Over the past few years, there has been notable improvement to the range of representation in games. Last year alone saw two separate big-budget titles featuring black protagonists, Mafia 3 and Watch Dogs 2-an embarrassment of riches, compared with the last few decades. As we begin to see more characters in games who resemble us and more developers taking the time to think about us, a question worth asking is: How well do games visually represent black people and others with darker skin tones? The clues to begin answering this are situated in the history of film, a medium to which games owe much of their visual aesthetic.
Stretching back to the earliest instances of film photography, capturing darker skin tones has rarely been prioritized or even much considered. When, in the 1980s, Kodak film—which was originally balanced against lighter skin tones—finally modified its film stock to be more sensitive to the brown and red ranges of the spectrum, it was to satisfy furniture manufacturers who complained their wood grain wasn’t showing up.
To this day, many black actors are underlit, even on big-budget movies and TV shows. It’s necessary, if not always adhered to, to adjust your lighting and makeup for actors with different skin tones when they’re in the same scene together. More often than not, it’s creators of color who take on the work that their white colleagues neglect.
Moonlight, which won this year’s Best Picture award after a shocking mix up last weekend, succeeds in part due to director Barry Jenkins’ and cinematographer James Laxton’s deep understanding and care for depicting black actors on the screen. “Whereas many cinematographers play it safe in exposing dark skin tones, especially in harsh light,” writes Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt, “Laxton built his look around pulling rich, beautiful color from the actors’ faces while still executing one of the boldest lighting designs of the year.”
Moonlight takes the stage in an industry that by and large has no idea what to do with its black actors—that constantly under-lights and backgrounds them—and drops a floridly explosive bomb in everyone’s faces. Seeing black actors stunningly lit on screen is both inspiring and painful. Inspiring to be able to see the same faces you see every day at the same level of detail and nuance on a 50-foot screen. Painful to try in vain to call to mind any other movie that made black people look this good. Black skin needn’t be drab, muddy and devoid of detail; that only happens when it is ignored or forced into the same constraints that allow white skin to flourish.
Going from the experience of a film like Moonlight to the majority of games is jarring. It’s been well-covered that video game protagonists tend to be a homogeneously white bunch. Yet for those games that allow you to choose your own skin color—and the still rarer batch which explicitly feature protagonists of color—so many fail to give proper consideration to what should happen once your character’s shade happens to fall on the darker side of the spectrum. Limits in technical scope are often trotted out as an excuse, but as with film, game technology is inextricable from its cultural foundations.
While we celebrate the ways in which games have begun to pay attention to the large sections of its player base who aren’t white, we cannot settle for characters who might vaguely resemble us but who were lazily designed and miss the mark of our intricate and colorful hues, our heavy lips and kinky hair, the celebration of blackness that we deserve but aren’t yet getting. In an effort to further cement the bedrock of this discussion, we reached out to other critics and game developers of color who are actively dealing with the question of lighting darker skin in games. …continue reading on Waypoint