Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39331
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39331
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Videogame, in a fantasy world that isn't our world. Why not make people blue, red, green? Who says their biology and skin colours have to conform to earth's? In fact, then you'd have a number of "races" (whatever "race" means), but you wouldn't be in any way tied to earth's stereotypes.

You definitely don't want to make all people pale-skinned. You do that, a whole lot of earth's population are going to feel excluded, and rightly so. There's already lots and lots of content that's all-white.

Many videogames I see nowadays (the _Dragon Age_ and _Mass Effect_ sagas are the example I most often turn to) have a slider for skin colour - goes from ghost-white to deep black, with all possible shades of brown in between. Both aforementioned sagas sort of ignore geographical realism completely, and just stick people of all colours wherever. I'm quite comfortable with this approach. I mean, why not? And even if it screws realism a bit, we're prepared to suspend our disbelief enough to accept magic, and health made of hitpoints. (Just think of how absurd the last one is.) If we accept that, why shouldn't we accept varied skin colours?

I also believe you are somewhat mistaken when you talk about means of transportation not allowing "racial mixing". Trade caravans existed from times immemorial. As long as you've got some sort of a pack animal, you've got those. Goods were travelling all the way from India to the Mediterranean ~1000BCE. We've got archaeological evidence of that (stones and metals that could only be found in place A, or goods exclusively manufactured in place A, found in place B). If goods travelled, so did people. And if people travelled, they also stayed, and had children. Considering that, a rather mixed population is not entirely unlikely. In particular, while the distinction between Scotland and the Sahara is rather sharp, people in, say, Iran, would have a much higher diversity of skin colours.

Original score: 11