Article: Windows or Mirrors? Diversity in Video Games

What we see – and don’t see – in media affects how we view reality. Media works can be mirrors that reflect your own experience, windows that give you access to experiences you otherwise wouldn’t have known, or in some cases both. Rosemary Truglio, Senior Vice President of Sesame Workshop, described the diverse cast of Sesame Street as giving children “a mirror for them to see themselves, and (…) a window for them to learn about others.”

It’s important for us to see both mirrors and windows in media. If you never see yourself reflected in media (mirrors) or only see reflections that are very limited or aren’t accurate, it can hurt your self-esteem, make you do worse in school, and limit what you think you can do in life. If you don’t see other groups (windows) or only see inaccurate portrayals of them, it can be easy to believe in stereotypes of them.

Stereotyping is the assumption that all members of a particular group share certain traits or qualities: that all athletes are stupid, for instance, or that men are hopeless at domestic tasks like cooking or doing laundry. Stereotypes can be either positive or negative, but most stereotypes tend to make us feel superior in some way to the person or group being stereotyped.

Stereotypes ignore the uniqueness of people by painting all members of a group with the same brush. Almost any group of people can be stereotyped, but some of the most common stereotypes are based on ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and ability. Stereotypes of a group of people can affect the way society views them and change society’s expectations of them.

On the other hand, seeing yourself or other groups shown accurately in media can have reduce your belief in stereotypes, which can have positive effects on your self-esteem and even make people less likely to be prejudiced. Games are no exception, but because they are interactive we have to think about diversity a bit differently. Whether a video game acts as a mirror or a window (or both), and to which groups, depends on two things:

First, its features, which means what you are allowed to do in the game. Some affordances are always available to you, while others are conditional. For example, in most platforming games like the Super Mario series you can always run and jump, but you can only sometimes throw fireballs (after getting the fire flower.) In many games you can talk to kinds of characters but not others: in World of Warcraft, for instance, you can generally talk to  characters who are on the same side as you, but thoseon the other side seem to speak in gibberish.

Many games let you date or marry other characters (in some, like dating simulations, it’s the whole points of the game.) Whether or not it’s possible to do this with characters of the same gender can have an impact on whether  2SLGBTQINA+ people see themselves reflected in the game, and an even bigger impact by providing a window for heterosexual people to see their experience. For other groups, like trans people, having the ability to play a character who is the gender they identify as, rather than the one they were assigned at birth, can be a tremendously affirming “mirror” and even a step in the process of transitioning.

Another thing that can be just as important is a game’s defaults, which is what you are expected to do or what happen if you don’t actively choose otherwise. For example, some games like Fortnite or Minecraft let you change what your character looks like, but while one in four of these games allow you to choose their race, 60 percent default to a White character unless you actively change it.

For most of video game history, the default characters in games have been White, non-disabled, male, and assumed to be heterosexual or cisgender. As game writer Rico Norwood put it, “historically, whiteness has been regarded as the default, a privilege not afforded to people of color.” In many games, Black characters have only been available as “Player Two” – meaning that you could only play as a Black character if someone else was already playing the White one.

Making the default character a member of an under-represented group can make a game a powerful window. 2020’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is one of the few big-budget games that requires you to play a non-White, character pushing against the idea of Whiteness as the default. Giving players the ability to accurately represent themselves in a game is a big part of providing more authentic mirrors in games.

Nadine Dornieden, who is Black, had this reaction when she saw the customization options in Guild Wars 2:

Unlike film or TV, everything in a video game has to be designed and implemented from scratch. That means making them act as mirrors or widows can be a technical challenge. Ion Hazzikostas, director of the World of Warcraft expansion Shadowlands, explained why the game hadn’t previously offered a diverse range of facial features and hairstyles: “Some of it was technical constraints, going back to the way things were built, and the number of different textures that could be mapped onto a single model from the engine 15 years ago. But those are lines of code that can be changed. And yes, the real question is why didn’t we do it sooner?”