The first game I can honestly say I played to completion, aged thirteen, was Final Fantasy XV. For the uninitiated, FFXV is widely considered one of the weakest instalments of the franchise, which is made up of discrete stories set in a variety of magically populated lands. In fact, one of the only recurrent characters across all the games is a man responsible for vehicle upgrades named Cid. For number fifteen, the developers had an old man version of Cid in the game, but his role as a mechanic was instead occupied by a young woman named Cindy.
It was then that I understood why it was called Final Fantasy.
At thirteen, I didn’t possess the critical thinking skills to fully comprehend the motivations and personal preferences of the men behind a game like Final Fantasy XV. As far as I was concerned, Cindy chose to wear revealing clothing, had a body that was out-of-this-world, and liked to bend over the cars she was fixing at just the right angle so that you could see a little bit more than you perhaps should. But there was a problem. Cindy didn’t like these things, the creators did.
Unlike oversexualisation, racial exclusion must be spotted by absence. In a moment that bordered on hilariously divine, as I searched for particularly lacking games, I found that the Final Fantasy series as a whole had come in for frequent criticism for its lack of POC characters. Just as with the women, I’d dismissed it in my childhood. The protagonists happened to be white, meet other white people, and exist in an area entirely populated by white people. Again, the problem was the same. It wasn’t a coincidence that there were all these white people, it was the creators' decision.
The real world isn’t exclusively inhabited by white men and women whose breasts defy gravity, but the world that these developers, most likely straight white men themselves, envisioned was.
This ‘reality gap’ is thrown into the sharpest relief by games that are forced to reflect our world. When I mentioned the subject of my article to my housemate, his response was immediate - are you going to talk about FIFA? I had only the passing familiarity of someone who grew up playing the couch co-op mode on other people’s PlayStations, but the relevance of the games was obvious. FIFA is real. Real players, real teams, a real football league. Due to it initially being men’s football, it didn’t feature any women until a few years ago, but the racial diversity was almost incomparable. Why? Because it reflects real life, and the obvious real fact that being a good footballer has nothing to do with race.
Similarly, the games of Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology each feature five protagonists, whose movements and expressions are obtained from closely translated motion capture gained by using real actors. By reflecting the proportions of ordinary actors, the female characters’ breasts can be large or small, but not unrealistic. The way they stand, talk, and move are all based on the decisions of real women. The human element is present here in the same way it is in FIFA, and disperses any notion that people might have that developers ignore diversity for ‘realism’ reasons.
Instead, they're breaking down their own games' immersion for the sake of preserving a false narrative about the world and the position of certain groups of people within it.
Thankfully, not all developers do this. The most recent game I played to completion, age 21, was an indie cosmic horror fishing game called Dredge. When you first dock, the Mayor of Greater Marrow suggests that you visit the shipyard and meet the character who will be able to fix your boat. When I clicked the prompt, a woman appeared. She was a woman of colour, sporting body-covering dungarees over a white shirt, stained with grease and frowning at me.
I looked. I saw all of these details, the time taken in this design, the realistic items, stature, and appearance.
My eyes passed right over her. I was too busy thinking: “Shit, I don’t have enough money to fix my boat.”