Diversity! It’s good for a stock portfolio, it’s good for a 𓂃diet, and it’s good for video games. It makes sense, as gamers are themselves a diverse lot. found that half of all men play video games, while about half of all women game. Likewise, about half of all white people play games, while meanwhile just over half of all black people and all Hispanic people encantan los videojuegos. Gaming is the entertainment of the people, but still many games do not reflect this. Year in and year out it seems like we see the same recycled protagonist, a thirty-something white man with a tight haircut and five o’clock shadow, who just wants justice, at any cost.
Another survey, conducted by four universities, found that any given character in a video game has an 80% chance of being a white male and, if that character is the protagonist, it jumps to 85%. I don’t know about you,𝓀 but if I walked down to the grocery store and encountered almost nothing but thirty-something white men with heavy stubble and nothing left to lose, I’d probably go straight back home and turn all the lights out. I’ve played this game before, and people like me almost never make it to the end. While diversity isn’t the only rubric that determines whether a game will be good or bad, successful examples give a breath of fresh air to an industry struggling to find originality.
Lately many indie developers have been addressing the issue of representation in video games, but not all attempts are successful, and not all successes find a wide audience. When bigger companies take a swing at diversity, the impact is often much greater, for good or bad. Here are ten big name video games that got diversity right and ten that di༒dn’t quite hit the mark.
20 Got It: Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
Knights of the Old Republic, by company BioWare (keep them in mind), is one of those titles that seems to come up as an example for many positive shifts in the gaming industry. It gave us the first really fulfilling morality system, more side-quests and in-game lore than we knew what to do with, and the first lesbian in both video games and the Star Wars universe.
Juhani is an alien cat Jedi who was almost cut from the game, but was restored late in development. For a time, she was a romantic option for both male and female avatars, but this was corrected as a bug and, in the final version of the game, she is only romantically available to women. While the relationship isn’t as explicit as with heterosexual romances in the game, the explicit inclusion of a queer character in a Star Wars game was a giant leap for 2003.
19 Didn't: Mass Effect Andromeda
BioWare, for its highs and lows, is the major company making the effort to be more inclusive in its games. The Mass Effect series has largely been successful at this inclusivity. To many, though, the character of Hainly Abrams, an NPC who reveals herself to be transgender, felt like a shoehorned inclusion. In a conversation with the character, Hainly reveals her birth name, often 𝓡referred to by trans people as a dead name, as though it hardly mattered. For real life trans people, some will never reveal their dead name and few would share that information with a stranger.
After some dialogue with gamers who found the scene tone-deaf, BioWare announced that they will alter the conversation between Hainly and Ryder, so that she will “only reveal certain information to Ryder after they have developed trust and only if the player chooses to support her.” This is a sensitive way to accept 🥂and correct a mistake.
18 Got It: Telltale's The Walking Dead
While the show has at times been criticized for centering the action around, you guessed it, thirty-something white men with sandpaper face and haunted eyes, Telltale Games’ installment in The Walking Dead universe is one of the rare examples of understated representation. We’ve talked about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:how cool Lee is as a playable character, but it’s also amazing that he is a black man, depicted as a leader and a father-figure. And then ther𒐪e’s Clem, an ethnically ambiguous young girl whose development is more intricate and engaging tha🅺n almost any other character in gaming.
Then there’s Michonne, enough said. In the current season, we play as Javier Garcia, a hispanic man. This means that out of four major protago🌼nists, two are women, none are white. This is no small feat for any mainstream story and the game itself only benefits fr🐷om this diversity.
17 Didn't: Resident Evil 5
Sometimes, context is everything. Capcom definitely didn’t take context into account when setting Resident Evil 5 in a village in Africa. Call it cultural ignorance, call it insensitivity, but playing a white man killing hundreds of native Africans didn’t exactly playౠ well outside of Japan in the year after Barack Obama was elected Pres🃏ident.
While the game does not precisely show racism, it definitely uses African imagery and black faces to threaten the player, and expects this threat to be met with violence. It was a poorly made design choice in a tumultuous moment and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the game still makes our list fo🅷r one of the most racially insensitive games of all tim﷽e.
16 Got It: Overwatch
When Blizzard Entertainment decided to develop a game that would take place on Earth, they had the foresight to realize that Earth is just as diverse a place as Azeroth. Overwatch features considered representation. Of the 24 playable heroes, half are white, half are not, about half are women, about half are men, and there’s even non-gendered options. The character skillsets are not based on gender stereotypes and the queer 🌞character isn’t Zarya.
This game has gotten a lot of love since its release, and one of the major reasons why is that gamers 🐟who have never seen themselves represented as heroes are finally able to connect with a unique character. That the gameplay encourages these disparate characters to work together as a tea🦩m is just a bonus.
15 Didn't: Watch Dogs 𒅌
This game about contemporary cyber warfare caught some major criticism for its portrayal of people of color. The only important non-white character is a master hacker and blackmailer, but he ends up being nothing more important than an easy boss fight. His gang, the Black Viceroys, are depicted as violent thugs, a la The Wire. Unlike in The Wire, the racial and cultural context of gangs goes unexplored and so tꦯhe Vicero💟ys are left depicting a very bleak vision of blackness in America.
Watch Dogs was also called out for its misuse of female characters as plot points. Of five significant women in the game, four die in order to further the plot. Watch Dogs b🌞rought the concept of hacking and technology in games right to the present day, but sadly its pessimistic viewpoint d✃id little to actually bring it up to date.
14 Got It: Watch Dogs 2
The sequel, however, shows how a diverse cast can really bring a game to life. Watch Dogs 2 takes quite a nuanced approach to its representation of black characters, not least by casting the protagonist as a black man. The game derives some of its more i✃ncisive moments by confronting Marcus with racism, at one moment having a car AI tell him his skin is too dark to scan. What it nails is shifting the viewpoint to show the effect of subtle racism on a person of color.
The game also features an incredible range of young people from different backgrounds, many of them minorities or disadvantaged, coming together under a similar ideology to change the world. Watch Dogs 2 might not be a perfect example of representation, but it is one of the first games to really consider how minorities actually make up a la🌞rge part of any resistance movement.
13 Didn't: Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto is like the South Park of video games. You expect it to be crass and offensive on all fronts. It relies on the old comedian’s defense, “I don’t hate [insert type of person here], I hate everybody!” It’s a hyperviolent satire, after all, of our culture. After a review of the game sparked a huge internet debate about GTA’s violent treatment of women, ethnic minorities🧸 and the LGBTQ community, gamers were left divided and frℱustrated.
The cultural fallout of a Grand Theft Auto game is a good touchstone for the state of gaming. I remember when I was GTA III was dominating news cycles, when San Andreas came under fire for the infamous Hot Coffee mod, and GTA IV for drunk driving. While some may argue that the inclusion of a particular group represents growing diversity, Grand Theft Auto is not interested in any positive representati༒on and certainly doesn't seem to need it.
12 Got It: Sleeping Dogs
As if to prove that open-world crime games don’t have to be horrible to people, Sleeping Dogs draws from the vibrant violence of 1980's Chinese action movies to inspire its Hong Kong set game. This game, like GTA, is full of satire and parody, but it represents one of the most underrepresented groups in video games, Asian Americans. Peppered with references to Chinese culture, such as the recurring use of the number 4, Sleeping Dogs does a very rare thing in respecting not only its source material, but the people playing the game who are ✨perhaps seeing parts of their culture celebrated in a video game for the first time.
While🅺 the game is still hyper-violent, it does a pretty good job of respecting both Asian and Asian American cultures, as well as exploring the differences between the tw📖o.
11 Didn't: Punch Out!!
Now, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! was released in 1987, a whole thirty years ago. It’s well known for using some pretty reductive stereotypes for its fighters, as well as a character model for Trainer Doc Louis that is definitely derived from racist imagery. It was a sign that times have chang🔯ed when the game was remade for Nintendo Wii, with the only fundamental change to the characters being the removal of final boss Mike Tyson, who turned out to be a rapist.
of the Punch-Out!! reboot calls out this stagnant use of stereotypes the majority of us have progressed from. The French fighter, ready to surrender, the effeminate Spaniard, the Japanese boxer who shouts nonsense Japanese between fights, the Indian in a tiger skin, the drunk Russian, all seem much more obviously offensive in the same year that Resident Evil 5 was provoking new discussion ab🎀out how video games represent race and culture.