note that Tom Cruise is not playing a Japanese samurai in the movie, he is playing a westerner hired to train the Japanese army in the western ways of war.
It is based on a real person - Jules Brunet. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Brunet

At least in the starting premise of the film, the only historical inaccuracy is that the character is an American Civil War veteran instead of a French military officer.
 

> I can see the need of the customer of a media product to feel represented. But that should include the case that if the customers are white, the characters should be white too.

Agreed. And happily, the designers of Paleo have retained some white characters.

(The reason the preceding phrase comes off as laughable is exactly because we continue to think of white as default.)

As to Bridgerton, its creator makes it very clear that it's an ahistorical fantasy, so I think we can mostly let it off the hook. It's basically a fairy tale about what might happen if there had been a black (or mixed-race?) Queen and black people got to wear cool hats and gleefully exploit the nascent industrial working class of England just as their white counterparts did.
 

I think that the make up of the time period that the medium is portraying should be respected. If we're talking feudal Japan than the ethic makeup of that time should be reflected regardless of what modern day Japan is comprised of. I remember the representation issue being raised when Kingdom Come: Deliverance was released. I just don't agree with adding groups who weren't around at the time or if they were in such small numbers not to make sense to include. I also don't agree with changing characters from one race to another just to add diversity.

However, I do understand those that champion diversity as there are underrepresented groups worldwide. To some members of those groups it could seem like people pick time periods to represent where their groups aren't represented and that is done on purpose. I'm sure that there are people that use those periods as an excuse not to include groups that they personally don't like. It's a tricky subject and I think it's hard not to group some "good" intent with those with "bad" intent.