As a dark-haired kid, it was hard to find media that I felt I could relate to. As I get older, it becomes a little easier to accept this; but it is very much an ongoing struggle.
In video games, this has always been a bit difficult. One of the games that captured my imagination (as most people did) was Super Mario 3 for the NES. I remember that the game excited me but also scared me a little (Why was the sun so angry with me?). His style made sense to my childish mind, but more importantly, it didn’t exclude me as an Asian child. I think this is due to two things. Firstly, the pixel-limited graphics meant that skin colors were difficult to capture, so most characters were generically white. While this has some obvious (Eurocentric) implications, it actually meant that skin color was reduced to a few pixels. Mario was white and European, did it matter? No. Was he really Italian? I guess he was. But the point is that this wasn’t really a depiction of the struggles of an Italian plumber. This was fun. There was a goal to reach, and you just had to do it against the backdrop of some fantastic graphics. Mario and Luigi were such inflated stereotypes that it was hard to take them seriously. When I played as Mario, I was Mario.
Second, as a Japanese game (which I didn’t really think about at the time), all the references were foreign to the west. It wasn’t exactly a “white” world because, culturally speaking, not all the referents were in the West. Tanooki suits? Goombas? It didn’t mean anything to us, it just looked cool and meant that as a brown kid I didn’t feel left out. In fact, I felt very much a part of this fantasy world and was glad to spend hours looking for secrets (and still do!).
Actually, the ultimate irony of video games is that since game graphics are now more “realistic,” they end up reproducing real-world discrimination. I’m much more likely to come across stereotypes of brown people in HD video games than when I was a kid (not to say there weren’t any in the pixel period). This is a real shame, and I think that as the games try to capture the feel of the “Hollywood” movie (for higher profits), they will simply duplicate the same problems that the cinema has been criticized for.
