I haven’t posted much about Earth Eternal here lately (ok, I haven’t posted all that much lately period) as I don’t want my blog to turn into a promotional device but I think the occasional post is alright. So in that spirit, I wanted to note that we released screenshots of males and females for all our 16 player races late last week.

Anura Male - Earth Eternal

The feedback we’ve gotten on them has been interesting. In the comments to the article Kotaku did about them, for instance, the screenshots were ripped to pieces and the comments basically turned into people alternatively bashing and defending furries (mainly bashing them). That’s hardly unexpected given the famously harsh Kotaku crowd though. On the other hand, we’ve shown the screenshots to a selection of somewhat random people ranging from 5 year olds to grandmothers, some of whom play games and some of whom don’t, and the reaction has been literally universally positive. Some of that positive reaction can be discounted based on the fact that social etiquette tends to discourage people from telling us they hate something we’ve done to our faces but many of the reactions appeared genuinely enthusiastic. (If only we had the resources to do the kind of user testing Microsoft provides for Bungie…go read this article in Wired about it. Their testing system is awesome.)

What’s kind of interesting about working with anthropomorphized animal characters is that some people see cute and accessible and others see furry, with the subtext being freakish and sick. None of us on the team are into the furry thing and we chose to do anthro characters partly to stand out from the humans/dwarves/elves crowd some and partly because we think humanoid animals are a theme that has a fairly wide appeal. Of course, it’s always possible that we’re right but executing on it poorly such that it won’t matter that we’re right. Or we could just be wrong. I don’t think we are though.

As an aside I’ll also mention that though I’ve not really had any experience with furry culture before announcing EE I’ve got a fair amount of empathy for them now. The hate speech people direct against them is often nearly identical to that which is directed against the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community and it makes me a little ill and a lot disgusted to read it or hear it. It’s going to be a challenge to come to a policy regarding what I’d consider to be hate speech directed against the furry community and do so in such a way that doesn’t alienate the non-furry players (who will be in the great majority I’m sure) by backing a “sick fetish” (not my words, but a common sentiment among online gamers, sadly).

My preference would be to be as intolerant of hate speech directed at the furry community as we will be regarding racial, sexual, or sexual-preference hate speech but on a practical level I’m unsure if we can do this. From what I’ve seen, many people who are not about to direct hateful statements at hispanics or lesbians have no problem doing the same to furries and I’m not sure we can afford to crack down on it the same way we would on most hate speech. It’ll be a challenge to manage, in any case.