My friend Sam Blackmon posted this link on Facebook today.
The article is well written, and it’s important. I applaud.
I also want to use it as jumping on point for something that has become critical to my career: explaining the need for diversity in games to people who are (hopefully and usually) well intending but not at all diverse.
There’s a cliche that works well here. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
What, exactly, do I mean? I’m glad you asked.
I’ve been shopping a research project for grants lately. The grants are some of the strangest requests I think many of the committees see, because all I’m asking for is money to pay undergraduates to help me do research. The goal of the project is to build a profile of where diversity exists in games (in the games themselves, in production, in the surrounding marketing and journalism, and finally in the player-bases itself). It’s going to be partly grunt work, because one of the things that *I* think we absolutely must do is draw a map. We need to know what is really there, because frankly, even I as a person deeply concerned about this issue often work from my known experiences and not from data.
Every grant I try to obtain, I get the same canned response. And I’m not saying this to be bitter– I get it. But people don’t think that mapping the diversity present in gaming matters enough to fund me undertaking a major project to do it.
And why would they? The people making these decisions usually aren’t gamers and almost always are white. How could they understand why this matters? They all present as caring about diversity and wanting to increase awareness, but they don’t see the value in trying to create a hard data set that will allow us to see just where we are succeeding or (much more likely) failing at recognizing and celebrating diversity. They’re in the high way to hell and I’m holding the “slow” sign and trying to get them to pump the brakes.
Gaming, meanwhile, is a multi-billion dollar industry, making more than film, more than television, more than music. It’s the thing most consumed world-wide. It’s peak entertainment. It’s where people are, and it should represent the people who are flocking to it more than it does.
And while I’m not speaking from my rich data map which WILL EXIST SOMEDAY, I can tell you from my experience that there aren’t nearly enough representations of non-white, and even non-male, and certainly not enough non-heteronormative characters in existing games. And when you can create “yourself,” as I’ve illustrated to many students, you can’t really create yourself unless you’re of a normal body shape and have generally “normal” (read: white) features. I managed in the most robust creation suites I’ve seen (the WWE 2K games) to make myself more-or-less, but only with hours upon hours of careful tweaking of the existing face geometry, with a patchwork of image uploads to texture the face, and without even coming close to my actual body shape. In other games I can’t come close, and one look at me will tell you that I can pass for white.
The response most often lobbed at me when I talk to people about this topic is exactly the one that Tanya D brings up: people say “why would you make me be black/native/female/gay/bi/insert-non-hetero-white-thing?”
No one ever likes the answer.
But it’s a combative one first, then the logical one.
First– you’ve made us be white dudes forever. Sorry if we occasionally want to change that up a bit. Not everyone in the world is a white dude on a hero’s quest, types the Cherokee guy in response to the article by the black woman.
But there’s also a reason that doesn’t need to be about social justice. There’s one that has to do with narrative and with experience.
Stories.
Yes, just flat out “stories.”
No matter how many creative things you can do with a white protagonist, there are stories a white man cannot star in. Sometimes creators try to force it anyway, which is perhaps the worst of the micro-aggressions one can pull. But in reality, the whole idea of everyone having a story also means that to hear all the richness of stories in the world we have to see stories starring and told by everyone.
Or to put it in a strictly capitalist sense: whoever figures out how to tell all the stories white men have missed in the games world is going to move units like you wouldn’t believe. It will be a new world order of gaming.
I push my students to think about diversity in my writing for games class, but I take it a step deeper. I talk about something I call “The Buffy Theory.” Joss Whedon, who is one of my favorite storytellers (yeah, he’s a white dude– I don’t hate white dudes), wrote perhaps the coolest SciFi series based on a female protagonist (certainly to that point, anyway– there have been many since, thankfully) in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. But Buffy, in spite of breaking ground, had to walk an uneven line. There were things about that show that were uniquely told from the perspective of a female hero, but in some ways, Buffy was just a female version of the white male hero on the quest. She had her damsels in distress (they were male, but they were still damsels), she had the overwhelming responsibility to save the world. She even had her Messiah and resurrection moment, thanks to a change in networks and a story-line involving a priceless urn purchased on eBay.
TL:DR for the last paragraph: it’s not enough to tell a white-male story with a non-white or non-male protagonist. The original Tomb Raider is just Pitfall Harry (or Indiana Jones) with jiggle physics and a “hot” costume. Playing a Mario game as Peach is still playing a Mario game.
I’m not saying that those changes don’t matter. They absolutely do. Sometime this week I’m going to write about my wife watching wrestling and what it’s taught me about female wrestlers like Asuka just watching Julie and talking with her. It’s important to see women and people of color and LGBTQ folks as heroes. But it’s MORE important to tell their stories, to not just sub them into the narrative.
And right now, we’re doing a lot of subbing into narratives. Particularly in games.
So if you ask me why you have to play an Indigenous girl, an Inuit, in Never Alone, it’s because that’s how it works. I’ve been playing a pudgy plumber for years and years. I’ve been Link and Solid Snake. I’ve been Duke Nukem.
Every now and then you need to be Samus.
It’s not a challenge to your right to exist. It’s embracing the fact that you aren’t all alone on this planet. Learn about other people. You’re missing great stories and experiences.