No you’re spot on. One of the non-negotiables with the designer was hiring a cultural consultant for that very reason. I also specifically looked for a Mexican artist to work with.
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This one also gets missed a ton.
So good on you.
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https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2480517/re-alma-mater-representation/page/1 Tom Lehman has said that in the initial printing of Res Arcana they removed an image of the Arab scholar Jābir ibn Hayyān from the cover, because a French distributor didn’t want an arabic man on the front cover because they considered it insensitive to victims of terrorism.
This is the kind of story I thought would be hushed over, until some investigative journalism uncovered it. But there’s no real journalism in boardgames, and apparently it’s blase enough to post about on BGG. Genuinely shocked.
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That’s absolutely atrocious.
The stuff from the publisher of the game actually being discussed in the thread is also disappointing but far more mundane and expected. I’m not convinced being less surprising should be less bad, but somehow that seems to be the way the human mind usually treats things.
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So they moved the image to the rear of the box? Publisher demands are strange.
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Remember the film people’s comment to Terry Pratchett when they’d bought the rights to Mort: “We love it, but can you lose the whole Death angle?”
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Representation, but not too much representation, obviously.
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I prefer the interviewer who didn’t know Good Omens was fictional…
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Or when they changed the cover for Equal Rites by chopping up the old art and putting the two female main characters on the back and putting Josh Kirby’s self portrait in the foreground.
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I’ve never seen that frankly awful cover before.
It’s because I’m old, isn’t it?
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Not to resurrect an old chat but saw this today and thought this was a reasonable response to problematic issues.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Pandasaurusgame/status/1313841688486518784
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