Dear Video Game Character Creators: You Still Need Work
With all the strides other forms of entertainment are making year after year, I can’t help but look at the missed opportunities in video games. In particular, video games with character creators. They can do better, a lot better. But, as of 2019, it’s pretty clear there’s still a lot to be learned and considered.
Black Desert, Monster Hunter World, NBA 2K 2020, Guild Wars 2, Sunset Overdrive, etc. What do these games have in common? Well, they’re generally known to have robust character creators.
However, they all also share the same common issues you can see across similar titles. Those issues are: limited skin tone ranges, improper lighting of Black & Brown skin, and a lack of hair options. You can fire up the most recent releases and see these shortcomings like clockwork.
Well, these aren’t problems if you’re white and sports Eurocentric beauty standards — straight hair, light skin, etc. Games tend to adhere to these concepts of beauty mostly. Now, if you’re someone with skin that’s a beautiful shade of Black or Brown and or have fantastic hair that’s not straight, making yourself in games has been/is often a practice in frustration — Often we don’t feel seen as a result
The questions we’ll explore are: why are games behind like this, and are there solutions to said…
