This truly is a bizarre article. A cheap kit of 16GB DDR4 (what most people are going to have in their system right now) goes for less than $50, that’s cheaper than most new games. Sure, it’s an extra cost to upgrade, but I mean you’re upgrading from playing games still playable on PS4 to playing games only playable…

This isn’t even really much of a story, in a sense.

I mean, it’s RAM. Don’t people just go and add as much as the computer will allow? It’s the easiest part of the whole buying process. Just get a shit ton and forget about it for the next decade.

I mean, I think it’s fair to say this is a shitty practice that’s pretty common and it’s ALSO shitty that Nintendo does it.

CR started as a home game amongst legitimate friends, which then was livestreamed and got popular, becoming what it is today. They weren’t “hired.”

So like, do you want the all-white dorks to dress like Middle Easterners for their session? That’d be worse, right? Do you want them to play only Western-inspired fantasy worlds, thereby ignoring the wealth of cultural influences in D&D? That’d be worse, right? Do you want them to bring in Asian and African ringers…

The main problem does imho not lie with critical role, but with articles like these who fail to grasp the basics of pen&paper roleplay.
It is a form of escapism, I’d compare it to improvised theater without a stage to play on. Instead of a script you have a gamemaster and a loose set of rules to guide the participants…

Was Aabria just a ‘guest’ when she DM’ed the entire Exandria Unlimited mini-campaign? Is Robbie not *non-white enough* to count, despite being a new permanent cast member? How many of the main cast need to change, exactly?

Being a fan of something doesn’t mean I can’t be critical of it; likewise, being critical of something when you’re not a fan doesn’t make you more objective. Bias is a thing ...sure. But I can full-throatedly criticize plenty of things I love...and have...professionally.

Here’s the thing, again, because you don’t seem…

For some people, there is no solution, the outrage is the point. And for a lot of others, there is no solution other than “Erase yourself, because white people have had the spotlight for too long. Stop creating, so non-white people can be more represented.”

The problem of lack of representation among the core cast isn’t a problem that can be *solved* (and honestly I don’t think it needs to be). The problem also isn’t that the aesthetic is just window dressing...that’s true of ALL fantasy worlds because even when they have real-world analogues they could never possibly be…

I’m a little confused as to the conclusion here. If they had dressed/acted in way that would make you think “they were connected to this world,” that would have of course been castigated for appropriation. To treat it more or less like any other fantasy setting, they “they fail to present us with anything of…

Ah yes, the semi-annual hyperventilating article about how a group of real-life friends who started streaming their hobby should replace half of their friend group with random people to meet a diversity quota, and how white people are forbidden from exploring anything except “Generic European” cultures even when they…

I like how you say that they haven’t done anything “wrong” with the content yet but you’re still not happy.

“One of the core concepts of Orientalism as a field of study is that even the most well-meaning scholars from the Western world are unable to present objective truths about the Orient. The Western view of the Orient is forever tarnished by the legacy of colonialism and fictionalized history.”

You said it yourself - this might be a cynical, bad faith interpretation. That right there is an admission that you know there’s probably a perfectly reasonable counter-argument that you conveniently omitted from your article in an effort to steer the narrative one way: the click generating, socially inflaming way.

*Sigh*

In role-playing games with predominantly white players, even with the most intricately built worlds there is still a lack of connection between the cultures they play in and the way they play their characters. The characters (and people playing them) are untouched by the world in which they exist, with most of their…

This is the article that will cause me to finally unsubscribe from Kotaku. What an absolute load of shit.

It’s Dungeons and Dragons.