My brother recently picked up a
copy of the Mass Effect trilogy for PS3. As he tentatively booted up his PlayStation,
and the opening credits began I grew increasingly excited. I had just beaten
Mass Effect 3, and ended almost a decade long foray into this fantastic
universe. I knew what kind of nerd he was, and how much fucking fun his
experience will be.
As he went through the opening
barrage of questions that the game asks you in order to create your own unique
Shepard, I remarked casually “So you making Shepard black?”
“Of course”, he replied instantaneously.
“I got to.”
For our lighter readers,
this conept of “got to” stems from minority nerds having very few instances of
positive images we can associate with. Mass Effect is the exception to the
rule. You can make your Shepard skin color anything under God’s green earth, change his gender,
and even his sexual orientation. It’s pretty amazing the level of customization
you have in such an early game.
For everything positive in Mass
Effect, it was still problematic. The Asari, a race of hyper sexualized females
predictably Angelo Saxon in their depiction. All of the love interests with the
exception of Tali (who when she removed her mask was still pretty white
looking) are white, or kind of Italian. Vega was a colossal masculine Latino
whose only Spanish was “Loco”, like he slept through Spanish 1 in high school
and that was the only word he remembers. Jacob, the black magic user, was okay,
but even he suffered. He came across wooden and not very powerful, and thus not
very popular. For all the amazing customization we are still left with very few
strong minority secondary characters to latch on to.
If you follow the “cannon” Mass
Effect story line, Shepard is a white straight male. He’s voiced as a white
straight male, and played as such. If you make him gay, these relationships
seemed forced and uncomfortable because he is still very straight in the way he
pursues his gay companions. If you give him a brown shade of skin, his voice is
a stark antithesis to the character we are controlling. Even “Fem Shep”, the
female version of the main character, ends up being a dude with boobs. Lost is
the sensitivity because her lines and choices follow the exact same track as
her male counterpart. So despite the
wonderful customization we have over our experience, it is in the end a glass
ceiling to true immersion.
Minorities in this country have
struggled for positive representations. Our struggles have not been in vain. It’s
gotten us to the point where actively we watch like hawks, and descended on our
various digital soapboxes to rage against injustices. As an effect, those
creating the media are extra carful as not to offend us. But still something is
lacking to make our experience truly feel special.
Why can’t we have our default
characters reflect a more wider and diverse landscape? Shouldn’t our cannon
stories begin to include a broader representation of the cultures that play
video games? Positive doesn’t mean that our characters need to always speak
well, or make good moral choices. Positive means we're regular people in
extraordinary circumstances.
Glen in Walking Dead is an amazingly
positive character for Asian Americans because he is simply a guy. He doesn’t
do Karate, isn’t the funny one, etc. He is simply a dude, who has a normal (albeit
surrounded by zombies) relationship, and is an active member of the group. He
is Korea, and it’s extremely important to his character, but like all minority Americans
his culture informs who he is, it’s not the only defining aspect of his
personality. Its that choice that needs to happen with everything in nerd
culture. It’s no longer enough to just have that one black secondary character who’s
only define personality trait is the fact that he’s black.
I went back to watch my brother
play Mass Effect. He had beaten Mass Effect 1 and was working through the
sequel. I asked him what he thought.
“Shepard is kind of a douche,” he
said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, with his voice and my
character he just kind of comes off as a douche.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s really white.”
“Word, I can see that.”
“It’s a great game though.”
That it is.
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