Empathize

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Video Game Characters need to be Culturally Sensitive and Novel

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Video game characters play an important role in creating immersion in Video Games. Designers have often borrowed characters form mythologies, religion and culture. They have received a lot of backlash by gamers and cultural stakeholders. In order to empathize with different stakeholders and understand the crux of the problem, we use research methods such as Stakeholder Interviews and Digital Ethnography.

Interviews With Cultural Stakeholders

(Audio Shared with Permission)

Temple priests were shown characters inspired/copied from Hindu Mythology and were asked a series of questions. Insightful responses are shown:

Digital Ethnography on Reddit Threads

To understand the perception of games on seeing gods being used in games, we studied reddit threads revolving around gaming. Insightful reddit responses are shown below:

Define

Insights

• Cultural stakeholders do not encourage copying gods into video games.
• Cultural stakeholders emphasize that it is important to stick to the scriptures and original narratives.
• Stakeholders suggest that creative liberty with gods from active religion should not be taken. Instead they suggest sticking to the original narrative and use fictional characters for gameplay.

Opportunities and Questions

Having discussed with stakeholders we realize that there is a large design space in Hindu mythology that can be leveraged. But this does not come at the cost of copying original gods. Stakeholders suggest that we can take granular elements form Hindu mythology and create new aesthetics and characters.

• How do we identify granular elements from Mythology?
• How do we present these granular elements to designers?
• Can we create novel video game characters using these granular elements?
• Are the characters that are created using these granular elements culturally sensitive?

Ideate

As an alternative to god transplantation, We employ Ethnography and Grounded Theory as research methods to develop granular artifacts that support the creation of characters. We hypothesize that combining artifacts (syntagms) allows the creation of novel and sensitive characters. We take the following research approach:

Visit cultural spaces for Visual Ethnography

Visiting temples we collected a total of 429 images. Of the 429 images, 248 images were images of idols, 63 images consisted of ongoing rituals, and 45 images were miscellaneous objects.

Grounded Theory to create a Syntagm and Paradigm based Character Design space

We used grounded theory a research method to create a design space of character creation artifacts. The design space has 141 open codes, categorized into 22 axial codes, that finally converging into 4 selective codes.

Prototype

Presenting the Syntagm and Paradigm based Character Design space

We showcase granular elements as syntagm and paradigms. The syntagm and paradigm based design space are displayed as cards on a table. The axial codes act as paradigms. The open codes are the syntagms and are distributed across the paradigms. This distribution allows designers to pick suitable syntagms from the respective paradigms for character creation. Designers are allowed to select any number of syntagms and arrange them to create characters.

Evaluate

We evaluate the design space on three parameters.

• Does the design space support the creation of video game characters?
• Are the generated characters novel and unique?
• Are the generated characters culturally sensitive?

We take the following evaluative steps.

Participatory Design Workshop

To verify designers could use the design space to create new characters, we conducted a participatory design workshop with game designers as stakeholders. Game designers were evaluated and were requested to create characters using the design space. Each participant was requested to create 2 characters.

Quantitative Framework to Evaluate Character Novelty

The syntagm and paradigm approach towards the design space allows to represent characters as a vector representation. The frequency of each syntagm in an entry into the vector. This vector acts as an embedding for the character and provides us an opportunity to compare characters using distance metrics.

We measure character distances from one central and plot them on a radar chart as shown below. We create two groups of charaters. Group (1) consists of characters copied from the original religious texts and used in games. Group (2) consists of characters created by the participants from the participatory design study.

We run Welch's t-test on the distances from a origin character and two groups of characters:

We generate the following insights:

• Participant generated characters are novel when measured across the entire design space (p<0.05). There is less overlap between the original gods and participant generated characters (d>0.8)
• Participant generated characters are unique in terms of their physical appearance (p<0.05, d>0.8). This could be a result of the fact that gods are mostly anthropomorphic in nature, while participant generated gods are a mix of both zoomorphic and anthropomorphic.
• A number of original gods are presented as royals resulting in high jewelry and other fashion elements. (p>0.05)
• The anthropomorphic nature of participant characters allows multiple hands and results in them carrying a larger set of weapons (p<0.05,d>0.8). The reverse is true for the game mechanics selective code (p>0.05)

Sensitivity Evaluation through Stakeholder Interviews

We presented temple priests with characters created by participants and gods copied into video games. They were asked about what aspects of the presented character they found offensive. Insightful responses are as follows:

Insights from Sensitivity Evaluation

• Participant generated characters were received positively by cultural stakeholders. Cultural stakeholders had a strong voice against using original gods in video games.
• Cultural stakeholders were able to identify elements borrowed from the specific mythology but assured that the characters were fictional and were just using elements from mythology.
• Cultural stakeholders were concerned with narratives around original gods being manipulated through video games, but shared that creative liberty could be taken on narratives for participant generated character.