In a move that, while an admitted step in the right direction, still signals that the Western video game industry is still much too focused on performative activism than it should be, Crystal Dynamics has announced that though their upcoming remasters of the first three Tomb Raider games will release completely uncensored, they will also feature a disclaimer decrying the “harmful impact” the series has supposedly had on players.
(Spoilers: It hasn’t had any.)
As discovered by series-centric news outlet Tomb Raider Chronicles a day ahead of the remastered trilogy collection’s February 14th release, upon booting up the game for the first time, players are presented with a one-time disclaimer informing them that “The games in this collection contain offensive depictions of people and cultures rooted in racial and ethnic prejudices.”
“These stereotypes are deeply harmful, inexcusable, and do not align with our values at Crystal Dynamics,” the Marvel’s Avengers developer’s mea culpa continues. “Rather than removing this content, we have chosen to present it here in its original form, unaltered, in the hopes that we may acknowledge its harmful impact and learn from it.”
Though the developer did not provide details as to which specific “cultural depictions” they felt warranted such a warning, an educated guess suggests it was made in reference to the various ‘local enemies’ encountered by Lara Croft throughout her first three adventures, and more specifically the Polynesian ‘Tribesman’ enemies depicted in Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft.
As noted above, there’s no doubt that this is an absolutely embarrassing moment of political virtue signaling from Crystal Dynamics.
Look no further than their use of the emotionally-charged yet appropriately-vague term “harmful impact” to describe their supposed issue with the games’ visual representations: Has any single individual ever truly suffered ‘harm’ as a result of this game’s use of tribal aesthetics on some of its enemies?
The answer, categorically, is no. Otherwise, wouldn’t some news outlet have covered such a story? After all with, video games, real-world harm, and a ‘sexy’ female protagonist, it’s got all the makings of a ratings-boosting moral panic.
However, as also noted above, this is a step in the right direction for the video game industry as a whole.
As players are no doubt aware of, as more and more games have received remasters or remakes in recent years, so too have more and more developers taken to ‘sanding off the edges’ from the source material in an effort to make it appeal to ‘wider audiences’ – look no further than the upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth.
Not only is such an act a disservice to the artistic vision of a given title’s original creative team, but it’s also infantilizing to audiences, as the presentation of such a ‘tut tut’ implies that audiences are either too dumb to separate the real world from fiction or too fragile to handle anything outside of their bubble – which, while an apt description of the terminally online this warning was obviously made for, does not apply to the other 99% of players who are capable of critical thinking.
To this end, presenting the game in its original form while also appeasing said activists with such sad warnings is objectively a better outcome than butchering their content in deferrence to ‘modern sensbilities’.
Of course, this does not mean the pushback and criticism of such warnings should come to an end.
Rather, it signals a slight hope that developers may be getting at least somewhat sick of social media’s emotional pearl-clutching.
Notably, Tomb Raider I-III Remastered appears to be the second ‘collection’ title to display such a warning amidst the entertainment industry’s currently censor-heavy ecosystem.
Last April, much to the joy of many a franchise fan, Capcom took a similar path with their release of the Mega Man Battle Network – however, rather than attempting to claim its contents had ever ‘harmed’ anyone, the disclaimer instead described them as ‘insensitive’.
