What about shooting zombies wearing ties? (Aka middle managers?)
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Heya Tom, itās Bob from the office down the hall ā¦
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One place where I think video games still fall down in representation of black characters is in MMO character creation. Very roughly half might have some sort of non-white choice that isnāt blue or green, but a much smaller fraction of those lets you create a character who looks authentically black. Usually when I try, they just look wrong and I give up and make them pale or tan.
There is, no doubt, a tendency for texture artists in the industry to overwhelmingly be white, and for black character skins to be an afterthought. They might use a color blending system that doesnāt work well, and/or the gameās lighting and rendering are calibrated more toward pinkish-white people.
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Now thatās just begging for getting strangled while zombies are eating you.
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I might just lurk here for a while, see what we end up withā¦pop back in 200 comments
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I really like Borderlands and Borderlands 2 for the character selections. While you canāt customize them and some of the bodies look a bit overdone like Brick but there are all shapes and colors for the NPCs. Even the female playable characters while they are āgood lookingā they have bodies of active physical women and not exaggerated.
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You beat me to it!
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In the L4d comic I think it was revealed that Louis was a DBA.
The wiki sort of confirms:
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Calling out Cole from Gears of War is kinda weird, since the white soldiers in the game look, dress, and act pretty much exactly the same. Canāt argue enormously with the rest, though.
While itās good that there are games where black men are not stereotyped, Iād say it does not excuse the games where black men are depicted as something dangerously brutish and animal. Itās especially toxic seeing how it builds on a tradition of depicting black men as a threat to civilized society, peace, and order.
Less reliance on lazy retrograde tropes of the past, more characters with depth and personality, please. Now that some games have shown us that steps in that direction can be taken, thereās no excuse, is there?
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Not quite true. Thinking of the 3 MMOs I hop between (Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, and WildStar), they all have a decent range of skin tones that done really seem to skew overly in the white direction, and are generally naturalistic. ESO, though, Iāve noticed had an issue with Redguard, the black race, NPCs in that they skew a lot paler than lore, or previous games, would suggest. I have or had black characters in most of these games, even though I am a white dude.
WOW did have issues with dark skin tones, when I played. But then again all my characters were green.
In a lot of MMOs, and games in general, they have an issue with white skin as well, they are prone to have corpse white as the default, which is generally strangely luminescent in most game lighting. Which is a small trouble, since MMO character design can get REALLY problematic (Teraās pedo race, for example).
On the topic of the article, I really doubt video games are the biggest problem in forwarding stereotypes, movies and television hold a much larger mindshare, and are much shaping of our preconceptions on race.
One character that springs to mind as a counterexample that hasnāt been mentioned is Lee in the episodic Walking Dead series. Superficially it seems he checks many of the stereotype boxes. Large black man. In the South. Convicted murderer. But as you get to know the character, his murder conviction was a trope that is often used for characters of any race; he murdered the man who was sleeping with his wife. He had been a university professor, along with his wife. He wasnāt ābrokenā by the prison system, because he had escaped while being transported after trial. And upon his escape, and being thrust into the zombie apocalypse, he came to be the protector of a young Asian-American girl, Clementine. The delicateness and complexity of his emotions, and the sacrifices made to put Clementine first really went against the major stereotypes for a black character, regardless of medium. It was a fantastic game, and putting a black character of this nature as the PC seemed like a conscious decision of the writers to not only portray things differently, but to do so ābetter.ā
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Ah pity ya, fool!
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Doesnāt the āself sacrificial strong blackmanā loop back in to some variation of Uncle Tom? Strewth, this stuff is a minefield.
I donāt know. I think we are actually progressing look at the evolution of Luke Cage in the comics.
"Americaās āvisionā of the Black male body is one of threat, menace, and labor. "
ā¦with an opening picture of Balrog from USF4?
Wat? You do know that game was made in Japan, correct? And was intended to be a carbon copy of Mike Tyson? And his name in the Japanese version is M. Bison? Why not have beef with the fact that every other character in that game that hails from the US is blonde with blue eyes?
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Looking forward to having my account creation date pointed out. I have another account and cannot remember the password. I ultimately (mostly) agree with this article, and I think that black characters being represented this way is a reflection of the fact that most people (disproportionately) who work on games are white males, which represents a societal problem. As a white male (Iām ready to take some flak for admitting that), I can also understand the defensive knee-jerk response, which is that since no offense was intended, none should be taken.
I have two unrelated things I wanted to say. First, I was wondering about the censorship of the Joseph Conrad quote. That isnāt a nice word today, we can hopefully all agree, but at the time I think it was simply descriptive. Is that censorship a reflection of the fact that the word was descriptive of a people who were generally considered inferior at the time (by Europeans), or was it done as a kind of trigger warning: we wonāt make you read this unpleasant word that may make you angry? Probably both, but I think the article would have been more powerful if the word had been left intact.
Secondly, as a self-described moderate, Iāve been looking forward to reading a reasonable article on a touchy issue so that I could make this post. What Iām saying now absolutely does not apply to the article I just read. IMO, this site gets a bit shrill on āliberalā issues sometimes, and some of the front page posts seem like attempts to generate outrage when it really isnāt warranted, specifically on issues related to mis/under-representation. I find it off-putting, I feel it undercuts this siteās integrity (which really sucks, because yāall are spot on about some issues that really matter), and I hope that the editors recognize and deal with this problem.
I would be very happy to talk about this further to reasonable respondents.
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I realize the irony in saying this, but generally speaking the Japanese are as racist as they come. Itās a product of a society that was completely isolationist up until very recently. Black people in particular are stereotyped pretty severely whenever they are represented. I agree with you but for a different reason: this article was written for an american audience, and no amount of social change in america is going to change this particular issue. That makes it a bad example.
