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Miguel Lopez
Assistant Editor
Many video games these days are heavily character-driven. Marketing, as you'd imagine, has a good deal to do with why this is so--a strong character behind any product (be it a soft drink, paper towel, or video game) helps cement its identity in the minds of consumers. Or so goes the thinking. And as games become further entrenched in mainstream culture (with big businesses simultaneously influencing the ways they're developed), you can bet that mascot characters like Mario will steadily proliferate.
As such, the art of character design is something that game makers take very seriously. Nearly every studio employs concept artists responsible for sketching out ideas for the characters who populate their games and the world in which they'll be set. Much like those in animated films and cartoons, video game characters are born on paper, and their looks continually evolve all throughout the preproduction process. In any event, this begs the question of where the game industry's character designers are drawing inspiration from. Anyone who plays games will recognize familiar imagery in several key areas--American and Japanese cartoons and Hollywood movies, most notably. Exceptions exist, of course. SmileBit's Jet Grind Radio was a fresh visual mix of graffiti art and candy-raver aesthetics, while Namco's upcoming Dead to Rights is largely defined by its fluency in Hong Kong's cinematic dialect. When such deviations do occur, the results are most often well conceived. But, largely, the images that our consoles project onto our screens have their roots in funny books, Saturday morning cartoons, or the products of Hollywood.
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Cease and desist! |
Strange things happen when developers indulge flights of fancy, though. While some of the cooler characters we've seen in games are probably the results of designers coming unhinged, that very condition has probably yielded some of the poorer concepts out there, too. But no recent game in particular has really stood out for its weak character designs, I feel; at worst, they have just been highly derivative. However, there is one particular image whose presence I find aesthetically revolting, not to mention borderline offensive: the "afro guy." Sadly, this image has become pretty ubiquitous, as of late.
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Even your online avatars can look played-out. |
It's like game developers think that including a character with an afro will make their games automatically hip, and thus relevant to youth culture (the target demographic). Either that, or there's some long running inside joke in the games industry that I am not privy to. Whatever the case, I have a message to developers eyeing that relic of the disco era for visual inspiration: cease and desist! By now, afros on male characters are analogous to oversized breasts on female characters--they're precisely the type of imagery that keeps gaming in the toilet of world culture. If developers really want society at large to regard games as anything more than toys for immature adolescents, then they're going to have to start thinking about the types of ideas the images they create carry with them. After all, if they're going to spend thousands of dollars designing character models, they may as well put some thought into their forms.
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Miguel's
Now Playing
Anarchy Online, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Ooga Booga
Recent Favorites
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Jet Grind Radio, Klonoa 2
All-Time Favorites
Street Fighter Alpha 3, Super Metroid, Fallout 2
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I'd have much less of a problem if the developers in question gave a damn about funk, hip-hop, disco, and the like. But more often than not, it seems like they don't. Or, at their very least, the games themselves seldom reflect it, save for on a superficial level. Rather, it seems like they use the guy with the 'fro as a cheap and easy way to exploit a well-defined stereotype; they're creating the interactive equivalent of Sambo, if you will. As is often the case with the games industry, the ultimate goal for all this seems to be the creation of cheap humor. It's not that every instance of an afroed character is somehow meant to be malicious. In truth, I think there's a large amount of naiveté behind it all--developers have simply never been forced to think critically about the images they put into their games. The fact that everyone's drawing from the same well--anime, comics, and Hollywood, specifically--doesn't help, either.
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A bit more acceptable, in this context? |
Is it really fair to blame game makers for this? After all, isn't it hard enough to conceive and implement an innovative product, let alone imbue it with clever imagery? I don't think that's a valid argument. As is evidenced by some of the more inventive visuals the industry has seen lately, game developers are not incapable of making an impact. So just as the presence of cutting-edge graphics and state-of-the-art physics models raise the bar, when it comes to games, so should inventive imagery. This will be difficult, however, simply because most people don't think about their games too critically, outside of their quality as consumer products. And thus, they'll just take the images at face value, without giving them too much thought.
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As an industry, it's essential that we start to become conscious of the images we put forth into the public consciousness. The medium of interactive gaming has amazing potential, as far as its ability to display inspiring visuals is concerned. Look at games like Rez, Jet Set Radio Future, and Parappa the Rapper for some good examples. It's really up to the developers to challenge themselves, and do justice to their medium. It definitely takes a lot of guts, but, in the long run, it's nutritious to the industry as a whole. So good luck to all the developers out there with vision--recognition will come, though perhaps not right away.
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