The desire for representation in video games is often dismissed as ‘whinging’. Psychologist Jolina explains what this has to do with social identities.
This year, the annual Pride Month in June once again saw the logos of almost every company and game developer draped in the colours of the rainbow. Sometimes for marketing reasons, but sometimes as a sincere symbol, it stands for acceptance of and solidarity with LGBTQIA people. As underrepresented groups of people, such as women and people of colour, gays, lesbians and trans people are now also finding the spotlight as the main protagonists.
However, this is not always met with understanding or even enthusiasm: some voices explicitly want a white, heterosexual cis man as the protagonist in video games and react to deviations as if their favourite toy had been taken away from them. But why is it still psychologically important for game developers to take this step?
The thing with the drawers
In order to understand the mechanisms behind things like representation, diversity and identification with content in video games, we first need to take a brief excursion into social psychology, or more precisely into the theory of social identities.
It’s actually quite simple: people have a tendency to categorise themselves and others according to things such as gender, ethnicity or leisure activities. Even simple preferences such as whether you prefer to play shooters or take on epic battles in JRPGs are a small part of social identity. Everyone is in several categories or groups at the same time or has several social identities. For example, I am a woman, a member of the LGBT community, but also a psychologist and a gamer, among many other categories.
All well and good, if that didn’t influence our interaction behaviour: We feel more connected to people who share the same social identities and feel more distanced from people with whom we share no or only a few social identities. The competitive thinking of ‘us’ and ‘the others’ begins automatically. We automatically judge our group as the better one and the other as the worse one.
Experiments have shown that even banal categories such as blue and red pit us against each other. This can also be seen, for example, in the hate-fuelled discussions about who the best characters and romance options in games are.
When the protagonist plays on the ‘other team’
When people behave negatively towards a certain group of people, it often has something to do with their own social identity. The more important it is for a person to be, for example, white, male or heterosexual, and the fewer other social identities a person has, the more they will distance themselves from other categories.
Accordingly, players in this group would not like it at all if they suddenly had to play Miles Morales as a black teenager with a Latin American cultural background, as in Spider Man, because the character belongs to the ‘other team’ due to their ethnicity and is therefore basically stupid. For most of us, this is not a problem because we do not build our collective social identity on just one pillar such as gender or ethnicity, and we can also find commonalities on other levels or are forced to find them if we have underrepresented social identities.
However, players with less diverse social identities feel ‘robbed’ of their affiliation to the protagonist and see themselves as victims of the diversity regime when they suddenly have to look for commonalities other than ethnicity or gender. How can such hardened fronts be broken down and to what extent do players who do not belong to a minority also benefit from diversity in video games?
The contact hypothesis – can playing together break down prejudices?
It is strange that the people who have the least contact with other groups, such as people of a different ethnicity or sexual orientation, harbour the most prejudices and are more negative towards ‘others’. This is what the well-known social psychologist Allport thought when he formulated the contact hypothesis in his 1954 book ‘The Nature of Prejudice’.
This states that the more positive contact you have with people from other groups, the less prejudice you have towards them. It is important that people perceive each other as equals and discover similarities (e.g. goals, wishes) or work together towards something. And as many studies have later shown, this is true even if you don’t know the ‘other’ person yourself, but only through acquaintances or relatives.
This phenomenon also offers an enormous opportunity for video games: the more we come into contact with social identities that are not congruent with our own, the more we can get to know new perspectives, discover similarities and thus break down prejudices. For example, adult men can also learn what the perspective and life of a teenage girl looks like when they accompany Max in Life is Strange. This gives them the opportunity to broaden their horizons beyond their own social identities and become a more tolerant personality.
But this is not (only) about the average player, but above all about those who otherwise do not feel sufficiently recognised and/or valued in society. For example, what do strong protagonists trigger in female gamers?
Female representation in video games
Basically, protagonists in video games offer a lot of projection and identification space: Who hasn’t wished to be as strong, smart or attractive as the main character? With Lara Croft in Tomb Raider, it was actually clear very early on that women could also play the leading role in video games, even if the audience is still predominantly male. There are now also some female protagonists in AAA titles, such as Horizon Zero Dawn, and you would think that players would be well served by this.
But representation doesn’t always equal representation. Just like in real life, virtual societies also have social hierarchies and structures. It is therefore not only important whether a certain social identity is represented in a video game in terms of its frequency, but also in terms of its equivalence. It is of little use for representation if female characters are reduced to their external charms but systematically have less to contribute in terms of content than their male counterparts.
One’s own understanding of female identity is often only found in video games as a distorted image in the sense of an ideal of female beauty on speed. This makes identification difficult and can even make you feel ‘inadequate’.
Video games as a place for experiences
Although we know that video games depict a fictional, virtual world, the experiences we have here also shape us in reality. As a result, people feel that certain social identities are undesirable and try to hide them (e.g. women in in-game voice chats). Behind the desire for adequate representation in video games is the need to be recognised as equal – both virtually and in reality.
This is why it is often so touching for people from underrepresented groups to finally get the spotlight and recognition they want and deserve: It’s validation that with your cultural background, with your ethnicity, with your gender, your body and your sexual orientation, you are worth just as much as other people with more common social identities or higher conformity to the norm or ideal.
A vivid example of how touching representation in video games can be is the reaction of Puerto Rican streamers Alyek and P1SMx to the representation of Latin American culture in Marvel’s Spider-Man Miles Morales.
Diversity in video games is therefore not ‘marginalised group whining’, but an important development.
It helps to break down prejudices, promote empathy and give courage and affirmation to those who need it most. Video games have the opportunity to be what reality has not yet achieved in some cases: a (slightly) better world.
A version of this text was published first in GamePro.de and translated from German.
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