Gaming is still a largely intolerant industry꧅, one that has historically resisted moves towards progressive and liberal values. When I say liberal values, I mean the most basic amount of respect towards marginalised gr𒁃oups – in 2024, there is still a vocal proportion of gamers who troll women developers and journalists, and whine about either how video game characters look, that video game characters are queer, or often, a combination of both.
Fortunately, that hasn&rsq🐲uo;t stopped studios from moving towards better representation. The last few years have shown us an uptick in queer, trans, and BIPOC characters, even though representing those demographics at all will likely lead to legions of annoying gamers screaming about the “woke mind virus” and threatening to boycott. Because of this, we rarely see developers try to engage directly with audiences about representation at all, but that’s exactly what Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada did last week.
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But also, what on earth does Brian Cox have ൩to do with Tekken 8?
, Harada-san said that he wanted to hear from Native American Tekken players regarding the design of two of his part-Chinese, part-Native characters, Julia and Michelle Chang. He explained that as Tekken started as an arcade game, there wasn’t much room to develop characters inside a narrativဣe, so the team tried to “reflect their Native American heritage in their character designs” and “took inspiration from the Native American tradition of War Bonnets and added feather accents to their heads”.
But over a decade ago, around the time of Tekken 6 and Tekken Tag Tournament 2, a Native player wrote in to say they felt the use of feathers in Julia’s design pro🔯moted stereotypes, and modern Native Americans don’t dress like that. Harada-san said that this “distressed” him, and highlighted that one day other characters may be labeled stereotypes (like Mexican luchador King), or cultural appropriation (he uses Paul Phoenix wearing a judo suit as an ironic example).
He then asked two questions, which boiled down to: firstly, are Julia and Michelle’s designs racist, and secondly, is there a way to convey Native-ness through design that wouldn’t inspire controversy or lean on stereotypes? It seems that Harada-san wants to create mജore Native characters – huge for Native representation in video games – ꧅but wants to avoid offending in the process.
It’s not my place to weigh in on whether the character designs are racist or not – I’m not Native Ameꦓrican. I’m not any kind of American. My opinion doesn’t matter here. But I do think Harada-san already knows how to create more representative and culturally accurate character designs, because he says it himself earlierꦜ in the tweet: consult with people of that group when doing character design.
That’s what he did when designing the Saudi Arabian character Shaheen, when he consulted with embassies and had a Saudi student “participate in supervising the character design”. He basically got a sensitivity consultant, which is a great first step in designing culturally respectful characters, and certainly more productive than asking on Twitter then having to sift through a load of replies starting with “I’m no🥀t Native but”.
The problem is, he said, “if we do this, we lose the fun𓆏 of ‘What kind of characters will we get? and our ideas and creative power will not be utilized’”. That doesn’t make a ton of sense, because creative freedom doesn’t require the use of racial stereotypes, but sure, it introduces constraints in the most basic sense. But what I find most interesting is the fact that Harada-san is asking this at all.
Surprise, Japanese Developers Can Care About Race Too
It’s not my place to pass judgment on the offensiveness of costumes based on a culture I’m not a part of✤. However, I am a Singaporean of Chinese and Indian ance🤪stry, and I care about Asian developers being held to the same high standards Western developers are. I often think about by Kotaku’s Sisi Jiang where they discuss the misguided belief that Asian developers can’t be expected to understand the nuances of Western racial tensions and stereotypes. Jiang wrote, “It’s insulting to hold blockbuster Asian games to a completely different standard. Moreover, it feels incredibly awkward to be told that Asian creators can’t develop media literacy about racism.”
This came after backlash 🎃to an article they wrote . This same producer has since announced that , for what it’s worth🅺.
And they’re right. We sไhould be expecting Japanese games not to be racist or use stereotypes the same way we expect that from Western games. Harada-san openly asking for comments and suggestions on the design of his characters proves that despite the gaming community’s determination to infantilise Asian developers, we can, in fact, have somewhat productive conversations about racial stereotyping without anybody frothing at the mouth.
If studios aren’t sure about cultural context, they can take steps towards reaching a useful level of understanding. It’s not so hard, especially if you’re a studio with a large budget like Bandai Namco, to hire a sensitivity consultant. A little curiousity can go a long way. Hopefully, in Tekken’s 🧸case, it leads to progress.
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