why can these characters only tell their own stories in expansions & dlc

June 13, 2020 2:59 PM

Black People Are Always The Side Story by Gita Jackson [Vice Gaming] “Thursday's Playstation 5 presentation opened with Spider-Man Miles Morales. Though the teaser was brief, I couldn't hide my glee. I've wanted to play as Miles Morales—the black Spider-Man that is beloved by the fandom—since I first saw that the character would make an appearance in Insomniac's Spider-Man game. Turns out, this game is just a side story. I should have known. Black people are used to being DLC, side stories, and expansion packs. There are very few games where Black characters are the leads. [...] I just think it's really lame that we won't get a full on, 60 hour video game-ass video game where I can play as the Brooklyn-born-and-bred webslinger. Especially in these major franchises, Black characters aren't given a chance to really take the lead in the same way their white counterparts are.”

• Black Representation in Modern Video Games [Keen Gamer]

“Obviously, just like in the film industry and music industry, there is a lot more representation in the indie space. Nevertheless, those games still need to be amplified in order to get an audience in the first place. The AAA subset of gaming has neglected a substantial portion of their audience for reasons only they would be able to explain. Representation matters because media reflects what we see and expect in real life. If there are no black people in video games, that is essentially erasure and it has damaging repercussions for the day-to-day lives of the people who consume this media. As mentioned earlier, video games have the unique capacity to elicit active empathy from the player. Anyone who has played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons or HellBlade: Senua’s Sacrifice can attest to the fact that games can teach and comment on difficult and diverse stories. [...] It would be remiss to not mention that some improvements are being made in this space with the very popular Apex Legends having 3 playable black women and Imani from Paladins (with the correct hair type I might add). And yet, there is still a long way to go before this becomes the norm. Black people shouldn’t have to cling onto fantastical characters coded as black, like Marina from Splatoon 2, as an example of great representation simply because we have crumbs to pick from. Where is our Nathan Drake; where is our Kratos; where is our Lara Croft?”

• White hero, sidekick of color: why Marvel needs to break the cycle [The Guardian]

“Iron Man has Terrence Howard and Don Cheadle’s War Machine, who always gets pulled into Tony’s orbit. Captain America has Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, a vet who drops everything to fight alongside Steve: “I do what he does, only slower.” Thor needs Idris Elba’s Heimdall to travel to his homeworld, and later Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie is integral in helping Thor escape from Sakaar. Doctor Strange has Benedict Wong’s Wong, who Stephen learns from and quickly surpasses. Jacob Batalon’s Ned acts as Spider-Man’s best friend and tech support. Before Ant-Man and Wasp teamed up, Scott worked with Michael Peña’s Luis and his team. Samuel L Jackson’s Nick Fury appears in almost all of these films, yet we know little about him outside his Shield work. Even Star-Lord leads a team of colorful aliens who, with the exception of Rocket, are all played by real-life multiracial actors. The only film that subverts this noticeable dynamic is Black Panther, which features an almost entirely black cast. [...] The characters would probably balk at the classification of “sidekick”. Yet they’re designated by the films as such, by virtue of their stories ultimately working to support the main character’s arc. All of them exist to help the lead work through some issue or trauma and provide logistical backup. We’re given glimpses at who they are as people, but rarely is that developed outside their relationship to the protagonist.”

• The Dearth of Asian Protagonists in Video Games [Indie Haven]

“When you think of a game with an Asian protagonist, which ones come to mind? Probably Sleeping Dogs. Maybe Street Fighter. Possibly Mirror’s Edge, the long-anticipated sequel of which is releasing in June. But for a medium that has so many Asian fans, markets, and creators, it’s surprisingly hard, isn’t it? If you have to think of an Asian American protagonist, it becomes even harder. Mirror’s Edge’s own Faith Connors was one of the first and only Asian protagonists to star in a game developed and produced in the West. And she’s not Asian American — she’s Asian European. How about a South Asian protagonist? One of the only examples I could come up with was Far Cry 4’s Ajay Ghale — and even then, he’s voiced by a white guy. It’s no secret that video games have a problem with whitewashing. Creators and developers have infamously struggled to make games that feature any protagonist that doesn’t fit the white cishetero male mold. But even as diversity slowly starts to creep in with protagonists like Max Caulfield from Life is Strange, Alex from Oxenfree, and Angela from Sunset, Asian protagonists are still scarce. In fact, the vast majority of Asian protagonists can be found in games produced in China and Japan. Even then, some of the most well known Japanese games — such as Metal Gear, Zelda, and Final Fantasy — feature white (or at least stereotypically Anglo-looking) main characters. If you have to ask why this lack of representation is damaging, it’s very likely you, yourself, don’t suffer from it.”

• Bethesda’s Prey gives us a rare Asian main character in a blockbuster game [Venture Beat]

“Diversity isn’t just about getting an invitation to a party. It’s about getting asked to dance, or being invited to dive in as a full participant, said Asra Rasheed, executive producer at Disney, in a panel on “Bucking the Status Quo” at our GamesBeat Summit conference. Is it a problem that there haven’t been many Asian characters in Western games? In some ways, it’s a reflection of demographics and marketing. Asian games, particularly those about martial arts and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in China, have a lot of Asian characters. There have been some academic papers on the subject, like “Game over: Asian Americans and video game representation.” This paper pointed out that even many of the critically acclaimed Japanese video games — which are often sold in larger numbers in the West — feature primarily European/white characters or those with white features. Perhaps that is a simple matter of marketing, as the Asian game makers know that games with white characters are easier sells in Western markets. “What this suggests is that video games, no matter where they are produced and by whom, are created with a Eurocentric bias,” wrote the author of the paper, Thien-bao Thuc Phi. “No matter what game genre you play, from sports games to kung fu games to fantasy role-playing games to futuristic sci-fi first-person shooters, chances are the main playable character that you control (and can relate to and identify with racially) is a white man.”

posted by Fizz (33 comments total)

100% agree black representation in games (and beyond) is way bad.

However, Spider-man: Miles Morales is in fact stand-alone. The expansion/DLC rumor was unfounded. That said, the scope of the game does sound like it may be smaller than the first, so there's still some good discussion to be had.

I'm super excited about the new game because the last one was so good, AND because they're making good on what it seemed to set up—Miles as the main character.
posted by angelplasma at 3:31 PM on June 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

It’s not going to be a full AAA game though. Sony are saying it’s going to be inbetween somewhere & priced as such.
posted by pharm at 3:33 PM on June 13, 2020 [6 favorites]

So disappointed to hear that Miles Morales Spiderman is going to be a smaller game. I enjoyed Into the Spiderverse so much more than any of the Peter Parker movies so far and was hoping to see more Miles.

East Asian representation seems better in online multiplayer games - Overwatch has a few Asian heroes, though their handling of D.Va has been kind of problematic. In Valorant, there's Sage and Jett - and it struck me how their faces immediately read to me as Chinese and Korean, respectively. It's a level of detail I'm pleasantly surprised to see from a Western company.
posted by airmail at 4:05 PM on June 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted; engage with what fellow MeFites are actually saying rather than presenting strawmen nobody is advocating for.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 4:07 PM on June 13, 2020

Sony Clarifies That ‘Spider-Man: Miles Morales’ Is a Separate, But Equal Game
posted by whir at 4:29 PM on June 13, 2020 [9 favorites]

It’s not going to be a full AAA game though.

Yeah, the message being sent is that it will be, well, a side story game, like Uncharted: Lost Legacy or something. It's technically a complete standalone game, yes, but it's clearly less than the main series games. It's the size of an expansion, even if it's not technically an expansion.

I mean, maybe we'll all be pleasantly surprised and the game will actually be the same scale and size as Insomniac's Spider-Man, but based on what we know right now that's not the case. The black Spider-Man is getting less of a game than the white one did.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:29 PM on June 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

The point is that these characters are always after-thoughts, they're never a first priority. They rarely ever get the budget and support other euro-centric/white games & media receives.
posted by Fizz at 4:37 PM on June 13, 2020 [7 favorites]

Having character creation not start with "generic white man" would be nice, too. Because obviously the default is white and male. Any other race or gender is an alteration.

I'm glad Deathloop was mentioned because that's going to be my "Time to buy a PS5" game.
posted by MaritaCov at 5:21 PM on June 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

The point is that these characters are always after-thoughts, they're never a first priority.

Exactly. And now everyone is caught up to, you know, the second paragraph of the first article in the FPP, which already addresses Insomniac's clarification that it's a standalone game.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:33 PM on June 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

I enjoyed Into the Spiderverse so much more than any of the Peter Parker movies so far and was hoping to see more Miles.

Into the Spiderverse was, for much of its running time easily the best superhero movie I've seen. (I mean is there any better moment in a superhero film than when Miles takes the leap and the whole world literally turns upside down?)

But even so, there is still the trope that it takes a white guy father figure in Peter Parker to teach Miles how to be a superhero, like some frigging golf channel commercial with the old white guy beknightedly passing on his knowledge and acceptance to a minority kid to reassure white audiences of overall continuity of the status quo. Finding commercial media that challenges that attitude is incredibly difficult as commercial media above all else wants things to largely remain the same, even as they may be happy to welcome a wider range of consumers to their world.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:43 PM on June 13, 2020 [5 favorites]

I mean, it's fine to just hate the entire concept of Spider-Man, which is pretty much what you are going for.
posted by sideshow at 6:53 PM on June 13, 2020 [1 favorite]

It's not. I don't want to derail the discussion to be about the movie as it's a videogame post, but they clearly set up the tension Miles faces to be between how his father and uncle see the world and how that informs his actions as a hero, but they sideline that to a large degree to insert Parker into the dynamic. I feel it deserves mention because it is so common to require a white character to normalize events and that acts as yet another way minority characters lose meaningful agency agency and have their own experiences sidelined.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:11 PM on June 13, 2020 [9 favorites]

Mod note: One deleted as off-topic
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 8:35 PM on June 13, 2020

Into the Spiderverse is the best superhero movie ever made, forget about best Spiderman movie ever made.

I have some issues with the copoganda part of the flick, though. The movie feels like they had to make the Black dad a cop in order to 'get away' with the family being black and latina. Like, making him a cop is the bone they threw to the white audience.

The cop-ness of the dad is never examined. It's just assumed that he is "one of the good ones" and that's that.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:33 PM on June 13, 2020 [3 favorites]

I thought Miles's dad being a cop was so that they could have the trope of "My family member hates Spider-Man! If they ever found out I'm Spider-Man, it would break their heart!" without just carbon-copying Aunt May's belief that Spider-Man killed the uncle in the family.
posted by haileris23 at 9:42 PM on June 13, 2020 [7 favorites]

(Cop dad also creates a natural tension w/ Miles' interest in graffiti, a 'secret life' he was already attempting to hide. It just didn't seem gratuitous in any particular way.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 10:04 PM on June 13, 2020 [2 favorites]

Right. So the cop-ness is never examined. It is just assumed as a benign foil to other stuff in the plot. That's what I have an issue with. The opening scene where Miles is apprehended and is played for tension until we learn the cop apprehending him is his father is also kinda gross. They pay it off with the extra "i love you" gag which lets the audience move past it. Anyways this is my personal nitpick with an otherwise absolute unit of a superhero movie that we own and watch regularly so who cares and sorry for taking up oxygen on a tangent.
posted by lazaruslong at 10:12 PM on June 13, 2020 [5 favorites]

Yeah, the thing about structural oppression as it plays out in stories written by privileged people is that for any given work there are often solid narrative reasons a particular choice was made, but that’s not mutually exclusive with that choice being part of a broader troubling pattern. So Miles’ dad being a cop can efficiently set up tension in his relationship with Miles as well as give him a reason to be around for certain events, and still be copaganda. Likewise, Peter Parker is one of a very few superheroes whose civilian life looms as large in pop culture as his heroic doings. So having him (both hims!) pass the baton to Miles through forming a personal connection provides a sense of satisfaction and closure that, say, Hal Jordan showing up in the John Stewart Green Lantern movie we should have gotten wouldn’t have. But that doesn’t mean it’s “hating the entire concept of Spider-Man” to point out that this plays into the tendency to frame young minority protagonists (especially black ones) through an older white character’s gaze to make them more palatable to a white audience.
posted by bettafish at 10:46 PM on June 13, 2020 [8 favorites]

(sorry, that was all over the place earlier, I thought I was in the ps5 reveal thread. my bad. :/)
posted by sexyrobot at 10:54 PM on June 13, 2020

Like, even if there are 83 good reasons to make Miles’ game shorter that somehow, impossibly, have nothing at all to do with the background racism of the society we live in, that still wouldn’t change that this is yet another instance of black video game characters not getting their due.
posted by bettafish at 10:57 PM on June 13, 2020 [4 favorites]

So Miles’ dad being a cop can efficiently set up tension in his relationship with Miles as well as give him a reason to be around for certain events, and still be copaganda.

Had the tension between Miles dad and uncle been allowed to follow its own logic more intently, it could have shown why Miles version of Spider-Man does finds it so necessary to be outside the law while upholding values he deems vital. It could have been, and still sort of is around the edges in an implicit way, one of the most meaningful examples of why a character can't work within the legal system but still seeks to make the world a better place by following a necessary alternative idea of justice, with Miles finding a synthesis between his father and uncle.

Attaching his story to Parker's version saps Miles version of Spider-Man of some important distinctions in how they develop their outlooks. It isn't that there couldn't be some shared ground, just that Miles should both be shown as able to become a hero on his own as Parker did and that experience and choices are necessarily informed differently than Parker's were even if both are heroes in the end.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:15 AM on June 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

Alyx Vance has her own AAA virtual reality game Half-Life: Alyx after being a supporting character in the early Half-Life series. She's biracial, the daughter of a black man and Asian woman, and, like the other Half-Life games, there is no character selector or generator -- she is the only playable character in Alyx.

I'm curious if the embodiment of playing her in the game for dozens of hours has been studied: do white male players feel any race or gender dysphoria? Does it have any lasting effects on empathy? Unlike the third person perspective of Tomb Raider, the immersive first person of VR means that you really feel that you are Alyx: your hands are hers, her voice is in your inner monologue, and when a head-crab attacks it is really jumping on your head.

Get it off! Get it off! Eww those headcrabs are really gross!
posted by autopilot at 1:41 AM on June 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

Assassin's Creed has not yet had a mainline game where the main character is Black.

I agree there's a lack of representation, but Assassin's Creed does have a mainline game with a black main character, Bayek in Origins.

As for Mirror's Edge, maybe I'm wrong but I thought the main character looked much less Asian in the second game compared to how she looked in the first.
posted by mokey at 1:55 AM on June 14, 2020

Can you imagine a Spider-verse game where you can approach the quests differently, depending upon which spider-hero you've selected? Miles could stealth past a certain area, while Penni could hack a back entrance; Noir would have to find an alternate way around the color-coded keypad...

Video games have understood the value of variance in game mechanics; but because they're still so frequently clunky in their understanding of writing, they still have a lot of ground to make up in bringing more than a simplistic "select attributes" attitude towards racial representation. Are there games in which choosing the player character's (human) race affects how NPCs interact with them? Where you get more police attention of you're black? Where your ability to bluff gets buffed if you're male?
posted by pykrete jungle at 7:00 AM on June 14, 2020 [2 favorites]

As it happens, I'm playing the previous Spider Man game now (signed up for PSNow in quarantine). There's a lot to like about it - combat is great, swinging around is a lot of fun, and it's amazing how much of NYC they got into the game. But it's astonishing how pro-cop the game is, in a way that probably felt like just a neutral thing to the writers at the time, but feels incredibly tone deaf right now. Like, if you want to get the icons on your map to do side-quests, you literally have to fix the NYPD's system of surveillance towers.

At least it led to an inadvertent moment of realism. Late in the game, I was swinging through a city that was in the throes of a disaster (not a spoiler, that happens in every superhero game). There were fires everywhere, and costumed villains were menacing countless NYers. My police radio came on to alert me to a side mission. "All units respond," it said, "possible narcotics sale in the Bowery."
posted by Ragged Richard at 7:40 AM on June 14, 2020 [7 favorites]

Assassin's Creed has not yet had a mainline game where the main character is Black.

I think it's very easy to get caught up in, well actually we do have this character in this series. And yeah, that's awesome that we have Bayek, but the fact that we're still counting and keeping track of the rare instances when a gaming company allows a POC to be the main focus of a game, it means it's not happening enough, it's a deviation of the norm.

The norm is white dudebros and they're the default archetype for characters and story-telling. I'm glad it's changing but they can and should do better.
posted by Fizz at 9:09 AM on June 14, 2020 [6 favorites]

"All units respond," it said, "possible narcotics sale in the Bowery."

Yeah, the copaganda aspect of the PS4 Spidey game is the ONE thing that turns me off about it. When I played it I made a decision to never respond to drug calls.
posted by Gaz Errant at 11:16 AM on June 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

As for Mirror's Edge, maybe I'm wrong but I thought the main character looked much less Asian in the second game compared to how she looked in the first.

She looks different, but still Asian to me. Not all Asians have small, slanted eyes.

There do exist Asians who look like Faith in the first game, but her face type is so disproportionately common in Western media properties that it makes me think character designers are working off of an Asian© template in their head instead of looking at a variety of actual Asian faces.

Sidebar: What makes Asian eyes look "Asian" is not really the shape or size, but the whole eye socket area. This is the best explanation I've seen on the subject.
posted by airmail at 11:50 AM on June 14, 2020 [8 favorites]

There do exist Asians who look like Faith in the first game, but her face type is so disproportionately common in Western media properties that it makes me think character designers are working off of an Asian© template in their head instead of looking at a variety of actual Asian faces.

The game studio that developed Mirror's Edge is in Stockholm, a city without a significant Asian population. (Seriously, it's the sort of city which has restaurants with names like “Thai Sushi Wok”, to give one an impression of how authentically Asian Stockholm is.) Asia is so far away culturally (compared to how it is in, say, Berlin or London, let alone Australia or the Bay Area) that it's hardly surprising if Asian tropes in games developed here arrived in freeze-dried form.

Source: my living in Stockholm—about 15 minutes' walk from the EA Dice offices, in fact—after having lived in Melbourne and London. Ask me about how long it has been since I've been in a good izakaya...
posted by acb at 3:14 PM on June 14, 2020 [3 favorites]

I feel like we’ve reached an awkward period where acknowledgment and discussion of whitewashing/colorism/Eurocentric beauty standards for BIPOC in drawn or animated media has become relatively normalized even among white audiences, if still fraught, but a lot of non-Asians trying to have that discussion about East/Southeast Asian characters still have The Template internalized. So on the one hand there are legitimate issues of character designs favoring paler skin, narrower faces, etc, as well as subtler production choices like casting white voice actors for “good” characters and Asian VAs for the bad guys. On the other, nine times out of ten when I see a non-Asian calling out a whitewashed character design and I go to look, I find...someone who looks very obviously East or Southeast Asian. Often even one who conforms to The Template, but their eyes are only slightly tilted or their skin tone is only slightly yellowish, so clearly they now look like a white person!
posted by bettafish at 6:43 PM on June 14, 2020 [4 favorites]

Half-Life: Alyx... do white male players feel any race or gender dysphoria? Does it have any lasting effects on empathy?

Can't report any. There are no mirrors in the game, and everyone treats Alyx as the super-competent hero of an action game that she is. The fact that she's a WoC has no material effect on the game or the player. Given the extent that I didn't notice it, that choice has to have been deliberate.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 10:31 AM on June 15, 2020

Assassin's Creed has not yet had a mainline game where the main character is Black.

There is also Assassin's Creed: Liberation. Not DLC, but also not mainline (i.e. numbered), I'm surprised it didn't get mentioned in the article. It is also one of the few games with a black main character that contends with race issues.

The point stands that there are few AAA games with black main characters, frequently spinoffs/sequels, and I don't think any of them really address the fact that the main character is a black person, i.e. they could swap out any race and it would be the same story:

Prototype 2
Crysis 3
Remember Me
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
posted by subocoyne at 1:08 PM on June 15, 2020

I can't believe I forgot Mafia 3. That one definitely engages with racism.
posted by subocoyne at 4:49 PM on June 15, 2020