jamesinclair said:
So "monkey" shouldnt be in the game, because it could be used in a racist way?
If writing "monkey" made a black person appear or something like that, then it would. The point isn't the word, it's what what it makes appear looks like.
HUELEN10 said:
It's a type of gourd, which looks a lot like a watermelon. It makes sense that it uses the same sprite. It truly is an unfortunate coincidence, but I think it is foolish to consider it anything more.
I know a lot of people here are now trying to deny that the word means what it does, but come on. It's the most common definition, that or the book that it's taken from. Search for it in any dictionary and the first definition is the racist one. The second definition is another racist one. Dictionary.com for instance doesn't even mention this Portugese gourd they referenced, just the many racist definitions and that aforementioned Russian wrestling style. This gourd is definitely very obscure, while the racist definition is very well known. Yet they'd never heard of it? I'm supposed to believe that? And this isn't foreign developers, they are American It just stretches credibility to say the least. Again I agree that yeah, it probably wasn't added meaning the racist definition. But how the heck did it get through?
I just find it hard to imagine that people whose job it is is to determine which words should go in and what they should create would not have heard of the most common definition of the word... if they really didn't know, it's pretty sloppy work there. If they did and just left it in hoping for it to sneak through or something because it'd been put in to mean that leaf with the same name, then it's even worse. Unless there really wasn't much checking done on inserted words, I find the excuse hard to believe... not for why the word was first put in, that most likely was as the ingredient for some obscure dish, but for how it stayed in despite the obvious connotations of the most common definition of the word.
On a semi-related note, interestingly enough Sambo from the book isn't actually African, he's south Indian (note the tiger in the story? There are no tigers in Africa.
)... not that that difference mattered for people deciding to use it as a racist term for Africans back in the 1800s.
Zzoram said:
How can we be absolutely sure that Obama isn't a Kenyan Muslim even though he denies it?
That wasn't my point there, I was trying to say that in order to avoid the questions, the image should never have been in the game because of how the primary definition is a clear racist symbol. That there's an obscure plant that fits the definition doesn't matter much compared to what most people who see that image are going to think.
I'm not saying everything should be censored... but the racist imagery in the term with that image is just too strong, no matter how accidental its inclusion. You can't be responsible for every way someone could interpret your work, sure, but something basic like this they should have been able to avoid. Even if it were just a plant most people had actually heard of it'd probably be okay, really, people would get the reference. But it isn't, it's one that almost no one has heard of. I don't support censorship most of the time, but common-sense avoidance of racist terms is reasonable. Overall this is a huge oversight, and one that is just extremely, extremely hard to believe they could have missed.
A Sambo gourd looks like a watermelon so they reused the sprite to save space on the cartridge. They didn't realize it had an outdated racial slur attached to it. No need for crazy conspiracy theories.
It's not outdated. Everybody's just trying to defend them, I think, because GAF loves this game, or the concept of the game at least... but that shouldn't be enough for you to defend them for something like this. It's just about whoever decided this word in the dictionary and whatever checking methods they had, not about everything about the game as a whole...
Crateman said:
If that the case, then I think a lot of us should publicly apologize for being born and raised outside the US and not knowing beforehand the possible racial connotations of a word we didn't even heard once before. It won't happen again.
Sambo -or fig leaf- looks like a watermelon. Same color, same overall shape. If I was in charge of putting the sprite of that in the game, it would look like a watermelon.
If it was a foreign developer, and not an American one, I'd consider that a fine defense actually... but that isn't the case here.