By Johansen Quijano (Tarrant County College, Trinity River Campus)
Black Desert Online (BDO)’s struggles with globalities vs regionalities stem from how it draws from Western and East Asian aesthetic traditions, offering a world that is both familiar and alien to different cultural audiences. BDO’s character creation system offers an impressive level of customization. It allows for the manipulation of facial structures, skin tones, and body proportions with a level of precision that allows for an unusually wide range of possibilities. However, despite this technical flexibility, the underlying racial and cultural frameworks of the game’s narrative impose subtle but significant limitations on identity projected unto the lore. This is due to the game’s lore being, largely, colorblind. For example, while a player can create a character with any skin tone, the game does not provide narrative contexts that acknowledge or integrate racial diversity into the world’s social and political structures.
Interestingly, BDO’s world design presents a Eurocentric medieval fantasy world with influences from East Asian and Middle Eastern aesthetics. The playable classes, each tied to specific in-game cultures, reflect stylized archetypes rather than historically or geographically grounded identities. This results in an ambiguous racial landscape where characters can appear diverse but are not acknowledged as such by the narrative. In other words, while BDO’s character creation tools allow for visual representation, the absence of in-game racial discourse means that players must rely on external roleplaying conventions or personal storytelling to construct meaningful identities within the game world. Thus, players build their more nuanced identities through roleplay.
Language play a key role in shaping how race and culture are expressed. Players borrow from regional dialects and colloquialisms to differentiate factions and ethnic identities, creating elaborate character backstories that compensate for the game’s lack of worldbuilding. The absence of a game-enforced racial framework allows players to construct identity fluidly, but it also leads to inconsistent portrayals of race across different communities. that could lead to performative strategies further shaping how players embody racial and cultural identities.
As a globally distributed game, BDO presents a medieval fantasy world with a highly stylized aesthetic that blends Eurocentric, East Asian, and Middle Eastern influences. This allows the game to appeal to diverse audiences, but also creates an ambiguous racial and cultural landscape where identity is visually expressive yet narratively underdeveloped. While the game’s character creation system allows near-unlimited customization, its lore imposes constraints that limit how race and culture can be meaningfully represented. This dynamic reflects a broader trend in gaming, where fantasy settings are designed for mass appeal but are stripped of the historical and sociopolitical nuances that shape real-world identities. At the same time, BDO’s communities demonstrate how players negotiate these constraints through localized cultural reinterpretation. These localized practices reveal roleplaying spaces as sites of both restriction and creative agency, where players work within the game’s limitations while expanding and reshaping cultural narratives. Through this process, BDO becomes a microcosm of broader tensions in global gaming, where fantasy universes are simultaneously homogenized and fragmented, reinforcing shared structures while allowing space for emergent, regionally specific reinterpretations.
Thank you for this interesting paper, Johansen. I am not familiar at all with BDO, so I would like to ask you to expand on some issues that caught my attention. You mention that the game, while “colorblind,” is framed through Eurocentric fantasy tropes. Could you expand on this issue? As such, how are these elements from other cultures incorporated into this framing? Does the ludonarrative of the game reinforce this eurocentric framing, or are there missions or mechanics that problematize this approach?
I knew I shouldn’t have cut that part out!
Right, so the colorblindness comes from how you can make the character look pretty much any way you like – you can choose any race, gender, job class, then customize your character with whatever skin color, eye color, wide or thin nose, slim or (kinda) chubby, etc. You can make a berserker and even though the “default” the game shows is what you’d expect, a large hulking dude, you can make it a short thin character that wields war axes. You can make a hashashin which in the game’s lore are darker skinned but you can make it light skinned, or make a dark skinned elf, etc. However, despite all this, the game itself is colorblind because its s progression systems and narrative don’t really change at all. The short thin dark skinned elf levels up at the same rate and gains the same skills as the tall, larger, lightskinned elf that someone else made. They both run at the same speed, jump the same height, hit with the same damage (contingent on weapons, point allocations, etc – the gamic elements), and the story, at least with the 4 characters I’ve started (one lv 58, one lv 43, a lv 18, and one to replay the intro for this paper) is the same. And I say it’s somewhat Eurocentric because even though now the game has all these classes and areas, the game’s foundations were European Medievalism and fantasy, and it shows. The classes in all the promotional materials and the ones highlighted first when you join the game are the expected “crusader”, “knight”, etc, and the world and narrative is very… I’m not quite sure how to put it… European feudalism-coded?
Thank you Johansen! I really enjoyed this discussion of BDO.
I personally never played the game beyond the beginning of the tutorial (I know, that’s not the best premise) but your paper caught my attention. You mentioned more than once how BDO eventually blends, somehow, European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern elements and tropes. This observation leads me to ask: what about Central Asia? Is medieval Central Asian culture (here roughly meaning the area currently covered by Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyzstan, Turkmenistan) actually represented in BDO? If so, how?
I’m interested into this not only for personal interest (I’m quite passionate about Central Asian culture), but also because your observation reminded how a great scholar of Central Asia, Frederick Starr, reiterated that often the area is ‘compressed’ between East Asia and the Middle East, without recognising its specificities (and contributions). It would be interesting to see whether this would be true also in a ostensibly not-European game.
I admit I haven’t fully explored the whole map, but based on what I’ve seen – about half, maybe 60% – there isn’t much by way of Central Asian architecture or culture markers. The influences from other regions are evident in their respective towns and cities, and there are in-between spaces, but the transition from an area with, for example, European influences into the area with Middle Eastern influences is via wilderness and camp outposts. It really would be great if they added those influences in their next expansion!
“Through this process, BDO becomes a microcosm of broader tensions in global gaming, where fantasy universes are simultaneously homogenized and fragmented, reinforcing shared structures while allowing space for emergent, regionally specific reinterpretations.”
That’s a” drop mic” paper ending if I ever saw one! I’m totally quoting this.
Thanks! Please do 🙂