What comes to your mind when you think of black hair in games? Maybe a clean set of cornrows? What about some dreadlocks? Or, and this is probably the most likely, are you thinking of an afro, a Caesar fade or just a bald scalp?
This litmus test is a conversation that’s raged on in the gaming industry for as long as there have been games with playable protagonists and character creators. Also former my city Contributor Evan Narcisse questioned the discourse in his essay the difficulties in depicting blackness in gamingwhich shows that the road has been covered, but is still quite long.
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Unfortunately, while all of the above hairstyles are likely to be found in almost every character creator today, they are still incredibly limited for black players when it comes to creating digital versions of themselves. As any black man will tell you, our hair has a depth and range that is rarely represented in our favorite medium.
And that’s exactly what it is Some fun games Host and producer Blessing Adeoye Jr. gets hands on in his latest episode of The blessing show. So we decided to sit down with him and bitch about how bad it is when it comes to black hair in gaming.
Character creators are good, but they could be better
Adeoye Jr., one of the recent additions to the Some fun games Crew, has its own series exploring aspects of gaming and design. In his latest episode “We need to fix black hair in video games‘ he provides some history of black hairstyles, noting that the most seen look in games, cornrows, ‘dates back over 3,000 years in sub-Saharan Africa’. This is profound. Going even deeper is the variety of black hairstyles, which include 360-degree waves, Bantu knots, fro-hawks, jheri curls, and twists, among others.
Unfortunately, many of these styles are not included in the character creators of most modern games. That doesn’t mean things haven’t improved. He points to games like Nioh 2 and sigh Hogwarts legacy as examples of excellent options for black players to create an extension of themselves with hair to match.
But that’s clear Western ideals of beauty– blonde hair, fair skin, blue eyes, slim build, etc. – are still the norm in the industry. As Adeoye Jr. points out, “many popular games are developed in countries like Japan,” meaning education about the more natural, “ethnic” hair blacks wear is far less common. As such, you’ll get something like Elder Ring‘s character creator, which while having many options, is limited in its ability to accurately portray a black person. The main work of FromSoftware is the best selling game in the Japanese studio’s catalogue, but it can’t even get its portrayal of blackness right.
The juxtaposition between games like that nioh series and Elder Ring shows how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.
Western ideals of beauty in games
Accordingly an estimate by the US Census Bureau, Black people make up just 13.6 percent of the American population, compared to whites who dominate at 75.8 percent. Judging from that alone, one would assume that black facial features — like our melanized skin and frizzy hair — aren’t “normal or common enough to be considered,” as Adeoye Jr. suggests in his video. And he’s not wrong.
Throughout history, Black people have been demonized for their natural qualities to shore up Western standards of beauty as the ideal that everyone should strive for, whether it is possible or not. This is something both of our families have experienced – straightening their hair to avoid it the discrimination that is coming with wearing a more natural style. And we went through it in our youth, waving our hair to get closer to white and thus be seen as beautiful by classmates, teachers, bosses and co-workers, even our parents. Forget the damage it did to our roots; Straightening our hair made us beautiful because it was the hairstyle that society wanted.
Because blacks make up less than a quarter of America’s population (and less in places like Japan), it’s no wonder natural hairstyles are nowhere to be found or limited to the usual suspects in games. Nor is it surprising that so many of them prefer physical traits that denote whiteness, such as pale skin, smoother hair textures, smaller lips and noses, etc.
While some games such as Pokemon scarlet And Violet And The Sims 4 have received updates to “expand” the options available, most like Babylon’s fallShe couldn’t even acknowledge that black hair (or people for that matter) existed. And even if we exist in those worlds, our portrayal is inaccurate at best, or feels like a caricature at worst (when I look at you, CJ).
Take existthe brave tribesman and a main character of Guerrilla Games’ horizon Series. He has an impressive number of locs that are “refreshingly inclusive” to Adeoye Jr., but even Varl isn’t devoid of the Western standards of beauty that game design has. Taking a closer look at the taper fader, Varl has in the 2022 sequel Forbidden Westyou can see the hair texture is smoother than what would be considered natural for a hairstyle like this (this is curly kinky hair). The same goes for Varl’s beard, which also appears to have a smoother hair texture.
Black people are not monolithic, of course. Our hair texture varies across cultures and across each individual’s scalp, but Varl’s design exemplifies this the effort to portray blackness in games. It’s almost there but misses the mark so often, and that’s a shame. For the most part, it’s clear that a lot of love has gone into these characters, and improvements in graphics rendering technology provide the means to make these depictions even better – we just need the training that comes with technological advances .
However, there are some shining examples of black players
Games haven’t had many great examples of authentic black hair. However, Miles Morales‘ “Next Gen Fade”, Kimberly out street fighter 6 and her huge pigtails, and Estelle out Season: A Letter to the Future with her cropped afro are among Adeoye Jr.’s favorite depictions of blackness in games.
“I think when you’re trying to portray black women in a video game, you usually go for something like Kimberly or something longer, but having a shorter afro for a character I think is great,” Adeoye Jr. says of season in an interview with my city. “One of my sisters has a shorter afro and stuff when I saw it [Estelle] I was like, ‘Oh booze, that reminds me of my sister.’ It’s a hairstyle that a lot of black women have, and I thought it was a really good thing to define her character that way.”
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It’s easy, by default, something like GTA Online And NBA 2K for character creators with decent options for black players. But what about inclusive representation in The Simswhich promised to do better for the black community – and delivered. The Sims 4 has implemented many of the mods that the Black Simmers made This allows for greater accuracy and variety in black character creation.
WWE2K22 is another powerful character creator with its diverse range of body types, skin tones, and hairstyles. Or the Saints Row series which blew our minds for how many options were available Creation of our own “boss”.
The curls are going nowhere
Often when conversations about black representation in games arise, a vocal subset of The gaming community belittles any value that the criticism emphasizes with excuses and “whataboutisms”. While Adeoye Jr. is angered by the stone wall that occurs during the discourse on black representation, he wants his video to be relaxed and welcoming to both of them Kind of funny audience and the gaming industry as a whole.
“This is a video I made hoping it would feel approachable, it would feel like something that wasn’t overwhelming most of the time. I feel like I can be aggressive at times, but I want to give people that option so they want to watch the video and don’t feel like I’m insulting them,” explains Adeoye Jr.
Despite the likelihood that the majority of Kind of funnyBecause the audience is white, Adeoye Jr. believes the arguments he made in his video and the easily digestible way he delivered them “will go a long way” in attracting viewers encourage people to advocate for better representation in games.
“In a predominantly white industry, it’s difficult to recognize these issues. It’s hard to look at these characters and say, ‘Oh, is there something wrong here or is there something wrong?’ As black people playing these games, we notice that,” says Adeoye Jr.
Adeoye Jr.’s video may not result in an immediate shift in the video game industry toward a more authentic portrayal of the BIPOC folks, but it does more than succeed in capturing the many frustrations and occasional joys black gamers feel when it comes to it going to see yourself in the games we play. We hope to get more hair options aside from just a her or fade in games like DiabloIV And starfield.
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