Far Cry 3’s stereotypes hold meaning, says writer

Far Cry 3 writer Jeffrey Yohalem says that the stereotypical nature the races and cultures and the all-over feel of the island of Far Cry 3 holds some sort of meaning that we’re all failing to understand.

“What I’m hoping is that through talking about this game and the Internet talking about this game, is that all this stuff will come to light, and the audience will say next time, ‘We want more of this’,” Yohalem said while speaking with Penny Arcade Report.

“This all comes from my sense that players shouldn’t be talked down to,” he said. “For me, there’s a kind of caustic relationship that’s developed between players and developers. It’s really a bad, abusive relationship, because developers say ‘Players won’t get it anyway, so we’re just gonna do something that holds their hand.’

“It doesn’t respect them, and then players say ‘I hate this,’ or ‘I hate that,’ or ‘This game sucks,’ and that hurts developers. So it’s like a cycle. It also feels like critics aren’t looking for meaning in the game, either. So it’s like all sides have just stopped listening to each other.”

He then went on to talk about the game’s setting and the stereotypes that are tied with such settings. “It’s set on an island in the South Pacific,” he said. “So immediately the thing that comes to mind is the white colonial trope, the Avatar trope. I started with that, and it’s like, ‘Here’s what pop culture thinks about travelling to a new place,’ and the funny thing is, that’s an exaggeration of most games, they just don’t expose it.”

He even cited games like GTA and Assassin’s Creed to back his claims. “For example, GTA is a colonization game,” Yohalem said. “You come to New York, you colonize New York. Most open world games function that way. Ezio comes to Rome and colonizes Rome. To take that to its extreme, exaggerating those tropes is how you reveal them. The exaggeration of that trope is what happens in Far Cry 3.”

Far Cry 3 is a game that has many intonations that some developers would deem as too complex and deep for the gaming market, but themes such as survival and the repercussions of killing are largely prevalent in the first person shooter. But is this one of the themes that we’ve somehow missed the point of? Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

[PCGamesN]