- No, I don’t.
- Yes.
- I suggest more options.
- No, I think that’s a great idea.
- I suppose that could work, and the way it could be done is by having the player’s ethnicity ignored completely.
- It’s a matter of preference.
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No, but I’m not exactly qualified to speak for other people. I do appreciate that Asia isn’t lumped together into only one group, though.
No, because I’m not sure what word could be used for my ethnicity. The closest I’ve seen is Austronesian/Malayan.
This depends on how much you want the choice to affect the MC. Most people typically divide others into basic races, but I know some people who like being as specific as possible, especially if their ethnicity isn’t normally mentioned.
It is completely possible to not use the *input_text, anyway, so I don’t think it would be considered overboard.
I’d say yes, because sometimes having to place someone’s ethnicity is immersion-breaking. I think if you were going with customization options for hair/eye color, you’d make the choice to skip them and the ethnicity option one and the same.
Not sure, but I haven’t seen Indigenous American used before.
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Not offensive, I just question what the point to this is. If your ethnicity makes no difference, to your story or stats or anything else, then why bother with it? It’s one of the most fake choices available to the story. If you really are worried about inclusivity then you really don’t need to. If you say nothing about ethnicity then most people assume their character to be the ethnicity they imagine them to be.
British, probably. Nationality is more important than ethnicity in European countries. You can be of any shade of brown you like, but embracing national identities makes you what you are, and allows you to be accepted. One thing most people don’t talk about is that white isn’t really white, we’re more very pale brown. And black isn’t actually black, and so on and so forth. As a joke, I would just put down lots of different named shades for brown, like what you find in decorating catelogs, just to demonstrate how superficial the choice is. 
Make as many as you like, hun. 
I wouldn’t think so. Just be sure that input_text for race is going to make sense. After all, people can put anything, like Asari or Turian or Krogan. Oh, that would be funny!
Absolutely. And I would ask them straight: “Wanna pick your skin tone? It makes no difference, but you can do it if you want.” Something along those lines.
I would just say to pick the names that people are going to understand best. Most people know what ‘white’ means. As they would for ‘black’. ‘Indigenous American’ maybe not so much, and would go with ‘Native American’.
Also, I am given to understand that race divides are so much more pronounced in some Far Eastern countries. I’m not sure ‘East Asian’ will quite suffice. @kyros makes a better point of this in his post.
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It always depends on the game, I’d say.
Going by other threads about this, as said, it should come into play in some way:
Look at Fallen Hero, for example, where what you look like has some impact on the story.
you get an achievement if another char looks like you, NPCs will acknowledge that etc. I think there’s a number of other scenes where things are addressed, too.
So, while yeah, mostly flavortext too, it feels like your appearance has an impact.
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I think it’s kind of like you’ve mentioned native Australians, but if you happen to not be a native aus and live there you get categorised under something else. If you’re using regional differences are you going to include cultural/linguistic etc differences or is it just skin colour as a flavour text. If it’s just colour, you could make your life easier and be more inclusive by having a selection of skin colours to choose from. If you’re going for regional, you’d probably need more categories to make everyone happy. (For example you’ve missed SE Asia countries, Maori, Pacific Islander etc and even then I’m not sure if everyone appreciates being put under a region for ethnicity.)
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Lots of really thoughtful, educated answers - thanks everyone.
@GenericGem I like your idea about the different shades of brown 
My grandfather was a very dark brown (Barbadian descent) whereas, you can see from my avatar, I am more cloud-coloured.
@MeltingPenguins thanks for the Fallen Hero example, that could be interesting to incorporate.
@Jacic good point about my selectiveness with the Asian countries.
There is some confusion as to why I have used the word ‘indigenous’ instead of ‘native’. I feel like the word ‘indigenous’ is more specific to a race of people who were there first rather than ‘native’ where I tend to think of people who just happened to be born in a certain country. Of course, the words are technically interchangeable and ‘native’ is more commonly used.
I think I also may have read something like ‘Native American’ is offensive now and they prefer ‘The Indigenous People of America’, or something like that. I could be wrong.
I don’t see the point in choosing an ethnicity (or other unused character descriptors except for name and gender) if it has no impact on the game and the easiest way to make ethnicity matter is to have a racist or prejudice NPC/world and that wouldn’t be fun. Choice of the Vampire made it work because the setting was prejudiced and it would make sense for a slave to be strong yet illiterate and not because the author is prejudiced and thinks that those are innate characteristics. It can also sound like a creepy exotic fetish when a NPC just likes you for your skin color. Also, having a “wow, that person looks like me” text makes it seem like it’s rare to see another member of the same race, unless that person could actually pass for a secret sibling or twin.
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1- I don’t find the above options offencive .
2- I can , although depand what I’m playing . I rarely go for my ‘ethnie’ if I can help it .
3- depand what you are writing about . if you are writing about something close to reality and wanna be ‘realistic’ , it maybe better to include as much as you can . If not , then it won’t matter . Say if you are writing about fantasy or science-fic .
4- again , depand on the context it will be used into .
5- I personally like ‘caucasian’ instead of ‘white’ .
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Honestly, I’d probably just leave this out if it means nothing in the game. But if it’s something important to you to add, then I would suggest going for choosing skin tone instead of flat out race. “Thier skin was pale and burned easily, causing giggles on occasion from schoolmates.” “Their skin was a darker shade then was normally seen in these parts, but no one gave much of a second glance.” If your gonna do it, go for more of a descriptive feel then just a list, if that made sense?
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I love that east asian and south asian are differntiated. Im pakistani and live in the uk where asian mean both south and east asian and ive noticed in america when soneone says they are asian people only think of east asian.
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To be honest, one could have as many identifiable races/ethnicities as needed. Each one would only require a few variables and if simplistic as possible, one identifying variable is all that would be required. As long as you keep track of variables, do anything with this concept as you like.
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if there is a “mixed” option, i would prefer to go with that.
My reason can be summarized with this tweet: https://twitter.com/kaninrice/status/979713180292169728
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I don’t want to turn this into a racial debate or anything so after this post I’ll stop if this turns into irrational arguments and name calling. I think it is unfair to everybody to say that race is an artificial and arbitrary concept. Different races have both physical and mental differences from each other. This has been proven time and time again and ignoring it won’t change facts. Being a European myself (Russian) I can tell you that my culture is much closer to say Polish or even French than it is to Nigerian or Malaysian. People tend to group people by race because races e.g white, hispanic, black, asian, tend to have more similar cultures and traits. I don’t think anybody can argue that we see differences in peoples skin color whether we do it purposefully or not. I don’t think saying that Europeans are white or Africans are black (I mean the majority not all) is the same as saying that since Russians and French are white they are the same. Anybody who thinks a Russian is the same as a Frenchman is either foolish or grossly misinformed. So tl;dr race is more of a way to group groups of somewhat similar people together for ease of classification and study. If you want to study specific/smaller groups of people for specific things then you go by country/nationality. But to stay on topic, if its more of a flavor text thing, I’d say if it makes you worried don’t put it in. Otherwise go for it. I doubt the majority of people would get super upset if you didn’t put in an extremely small/rare ethnicity.
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I see what you’re going for but it’s still kind of problematic in a way you probably don’t need if it’s not important to the actual story. TBH if you wanted to ask a question like that, I’d almost have a “What country are you from?” with a few options + a manual entry since you couldn’t possibly list them all comfortably in a choice game.
For what I mean by problematic, you’re kind of mixing broad skin tones that cover large numbers of countries and cultures (ie white/black), with some very specific ethnicities (ie: Indigenous Australians and Americans).
Also I know people who have parents or grandparents from at least one of the Asian countries you’ve listed. However not all consider themselves Chinese-Australians, or Indonesian-Australians etc because they were born in Australia, not Asia. It gets even cloudier if you have people with “mixed” ancestory which is pretty common around here. People often identify simply as Australian, not Australian with “x” heritage. Asking them to choose Asian or mixed from the menu for ethnicity may not sit well with some people.
I guess you could phase it as ancestory rather than ethnicity to be completely clear what you’re asking, but is that something that most people want necessarily want to have? I’d personally think the question kind of odd just from my own stand point being asked to identify with where my ancestors originated from on one side of my family or the other for a story where it wasn’t something vitally important to the storyline. I could answer it, but I don’t really identify closely with the country I’m probably closest to from one side of my family (in terms of language, culture, etc) and I’d be surprised if I was the only one.
You could put a “skip” or manual entry in, but if you do that, I’d probably negate any real customisation you could do with the choice. Also I’d be very, very careful about using ethnicity to select for physical features since there can be quite a range. I can tell you even among the people I’ve met who identify as Indigenous Australian, some people have very dark toned skin, some look almost caucasian and everything in between. But that’s just my POV, it’s your story so you get to choose what system you want to use. I personally can’t see anything outright offensive in what you’re suggesting, just perhaps some people feeling left out or awkward if there’s not a suitable option for them.
(By the way I also thought that there’s no option for people from places where they could have olive toned skin. Also technically, I think the most correct form of address for Indigenous Australians is probably “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.)
I’m going to kind of disagree with you there @anon90085413. While that can be true of some, it’s definitely not true of all. I know people from all sorts of backgrounds, whose worldviews are not dissimilar to mine, having grown up in the same country as me. Why should anyone have a particular culture based on the colour of their skin, or a relative 3 generations back? That’s often more of a country and cultural thing than an ancestory one. You’ve even said that yourself when you said that Russian and French cultures are not the same despite both being European countries.
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The funny thing about the term “Caucasian” is that it does specifically reference the Caucasus… just because one early anthropologist decided to consider them as the prototypical white people.
I’d say this has more to do with historical events than anything racial. France and Russia both drew from the same cultural sources in the Middle Ages—Christianity and the Greeks, notably—though with some differences, like France drawing more from Rome and Russia drawing more from medieval Greeks—and continued to exchange cultural ideas as history went on. This got even more prominent a few centuries later with Peter the Great specifically emulating French culture… and things like concert music styles were in close contact as well, even when folk music drew from much more distinct traditions. But cultural and historical boundaries don’t always line up with “racial” boundaries; it can be quite arbitrary what lines people choose to draw, and where.
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Well, to be fair I never said they were the same. It’s kind of the same thing with classifying Europeans as white and Africans as black. It is because the majority of them are that race that they classify those paces as either white or black. I meant more of nations and the people in Europe tend to have similar architectural designs, medical practices, and governmental types. And you don’t need to be a certain skin color to adopt a certain culture or governmental types. But those other things I said about how different races tend to be different both physically and mentally is where these ideas and governments come from. I think ignoring the differences in each other will do nothing but harm us in the long run.
While I agree to a certain extent I also disagree. There is a cultural and historical reason why they were brought there in the first place but there is also a reason those policies stayed and were adopted. There is a reason that the concept of democracy or republics tend to fail so often in places like Africa or South America but work so (relatively) well in Europe. But I don’t really want to get banned so I won’t go any farther into the debate. You guys have been very polite but I know other people don’t like hearing about race. I also don’t want to derail the topic any farther. 
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Maybe call West Asian Middle-Eastern instead? That name is kinda confusing since it isn’t really an ethnicity in real life, and the middle east covers the same area anyway
Also you can remove indigenous Australian/American, these nationalities are very rare and the chance you’d find them in Britain is very low
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@Sovereign2Lilith I agree, Choice of the Vampire made good use of the ethnicity variable in a way that was relevant to the story.
@E_RedMark thank you for your input. Fantasy races would be a lot of fun to code! Perhaps in the future.
@AgentVerona I like your suggestions, thank you 
@TheReverse thanks for commenting, it is helpful to hear from someone of Asian descent. It’s such a big place with so many, very different, cultures.
@Ambulantio I am sure that you’re right regarding the simplicity of the coding, at least initially. I suppose what I really need to figure out, before I continue, is how exactly I am going to be implementing racial characteristics within my story.
@Abe Haha! I had no idea The Philippines was such an ambiguous place
@anon90085413 I agree that physical and mental differences are likely to exist between races, although I imagine this is based largely on external influences such as environment, culture and family life, rather than how we are born. In which case, I suppose ‘nationality’ (and the nationality of one’s parents) would be the influencing factor.
@Jacic I agree that mixing skin tones and specific ethnicities seems awkward. And you’re right in that, despite ethnicity, some people are anomalies when it comes to complexion. My mother is mixed race and I didn’t even notice until I was a young teenager! 
@TSSL interesting note about the Caucasus. I’ll admit I was completely ignorant of the entire thing.
@Frogs Good call - Middle-Eastern was the term I was forgetting. It does kind of beg the question, why do we say that instead of ‘West Asian’?
The Middle East isn’t just Western Asia but Egypt and some other North African countries (depending on the view point) too. It’s also a far common term in general cause it can be cultural/political too rather than purely geographical.
The term West Asian sounds a bit weird to be honest. I never really heard that term before and I actually live in that region.
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@Frogs Ah, that makes sense. At least, it makes more sense than the Midwestern United States which, geographically, seem to make no sense at all! 