​Steps in the right direction

Run a Google image search for “diversity in video games,” and the first result you’re likely to get is a collage of several 20-30 year old white guys, usually with a little scruff on their face.

From the Assassin’s Creed to the Call of Duty, there’s a lot of homogenization among AAA video game protagonists. Female characters, when they appear, are often in need of saving rather than taking center stage and saving the world themselves. None of this, of course, is even mentioning gaps within race, age, religion, or sexual orientation.

People like to be see a little part of themselves in the games they play, and when a lot of the mainstream is looking so samey, it’s hard to appeal to everyone. My solution, as ever, is to look at places besides the mainstream. Or at least, look away from the usual mainstream suspects.

Plenty of games are being made by developers other than industry giants like Ubisoft and Activision, that push the lines of character background past the point of the unshorn straight Caucasian everyman. Look outside the widely pushed titles, and you can find that things aren’t completely hopeless

.Blizzard Entertainment, while far from being a fringe company, is probably the most recent example in video games of a developer making a push for diversity among characters. The multiplayer shooter Overwatch features a global organization of heroes fighting to maintain peace, and features a cast hailing not only from the United States and Europe, but also from Russia, Brazil, and Korea.

The most recent additions to Overwatch’s roster are the dangerously proficient hacker, Sombra, and the veteran sniper Ana Amari, from Mexico and Egypt, respectively.

Ana in particular covers new ground. She’s 60 years old, one of the founding members of Overwatch, and she keeps a tally of every life she takes from afar. It’s really rare to see older individuals, especially older women, taking the stage in games. Ana moves as capably across the battlefield as her fellow heroes, but I feel like the character’s experience could offer a unique point of view to the stories Blizzard tells outside of the game.

Another game featuring an older character, and indeed one that shows his age, is Campo Santo’s Firewatch. In this story-driven adventure game, players take on the role of a man named Henry, who, after things take a turn for the worst with his ailing wife, retreats to the Shoshone National Forest to work as a fire lookout.

Henry is middle-aged, far from a supersoldier and far from infallible. He’s made mistakes. He’s not the most physically fit, and he’s not an expert at the new job. If anything, Henry’s failings only help to ground him as a character so that, regardless of who’s playing, anyone can find something to identify with in Firewatch.

Outside of the realm of video games, Wizards of the Coast has recently made great steps towards representation in their trading card game, Magic: The Gathering. In January of 2015, one of the cards featured Magic’s first male-to-female trans character. Alesha Who Smiles at Death comes from Tarkir, where warrior clans struggle against flights of powerful dragons. Members of Alesha’s clan were nameless until they could earn their names through combat. Alesha chose her grandmother’s name to solidify her identity as a woman.

Since the appearance of Alesha in Magic, Wizards has been making other strides towards varying its characters, most recently in the form of the first homosexual couple to appear on a card. Kynaios and Tiro hail from the Ancient Greek-inspired world of Theros. Together, they liberated their city-state of Meletis from its former tyrant and rose to become noble kings themselves.

That all said, while there has been an increase in diversity among characters in games, there are still risks. One thing developers should be careful of is falling into tokenism. These characters shouldn’t exist just so the company can check a box.

Once the effort is made to include characters of unique backgrounds, creators should keep pushing for more. That way, there’s even more opportunity for unique stories.

To some, it doesn’t really matter what the characters look like or who they love. Some people just want to play the game. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important to see new ideas explored. Thankfully, I think there are many instances where the right steps are being taken, if one is willing to look. Hopefully, in time, these new perspectives will become even easier to discover.