When designed with care in mind, games can be impactful, fun tools to while away excess time and use to procrastinate on various kinds of work (cough, cough). But used crassly, they can have implications that hit home on the kind of racism and bigotry we see emerging from the depths in politics today. But these harsh, hateful streaks in society aren’t anything new, they are just more pronounced with the dawn of the internet and games.
In an article entitled “This Black Woman Gamer Didn’t See Black People In Her Favorite Game, So She Put Them In Herself” written by authors at Blavity.com, they explain the representation in the industry is particularly abysmal. Only about 3 percent of developers are black and this is represented in games like The Sims in terms of character design choice (Blavity 2017).
The lack of representation stretches back further than just video games, though. In “Black Skin Is Still A Radical Concept in Video Games” Yussef Cole And Tanya DePass discuss the film industry’s lack of thought for those of darker skin tones (2017). Particularly how directors started using better lighting not to enhance how darker skin tones looked on camera, but to instead appease furniture manufacturers with their wood grain, yikes (2017)! Lighting is also a major issue, with black characters in games like Skyrim suffering from the poor design and looking like they are a separate unit in the environment, unnatural and out of place (2017).
But this article and others like it aren’t all doom and gloom; with the innovation of shaders and modding forums black gamers can find additions to games that make them more represented as characters (2017). In fact, Cole and DePass note that we are in an era of more progression for black protagonists, with more games featuring characters of different races (2017).
Much like the pitfalls of not including those suffering from mental illnesses in game development processes about them, the industry at large often fails to consult with people of indigenous or other groups before portraying them in whatever fashion they please (remember that most developers are white or Asian males). In “Video games encourage Indigenous cultural expression” by Elizabeth LaPensée she discusses this pattern of developer behavior (2017). She argues that developers have an obligation to consider creating deeper meaning and portraying a wider range of viewpoints instead of falling back on old stereotypes and colonial ideologies (2017).
She notes several examples of games that incorporate learning about different experiences and cultures well, such as Never Alone by Ishmael Hope in collaboration with Iñupiaq elders and The New World by Brenda Romero. It is wholly possible to create unique, inspired, interesting games while being culturally sensitive to the vast amount of viewpoints and perceptions.
References
Blavity.com. (2017). “This Black Woman Gamer Didn’t See Black People In Her Favorite Game, So She Put Them In Herself.” Retrieved November 29, 2017, from https://blavity.com/black-simmer-amira-virgil
LaPensée, Elizabeth. (2017, November 27). “Video games encourage Indigenous cultural expression.” Retrieved November 29, 2017, from https://theconversation.com/video-games-encourage-indigenous-cultural-expression-74138
DePass, Y. C. (2017, March 01). “Black Skin Is Still A Radical Concept in Video Games.” Retrieved November 29, 2017, from https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/78qpxd/black-skin-is-still-a-radical-concept-in-video-games
