A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I've written before about my observation that Japanese-produced video games seem to care far less about portraying or even acknowledging ethnic diversity than American-made games do. I've started to notice that this can also be said about European tabletop games.

I was introducing a friend to the German-originating Citadels this morning, and while going over the role cards she made a disgusted face at the Merchant. This started a conversation about an unfortunate aspect of one of my favorite games: this particular card depicts - let's be quite frank - an obvious charicature of a conniving Jew, right down to the period-appropriate red cap. I guess because it has the neutral label "Merchant" I've been able to mentally ignore the artwork, but now that I've talked about it I really can't any more. Really, would it have been so hard to draw the Merchant as, I don't know, anything else? I mean, let him keep his hat if you must, but we could have done without the full-bore Shylock posture.

In the Italian-produced Bang!, on the other hand, I have always cringed whenever the "Indians" card comes out, with its depiction of a screaming horde of warpainted braves who immediately engage in a shootout with all the active players. These are the only Native Americans who show up in the game. Now, you could argue that they are actually no more violent than every other character in the game (which after all has the goal of being the first to gun down all your friends), but if an American repackaged this game for mainstream distribution you can bet that card would turn into, I dunno, "Bandit Gang" or something, and I would have no problem at all with that.

Again, I can only theorize that these things are so because America is so much more of a polyculture than not just Japan with its video games but individual European countries with their card games, enough that what seems like a perfectly good thematic twist yonder seems over here like hair-raising insensitivity at worst and plain tackiness at best. Interesting, is all.