Semester 3 Work Part 1: Research Research Research!

 My aim for this semester was to analyse the issues regarding poor representation of minority cultures in video games and address these issues by creating and testing a design process which ensures authenticity. As a concept artist I feel that my artistic input matters a lot when it comes to authentic design. Even if the person in charge (Art Director or Game Designer etc.) has given me a character brief to adhere to, it's up to me to depict ideas which are in essence 'cool' (as I learnt from interviewing practitioners in semester 2) and also interpreting the brief into something unique or less known. If I don't even try to propose a suggestion which may be a bit different than what everyone is used to, then my idea remains in my head and never gets put out there. If the issue with lacking authenticity could be partly down to ignorance (not knowing of something) then I at least can make it so that they are made aware of the concept/thing and therefore clear that barrier. There are of course other barriers to deal with when it comes to depicting minority cultures accurately and authentically but knowing that I have and can play a part in improving that is what has driven me to pursue this area of research for my master's. I acknowledge that my work is not the solution to all the problems of representation in the games industry. I just have an idea that I wanted to try and see if it works for me. If this idea can be implemented by others then that would be great but as each artist's design approach is unique to them, so will, I believe, their approach to cultural sensitivity.  

After doing the commission for South Asian heritage month I wanted to back track from drawing and go back to what I do best - research. Most of my July was spent on research. I felt at this stage it was crucial for me to delve deeper into the issues players faced and the effect good and bad representation had on them. I thought by doing this I could pinpoint an area that I could solve and figure out a process to fixing that problem. One of the key texts I read that influenced me a lot this semester was a conference paper: An About Face: Diverse Self-Representation in Games by Passmore and Mandryk. This paper went into the intricacies of how players self-identity within a video game context and how choosing a character design reflected the way they saw themselves and played. What I also found relevant to my work is that the survey done on players asked whether certain facial features and other characteristics on a video game character were important to them. This is prevalent in fantasy RPGs when a player has the option to customise their avatar's features so they can be 'whoever they want to be'. Unsurprisingly, the survey results showed that "...player rationale favours character customization as a means of self-representation, more-so by players of colour ... Players of colour demonstrated greater preference for identical skintone matching, with common references to the inability to do so successfully." (Passmore and Mandryk, p.369). 

Two key themes stood out to me in this paper: skin tone and facial features. The argument for skin tone came up a lot in this paper with Asian players claiming that customisable skin tones never matched their own and yellow undertones are rarely present. Asian, along with Black players also mentioned that even when their skin tone is available, the facial features and hair types are predominantly racially white and thus do not suit their skin tone. It comes across as an attempt to simply give the players white-appearing characters but with darker skin tones. This leads me onto the second theme: facial features. There are facial features which are racialised and do not fit into a one colour for all e.g. mono eyelids are prevalent with East Asians, almond shaped eyes with South Asians, full lips with Black people etc. This survey also highlighted the players' desire to see themselves represented in video games and more often than not choosing skin tones and facial features similar to their own. Out of the racial groups, "White players are significantly more likely to choose representations different from their ethnicity... [they] are over-served in their representations while players of color remain under-served." (Passmore and Mandryk, p.373). This shows that due to the availability white players have at their disposal, even they want to try something different as it is not readily available. In contrast, ethnic minority players often don't choose their race because of "limited options, developer oversights, and/or discriminatory norms." (Passmore and Mandryk, p.373). I particularly enjoyed this paper as it even went into how players will cover their face with helmets/masks to avoid being perceived as darker in skin tone when playing competitively due to the unconscious bias that players are more likely to shoot darker things than light. That however is not something I can solve by myself as that is felt on a wider scale socially (not just in video games) and is more to do with the social power relations that exist in real life. 

So, going back to the 2 themes I picked up from this paper, skin tone and facial features, I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to base my approach on the results of this study. I could be seeing this as an outsider as the survey was done in the US, but unfortunately as a player of Asian background I could relate all too well to the answers and questions being asked and experiences of customisable features. My own particular skin tone (which is not even that dark) is rarely represented in video games both in customisable avatars and fixed characters. My skin tone is in between the white skin tones and perhaps the one East Asian skin tone/brown skin tone as after that it will be reddish brown and like 1 or 2 darker skin tones. I don't really like choosing a white skin tone if I want to represent myself so I end up choosing a darker skin tone than is my real one. I'm not saying that video games need to have my particular skin tone for me to play them but if I see in the game they took the time to create 5 - 8 white skin tones then I expect a similar number of skin tones for Asians (East, South, South East, West and all) as well as for other races. This kind of problem is part of the overall issue of the lack of (good) representation of non-western cultures. With adequate research, care and sensitivity to other cultures, game designers could make a lot of players happy (who are not white). On that note, I will finish with a final quote from this conference paper that I loved and ended up writing a mini essay about: "People of colour purchase games and identify as gamers in a larger proportion than White players [89–91]; however, characters of colour are grossly underrepresented in both mainstream games produced by AAA studios [12,39,106,108,118] and in games produced by independent studios [98]." (Passmore and Mandryk, p.365).

(Yes I may be trying to hint at game designers here to do the right thing by us!)

Just to make things easier to read, I will break the post here and write up what I did with this research in the next post (Part 2).