A game that I grew up on was Pokémon. Starting on the gameboy color, I then moved onto the gameboy advance, but stopped playing the game due to outdated consoles, until it finally became an app that we all know as Pokémon Go.
This game is a perfect example of how the times have changed and the games evolved with it. It started off as the main character being a boy. You would have no choice of which gender you could be. The mom, gym leaders, and different types of pokemon catchers were all women. But it was a male dominated game with the Professor, main character (you), and the arch nemesis all being men. The dialogue that comes with the women are usually pretty sexist, also. And a lot of the time they only appeared one half of a couple.
The creators heard the complaints and added an option to be a female trainer. I never complained about having to play as a guy trainer, but on the other hand, it did subconsciously make me feel more accepted. Maybe more girls than just me were playing the game!
However, one problem I have with Pokemon is that it isn’t racially diverse. One can argue that the characters are Japanese so they are all lightskinned. But as an internationally popularized game, it should be more racially inclusive. This is problematic! Nakamura gives one reason by saying “cybertypes stabilize a sense of a white self and identity that is radical fluidity.” It’s another example of westernized beauty, and doesn’t give enough representation for people of color.
Schaap gives a reason for this. He says, “An enormous amount of work goes into developing fantastical virtual environments, life-like animated avatars, and artificial intelligence routines for computer-controlled characters, but the mechanics animating these worlds and shaping the tools and conventions for social interaction in them are, mostly implicitly, based on our everyday commonsense understandings of how the world works. These understandings are formalized, reified, and encoded as the natural way of doing business in virtual environments, while the social implications of this process remain largely invisible to developers and users alike.”
Then, Pokemon Go came. You could be anyone (as long as you have a smartphone and the app) and catch Pokemon. You didn’t have to choose a character because you, yourself are the character. Of course, the app is a lot different than the game that you can play on a console. But it just goes to show how great Pokemon has been at making the game an all around inclusive activity!
My questions for you are:
- When you make an avatar, do you make one that is similar to you, or completely different?
- For women, would you be more willing to play video games if it were more catered to you? What can companies do for you to have more access to play these games?
(Featured Image Source: Twitter)