On Woke Shooters
An essay on diversity in character-based games, and why it doesn’t amount to much.
There’s few events more exciting in the world of character shooters than a new character reveal. They’ve been teased for months - the developer site’s under constant surveillance, every new addition to the playable maps is scrutinized, theories run rampant as to how they relate to the existing characters, their potential movesets, and how they’ll impact the meta on release. The game logo fades in as lights flash and flicker, the music swells, and finally, the reveal: a femme fatale from Latin Country™. She’s ruthless above all else; she takes up a life of crime easily, with glee.
Caveira, from Rainbow Six: Siege? Loba from Apex Legends? Qiyana from League of Legends? Reyna from Valorant? Sombra from Overwatch? It could be any one of them! Every major character-centric team game has fallen for the same telenovela villainess stereotype. And this is far from the only glaring racial pitfall: the infantile, beautiful Asian girl or her counterpart, Japanese Guy With A Sword; there’s the jovial, showstopping Black man who loves hip hop, the ambiguously Indigenous person with a tomahawk and facepaint, the Chinese monk whose life inexplicably revolves around violence, etc.
The character “shooter” has fast become the most popular genre in gaming, and in many ways it’s easy to see why. We eat up character design and costumes (check out those skin sales!), there’s an endless supply of lore as new characters are released, and the competitive scene is guaranteed an ever-evolving meta. But an unlikely challenger arose… the antithesis to casual and career gamer alike… the SJWs.
An increasing demand for diversity in all fields - but especially on-screen characters - put game developers in quite a dilemma beginning only a few years ago. Hardcore gamers were seriously vocal about wanting politics out of their games - “I don’t care if the characters are black or brown or purple, just make sure the game is good. I don’t get why this even matters.” Would their core (read: bankable) audience stay if they introduced more characters of color? Does it actually matter? Would all this money, time, and effort even reap any rewards?
Yeah duh. The answer to every question is a resounding “yes.” Overwatch might’ve been the one to break the seal when its cartoony, energetic gameplay and colorful cast took the gaming world by storm in 2016. It was a solid enough competitive experience that hardcore fans could easily look past the cultural aspect and focus solely on mechanics and strategy, while thousands of underserviced gamers could find representation in-game for the first time, and became highly devoted as a result. This was all fantastic news for Blizzard: Overwatch was one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful games of 2016, and held steady as an industry force for a few years. However, the reason for their success and their eventual downfall is one and the same. When the balancing act between their “hardcore mechanical” and “casual diversity” crowds became difficult, they didn’t fumble one at the expense of the other - they dropped both. Issues with character balance continued to bog down competitive play, while many fans of color, as well as female and LGBT+ fans, found Overwatch’s diversity to be lackluster, a collection of half-measures meant to appease the crowd and little more.
The fall of Overwatch caused upcoming character-based games to double down on their diversity efforts - or at least the appearance of them. Apex Legends launched with one gay and one nonbinary character, a Black man graces the cover of Valorant, and League of Legends released the first Black female character in the company’s history. The rub is that there’s little substance or care behind any of it, leading to the aforementioned stereotypes running rampant.
That’s the secret - it was never because they cared. It was never because it was right, and it was never about respecting the culture. It was a minimum effort cave to public pressure, and an attempt to cash in on a previously untapped financial resource. The hardcore audience that keeps games like these at maximum profits is the priority, and anything that could threaten their financial contributions is treated with extreme scrutiny. The developer, as an entity, will only do as much as it expressly feels necessary given the budget, time, and priorities; and catering to the minority (who will likely play anyways due to a lack of competition) is permanently on the backburner. The only diversity measures taken are those that will either appeal to or fail to offend the core demographic - primarily 15-25 year old straight white men from English-speaking countries. At the end of the day, it’s what white people think looks cool that makes the cut.
Video games, though a young medium, have already established their own institutions - ones which revere the white, cis, straight world of film & television. For genuinely diverse games to exist at the highest level, games companies must change fundamentally, not hotfix diversity hires who are ignored when they raise concern or challenge the status quo.