Ubisoft Apologizes For Adding Playable Black Person In Latest Video Game
Ubisoft, the developer and publisher of the famed Assassin’s Creed franchise, has apologized for adding a playable Black person to its game.
The French company, who mistook white men with anime profile pictures as the “Japanese Community'“ said that they were sorry that “some promotional materials caused concern,” in a social media post on Tuesday. The concern being their decision to feature Yasuke, a Black samurai, as one of their playable protagonists.
The company continued their statement by acknowledging that video games are not in fact documentaries but pieces of fictional entertainment with “creative liberties,” AKA your character possesses an inhuman amount of endurance, strength, and acrobatic skills that could never be fully replicated by a real living human being.
In addition, Ubisoft acknowledged that having a Black person being depicted as anything other than as a slave was a topic of “debate and discussion.”
As to which authority was debating and discussing, they did not say. According to verified historians on the strictly moderated subreddit r/AskHistorians, who don’t debate but instead research and conclude, deduced via historical record that in fact Yasuke was a samurai.
Even if Yasuke wasn’t a Samurai in real life, despite the fact that he definitely was and it’s been tirelessly proven over and over, the game exists in the genre of historical fiction, and fiction does not need to be justified to anyone whose main criticism is that it’s not accurate enough. That just defeats the entire fucking purpose of the genre, doesn’t it? Isn’t like, the whole point of fiction to be, you know, imaginary? Not real? Untrue? Fake? Made up? Why do we need to Cinema Sins a video game whose entire basis is that famous historical figures are assassinated by a guy in a hood who does parkour and has wrist mounted daggers?
But, as a highly upvoted reddit post on the Goober Gobber subreddit KotakuInAction rightly points out, the real concern isn’t with historical accuracy, it’s that Ubisoft “needed the slightest excuse to force diversity into the game.”
Ah yes, forced diversity. You know, that thing that everyone wants! Me personally, I love when writers make up one dimensional characters that serves no expositional purpose. It’s super cool! More bad characters please.
But let us be honest, forced diversity isn’t even about the concern that certain characters in media aren’t being given the type of depth they deserve, it’s about how racists were non consensually subjected to the appearance of a Black person in a piece of media they were interested in.
And Ubisoft, in all of its idiotic wisdom, apologized to these people for dishonoring a culture that A) isn’t even theirs, and B) they fetishize the fuck out of.