Bianezzi

Rather historically incorrect.

__________________
"I fooled you,I fooled you,I got pig iron,I got pig iron,I got aaaaall pig iron"

tempacc

"We squalor and filth..."

I guess Barbarians aren't native English speakers.

KillerClowns

"Rather historically incorrect?" Yeah, last I checked it was Europeans who were the unclean ones, what with all the plagues and such they brought.

Having cast my agreement with a previous poster, I have only one comment: nice teeth. I mean, seriously, that guy's grin could make a vampire flinch.

So, this is presumably the tropical barbarian. Having seen him and the cold barbarian, I'm wondering what the temperate barb is gonna look like. I'm going to wager on a Germanic, Gothic type of look.

XMasterMind

Stand aside, smelly one xD

__________________
Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.Sir James Dewar

sargasm

And people complained about ethnocentrism in Civ IV...

MarkM

Yeah, I hope they come to their senses and back off this stereotype. This is really bad, and totally unnecessary.

I could be wrong but I think that most major "barbarian hordes" of history (in the sense of warlike peoples that attack major civs of history) originated in Europe and Asia. Well, unless you call the aztecs barbarians (which would be highly accurate).

__________________
"The temptation with Civilization is to throw everything into it" said Meier. "Computers can handle that, but humans can't."__________________________What could possibly be left? "Canadians versus the Swiss," replies Meier. "That would be a real battle."

Camber

Puh-leese! Back off liberal ideologues. The very term "civilization" is culturally biased, so if you want equal tolerance for all peoples, you'd better look for it in a different game. If you think for a moment that anyone 5000 years ago saw their neighbors as anything other than barbaric (even when their neighbors were more advanced), you don't understand history. Everyone was bigoted, and to portray them as anything else would be rewriting history (just so you can feel better?).

__________________
This is not my signature. I type this at the end of every post I make.

sargasm

So would you favor the addition of racial slurs to the game, as long as they were historically accurate? To do otherwise would be presumably rewriting history.

In any case, it doesn't really matter whether people 5,000 years ago were bigoted -- the representation is simply inaccurate. The Norte Chico had a complex society, and that nonsense about hating cities and knowledge is just that: nonsense. To claim that because some civilizations might have seen them that way, they should be portrayed as such in the game, is missing the point. Unless there is some reason the game should adopt the bigotry of a particular civilization?

Cabay Jet

Racial slurs? What racial slurs? Or would you rather we dressed up some poor white guy with face paint and fangs Dracula would be proud of as a (poor) substitute?

And for the last time, it is just a game!

__________________
Have you ever thought that life is simple? No? Not once?

Spikerocks101

After looking at the Vampire for a minute or two, whats this game going to be rated? I kids going to buy it for there Wii and the mom will be like, "Hey, it teaches history." The kid plays it for a while and when the mom comes in the room, she will see Nukes coming down from the sky, cleaning off the barbarians and then hundreds of heavily armored tanks rolling in to finish off the tribal people because there different. Then she will see global warming killing many people with ships blasting away settlers and workers... But nice pic thou.

__________________
Hitler was right! Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt were all Jewish.

noto

hmm...I just realized something: the term 'barbarian' is pretty much a racial slur. It was the racial slur of the time.

Greywulf

From the shrunken head on the guys necklace I tend to agree with the Romans lol!
It does sound a bit odd though, how many times have the natives been the ones who attacked first? Hardly ever! Those new invadors were the trouble makers! I hope you can get a good response from Barbarians at times! That would make it a tad more realistic!
Barbarian was deffenitly a racist word in Ancient Greece, however, I don't see many people calling other racial groups "Barbarians" these days, so I don't think it carries the same weight as it did back then.
Does anyone take offence to the word "Barbarian"?

Matrix

Well, if anyone is taking offence to the word "barbarian", or to this image for that matter, it's much more a taught insult rather than a real one. People think they ought to feel insulted when someone's calling a black person smelly, regardless of context.

The whole game of Civilization is culturally biased, but that's not a bad thing. Everyone has a cultural bagage and one cannot think without picking out certain aspects out of this bagage. And indeed, when Europeans were fighting natives (which is a very culturally biased word on itself) they had little to no regard for these 'barbarians', so this picture is more or less historically correct. His looks are very stereotypical, though...

Nowadays we don't consider any nation in the world as 'barbarian' or 'savage', but that doesn't mean barbarians should not be included in the game. The whole choice of civilizations included in the game, plus their so-called unique units and unique buildings, is a product of common 'knowledge', whether historically accurate or not. Mostly they are, but that's not my point here. In fact, the whole thinking in terms of nations as entities with absolute power and sharp borders is a left-over from the age of nationalism. Think about religious groups, companies, corporations, terrorist organisations... But now I'm wandering off.

In short: don't try to be ethnically correct too much, but rather enjoy the recognision of an etnocentristic expression. Once you know how to identify them all, you would grow mad about all the 'insults'.

Signed, a cultural geographer.

__________________
CFC dinosaur

Aemilius

Shrunken head? Another historical inaccuracy? I thought they were made by Amazonian tribes...

__________________
[Insert a witty phrase about inserting a witty phrase here]

rhinoman

I think these barbarians lived in south America which is somewhat close to the amazon if not in it and the game designers had to make him look more barbarian like somehow.

Huayna Capac357

The Norte Chico were not barbarians. They were a civilization in the Andes. The reason this is wrong is not that they're using the term "barbarian", though the Norte Chico certainly weren't that, it's that they portray them as some "black" Amazonian tribe that has shrunken heads and hates cities and attacks with blowpipes when in fact nothing could be further than the truth. The Norte Chico were somewhat like the predecessors to the other Andean cultures- Chavin, Moche, Huari, Inca, etc.- they built cities in the Andes based around terraced pyramids and verticality. The Norte Chico farmed potatoes and raised llamas and were sedentary.

If Firaxis had really wanted to put this ridiculous stereotype in, they should have said something like "Cunhambebe", a leader of the Tupi, an actual Amazonian tribe.

__________________