Assassin’s Creed III’s Connor: How Ubisoft Avoided Stereotypes and Made a Real Character
“About one year into the making of Assassin’s Creed III, the team at Ubisoft Montreal realized they needed help with their protagonist.
Ubisoft had the concept for a half-Mohawk, half-British assassin named Connor, who would fit the role of an outsider during the game’s American Revolution setting. But the last thing they wanted was a collection of clichés and stereotypes, so they began digging into the intricacies of Mohawk culture to make Connor more authentic. On their own, that turned out to be too difficult.
The team was running into too many faux pas and factual errors, so around April of 2011, Ubisoft Montreal hired a Mohawk cultural consultant to be on call at all times. The team also worked with the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk community near Montreal and contracted some of its residents to help translate, sing and voice act for the game.
“There are people from all over the world on our team, but we’re very aware that we’re still pretty much a bunch of early-middle-aged white guys,” Alex Hutchinson, Assassin’s Creed III‘s creative director, said in an interview. “We didn’t want to make mistakes, even well-intentioned mistakes.””
What? You mean white people can’t just take stereotypes and say it’s an okay POC character? You mean you actually have to fucking use POC in the process to make shit work?
YOU DON’T FUCKING SAY?????
(Source: TIME)
