This Wired story isn’t really comics per se, but the author, Chris Kohler, name drops Scott McCloud, so I thought I’d share it with you all, if for no other reason than to underscore how ubiquitous “Understanding Comics” has become. The topic of discussion is race in video games, or the absence specifically referring to Jade, the main character in “Beyond Good and Evil.”
As Scott McCloud famously put it in his non-fiction comic-about-comics Understanding Comics, you want to design your main character to be as abstract as possible, if you want the reader to identify with him/her/it. If you add a whole lot of specific detail to your main character, you are just adding differences between him and the reader. To make the point, McCloud, who narrates Understanding Comics, draws himself in an abstracted manner. For one panel, he draws himself in ultra-realistic, heavily detailed style, asking the reader, “Would you be paying as much attention to me if I looked like this?”
The implication being, no.
So think about what that would mean if Jade was one hundred percent identifiably black, or Asian, or Greek. Again, this has little to nothing to do with racism. It’s just as much to do with skin tone as it has to do with gender, hair color, eye color, height, weight, the size of a nose or the length of a fingernail.
Well, anyway, I thought it was interesting.
February 13th, 2007 at 10:18 am
Jade is also one of the better female lead characters in games. She’s not a ridiculously proportioned doll.
Too bad the game didn’t sell better. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a pretty good game and deserved to do better than it did.
February 13th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Er… why would Jade’s race be a factor? The game world she inhabits is not only multiracial, but multi-species.
February 13th, 2007 at 11:42 am
It’s exactly what McCloud referenced; the ability for a broad audience to identify with a character lessens the more specific thAt character becomes. An “everyman” like Peter Parker is much easier to relate to than an alien from Krypton or an African King, both from technologically superior cultures. It’s part of the reason first-person perspective and RPGs are so popular in video games, because they offer the most immersive experiences.
February 13th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I can personally attest that McCloud’s name comes up often in intelligent games discussion.