 Alright everyone, it was time for me to get a video up and luckily I've got a fire lit under me to write about a criticism I've seen of the game Sifu. I would have written about dying light too already but I don't think I'm even halfway through it yet because the game is just insanely long. But today I'm going to talk about Sifu. I mean I'm not really going to talk too much about the game because I don't think there's too much to say beyond it's pretty good, probably too hard and the camera is kind of annoying. No, instead we're going to talk about a criticism I've seen on Twitter and in the gaming press that says Sifu is guilty of cultural appropriation and exoticism. I'm going to argue that this critique isn't just silly, it's a dangerous argument. If you're finding yourself reflexively agreeing with this take, I implore you to stick around and make your case in the comments after you've heard what I have to say. Alright, Sifu and cultural appropriation in games, after the logo. The creation of a dogma. Okay, listen. I tend not to comment on these weird little game controversies because I generally find the discussions to be kind of stupid. I think it's annoying when a game like Battlefield has to deal with criticism for having women in Battlefield 5 because the discussion is never nuanced. There's a bunch of extremely loud right wing people who scream about the SJWs ruining their games while left wing people disingenuously only point out the most egregious misogyny coming from the other side of the argument. Nobody seemed to say, actually, millions of women fought for the USSR in World War II, mostly as snipers and tankers, but also on the front lines, but DICE still fucked up because instead of using one of those millions of historically accurate stories, they made yet another miserably terrible campaign and chose to make a mission that featured women fighting for a country they didn't actually fight for. And also the game launches a broken and barely finished piece of shit. What's missing from most of our political discourse in this country, and also in our discussion of politics and games, is an acknowledgement that other people have legitimate opinions we may disagree with, that this doesn't make them automatic assholes, and finally that there's always the possibility that we ourselves might be wrong. Everyone in this country is entirely too fucking sure that they are right. Everyone is way too certain of themselves. Discussion to try and make a point. It should try to convince. The point of discussion isn't to make the other person feel as bad as possible so we can feel like smart boys. It's just all exhausting. Because the vast majority of political commentary on games is either self-righteous, progressive, sniggering at how perfectly correct they are, or obnoxious conservatives deliberately trying to troll people and being rude and offensive just for the lulls, I tend to stay out of these discussions. They're usually loud, rude, and full of people on either side saying an awful lot of words without doing very much thinking beforehand. I have a visceral hatred for dogmatic thinking and I'm finding it increasingly frustrating that one has to agree with the entire conservative or liberal package of beliefs or risk being yelled at. When it comes to most political issues in games, I probably come down closer to the left because my basic beliefs boil down to the following. Don't be a dick. Avoid making other people feel bad. It doesn't hurt me to avoid using words to make others feel bad. Nothing actually matters all that much and in general, having all sorts of different people in games is at very worst meaningless and at best it might slowly contribute to a slightly less stratified society. So I guess that makes me one of those pro-military, pro-gun, feminist, pro-choice, small government, pro-LGBT rights, anti-Confederate flag, anti-welfare state, social justice warriors, or something. I have a suspicion that amongst the people who watch my videos, I've got both conservatives and liberals and progressives. My main point is I find it odd that we're in this area where we agree with everything that comes with that. It's a weird time where liberals agree basically with the entire liberal package and conservatives agree with the entire conservative package. There's no real reason that believing in gun rights should also come with the whole package surrounding corporate taxes or believing in abortion rights should also come with the entire package and how we address racial issues in the country, which brings us to the issue at hand. Sifu is the new game from slow clap. This is the french dev team that made absolver a few years ago. If you played absolver, you'll have a decent idea of what this game plays like. It has a pretty similar combat system, but rather than being a weird open world PvP game, Sifu is more of a strange blend of souls, devil may cry stylish action, brawler, and roguelite. As I said earlier, it is probably too hard, at least for my taste, but it's a nice looking game with a deep though sometimes frustrating combat system and extremely unforgiving roguelite structure. None of that is germane to the discussion here though. The issue I'm going to talk about relates to Sifu's story and setting. After playing absolver and a few hours of this, it's quite obvious that the developers at slow clap love kung fu movies and Sifu is, at its very core, an effort to make the game equivalent of a John Woo film. The first level even features a section that is an homage to the hallway scene from the classic movie Old Boy. All good, right? Well, according to some writers on the internet, no. To these commenters, Sifu has an issue with cultural appropriation, at least, and at worst is guilty of trading and exoticism, which is really a fancy way of saying racist tropes. I did that whole spiel earlier to make clear I'm not interested in trying to make other people feel bad for what they believe. I'm interested in trying to convince them that they are wrong, and not only simply wrong, but engage in a project that, taken to its logical end, would be terrible. So how is the game cultural appropriation? Well, the articles and tweets tend to be extremely vague on what specifically they mean with this language. I read these articles and saw a few examples of bad localization, of signs being written in both Chinese and English, of the fact that the game seems to be placed in the classic rough streets of Hong Kong setting, but none of this isn't anyway disturbing in and of itself. There's only one factor that seems to make this game troubling at all, and it's the fact that the people who made it are white. In fact, what drove me to make the video was seeing this article right here. Let's discuss. Sifu is, again, clearly, clearly an homage to classic kung fu movies like Enter the Dragon or any John Woo film. The idea that white people should have to be careful, or that they should need permission, or that this genre belongs to the Chinese, is a truly insane position to take. First off, let's pause and really think about what a John Woo movie is. John Woo movies are, themselves, a Chinese appropriation of an American art form. John Woo movies are a Hong Kong version of a Chinese take on American action films of the 1970s and 80s. They are, themselves, a cultural fusion that is impossible to take as entirely Asian or entirely Western forms of art. That's what makes them so cool. Which means that Sifu is a French interpretation of a Chinese interpretation of an American interpretation of kung fu. It is, by its very nature, an international project that belongs to nobody. Cultural appropriation is an entirely misguided way to view it. It's cultural fusion, which is the core of societal progress from the dawn of time. From the Babylonians, to the Egyptians, to the Phoenicians, to the Greeks, culture only moves forward when it is borrowing from others. Agricultural techniques and the wheel and metallurgy and art aren't reinvented in every society. They are transmitted, traded, and absorbed. The Chinese invented a writing system. The Koreans and Japanese appropriated, changed it to their needs, and made it their own. Over time, culture washes back and forth, enriching all of us. No nation gets to copyright and jealously guard its culture. If that was how it worked, we wouldn't have rock and roll, which is a fusion of styles from black and white American folk music. If we lived by this ideal, nobody in China would be listening to Brahms or Bach. In America, we'd be using Roman numerals instead of the clearly superior Arabic digits. I need to understand what the goal is here. Should slow clap have asked permission to set their game in Hong Kong? Should they have chosen an Asian developer at random to work on the project? Should they have passed it by a group of Chinese people to make sure that it was culturally sensitive? Should they have just made a game about French people fist fighting? What goal does this accomplish? How does it help anyone? How does culture move forward and fuse into new and exciting forms if it must be siloed according to race? As to the charge of exoticism, this too is, once again, a word that's so vague as to be useless in this context. It's true that throughout history, cultures have tried to paint unfamiliar lands as decadent and debased. If you read Herodotus and his description of the Babylonians, you'd think they spent all their time eating and sleeping with prostitutes. It's the classic example of the exotic east and makes one wonder how the Babylonians managed to conquer and rule an empire for a thousand years sandwiched between all their debauchery. A more recent example would be something like this scene here in the second Indiana Jones movie. This isn't an effort to use a foreign culture as a setting because it's interesting. It's using it to shock and disgust. And of course it is ridiculous and has aged very very badly. Then there's something like prey from 3D realms that uses the magical American Indian trope. The worst part about that is it's a total mess. Cherokees weren't planes Indians. One of the great tragedies of the Cherokees, they were a settled farming society not all that different from the white farmers they lived near. They weren't a magical people with spirit hawks and vast magical knowledge. They're just people who farmed and hunted and had gods they believed in like anyone else. A better example when talking about Sifu specifically would be the classic villain Fu Manchu. He's evil because he's scary exotic and Chinese. Look at him. Isn't his alien mustache dangerous and scary? Those are examples of exoticism in media. Sifu has precisely zero in common with Fu Manchu. Its villains are pulled directly from anime or classic kung fu movies. The bad guys aren't bad because they're unusual in Asian. They're bad because they're bad guys in a kung fu movie. If it's dealing with any tropes it's that drug dealers are all bad guys and the classic teacher with a bad student thing. It's basically Darth Vader. That's the trope the game is using. Nothing here is remotely insulting, outrageous or racist in and of itself. Secondly cultural appropriation is already a hazy and big term but in general it has been used to describe the theft of art and culture by a dominant society against a vanquished or oppressed minority. It is not cultural appropriation when a Japanese developer makes a game with American characters. It isn't cultural appropriation when British people play rock and roll. It is not cultural appropriation when an Egyptian orchestra plays Beethoven. The term is used to denote exploitation of an oppressed people. A classic example would be the American Indian themes in white society. That 3D realms pray game is a classic classic example. While I still don't agree that this is always a problem I can at least see the profanity involved. The American Indian culture was almost entirely destroyed in North America and what remains is a small slice of what existed before. It's often reduced to tropes and stereotypes. This works both ways incidentally with native cultures being presented as utopian sometimes when in fact they were just people like others growing crops fighting wars getting married conquering foes or living in peace. That's at least an embarrassing example that we can all understand but China? China is not a defeated or oppressed minority. China is one of the greatest cultures in human history. It's currently the third most powerful military in the world and somewhere between the second and 10th wealthiest nation on earth depending on how you want to calculate it. China is a nation that has spread its culture over vast regions for thousands of years and along the way it has taken a bunch of culture from nations and peoples around itself. China is not an oppressed minority that needs protecting in the video game press. Even implying that is a gross misunderstanding of history and it's basically parroting the propaganda of the current Chinese regime. China was one of the most powerful societies on earth for thousands of years before a tiny little period of trouble. Trouble that was in the end its own fault brought on by the slow choking of a sclerotic and useless monarchy that fought itself as the country fell to pieces under the rule of local warlords. It was unlucky enough to go through this just at the historical moment that a few powerful nations in Europe were involved in expanding empires. This was certainly unfortunate for China, but it was a blink of time in history. This is how history works. Countries rise and fall. They are stable and able to defend themselves or they are dominated until they're capable of defending themselves again. Europe forced uneven trade deals on a weak China and Britain won Hong Kong in a peace deal after China lost a war. But for the thousand years before that China was conquering everything around itself and doing the exact same thing. After expelling Japan in the 40s, China invaded Tibet. It conquered the Turkish people on its western frontier. It pushed its borders into India where to this very day it claims a chunk of land it has no reasonable claim to. China isn't a victim and one could easily argue that the Han Chinese are currently the white people of Asia. Finally, we may soon have to let go of this entire idea. For the first time in history we're truly creating a world culture. In 1915 there were indeed vast cultural differences between a farmer in rural China and someone in American town. But those days are rapidly fading away. World culture is converging. Fashion and styles have never in history been so homogenous. One can see the same mass produced clothes, the same sneakers, the same t-shirts literally anywhere in the world. Pop music is far more similar than it is different across the entire world. Watch television news from Kazakhstan or Yemen with the sound off and see how incredibly similar it looks to TV news in Germany or America. Never in history has anything like this occurred. There's less and less differences amongst our cultures. You can hear classical music or jazz in any major city on earth and you can buy fast food almost anywhere on earth. We can't use this as an excuse to say any small local flavor added to a game or movie is guilty of exoticism. For many years I've often been slightly annoyed or at least amused at the way Italians from New York are portrayed in movies. Not because it's particularly harmful but because it so often focuses on the things that least make us who we are. Most New Yorkers are not rude. They're just not in the mood to waste a bunch of time. And not every Italian talks like this. Some of us don't say things like I'm going to use the phone boot and call the deli to order some mozzarella. There's a difference between using cultural shorthand for flavor and destructive stereotypes. In Sifu the characters are wearing jeans and sneakers. They fling beer bottles. There's neon lights. The only way to keep any unique cultural flavor is to distill it down to broad themes. It's not exoticism that the character in Sifu uses mystic kung fu arts. It's a game mechanic. Gandalf isn't an exoticism of British culture. It's just the flavor of magic appropriate for the society being portrayed. Would these writers have preferred if Sifu got his powers from an anime-style umbrella corporation? Does that accomplish anything? Does it even really matter at all? Actual examples of destructive Chinese stereotypes were everywhere, as recently as 30 years ago. And 75 years ago, the Chinese were portrayed as a decadent race of opium addicted rapists. This all lays on a continuum, of course. Just because things aren't horrendous doesn't mean they're perfect. But it's important to not go looking for things to outrage us. Having magical kung fu could be racist exoticism. Or it could be a game mechanic that's trying to recreate a beloved genre of film from a French developer. Listen, one of my favorite things in games is seeing Japanese developers make games with American characters. Seeing my own culture interpreted back to me from Japan is often both highly amusing and strangely compelling. It's often chock full of stereotypes. It seems to misunderstand the zeitgeist or basic feel of American life. It tends to be distinctly Japanese, even as it tries to be American. Hell, much of post-war Japanese culture is an amazing fusion of Japanese and American society. Often it can feel like a funhouse mirror of us. The forms are the same, but the feeling is different. That fusion is something completely and totally new. It didn't exist before. And I find Japanese culture absolutely fascinating. That's how society moves forward. Culture belongs to nobody. By putting a racial litmus test on art, we do all of society a grave disservice. By all means, we should be mindful of stupid stereotypes or racist mockery, but sifu is clearly a love letter to the kung fu movie. It's not full of harmful stereotypes. It's full of kung fu movie tropes. And there's an ocean of difference between those two things. No developer should have to confine themselves to their own culture for inspiration. How terrible would it be if French devs could only make games based on French cinema or history? How terrible would it be if black music and white music had been siloed away? How awful would it be if Japanese culture couldn't borrow from us and vice versa? Without realizing it, what these critics are really calling for is a sort of death of progress. A world that does not move forward and boring games made by people too scared of offending to ever produce something that feels different and fresh. I refuse to concede that anyone owns a culture. Hell is my firm belief that the American appropriation of my own family's culture has made this nation immeasurably better. Even if the pizza sucks almost everywhere outside New York, it's getting better. And I can get espresso from sea to shining sea. I'd rather have pizza and espresso than hand-ringing over who has the right to make a game about kung fu. Alright, Dying Light 2 will be next, and then The Witch Queen is coming up. And of course, Elden Ring, baby. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.