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blackgamers.net/forum

But this is an issue I understand and am also apathetic to a point of. On one hand, I never really paid much mind to race when I played a game…. not really anyway, most of my ilk came from ‘wth is this, why couldn’t this have been a woman lead?’. But, on the other hand, I know and experience how damaging stereotypes can be. For example, when I meet someone I often note some of their auto mental responses. First it’s ‘oh gosh, it’s a black person’, then they notice I am a girl(I’m kind of boyish looking) and go ‘oh snap, it’s a black woman… this is potentially bad because she will Z snap me to the next world and must be Sassy’, then I open my mouth and speak and I can practically see them relax. It’s amazing. Those few reactions come from stereotypes from media. Media means tv, movies, books, and yes video games. If every other black character was a gun toting nut and ‘talked like dis, foo!’, and was a charming buffoon, I promise you that image will stick in some manner. Like when you see a group of black kids you think ‘gangs?’ or ‘up to no good’. I’ll admit I’ve even caught myself thinking it before I caught myself which is pretty darn sad, but that’s the power of the stereotype. To be fair everyone gets stereotyped(Caucasian man is the Everyman that every human is meant to relate to, Asians are either the hot exotic or smart ones, Hispanics I’m sorry to say in most games seem like the other half of Sassy, and women are Boobs or nags).

And that’s why I’m sort of happy for this article. It’s necessary to see everyone, and not just Africans, more frequently out of their roles and or taking up roles as leads. The more we see that the perspective of the main character is essentially the same regardless of nationality, gender, or race the less we’ll mentally associate someone who is not a Caucasian male as ‘other’ or ‘other and it has breasts, too’.

Honestly, this is not something that should be ignored. When I play a game, I play a game where I am not represented. Does that mean it should be forced? No. However, you get to play a game that shares your face, that looks like you. You get to connect more with the character. You may say that you don’t care about race, but you have that option. You don’t have to feel like you’re living as part of a “white world”.

It is as xephoid said. You may say it isn’t a problem, but you don’t live his world (and no, a short story about how you two “are not so different” because you have “experienced” racism worst that most doesn’t count). His story captured how I felt for quite some time. You say that it doesn’t matter, but you never have to feel different everywhere you go. I walk outside, and everyone’s white. I watch TV, everyone’s white (cept that terrible network, BET), I play games, the leads are always white. You will never have to feel ‘out of your element’, as it is always there. Sure, you may have a short feeling about how that is, but imagine that we feel that way everyday.

BTW, there is nothing wrong with being white. At all. You are not ‘the devil’, and it is wonderful that you see past the race. But that doens’t mean that it doesn’t exist, which is what many of the ‘naysayers’ on this article seem to feel.