Blog 8
My experience with video games across genres is somewhat limited, I have played mostly sports games in my life, and of those, basketball games dominated. So in the games I’ve played the most of, I see a diverse variety of characters, being that the NBA is a very diverse league and is predominantly black players. However, when I step outside this genre, the games characters are dominated mostly by white males. It really does seem as if they are the default characters, in video games and across most media. If something like a show or a game has a star character that is black, or a black dominated cast, they run the risk of not reaching as wide fo an audience because the show may be dubbed a “black show” or a “black movie” So black skin isn’t just a radical concept in video games, as said by Yussef Cole And Tanya DePass, but it is a radical concept in the world of entertainment. When games I’ve played have reached a large range of audience with a black main character, their representation hasn’t always been the greatest. For example, in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, you control a young black man named CJ, you spend most of your time killing, robbing, and doing other illegal activities. Not saying that the creators singled out the black male in this game, because in the past and in the future, the story line is consistent with violence and crimes, but more often than not, the player is white. But when it is a heroic adventure game, you don’t tend to see POC in the main roles, and when they have roles, they are not always represented in the nicest light.
Even in these NBA games I’ve played, when you get to create your own player that you want to make look like you, it is hard in some cases to get certain features about yourself into your character. Most recently I’ve struggled with getting my player to have my hairstyle or even something similar. There are much less options for a person of color’s skin tone and hair compared to those of their white counterparts. There have even been forums I’ve seen on how to create your own fade haircut look with tattoos and other hairstyles on your head. I think that it is really cool that someone like Amira Virgil is tackling this issue. In an article by Blavity Team entitled ‘This Black Woman Gamer Didn’t See Black People In Her Favorite Game, So She Put Them In Herself’ they wrote; “In order to give Sims players more choices, Virgil created The Black Simmer, an online forum where gamers can share and download custom skin tones, hairstyles, mannerisms, clothes and body types that reflect actual communities of color.” My staple game, NBA 2K has been trying to get better with this each coming year for their new installment. Every year there seem to be more hairstyle options, tattoos, shoes, and other gear and ways to customize your character and make them feel like you, or however you want to make them feel. They even use a face scan technology that allows you to render your character to look almost exactly like you as far as facial structure goes, but you still run into problems with things like hair styles and textures that many POC have.
Overall, I see that a few people out there are trying to make a change, but this world is scared and set in it’s ways, so it is a long hard battle to fight.
DePass, Yussef Cole And Tanya. “Black Skin Is Still A Radical Concept in Video Games.” Waypoint, 1 Mar. 2017, waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/78qpxd/black-skin-is-still-a-radical-concept-in-video-games.
“This Black Woman Gamer Didn’t See Black People In Her Favorite Game, So She Put Them In Herself.” Bulletin, blavity.com/black-simmer-amira-virgil.
