Being mixed is a curious thing, because you can see yourself in a lot of different people and not think twice about it. But then you get older, and you start realizing that not only is nobody really like you—they’re not really like your parents, either.
That’s how it feels playing western fantasy games (emphasis on WESTERN—obviously, it’s different with eastern studios, like FromSoft and Square Enix), as an Asian person seeking Asian representation. Sure, dragons and magic are perfectly plausible, and everyone loves knockoff samurai aesthetics, but Asian people themselves? Apparently, it’s too taboo to consider them a part of anything at all.
Well, I say it’s time to change that. The gaming industry has changed immensely over the past decade, and with all the positive strides it’s been making, I think it’s high time we start involving people like me in the worlds our beloved games take place in.
The impact of the genre’s history
A while back, I was working on a project about race in western fantasy, and the above video was unironically a part of my research. It perfectly summed up why “fantasy,” as we know it, is the way it is. Once upon a time, elves and magic and etc. were just folk tales that served a larger ethno-cultural purpose in the general U.K./Nordic region. Then, J.R.R. Tolkien walked in and rewrote the narrative entirely with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Suddenly, fantasy was a solid genre for people to work with and widely enjoy—not mired in endless folk tales, but established with tall, beautiful elves, kitschy hobbits, and magic to spare. It was a phenomenal stroke of genius on Tolkien’s part as a creator, because he was able to breathe life into something old and precious, and turn it into something new and promising. Unfortunately, this was the ’70s, and people of color weren’t really given a lot of authority within certain artistic spaces. Therefore, the world of western fantasy became dominated in large part by white men, who failed to see how Tolkien used racial stereotypes to develop his fantasy races, and instead just kept building upon those stereotypes.
As a result, for a very long time, the conversation surrounding “race” in games could simply be whittled down to discussions of fantasy races: drow, gnomes, etc. And while these conversations had merit, they distracted from the other big conversation that needed to be had, which was: Why do almost all of these people have to be various shades of white—often just feeding into troubling implications when they’re not? A popular counter-argument in these discussions was that “it’s based on medieval Europe, get over it,” but it’s rare to see that argument made in good faith when fantasy environments often feature far less realistic elements, and it’s usually deployed by people whose grasp of historically accurate portrayals of race is tenuous at best. They just heard it somewhere and decided it sounded like a good excuse to keep from questioning the status quo, without having any real informed, nuanced opinion on the subject.
They’re video games, my dudes, and it’s 2022. Surely, we can be more imaginative than a bunch of old men who came before us.
Issues persist even as character creation advances
I’m currently replaying the Dragon Age series in anticipation of the upcoming fourth game and, as of yesterday, have finally made it to the third game, Inquisition. Good lord, the character creator. I got to the eyes and let out a groan that came from my core, because the “Asian” eyes were …. not ideal, to say the least.
This is a common problem in character creators in Western games, and I don’t know why, when there’s so many Eastern games that have all kinds of Asian eye-shapes for them to reference. It just feels lazy, especially in Dragon Age’s case, since the previous game in the series allowed you to have an entire family of Asian people.
Poor POC representation in character creators is not a new problem, and it’s not exclusive to Asians, so it’s a wonder that this problem hasn’t been remedied yet. Forget the whole “anti-SJW” rhetoric that’s been beaten to death, and consider your circle of friends who game. Are they really all white? I don’t think I’ve ever had a group of friends who game that are entirely white. Games are fun, and human beings are attracted to fun, therefore games will attract all kinds of people. If anything, my experience has been that my Asian-American friends are more likely to be into gaming than otherwise.
So why is this still an issue? Why do our characters look like a sheltered white child’s idea of an Asian person? And even aside from characters controlled by players, why don’t they get to meet other Asian people in their game worlds at large? The only such character I can think of in Dragon Age is Dorian Pavus (in the featured image up top), who looks definitively Southeast Asian, which is awesome. But with every other character in the games, I have to pull at straws, wondering if they’re Asian or just an amalgamation of random character creator traits.
It really shouldn’t be that difficult.
Who does it right?
Luckily, more recent western fantasy games seem to be moving in a positive direction, judging from recent character creators. My favorite example of this is Baldur’s Gate 3, which uses a huge variety of pre-rendered faces, scanned from real actors and models, for players to choose from. (This is how Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios has done character creators for years.) It’s a pretty brilliant way of making characters look good and personalized, because they scanned the faces of a very diverse group of people—including Asian people.
The studio says, according to Game Informer,
Our character creation features photorealistic fantasy races, based on 3D scans of actors and models (blemishes and all), selected because their features roughly resembled the direction for each race in the game, as well of course for diversity and variety in the human-like races. Our team spent much of pre-production carefully selecting, scanning, and moulding these scans, to become the base heads for character creation. Launched into Early Access is a total of 150 heads to pick from, across the 16 races & subcraces.
Let me tell you, I was elated when they added a mixed-Asian girl’s face to the half-elf creator. I couldn’t believe my eyes. But even before they added her, there was a huge variety of Asian faces to choose from, regardless of what race you were playing, from Southeast Asian to East Asian and more.
That’s representation done right. It’s the least clunky, most respectful way of going about this whole thing, and it makes the game more fun to play for the rest of us. (That said, fantasy racism in general is still a problem, but that’s a discussion for another time). I loved walking around and seeing Asian folks doing their thing throughout the game, whether they were Druids casting spells, or human guards putting out fires. And it takes literally nothing out of the experience of the game—it’s just how the world is, and I love how refreshing it feels to see that reflected while playing games.
So, if it takes literally nothing away from the game … then ideally, it should take nothing for game devs to do better by us, and other POC. Asian characters shouldn’t have to be limited to Eastern fantasy. We exist all over the place, believe it or not; it shouldn’t be so taboo to see us riding unicorns and throwing fireballs, too.
(featured image: EA/Bioware)
Published: Apr 12, 2022 02:01 pm