BioWare's Manveer Heir on Racial Diversity in Video Games
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Like in Fallout 3, a friend of mine, he played an Asian character, and he got at some point some comments about, you know, like "Damn Chinaman" or something like that, and he's like, "Whoa, that's crazy."
MH: Really? Because, yeah, I think I have an Asian character in Fallout 3, so I'll have to check that out. I don't remember that. That's really cool. You can think of fantasy games where if you were the dark elves, you know, the Drow, were always looked upon... They were the black people of the fantasy world, right? And if you played the dark elves, you were treated like garbage by many of the townspeople. So, my only question is... why can't we do that when we're actually talking about real people?
That's the thing that people seem to do to get around the issue. This happens in Mass Effect, or Dragon Age, or whatever is you have these racial distinctions, but they're based on fantasy or aliens and stuff, so it's much easier... It's an easier pill for everyone to swallow because it's like, "Well, I'm not saying this about any person." It's so ambiguous. People are afraid to make any kind of direct statement about anything.
MH: I mean, it is an uncomfortable topic, especially in the U.S., where racial issues are always going to be a hot-button issue, from my perspective -- just on the way the country was founded, right? So I don't think there's ever going to be a solution there, but ignoring the problem doesn't necessarily solve anything. And we're not necessarily trying to solve anything with the video game; we're just trying to make commentary essentially, or make the player reflect in certain ways. So I think it'd be really, really interesting...
While I love plenty of games that use these alien and fantasy characters, I don't even think they go in saying, "I want to make this commentary on this culture." They're just like, "We have these fantasy characters", and once they've made those races or whatever they have, oftentimes, they just start making parallels to what you see in life. It becomes like, "Well, this race is like this race." You know, "This is the Asian race. Let's do it this way." I think it's actually kind of accidental. I'm not really sure. I haven't been a creator of fantasy worlds, but that seems to be the way it always happens to me.
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The lack of racial diversity in games is sort of symptomatic to a greater lack of diversity in game universes, where we don't have as many positive or realistic female characters, or non heterosexual characters, or transgender characters, or things like that. People don't necessarily think about this stuff. Maybe they don't want to put it in because it's not even something they feel is necessary or they consider in their lives at all. It seems like to move forward, we would want to be able to have all subjects open to us.
MH: Right. And I think part of it comes down to most games, I feel like can still be drawn down to the male power fantasy of saving the world effectively. When you do that, there are only certain types of characters that make sense for that, right. You're not going to have an elderly woman save the world. If you did, and you pulled it off and it's awesome, you're amazing.
So, I think when we don't try to do things that are out of our comfort zone, we fall back into comfortable patterns. And like you said, the lack of diversity just in the general industry, at least in North America... I think how to solve that is a much harder and bigger question. I think it's having more minority people in video games recognized.
I don't mean necessarily calling them out because they're a minority. Rather that in general, game creators are not recognized. Besides a handful, people don't really know them. And I only know of a couple that I can think of that aren't usually white males.
There's Amy Hennig at Naughty Dog, and Jade Raymond at Ubi. Those are like the two who I think of when I think of like the non-standard creative director, executive producer-type. I hope that down the road we start promoting our talent more so that someone's coming up to a school, and they can say, "Look, oh, this person has the same kind of interesting ideas that I do. I'd really like to follow that person's path" the same way you do with directors in a film.
I know games are not the same authorial control as a director -- you know, games are made by teams, not individuals. It's not exactly the same. But I think we can promote our talent, not just at the top level, but at the lower levels as well. That gives more visibility to the talent, as well as it gives visibility to people from the outside, on who is making these games.
