Games and discrimination

It’s no secret that mainstream super hero comics are a kind of sexist medium.  Very few female characters are more than gender-swapped and fetishized versions of their male counterparts, and the few original female characters are generally poorly handled.  Hell, the entire concept of women in refrigerators comes from comic books.  This…is improving somewhat as time goes on.  Originally, a lot of comics were written by middle-aged men who had no real knowledge of feminine psychology, nor did they care to.  Now, there are several women writing comics, and the male writers have taken great strides in improving the role of women in comics, but it’s still kind of problematic.

Sexism in video games is a little bit harder to define.  Granted, there are many “damsel in distress” stereotypes in video games and most female characters are designed to be as appealing to adolescent males as possible.  On the other hand, a lot of women in video games are capable, competent and do not get stuffed into the fridge.  The elements of sexism definitely exist in video games, and they should be dealt with, but it’s not as big a deal as some people make it out to be.

No, the real problem with video games and discrimination is the lack of ethnic diversity.  Most characters in video games are white, or white looking Asians.  Even the Middle Eastern Altiar looked Caucasian under that hood of his (Desmond, however, does not thankfully), which was strange considering he was born and raised in the Assassin’s guild.  One of the few recent non-White heroes I can think of is Marcus Fenix, and even then, I’m not entirely sure if he’s Latin or not (Dom Santiago is definitely of Latin decent though), but even then, that game featured the sterotypical black guy in the form of Augustus “The Cole Train” Cole.

It kind of bothers me that most video games do so little to feature non-white or non-Asian protagonists, or even supporting characters for that matter.  What’s worse though, is often, when non-White characters are included in a large fashion, it’s often in a very stereotypical way.  Like the Cole Train example above, most of the black and Latino characters in games just caricatures of actual black and Latino people.  Most of these characters are gangsters or they sound like bad impersonations of Xhibit and Cheech Marrin respectively.

I can excuse Japanese games a little bit, as their culture is still somewhat insular when compared to the United States, but for Western games, it’s just strange that we have these mostly white washed games, with maybe a smattering of Asian kung fu or ninja guys.  When a black guy shows up, I half expect him to be a bad imitation (not parody, sadly) of minstrel actors from the turn of the century.  This is just pathetic.  In a world where Will Smith can draw crowds to his movie just by having Will Smith, why is it that just a handful of games have non-stereotypical non-white characters?  I would love to play a fantasy epic where I’m playing a guy who looks like Denzel Washington’s character from the upcoming Book of Eli movie.  From the trailer, that guy just drips “video game hero,” but we rarely, if ever, get to play a character that looks like him.  Maybe in Fallout 3 or Mass Effect, but those are the exceptions.

The bottom line is, we need more non-white folks in our games and we need better ones than the ones we have now.  I don’t mind playing a bleach blond spiky haired badass in my JRPG, but I’d like to play an action game where I look like Keith David .