Just a week after the Assassin’s Creed Shadows development team’s widely derided statement addressing racist backlash to the game, the lead of another Ubisoft title is taking a much different stance to online criticism. Responding to trolls complaining about protagonist Kay Vess’ appearance, Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty says it’s better to ignore the manufactured outrage than to waste time responding to it. While the conversations about Star Wars Outlaws and Assassin’s Creed Shadows are different in some important ways, Gerighty shows that there’s nothing to be gained by doing bigots’ work for them.
“It makes no sense to me, and it’s not worth engaging with,” Gerighty told The Washington Post. “If you engage with bad-faith people, there’s no nuance and no possibility of real dialogue. So all we can do is make the best game possible.”
Gerighty’s response stands in stark contrast to how Ubisoft addressed similar bad faith criticisms of Assassin’s Creed Shadows last week. Shadows features two playable characters, one of whom is the historical figure Yasuke, an African man who became a samurai in Edo-period Japan.
“While Yasuke is depicted as a samurai in Assassin’s Creed Shadows,” the company wrote in a social media statement, “we acknowledge that this is a matter of debate and discussion.”
There is no serious debate over Yasuke’s status as a samurai. Since the uproar over Yasuke began, credible historians have weighed in to share the abundance of historical evidence pointing to Yasuke being made a samurai around the year 1580. Rather than point that out, Ubisoft’s response seems to imply that Yasuke being a samurai is a creative liberty taken by the game’s developers.
Gerighty’s brief response is extremely satisfying by comparison. Short and to the point, his comments point to the real issue surrounding criticism of Star Wars Outlaws, and by extension Assassin’s Creed Shadows — it’s all a sham.
To be fair, Gerighty did have an easier job in some ways. The criticisms of Kay Vess are blatantly misogynistic, coming in the form of online trolls (who apparently have some pretty busted beauty standards) calling Vess ugly. While the attacks on Yasuke’s inclusion are clearly born of racism, the people behind them are at least making an attempt to hide that. Claims of historical inaccuracy, even if they’re fraudulent, are harder to disprove than open misogyny is to dismiss.
Still, it’s refreshing that Gerighty didn’t even gesture toward diplomacy in his reply. It would have been easy to dodge the core issue and simply say “we stand by our design.” Instead, Gerighty called out the problem at the heart of the manufactured controversy. It’s not about differences of opinion or the freedom to debate or even the sheer absurdity of the idea that female characters in video games need to conform to the beauty standard of angry nerds who spend too much time online. It’s about people acting in bad faith to drag every conversation in gaming down to the level of their own bigoted worldview.
It’s never a good idea to cater to people whose arguments are based in bigotry, whether they’re proudly crowing about their misogyny or hiding their racism behind a paper-thin veil of historical debate. Gerighty’s statement acknowledges that fundamental truth. Whether you fight trolls or give in, they’ll also find something else to feign outrage at, so why take them seriously? Their arguments come not from a real sense of grievance but a desire to spread retrograde ideas like a virus and treating their points as serious matters of debate just gives them room to spread. Instead, refusing to pretend their attacks have any merit might be the best disinfectant.
