Reading 05

I've continued on my research on the representation of different minority groups in gaming. This time, I've focused on racial representation. What I found was shocking, as I didn't notice it until I really started to look at it. This in of itself can be a problem, because I, being a Caucasian male, shows that I don't notice other racial groups being under-represented, which is a problem that needs to be addressed.

A big problem with this part of my research is a lot of the papers I was finding required me to pay money to see the full paper, so I had to make do with the previews for my reading, which did work out, but it would have been nice to be able to see the full paper.

One paper I looked at talked about how someone, who I assume is African American, talked about revisiting a childhood boxing game and talked about how in their adult game, found it offensive how they represented the African American characters. They then talked about how younger players didn't notice it. A big problem of younger players not noticing these things is that they will start to expect these stereotypes in real-life.

While that paper talked a bit about older games, another paper talked about newer games and how black people are represented. A huge problem is their portrayal in the Grand Theft Auto series. I personally never liked it, but I read somewhere that all the black characters in the series have some sort connection to crime. This can lead people into thinking that all black people are criminals, which is far from true, but just another example that the gaming industry has a long way to go to properly represent racial minorities

When I started to think about it, I wondered how many non-white characters I know in video games, and I realized that there weren't much at all. I decided to look into it. I looked into the Xenoblade Chronicles series. I looked at all the spirits from my Super Smash Bros game, since I don't play the Xenoblade games myself and I was shocked to find that all the human characters were all white. There wasn't a single black character in it. I also noticed that all the female characters wore some type of outfit that either showed their thighs, or their stomach or the top of their chest, or a combination of them all, but that's another topic. Xenoblade is a Japanese RPG, which are the most popular type of RPGs, the fact that a modern Japanese RPG has no significant black character shows that if anything the representation of racial minorities has gotten worse as they are not even present, instead of being present in a stereotypical way.

One problem with the representation of black people is that people can get upset about it, even if their reason is completely invalid. I remember reading, a long time ago, Resident Evil 5, had people complain about a lot of the enemies being black. This was completely invalid because the game took place in Africa, with the main characters dealing with a zombie outbreak, so having black zombies was inevitable. This just shows that game developers might be intimated in adding black people in their games because people would get upset about it, but they aren't doing any better not adding black characters in a non-stereotypical way.

Overall, from my research so far, I believe the representation of racial minorities is the worse of all minority groups in gaming. Even worse than the representation of women and LGBT people. The gaming industry still has a long way to go. But I'm sure if more people of colour take more leading roles in game developing companies, this will help resolve it. I will continue to research all this, and I think I'll shift my focus on the representation of people of different nationalities. I'll see you later.

Bye