Semester 3 Work Part 2: Skin Tones and Facial Features
So, moving forward from the research I did, I decided to focus on skin tone and facial features. I focused on South Asian people, in particular Pakistani people, for this. I guess I wanted to show that even when you are trying to depict a whole country such as Pakistan, there are a lot of variations in appearance that should be taken into account. I hope by doing this I can perhaps inform someone of something new that they might have not known before regarding Pakistan (also the country has a very negative connotation with most people due to um 'terrorism' so I kinda wanted to get rid of that bias too).
So for me Pakistan seemed like an obvious choice to show variations in skin tone and facial features as as a country it's pretty much a hodge podge of different regions and cultures that happen to be bound under the same national border. Within Pakistan the main ethnic sub-groups are: Punjabis (from Punjab region), Pashtuns (originally from Afghanistan), Sindhis (from Sindh province), the Baloch (originally from Iran, now in Balochistan), Muhajirs (immigrants from India after the partition of India) and Kashmiris (this is what I am but technically Kashmiris don't consider themselves as Pakistanis as Pakistan currently occupies Kashmir and the region Kashmir wants independence).
Okay so as you can see, there are a diverse bunch in Pakistan itself. Some pictures so you can see the differences (and also what I used as references for my later work):
Sindh:
As you can see, the people vary a lot in terms of facial features and skin tone. As I mentioned in my previous post, I often don't see a lot of skin tones in customisable avatar games for Asian people, so I did my research and picked out a few people that could be used as reference. I thought using pictures of ordinary people instead of say celebrities for example would be better as they aren't airbrushed/white washed from the lighting. I focused on womens' skin tones as tbh even women are underrepresented in video games so 2 birds with one stone. Anyway below you can see the sketches I did and their corresponding skin tone:
I tried to focus on skin tone and facial features so I kept it pretty basic colouring so the base skin tone would be apparent and thus it would be easy to see the variance of skin tone in just one country. They also vary further with different degrees of warm, olive and cool undertones. Now I just did a basic exercise as I didn't even go into depth with mid-tones and shadows but what I was trying to do here is show that just from a selection of Pakistani people I was able to pick out 8 distinct skin tones:
Also the far left skin tone is pretty close to my skin tone which was a nice bonus from doing this exercise. My point being that if I can do this tiny amount then I'm sure whoever is in charge of skin tones can at least research if they want to be inclusive of many ethnicities. I thought this was a pretty straightforward exercise but obviously I was already aware of Pakistan's ethnic sub groups so you could say I had an advantage here. I believe though if there is an agreement as a company that X game is going to appeal to a wider audience then they need to allocate time, resources and the right person to do the research required to get the authenticity that I'm advocating for. It definitely isn't easy but at least they know that by putting that effort in a lot of players will appreciate it.
Some of my favourite moments of a game are when I see myself represented in an unexpected way. It could just be a name, someone wearing a hijab, a phrase said in my mother tongue or anything I can relate to and I think to myself that someone in that team made a conscious decision to put this in and even perhaps thought about me (a British Kashmiri Muslim woman) as someone who would play this video game. As someone who grew up with video games yet is very rarely (if ever) considered the target audience, those moments are special to me.
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Moving forward to the 2nd theme: facial features. Personally I believe the most distinguishing feature between Pakistani people are their noses, although eyes and mouth do vary. As the two themes (skin tones and facial features) are from the conference paper An About Face: Diverse Self-Representation in Games, I thought it would be important to mention that not all facial features are inter-changeable. This is because some are racialised, thus by doing so you could be changing the race of a character or making them mixed heritage, if unintentionally done. Also mentioned in the paper is that people can distinguish facial features more easily within their own race and have more difficulty with other races. I agree to an extent with this, however living in the UK means being exposed to other races often enough (depending where you live of course) that those races can also be distinguishable. As someone who pretty much grew up in the UK I can distinguish white facial features easily enough as well South Asian ones. After attending university in Edinburgh I also got used to many other ethnicities and feel comfortable with a variety of facial features. I understand that not a lot of people can have these experiences so it may be awkward at first, but if you are part of a game studio who is advocating for diversity within the industry and in your games then this is something that has to be practised and learned until you no longer confuse two brown people with each other for example.
As a little exercise I decided to swap around certain facial features of the women I drew to see if their faces changed significantly or not. I noticed that if the mouth was swapped there was not much difference but as predicted with the nose it changed quite a bit. As well as changing the facial features, I also changed the skin tones of the faces to showcase how a variety of Pakistani faces can be made with a small group. I hope by doing this I can show that creating diverse characters isn't meant to be a challenge but an informative and hopefully fulfilling task that benefits everyone involved. My swapping exercise below:
Perhaps like the paper suggested you may not see the differences like I can, but I hope with this exercise you can see something of what I see! Also I believe by depicting Pakistani people in this way, anyone looking at this can become more familiar with facial features and people who don't look like them necessarily (and thus hopefully improve facial feature distinguishing skills). Also a note: I am able to swap the facial features here as they are part of the same racial group (South Asian) so changing their features still makes them Pakistani. With some changes to skin tone and facial features a Pashtun could end up looking like a Punjabi but what's important to remember is that I know that their sub group appearance has changed. If I was designing a character who was meant to be Pashtun and I swapped their features and skin tone so they were no longer Pashtun then that would be wrong to do as I've changed their identity. If I know not to do certain things though then I can avoid these kind of mistakes. Of course with a lot of things it isn't simple but it's worth it to educate ourselves so we understand more of the world around us and regarding the things we are not a part of and have little knowledge of, knowing what is okay and not okay to do.
For me, doing this exercise made me understand more what it meant to be Pakistani from physical appearance. Also as you may have noticed, some of the skin tones are similar to white skin tones, however the people do not necessarily look white as they have predominantly South Asian facial features. This is an example of how you cannot take shortcuts when trying to include a character of another race, in this example we will say South Asian for the sake of it, by using white facial features and then superimposing a 'darker' skin tone on them so that they appear South Asian. South Asians, as well as other ethnicities, have distinct facial features and as people of that ethnicity we can tell when a game hasn't properly considered our physical appearance when creating customisable appearances. Therefore the way forward is again to ensure adequate research is done on whoever it is you are trying to depict. Having someone on your team as a consultant is obviously helpful but it would be a greater benefit to hire more artists, developers and designers who come from diverse backgrounds. The issue unfortunately can come down to a matter of ignorance, and if we are not around then our voices may go unheard.
I hope by doing this exercise you can see the physical make up of some Pakistani people and become familiar with what we look like and understand the country a little bit more. Also learn about what it means to design characters from different regions and of different races and how facial features and skin tones are more nuanced than they seem. Cultural identity is an important thing to many people so respecting their portrayal in video games I believe should be equally important. When you create a character, their identity is going to relate to someone out there and wouldn't it be nice if that person feels respected, valued and appreciated by that character? Especially when you belong to a group who is marginalised and has negative connotations associated with them (Pakistani Muslim hijabi here), an accurate and authentic portrayal holds a lot of significance.
To make things easier to read, I will break the post here and write the next part in the next post (Part 3).
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