Race and Video games
Waypoint came out with an article discussing the skin tone selections in video games. The article is called, “Black Skin Is Still a Radical Concept in Video Games”, it brings light to a serious issue in the gaming industry that promotes a stereo type of one type of “black person”. It has been a reoccurring issue with video game designs, in which the African American characters are in very dark lighting. The article mentions that real actors have the same issues sometime on movie sets.
In my personal experience playing NHL video games, characters have been very dark not matching the actual hue of the character in real life. This concept is very funny to me because video game creators really strive for a realistic experience and realistic characters. As you can imagine these characters are often over looked because, “it’s just a video game”, but in reality people notice. I believe that Ryan Reaves, a NHL hockey player tweeted about his character on NHL and thought it was very funny that his character was very dark compared to his actual complexion. I don’t believe that it truly affected his emotions when playing this video game; but it was interesting to see someone actually come forth and call the gaming company out for their lack of diversity. Ironically a year later NHL came out with their annual game, in this game they made sure to incorporate more shades to the different characters in the game.
Race is very prevalent in today’s society; I believe that every video game developer should reevaluate their techniques when creating their video game. I think it is very offensive to portray the image that there is only one or maybe two hues that are darker that the Caucasian characters. The technology is there it’s just a matter of incorporating this aspect to the game. The Waypoint article mentioned that Mafia 3 and Watch Dogs 2 have proved that the technology is there to fix this issue. The problem is that video game developers think that that shades of black or brown don’t matter or have no effect on if people play the game or not.
