Nit-pick

So Civ IV has this feature wherein your cities (and the AI's cities) will generate Great People: Great Prophets, Great Artists, Great Merchants, Great Engineers.

I rather like this feature (the Great People can do various nifty things once they've been generated), but something about it has been bugging me. Namely, that while the Great People chosen (Moses, Joan of Arc, Valmiki, Isembard Kingdom Brunel) are sexually diverse and quite multicultural (so much so that I haven't heard of half of them), the little animated Great People on the screen are All. White. Men.

Now, okay, so I do get fits of the giggles over Joan of Arc with her big bushy Old Testament Patriarch beard. But if the game designers could program in two different versions of each type of Great Person (one for Ancient and one for Modern, although come to think of it, the Great Prophets are stuck with their Old Testament Patriarch beards and dresses until the end of time), they could surely have made some gesture toward the ethnic and gender diversity represented in the pool of historical Great People they chose to immortalize as part of the game.

No, this is not an earth-shakingly big deal. But at the same time, because it's not an earth-shakingly big deal, it would have been easy for them to address. And, well, yeah. It bugs me.

bookkeeping

The Second Son: 301 words

Every word written is a good word. It may not be right, but it's still good.

---

Muses resemble women who creep out at night and give themselves to unknown sailors and return to talk of Chinese porcelain.
    --W. B. Yeats, quoted in Brenda Maddox, Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats (New York: Perennial - HarperCollins Publishers, 2000).