Issues With Representation of Video Game Characters: More Than Just Pixels
Do you play video games? If the answer is yes, who is the most memorable character from the games you played? People use video games to relax, have fun, and release stress from their busy life. Yet, many easily overlook the potential impact of video games and the characters within. Often, the games contain portrayals of human characters to bring engagements from the players. These characters can play different roles in the story, and sometimes the players even have a choice to create their character. Nevertheless, video game characters are the creation of humans, and we could have biases, whether they are conscious or unconscious. Currently, there exist significant racial and gender disparities within the gaming industry. The dominant group within game development determines the representation of game characters. A closer analysis of the representation of human characters in video games reveals why the current inequality of game developers could be problematic. Although video games serve merely as entertainment for many, the representation of game characters within them requires more attention due to the lack of diversity in the game industry and the impact of game characters’ representation on one’s perception of the world.
To understand the potential issues, one must first investigate the root cause that lies within the game industry. So who dominates the current game industry? According to a news report from CNBC, the 2019 survey shows that 71% of game developers are men, and 69% of games developers are white, while only 3% of game developers identified as non-binary.
In comparison, the data from Entertainment Software Association indicates that American gamers consist of 54% men and 46% women. There is quite a difference between people who play video games versus people who create video games. The current game industry lacks diversity in both gender and race. With more than 3 billion people playing video games globally, according to IGN, the game developers’ decision of character representation can potentially influence billions of gamers. Many of these gamers belong outside of the racial or gender group of the game developers. A correct character representation is required to prevent the minorities from dangerous and harmful attacks virtually or physically. However, can people trust the current game industry consists of mostly white male developers to implement this?
One of the problems with the white-dominated game development group is that the developers cannot perceive the potential harm of inclusion of minorities. As Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein mention in chapter 4 of Data Feminism, the “system designers from dominant groups do not experience the harms of being counted or of being made visible without consent.” Allowing game characters to represent more diverse groups will not always generate positive results. For example, in July 2019, Mordhau, a first-person medieval game that previously only allowed players to play white men, added an option to create female characters and characters of different skin tones. However, this decision quickly received backlash from players through sexist and racist online harassment. As a result, the development team spoke to potentially including an additional option for players to disable this new change.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Andrew Geach, from the development team of Mordhau, explained that the team “want to put the power in the players’ hands. If we take an official stance and we put an official filter list on all the words in chat, people will, first, find a way around it, and it might catch innocent words, or people might claim we’re censoring. So we’d rather put the power in the player’s hands.”
The reporter of the PC Gamer article, Samuel Horti, criticized the development team for being unwilling to stand hard against the community’s toxicity. Later, the development team of Mordhau made another statement on Twitter saying the interviewed developer had some misunderstanding and did not answer correctly. Although the choice of toggling off gender and race was discussed as a possibility, the team discarded it in the decision process. Through observing the case of Mordhau, one can realize the lack of consideration when a dominated group of game developers tries to include more diversity. Mordhau’s development team did not perceive the hateful harassment that will come with racial and gender inclusion. Consequently, the developer from the interview was not prepared at all when talking about the topic. Seeing how the interviewed developer considers stepping back after the backlashes, the inclusion of diversity is just something additional that can be removed anytime. Even if the final decision ultimately did not include the feature to toggle off race and gender, this lack of understanding still exists in individual developers. These developers of Mordhau have trouble controlling the racist and sexist attacks from players because they never face those in their personal life.
Including certain racial or ethnic groups in a video game can go beyond just online toxicity. Representation of video game characters can affect one’s attitude toward a specific group in real life. For example, popular first-person shooter game franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield often present the Arabs as threatening terrorists. After watching these portrayals inside video games, can all the players remain unaffected and move on with their life? The finding of the study seems to disagree. Muniba Saleem and Craig A. Anderson, two researchers from the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Iowa State University, conducted experiments on the effect of having stereotypic representations of Arabs in video games. Two groups of participants are shown violent and nonviolent portrayals of stereotypical Arabs inside the video games they played. After the experiment, both groups showed an increase in negative and aggressive attitudes toward Arabs, but the group that saw the violent portrayals of Arabs had a stronger effect compared to the group playing nonviolent portrayals of Arabs. This research implies that game developers need to be more cautious with portrayals of different races in video games. Of course, due to the lack of diversity in the game industry, white developers will inevitably overlook the effect of relying on certain racial groups as antagonists. In the end, they aren’t the ones suffering from the stereotypical portrayals. Nevertheless, if game developers continue the trend of using a certain race as a criminal or terrorist, players’ attitudes toward minority groups will worsen. As a result, more attention will be needed to prevent reinforcement of negative stereotypical portrayal of video game characters.
While the Arabs take the role of being the “bad” guy, the protagonist of many video games often resembles a different race and gender. You probably guessed it, white male! Four researchers, Dmitri Williams, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory, from four different U.S. universities, collected a sample of 150 games to study their representation of race, age, and gender. These games came from different platforms, and some were the top-selling titles during the sampling period from 2005 to 2006. When calculating the percentage of representation, the number of copies sold also determines the game’s weight in the analysis. With a total of 8572 characters in the data, around 85 percent of them were male characters and usually played a significant role in the story. Also, around 85 percent of the primary characters were white. In comparison, Black and Asians account for less than 10 percent of the primary character. Furthermore, Hispanics and Native Americans only appear as secondary characters. After looking at the study, there exists a biased way of portraying important characters in games. Since most of the white male characters play a crucial role, people should raise attention and wonder if this correlates to the current white male-dominated group of developers. While the minorities suffer misleading representation in video games, the white male characters illustrate the image of a heroic savior. This lack of diversity within the game industry is further dividing the dominant group from the rest of the community.
Shaping a correct image of minority groups is complex, especially for the white male-dominated game industry, and many risks follow when the game developers fail. So what if the game lets the player decide the portrayal of race and gender? An alternative solution is for the game developers to implement a character creation system. However, we have already seen from the Mordhau case the complicated problems of the character creation system. In Samuel Oakley’s publication, he analyzes five different games containing an option for the players to create characters. According to the analysis, two games named Skyrim and South Park: The Fractured but Whole have the character’s default skin color set to white. On the other hand, The Sims 3, Tyranny, and XCOM 2 start with a randomized character at the beginning of character creation. Video games with character creation systems also treat skin color differently. For instance, in Skyrim, the character’s race can potentially change the dialogues with other in-game characters. However, in The Sims 3, although the players decide on skin color, the concept of race is excluded with no real effect on gameplay. There are two significant points to be noted from these cases. First is the possibility of a default look for game characters, and the other is the effect of the player’s picked race or gender on gameplay.
Even if the game provides a character creation system for the main character, we can see some potential problems from Oakley’s study. First, the game developers can unconsciously use white as the default race. This is unsurprising considering the population of the game industry. With the influence of video games, this default look when the player first reaches the character creation process could convey an inaccurate message of normal. The usage of randomization can solve this, but the developers need to be cautious whether the randomizing algorithm is truly unbiased. Furthermore, how this main character interacts with the rest of the game still abides with game developers. If the game chooses to acknowledge the player’s race or gender and let it affect the gameplay like Skyrim, then the issue of misrepresentation still persists. On the contrary, excluding the concept of race as a whole like The Sims 3 ignores the difficulties gender or racial minorities face. In either case, the choice to Incorporate a character creation system does not eliminate the developer’s need to consider race or gender completely. In addition, Lisa Nakamura, a professor researching digital media, race, gender, and sexuality, points out the dangers of character creation in online gaming. According to Nakamura, players might choose to play a race other than theirs to reinforce stereotypes. Also, Nakamura shows players in Halo and World of Warcraft receiving attacks due to their virtual avatars being a minority group. Therefore, regardless of online games or single-player games, the character creation system is not a perfect solution to the lacking diversity in the game industry.
While playing video games, people must not forget the relationship between the game characters that live within and the real world. Their representation is a reflection of the current formation of the game industry that lacks diversity. This biased group of game developers has the power to influence a player’s attitudes toward a minority group of race or gender. Certainly, there are attempts to incorporate more diverse representation, but a closer analysis reveals the shortcoming of the current approaches. Therefore, we need to raise attention and bring in more experts and more diversity to refine a better approach to the game character’s portrayal. Video games are still a type of media and can be influential. This blog post discusses a lot of negatives that can occur when the developers make wrong design choices on the representation of game characters. However, when done right, the powerful influence of video games can generate positive changes to assist in solving biases or stereotypes toward gender and race minorities.
