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Designer's Notebook

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alist added to CMS 998

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So here I am, a few years back, firing up Baldur's Gate for the first time. This is gonna be great! A huge multi-disc CRPG with a decent storyline and tons of gorgeous artwork, the reviews tell me. I can't wait. First things... See more » So here I am, a few years back, firing up Baldur's Gate for the first time. This is gonna be great! A huge multi-disc CRPG with a decent storyline and tons of gorgeous artwork, the reviews tell me. I can't wait. First things first, though; gotta create my avatar. Forget the suggested, pre-built person they give me -- this is my big chance for self-expression. I'm looking through the portraits available trying to decide what kind of a person I'm going to be. Nice selection. Hey, there's a black woman! I can play a black woman! They're scarce as hen's teeth in computer games. She's got her head tilted back and her eyes half-closed in the snootiest expression imaginable, and she's holding out her hand for it to be kissed - what an attitude! I warm to this lady immediately. I'm gonna be her and we're going to be a Heroine together. So I play along through the game for a while, gathering my posse and talking to bartenders and killing things and selling slightly dented armor down at Ye Olde Dented Armor Shoppe, the way you do, and after a while I decide to check out the gnoll fortress. After seriously whomping on a whole lot of gnolls, I come across this female mage being kept prisoner down in a pit. So I get her out of the pit and she joins the party. She's called Dynaheir (weird name… a descendant of Alfred Nobel, presumably). Her stats are pretty good, but she's an Invoker, limited in the kinds of magic she can perform. She'll do until somebody better comes along. However, there's something odd about this woman. Unlike everybody else in the game, the clothing in Dynaheir's portrait doesn't match the clothing that her character is wearing in the main window. In fact, her character's clothing really matches my portrait. What's going on? A quick look at a Baldur's Gate fan site gives me the answer. I've accidentally stolen Dynaheir's head. I unknowingly used her portrait for my own character, so the game has substituted a different one for Dynaheir, one that doesn't match her character. The Heroine of this story wasn't really supposed to be a black woman. There's only room for one black woman in this game, and she's a second-rate mage being kept prisoner in a pit. Now, this isn't meant to be a criticism of Baldur's Gate. It's a wonderful game, one of the best I've ever played. But my experience does point up a longstanding problem: there aren't enough minority characters in games, and the ones we do have are confined to too narrow a spectrum of roles. Back in 1999, the New York Times ran an article called "Blood, Gore, Sex, and Now Race: Are Game Makers Creating Convincing New Characters Or 'High-Tech Blackface'?" It was a worthy question then, and one that doesn't seem to have received an answer in the intervening four years. The first black character that I can remember in any video game was Julius "Dr. J" Erving, in one of Electronic Arts' first titles, Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One, a basketball game. The machines it shipped on had such limited graphics capabilities that it was essential for the athletes to be different colors so players could tell them apart. (If I remember correctly, Larry Bird was white -- bright white -- and Dr. J was actually orange. The background was black.) So began a long tradition of black characters in games… as athletes. Tiger Woods has been a huge seller, too, but that doesn't have much to do with black people in the larger social context. More and more games are starting to feature rappers and hip-hop music, and some games are beginning to incorporate black urban slang as well, for its "cool value." There's a debate among black game developers about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Some people think it means that games are finally starting to recognize the energy and vibrancy of hip-hop and rap music. Others see it as the publishers co-opting that music simply to put more money in their own pockets -- primarily white pockets -- trading on the popularity of hip-hop to sell games. A few people are concerned that it could actually be a form of stereotyping. I don't have a See less »

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videogames race minorities

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From the list : CMS 998 by alist

Ernest Adams' "Not Just Rappers and Athletes," a fairly ok article on race and games, from the designer's perspective.

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