@egg said in MU* Gripes and Peeves:
#MU*sSoWhite - sometimes this really bothers me and it's particularly bothering me right now given the current climate. I'm gonna go on one of the games I play on and count the number of characters with blue eyes. I'm pretty sure it's 75+%.
Play a POC, it wouldn't kill you.
Not MU*ing directly, but please excuse me while I regurgitate some lengthy insomniac thoughts...
I got challenged by a POC friend ages ago (fourteen-ish years, I think?) to try playing exclusively POC characters in MMOs and other online games for six months and see what happened, and I found it an eye-opening experience. Not just socially—in a breathtaking amount of online gaming there's a surprising amount of sudden racist toxicity you experience when you change your avatar's skin color, far more than I'd realized even though I knew intellectually it existed—but even technologically as well.
It was surprising to me both as a gamer and a former game designer/developer how many games, MMO or single-player, simply cannot even handle cutscene lighting right if you give your character dark skin. I expected better of classic-era Bioware, for instance, but Dragon Age Inquisition was particularly bad about this in places; there were whole cutscenes where I literally could not see my Inquisitor at all. This technological aspect was particularly striking to me because I had to admit that, in hindsight, it was not a thing I'd bothered to consider in my own professional game development days. (And I was the one writing the lighting portion of our game engine...)
I've actually played predominantly dark-skinned characters in MMOs—and any other game with chargen—even after the six month stretch passed. In part because anything else aside man has it been a remarkably useful litmus test to show me who I should not waste time trying to associate with. And often serves as a good way to judge the toxicity level of any online video gaming community overall very quickly. It was a large part of why I left WildStar despite having been involved in the actual development of the game to a point where I very seriously considered moving to California to take a job at Carbine; moving up to and after launch, the very tight-knit cool community we'd had in early beta dissolved under the weight of a much larger playerbase, and holy cheese was the post-launch community racially toxic to a breathtaking level in places.
And even when a game is single-player, I've found making my character a POC also makes me a lot more aware of NPC racial diversity. (Which is often, uh, let's go with "not great".)
I mean, in The Secret World, my extremely dark-skinned character did not stand out because there were a fairly diverse cast of NPCs to start with. (Heck, my character's actual NPC boss was basically "what if Idris Elba played James Bond... who'd had to retire from the field and become the overseer for a new generation of secret agents, who happened to be working for an ancient secret organization to basically fight C'thulhu and other similar scales of threat in order to keep people safe from the things in the shadows?")
But playing FFXIV with a dark-skinned character—while I've encountered almost no OOC racial toxicity from other players as in Far Too Many Other Games, which is refreshing (though I have had a few notable non-toxic but very uncomfortable interactions)—I quickly became hyper-aware of how few NPCs were dark-skinned (i.e. damn near none), all the way up until I reached Ala Mhigan territory during Stormblood (the second of the three current expansions). And even there they were hardly the majority.
I mean, some of that is the Japanese tendency to make characters very light-skinned even when they're supposed to be Asian or anything else, but it still felt a touch uncomfortable. (The fact that there are shockingly few dark-skinned PCs either did not help that feeling, mind you.) It was actually a relief to me on a level that caught me totally off-guard when my character finally reached Ala Mhigan territory and met the (POC) leader of the Resistance and other freedom fighters serving under him, because abruptly she looked like she belonged there.
That sort of stuff has been an eye-opening experience about the importance of representation, even as pale a reflection as it is of the real thing.
So, I mean, definitely don't play a stereotype—because no character should be a stereotype, and they really shouldn't be a racially-derived one, because yikes—but I've found that taking up my friend's challenge over the past however-long-it's-been (well over a decade, at least) in at least online video gaming has definitely forced me to look at points of view I probably would've otherwise taken for granted, both narratively (in RP and everything else) and OOCly socially (because hoooooly cow can people get horribly racist at dark-skinned avatars in some gaming communities).
(Admittedly, picking a PB in MU*ing is a wildly different experience than "hey look, I'm interacting with random gamers in multiplayer" is; with online multiplayer games, RP and "in character" is not the dominant paradigm of interaction, so people are far, far more likely to think of your avatar as "you".)
So although that friend and I have largely lost touch in the past six years or so after he moved to the East Coast, that challenge definitely had an impact. I like to think it's helped break me of habits I wasn't even aware of. I know it's changed how I write fiction in general, because it's forced me to stop just mentally defaulting to every character being white; when writing fiction I used to have to pause and go "wait... should this character be non-white?" consciously with every character I created, and that hasn't been the case for some time.
So I have little doubt that, done right, it can be a worthwhile experience for many people to try out.
That said... even if it helps with some understanding and forces you to break out of unconscious biases? It's even more important to take those experiences and really internalize that they've got nothing on what POC folks have to go through RL.
Because no matter how racially toxic someone might get at my old Defiance character, or my Elite: Dangerous commander (seriously, you barely ever see them, wtf), or my old secondary EVE Online capsuleer (reiterate Elite comment here... though to be fair, EVE's just gleefully toxic in general in places, and the racial aspects were basically opportunistic seasoning), or any other online avatar? I can always log off and put all that aside. It's not like those online avatars will impact me if I'm pulled over by some paranoid traffic cop. It's not like those online avatars will influence someone's perception of me professionally in my day job. It's not like they affect my offline, real-world, actual life.
Many folks don't have the option to put it all aside by logging off. And reminding myself of that every time I do run into one of those experiences? That's been the most sobering part of the entire years-long history of this challenge.
And, unsurprisingly, the point the friend in question wanted to originally make by issuing that challenge to me all those years ago.
