269: The Pasty White Person Is King

[370999]

The white male teenager has all the power. While I see no issuse with allowing you to pick race, I mean what differemce should it make seeing as all races have the capacity for equal kindness and viciousness and the cost seems quite neglible. I can understand why white skin would be the first choice however in most cases and I think people who really dislike that shouldn't play videogames in the first place.

 

[SimSquid92]

Saints Row 2. Not only can you make caucasian, asian, hispanic and african, but you can give them facial deformities too. I made a 50 year old guy with a cleft palete who was as big as a house. Dressed in clown make-up. He drove an ice-cream truck. And I tried to make him blue, but that wasn't really an option. But still, it's probably the only game that has come close to getting diversity right.

 

[370999]

3. "It's just marketing, because their audience is already white and they're trying to appeal to them."

This just isn't true. There's a huge and growing nonwhite audience for games, and no sensible marketing tactic would ignore them or deliberately alienate them, that would be stupidity.

Ofd course there is and this is why options are preferable but at the same time if you are going to have only one character model then I can see why it would be white. I have no problem with their being more fantasy settings and coming up with inventive and novel ones but once again is American going to get behiend Aztec beliefs?

 

[aldowyn]

As usual, the issue of race is distinctly connected to the issue of gender. The biggest difference in this situation is that a female is quite obviously a female. Another difference is that those females are probably quite often designed with the intention of being played by males, or at least with males in mind.

Anyway, adding different races is easier. You can use the same body structure and dialogue -- all you need to change is the skin tone, facial features, hair, etc. I'm not sure of the specifics, but I'm fairly sure that wouldn't be that hard.

You also have to address whether it affects sales. How many people don't buy Dragon Age or Fable because they can't play as a non-Caucasian? Many people would just deal with it as a fact of life, just as they deal with the fact that most movies are white-washed as well, and often with less to no justification. Most developers wouldn't put forth the effort, just to not possibly alienate a section of the consumers, especially when they'd probably buy the game anyway.

The only reasons I can come up with for the emergence of the female PC as opposed to the black, asian, etc. PC are A: That the developers are specifically targeting the female demographic, and don't think they need to do anything for the non-Caucasian demographics, or B: Gender is just a wider, more obvious classification.

 

[chuckwendig]

Sidenote:

This study offers that whites and Asians are over-represented in games, but the other races are under-represented. Do with that as you choose.

http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/5/815.full.pdf+html

-- Chuck

 

[Continuity]

The only reasons I can come up with for the emergence of the female PC as opposed to the black, asian, etc. PC are A: That the developers are specifically targeting the female demographic, and don't think they need to do anything for the non-Caucasian demographics, or B: Gender is just a wider, more obvious classification.

Or C: male gamers like to stare at totty. E.g. lara croft.

 

[Larsirius]

Oblivion did this right 5 yeears ago.

 

[FloodOne]

This article was written in a tone that's similar to the dude who rattles off a bunch of racist jokes, and then tells everyone he isn't a racist.

Makes it kind of hard to take you seriously dude. Which is a shame, because this is a topic that needs to be explored more thoroughly, and with maturity. The latter of which you severely lack in this piece.

 

[aldowyn]

The only reasons I can come up with for the emergence of the female PC as opposed to the black, asian, etc. PC are A: That the developers are specifically targeting the female demographic, and don't think they need to do anything for the non-Caucasian demographics, or B: Gender is just a wider, more obvious classification.

Or C: male gamers like to stare at totty. E.g. lara croft.

well... yeah, but I decided not to say that.

 

[Acting like a FOOL]

I'm black but I find the overuse of the word pasty a bit unnecessary...
Caucasian doesn't equal pasty...there are distinct differences among people of the SAME ethnic group...really I think this article should be more about the depth of immersion that a player can experience if the protagonist was able to look more like them as INDIVIDUALS.

 

[Joshic Shin]

A point to consider.

Another article written on the Escapist by Fintan Monaghan may have a counter point. I won't go through the whole article on "The New Face of Japanese Games" but I would like to point to a very specific quote.

While the number of Caucasian characters was still overestimated, Asians were found to be more lo identify characters as Asian, while Caucasians were more likely to say the characters were Caucasian. This seems to suggest that anime characters are, to at least some extent, ciphers upon which the beholder imposes their own interpretation, a process Dr. Lu refers to as "Own Race Projection." These results echo Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics, where he states that cartoon images are a vacuum upon which the reader imposes their own identity.

This may be part of the problem for any objective commentator, their own race may be forcing them to see everything as something of theirs, or latching onto any small characteristic that they are able to relate to. Of course, if one is looking for these things, as the writer for this article was, they'll always be able to find them.

I wouldn't disagree with the observation that other ethnicities are unevenly represented in video games, but the problem is greatly exaggerated. For a good example of this, look at the controversy that Left 4 Dead 2 caused when they had black zombies. Of course it is realistic that zombies in New Orleans would be both black and white, but for some reason people protested this, saying it was racist (and Valve did a great job in both games in representing blacks as good people as well. Look at Lewis, he's the most normal one on the team ignoring his Pillz).

Basically what I'm saying is that maybe our own biases force us to exagerate this problem. I'll be happy when we get to the true post-racial world, where we don't look at race anymore. Not because it's improper, but because it doesn't matter. To truly move past means we add someone into a game because we like them, and don't look at our NPCs, PC, or just people in general based on their skin.

 

[Soylent Dave]

I'm going to sound like typical BNP racist [...]

Even in current times, the UK is still 90% white and the majority of those that arn't are mainly in the larger cities. In the countryside (or even some of the larger towns) the percentage of people of an ethnic minority drops to ridiculously low levels

That's a bit of a misrepresentation of statistics - the UK is 90% white because the towns and villages have a ridiculously low proportion of brown people. Which means that the cities have a significantly higher percentage.

Manchester, for example, is 80% white. The (densely populated) district of Manchester I live in is only 35% white, and most of those are immigrants (Irish or Eastern European).

Does that mean you can conceivably create a simulation of the UK which only features white people? Yes it does. But it also means that you can conceivably create an ethnically diverse simulation of the UK without it feeling 'wrong'.

And of course, fantasy games aren't a simulation of the UK anyway.

Why is white the dominant colour for medieval fantasy characters? If you want to argue that there were other races with a significant population in Europe at the time, then fine, argue that. The problem is that as far as I know none of them were knights, and I highly doubt that lords and kings let them fight in their armies, and they weren't exactly meshed in with native britons.

It's easy to think that black people weren't well-integrated into medieval British society - especially when you look at the problems with integration we've had in the 19th and 20th centuries.

That probably wasn't the case, though.

There's a fair bit of evidence that numbers of black people existed in Britain from pretty early on (probably dating back to the Roman conquest) - they're included on tapestries (sometimes wearing important clothes and armour, and carrying important props - they're not there as peasantry), there are some in stained glass and so on.

But there's not a lot of mention in historical texts. Which either means there weren't any black people to write about (unlikely, considering they appear in several pieces of artwork), or the chroniclers of the day didn't think it was worth mentioning - in other words, they didn't make a big deal about the colour of their skin. When we do identify a black historical figure, it's because he has an obviously 'black' surname (like John Blackmore of York). So we don't notice anyone who had a British name.

We probably need to bear in mind that any foreigner who came over here (of any skin colour) was probably pretty well off, educated and may well have been noble (or Roman). All stuff that was far more important in medieval times than anything else.

(aroundabout the time of Elizabeth I, there begin to be reports in London complaining about too many 'blackamoors' and their having too much influence on city politics - but that's relatively recent)

-

As for the article - I agree wholeheartedly; I don't think it's explicit racism on the part of developers, but I do think it's a level of laziness (or something) which should really be addressed.

It can't be that expensive - not in games when you already have character customisation options - to allow people to make characters who actually look like different ethnicities, rather than white people painted a different colour.

As some others have said, voices are a similar problem - although I don't think that should necessarily be tied to ethnicity as much (accents are very much a cultural thing - black people don't all sound like black americans, for example), but it would be nice if there was a variety of voices matching characters of differing builds (i.e. if I design a big guy, I'd like him to have a matching voice)

 

[Horben]

U mad bro?

Seriously though. Here are some notable non-white characters in video games:
Zack, Left for Dead
Sazh Katzroy, FF13
Jackson Briggs, Mortal Combat 2 and later
Barret Wallace and Tifa Lockhart, FF7
Jade, Beyond Good and Evil
The entire cast of Jade Empire, which fits the setting
Dean Shepard, Medal of Valor
Nearly the entire cast of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and much of the other games
Agent, in Crackdown
Zasalamel, Soul Caliber 3
Eric Brooks, in Blade
Wil Smith in Bad Boys
50 Cent, Blood in the Sand
Niobe, Morpheus and Commander Locke, The Matrix
Faith, Mirror's Edge
Half the cast of Tekken
Mace Windu, in Star Wars: Episodes 1-3
Afro Samurai
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Most of the cast of the Street Fighter games
Most of the cast of Dead or Alive
Alyx Vance, Half Life

Click this link for a link to a list of more black characters from video games http://wikibin.org/articles/list-of-black-characters-in-videogames.html .

There are hundreds of other references, but you get the idea. I realize you need to make a living too, but if you're going to write about an opinion and try to sound controversial about it, at least write with rhetoric that holds up to scrutiny.

 

[Gralian]

Seriously... what?

You don't want your avatar to 'just be a white guy with a new coat of paint'? What the hell do you want, bad accents on Asians? How about a black guy sounding like Samual L. Jackson? Maybe we could get some Hispanic gangsters?

The minute you try to go to such great lengths to explicitly say "This is MY avatar's race and HE or SHE is BLACK or (insert other minority)" by creating stereotypical identifiers like cliché voicing or behaviour is when you take being PC a bit too far. I'm all for equality, but come on mate. It's not like we've got minstrels running around in our games as the only representations of non-whites. Just look at the heroic Sergeant Johnson from Halo, or Sergeant Foley from Call of Duty, who made a stalwart team leader that the player looked up to as the more experienced soldier.

And if you try to defend it by saying that you don't want your black guy sounding like a caricature, then all you're effectively doing is going right back to where you started. A pasty white guy with a new coat of paint. Because that's all you're ultimately doing when you're deciding between avatars of different 'races', unless you plan on getting eugenics involved in character customisation to determine 'what's black enough'.

 

[Gralian]

Wow, I actually want to shoot the author of this article.

What the hell do you want, bad accents on Asians? How about a black guy sounding like Samual L. Jackson? Maybe we could get some Hispanic gangsters?

U mad bro?

Damn. It figures I'd have to leave just when the defensive nerdrage is starting to get good.

Excuse me?

I was trying to point out that, while the author decried that all character customisation seemed to allow him to do was change what colour the skin was without becoming objectively 'African' or 'Asian', that is all you can effectively do to show any significant difference in race. You either make them into obvious caricatures (Like Cole Train from Gears of War) or you go along with the subtle differences you make in character customisation. If you want a fully realised diversified character you need to look at central characters like Sergeant Foley, because they are designed from the ground up. Characters made and played by the player have to range the gambit and so the developers can't hope to put all their eggs in one basket, and as the player base is predominantly white caucasian, that is where character customisation leads to. On a realistic level, you can't really physically do anything but colour a character's skin tone.