In the past 5 years, there has been a large 'push' in society for diversity and equality to be recognised and accepted and, as a nation, we are more diverse than ever. Now the question is, how is this diversity and equality represented in video games and how has it adapted and evolved throughout the years - for the better or for the worse?

Players now want video games to feel inclusive and safe to anyone that might want to pick up and play it and game developers can't expect things that might've sold years ago to be up to todays standards of representation. Two of the main representations that players want are race and gender. Both of which I will be discussing as they can't be ignored by the diverse standards of today and are big factors in games that demonstrate representation.

The other thing that should be mentioned is player disability and how the game is accessible to them and how that has progressed over time.

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First of all, gender and race representation in the gaming industry has gotten far better as time has gone on. For example, games like Phasmophobia (released in 2020) and other recent games that have character options instead of character creation have a wide variety of unique and diverse characters. Phasmophobia specifically has a total of 8 characters, 4 of which being White, 2 of which being Asian and the other 2 being Black characters. Of these 8 playable characters, 4 are male and 4 are female, giving an exactly equal split of gender (Player, 2021). It doesn't stop there either, even the unplayable ghost models of Phasmophobia are randomised from a diverse list of possible models. With a 50/50 chance of the ghost being male/female and having an appropriate name, model and voice files for each outcome; and while we are on the subject, age is also represented as its randomly decided between 5 and 90 years old (Ghost, 2021).

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This is a large leap from how gender and race was represented a few years ago, for example, in South Park: The Fractured But Whole (released in 2017) the character customisation options for race were linked to the difficulty of the game and increasing the difficulty of the game would make the players skin darker. As well as this, when first opening the screen where it surprises the player with this difficulty/race slider, the narrator, Cartman, also mentions "This doesn't affect combat, just every other aspect of your whole life." and would supposedly alter character interactions and money earned throughout the game (Winslow, 2021).

As well as this, depending on the gender you choose, it would alter certain conversations through the game but in a way that gives the characters, and therefore the player, a sense of unease. For example, during an interaction with Mr. Mackey, the school counsellor will get uneasy if you choose to be a girl and, while not adding anything constructive or dynamic to the gameplay, would just change dialog to focus more on the players gender than the game itself. He’ll later reference South Park: The Stick of Truth (released in 2014) and say, “So the whole King and Stick of Truth thing, she was actually a girl the entire time?” which develops a stereotype of assuming that the 'hero of the story' is always a male (Romano, 2021).

While this could be seen a social commentary, a lot of the things that the franchise does are simply no longer acceptable by todays standards and if those games were released now, would receive a lot more criticism than it did 5 years ago - overall, showing a more positive and aware view on equality and diversity as time has progressed.

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Lastly on the topic of gender and race, Detroit Become Human (2018) was a social commentary of a game that will test your political, social, and moral beliefs by teetering on the line of uncomfortable for some — themes of slavery, civil rights, child abuse, and racial prejudice are more than just circumstantial during gameplay and heavy loads of interactions as you witness or are a victim of prejudice, violence or command. Detroit Become Human uses the divide between humans and AI to demonstrate a futuristic look on prejudice that could arise, similar to what exists currently between different genders and races.

From the very beginning of the game, when you are sent to collect a package as an android, you are immediately bombarded by hatred, homeless people with signs saying "androids took my job", a religious preacher in the street saying androids are not holy and have no soul and much more. As well as this, after collecting the package and going to head home, you have to walk by a rally of 'pro-human' protestors which stop you and attack you to rough you up for being an android, which is only stopped by police intervention. Finally, after all of that, you take the bus home which has humans and androids segregated with androids having a small area in the back of the bus to stand; all of these things happening on the first quest you play, as one of the three main characters. All of these are clear signs from the very beginning that Detroit Become Human decided to use robots as an allegory for minorities (Kennemer, 2021).

Later in the game, one of your characters, Markus, is the leader of a "deviant" (the human given name for androids who feel human emotion and defy their programming) fuelled movement for "android rights" and depending whether you decide to do things peacefully or violently, you can either take over Detroit violently or raise the publics opinion by doing things peacefully. Either way, police are shown to be extremely brutal from beating up non-compliant androids to shooting them dead while they sit in the roads during a peaceful march. The comparison of androids being killed for peacefully protesting by sitting in the street and the humans that tried to kill an android being given nothing more than a verbal warning shows the prejudice divide in punishment by police between the majority group (in this case humans) and the minority group (in this case androids) in Detroit.

Finally, depending on the choices you picked, deviants that are arrested instead of killed outright are sent to  an "Android Extermination Camp" called a "Recall Center" which strongly resembles a concentration camp and is even called such by some news presenters in the game, for any and all androids where they are stripped of their clothes, identity (losing all features and colour and returning to a basic, grey android figure), and they are systematically killed and destroyed (Seppala, 2021).

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Next, on to disability. Disability representation in video games is incredibly important and while games sometimes have their own ways of presenting it, other games have their more noteworthy examples, such as Wolfenstein II (2017). Wolfenstein II starts the game with a Nazi incursion on a Submarine you are on, heavily wounded and still recovering; not being able to walk. You’re not just wounded, you’re not just weak – you’re actually fully disabled. You end up with a gun and you have to try and escape the incursion while being wheelchair bound, and you’re still able to kill Nazis, in direct opposition to the Nazi idea that being disabled makes you a lesser person. Obviously, this decision is really startling in terms of representing disability in video games. There aren’t many disabled characters generally in video games, and when there are, they're typically not depicted as action heroes (Green, 2021).

And on the topic of awareness and representation during this scene, being wheelchair bound adds a new layer of innovative gameplay and difficulty to the movement and shooting, both of which scaling greatly in difficulty. Aiming is particularly hard as its hard to turn and shoot behind you while also wheeling a chair forward and wheeling the chair in the first place also forces you to shoot one handed while moving. The movement of a wheelchair is different to walking momentum wise as building up speed takes time and gives movement a sense of inertia when trying to change directions as there is resistance and difficulty turning in a wheelchair. As well as this, any form of vertical movement is either impossible, one-way, incredibly slow or incredibly fast to traverse in a wheelchair whether that be upwards stairs, downwards stairs, upwards ramps or downwards ramps - all of which allowing players who have never experienced what its like to try and maneuver a wheelchair be more aware of the difficulty and feel more empathetic towards those who have to be in a wheelchair every day (Wolfenstein II: On Disability, 2021).

However, this section is almost a double-edged sword for Wolfenstein II as after the section, the protagonist gains a futuristic suit that allows him to walk freely for most of the game, only being removed at specific plot points only to be regained later. This almost makes the wheelchair section redundant as recovering from such an injury is portrayed as being much easier and possible than it actually is and could convey the wrong idea to a player.

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And not only is disability important to demonstrate, it is also important to design for as disability in the real world can prohibit people from playing the games in the first place. The most noteworthy of such games that do this well is Far Cry 6 (2021) that excels at allowing less able players to gain the full experience. When first loading up the game you are immediately greeted with a large accessibility options list that makes the game largely accessible. Not only that, but the game has menu narration ON by default that enables visually impaired players to navigate menus right from the start. This menu has options for "Vision, Hearing, Motor, Cognitive, Motion and Colours" which covers a large majority of possible contingencies from colour blindness to motion sickness to being hearing impaired (Boyles, 2021).

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To summarise, representation of gender, race and disability has progressed greatly over the past 5 years, with a few drawbacks overall but definitely a large improvement over how minorities were represented in the past. As well as this, in the future when creating games, I can apply this to my own games by making equal representation of both men and women and races as well as implementing more accessibility options for the impaired so that everyone is able to play and feels comfortable doing so.