2017 and Race is still a problem

It’s a tough line to stay on the right side of when it comes to developing video games, the side of being culturally appropriate and appealing to the needs and respectfulness of everyone, or completely throwing that out the window and relying primarily based on stereotypes to appeal to specific crowds while alienating and discriminating others. There are times when this is just blatantly obvious when developers did not care to be politically correct and were simply designing a game to make money, and majority of the time relying on stereotypes will help them do this. Stereotypes aside, majority of the nations that came to power in the earlier years did so through colonization and slavery and even this can be seen as problems when trying to sell games as it is showing certain races and ethnicities having considerable power over another. Now the only reason I don’t have a problem with this as compared to creating games about modern times that clearly discriminates others, is these games are about history. That being said, it does not justify the actions of what some of these people did but I think its an important people should learn about as it not only teaches us the very wrong ways of creating societies and life but it teaches the ways the people in power abusing their roles can completely screw up parts of history. An example of this is from the new Call of Duty that came out recently, a game that is designed to take place in the era of WWII, they didn’t put any swastikas in the game for the fear of offending others. I understand where they are coming from but I think this is an example of over censorship, it is basically manipulating history into a more friendly story which I think causes it to lose some of the impact the tory can have if told how it actually happened.

The use of colored characters is still severely lacking within the video games. It was just last year that we only saw a couple of games that had a main or leading character of color be one of the more important people. I think that the real problem sits within the industry itself, as video games are typically used as a tool for creators and players to escape into a fake world where they can do whatever they please and with this is the problem that majority of these people are white. As these game developers are creating games with their imagination that will allow them to escape into worlds of their own, these people primarily being white just create the characters to be white as well. It is still seen as the “default” for characters to be white and because of this it is clearly discriminating against all other races. The only way I can see this problem being fixed is through raising awareness and exposing the problem as it’ll still come down to the judgment of the creators.