Dreamfall was criticized for offensive "ableist" language used by one of the characters - http://bitly.com/10sIYj5



This is of course highly relevant these days as some people believe that there are people within the industry who are actively looking to sanitise parts of games they disagree with. I don't believe there are that many of them but I certainly believe there are some who exist. The "nobody wants to take away your videogames!" argument is for the most part correct but there are certainly people that want change when it comes to writing and character representation and some of that is not necessarily positive.

If we are to appreciate games as an art form, we must also accept that art can be offensive, it can be ugly and it can be upsetting. I maintain that writers should be able to write whatever characters they want and if they want that character to use offensive language so that they are less likeable, so be it, that's an effective writing device and it also conveys a sense of realism, since that sort of language is alive and well in todays society, even if we wish it wasn't.

The calls for inclusiveness and diversity seem to fly in the face of this idea and it would be fallacy to conflate the two as being the same people, but I would argue that writers should not be afraid of having to sanitise their work and that doing so will lead to less diverse titles. It's one thing to write a character badly and use offensive language poorly to try and jackhammer home a clumsy idea of "edgy", it's quite another to deliberately use it to provoke feelings of dislike towards a character in the player. Based on his previous work I'm confident that Ragnar Tørnquist and his team have the ability to write a character like that and not have it come off as provocative for the sake of it and I fully support the inclusion of such a character in the name of artistic freedom, real character diversity and treating this medium as it is, a grownup artform just like any other. Other mediums use exactly the same techniques and are often praised for pushing the envelope when it comes to writing. Games need to be able to do the same.

