Our article on Sweet Baby Inc. and conspiracy theories in the gaming industry sparked a fierce debate among both Mezha readers and the Ukrainian game development community. But some of the domestic developers went a little further than just discussing it.
We got in touch with Wael Amr, the founder and permanent head of Frogwares, the oldest Ukrainian game company that has been operating without interruption, to talk about his experience of implementing diversity in the studio’s latest games. An experience that has nothing to do with politics or fashion, but is caused by the need to improve Frogwares games, to make them better and more diverse in terms of gameplay and narrative. The following is a direct speech from Wael Amr.
In 2017, when we were working on The Sinking City, we had to “populate” a city with 30 km of streets, albeit with a not very large population, but still. This led to thousands of people being on the streets of Oakmont while the player crossed the city by boat or on foot.
To create a realistic crowd, we had to question our preconceptions. Before that, our experience was in developing Sherlock Holmes games with a few dozen NPCs and a small number of people on the streets, based on literary and cinematic models. As a studio from Ukraine, we tended to copy what was around us. Most of our characters were adults or old men, powerful or in positions of authority, and mostly white.
We created an initial set of characters for the city of Oakmont in The Sinking City and immediately noticed a problem – there were too many white men, which made the city boring and homogeneous. It didn’t create the sense of vulnerability we wanted to achieve, and it didn’t generate the passive compassion we wanted to evoke for the people around us. So, we started asking ourselves how we could change this.
We started researching the population censuses of the time and taking into account social classes(remember, The Sinking City is about the United States in the 1920s – ed.) We created a database where the criteria were gender, race, and social class. Since NPCs are generated dynamically, the system selects them from the set of available characters. To achieve a certain result, we introduced quotas, for example, 50% men and 50% women. Depending on the type of street (main, secondary, cul-de-sac, or alley) and the category of the neighborhood (rich, commercial, residential, industrial, poor), we chose different NPC races and their outfits. After that, we started producing the characters we needed.
This simple system allowed us to create the right content for the desired effect. If there is a political effect here, it is the effect of representation and difference.
In the next game, Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, we reused and modified this principle for the island of Cordoba, including the different ethnicities that have settled there throughout its fictional history. This allowed us to once again create a believable environment, questioning our preconceptions and striving to improve.
We went even further by hiring actors from the countries the characters were supposed to come from. It was not easy, as it was the first time for us, but we believe that this decision paid off.
In this second game, we realized that having more diversity in gender and ethnicity allowed us to create stories with multiple perspectives, enriching the game compared to a limited set of characters. Many of the quests were influenced by their detective content, which encouraged us to explore stories and themes we had never considered before, much to the delight of our fans.
Finally, in 2023, we released an updated version of Sherlock Holmes The Awakened. Since the original game was created back in 2006, we changed the cast of characters to have a balanced ethnicity and gender. Although the game’s plot remained the same, the different characters told the story in different ways, making the game richer and more varied.
Over the years, we’ve received feedback and criticism about ethnic and gender differences, but we haven’t found these opinions to be helpful to the quality of the game, the audience, or the diegetic(storyline-related – ed.) construction of the worlds we’ve created.
With this story, I just wanted to explain why Frogwares, as a studio, chooses diversity. And that this is not a political decision. And that, on the contrary, as is often the case, resistance to change is politically motivated.
We would like to remind our readers that Kyiv-based Frogwares is currently working on The Sinking City 2, and something tells us that the studio will use the above principles and approaches in the new project. And it’s cool.
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