I’m sitting on my bed for the third day in a row.
I’m waiting for 5PM to hit so that I can finally close my 3DS. I’ve been ‘tanning’ my avatar in the latest entry of Nintendo’s long running Animal Crossing series, New Leaf. I put ‘tanning’ in scare quotes because the method doesn’t match my intention. Yes, I’m doing the the thing the game calls tanning, but my objective isn’t just darkening my avatar’s skin tone, it’s being able to see in the screen what I see in the mirror
This is an AMAZING post that covers a lot - how the default whiteness of Animal Crossing ties into the default whiteness of videogames ties into just trying to exist as a person of color.
jfc, I’m on the verge of tears after reading this because I can relate so much. I felt like I was reading my own journey in this post.
default whiteness of videogames is so incredibly damaging, white people have no fucking idea how harmful it is to gamers of color and our sense of identity and self-worth
but simply being an “option” hidden in character creation is not enough
especially when it is frequently an inadequate and inferior option, given how Afro-textured hair is generally given one token representation amongst a sea of bone straight hairstyles, how “ethnic” facial features are limited to one or two presets at most and in-game sliders are frequently limited to producing northern European-style features, and how game engines commonly fuck up when rendering darker skin tones, and how none of these obvious design flaws are ever seen as such (if Dragon Age’s engine rendered white skin tones as badly as it does darker ones, the game would never have shipped in that state)
it’s not enough to be “optional”
games that allow for character creation need to be designed from the ground up to accomodate all types of ethnicities
games need to be playtested with dark-skinned characters so that lighting issues can be addressed (there are moments in Mass Effect 2 especially when my darkest-skin-possible Imani Shepard is only visible by the whites of her eyes)
and most importantly
these asshole game developers who crow about how ~progressive~ they are need to put their money where their mouths are and stop treating characters of color like an afterthought
put up or shut up
put characters of color, particularly women of color, on the box and in the trailers
don’t brag on the internet in quiet corners of fandom about how you are so committed to diversity in your games when the Face of the Game is perpetually a grizzled white man with stubble
artists hired to produce supplementary materials such as comic books and lore compendiums need to stop fucking whitewashing the precious few characters of color there are and need to care as much about the color of a character’s skin as the color of their outfit
this shit is important, it’s incredibly important, and empty platitudes and promises are simply not enough anymore
gamers of color deserve better as consumers and human beings
Reblogging again because Bisho says it a million times better than I wanted to
