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race & video games
so, I've been playing City of Heroes. It's a massively-multiplayer superhero game.
Recently, a bunch of screenshots previewing the next update were posted over on gamespot. One of the new features coming up involves the character-generation-system, so there's a bunch of screenshots of the character generator.
The character generation engine supports a wide range of skin colors -- warm, neutral, and cool skin tones from very light to very dark, and a bunch of not-normal-skin-colors (green, blue, purple, etc.) But...every single example character in the character-generator-screenshots is light-skinned.
In the other screenshots -- the ones where you actually see characters in action -- skin color is harder to determine; oftentimes characters have enough mask-and-costume that you can't see *any* of their skin, or what little skin they're showing happens to not be facing the 'camera', or they're surrounded by some game-effect that makes it hard to see them at all. But for the ones where I *could* see their skin color -- all light-colored. The handful of green- and blue-skinned heroes were even light green and light blue.
They did a bit better in their "ensemble" shot of thirty heroes -- two heroes with dead-white skin tones, ten with what I consider european peach skin tones, maybe four with darker skin, one with this bizzare greenish-brown color, and the rest showing no skin or whose skin color is obviously-unnatural (purple, orange, blue, magenta). I do think it's relevant to note that the two darker-skinned male heroes showed no skin but the lower halves of their faces, and both of the female darker-skinned heroes were showing a whole lotta thigh. In contrast, the scantily-clad lighter-skinned heroes were fewer and further between, and were equally distributed across gender lines.
It is, in case anybody was wondering, insufficient that they made this engine that supports any skin color you want. I don't accept as an excuse that the superhero genre is racist and they're just being true to the archetypical (white) comic book hero. If you provide a relatively race-blind tool, you spoil it when you only ever show it used for white people. You don't get credit for lip service. You don't get a "get out of being racist free" card for doing only the easy parts. And you don't get to blame your own racism on the genre you chose to create in.
I'm part of the problem: Most of my characters have the same skin tone as I do, and I'm relatively light-skinned. Probably the people who made the screenshots were all white, so their characters have the same skin tone as *they* do. It doesn't excuse me and it doesn't excuse them.
and now, I'm taking my heroes to the tailor to pay for some skin-tone-variation...
This game needs a visit from the liberation league. And maybe a heroes-of-color supergroup.
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