Breaking Marginalized Character Narrative Molds to Write Better, Richer Characters

[Music] hi uh so this is actually going to be a very dense talk it is about 30 minutes it may be 31 minutes so there won't be any time for questions if you want to talk to me afterwards I'll be running over to where the one life left uh podcast is happening and you can come over there and talk to me I will also put my email at the end of the at the end of the talk so thank you for coming out uh I am an artist game designer and I guess most importantly uh the writer at New Challenger and I'm working on a game called treachery and Beatdown City uh but my first job in the games industry was working at Rockstar Games uh I worked in the production department for about 4 and a half years which meant I made a lot of trailers and I knew basically all the writing and cut scenes backwards and forwards I'm also in some games uh I'm in this cut scene uh audio wise I am if it's not really clear I'm the black boxer who has no facial animation uh I am also this guy who's

pretty awesome one of his he's quoted on a red dead fan Wikipedia uh as saying you look into to hell it up that was an interesting role to play I basically got grabbed like whenever they needed kind of like a secondary like black voice actor in things but I also got to survive to the Undead Nightmare which is kind of rare uh I helped I write a lot of stuff I helped write this article I think this is a pretty epic article also Anna anthropy just told me that she's using this article in her class that she's teaching which is pretty amazing and pretty uh like humbling so we're going to kind of jump into things really quick uh when I talk about you know breaking uh molds I actually don't think that these are things set in stone I think they're things that are mostly in people's heads I think it's basically like a lot of well-intentioned ignorance by people who just they just want to do something good but they just might not have enough research or stuff they think that

they're doing a good job when they're probably not so I've been thinking about how to work my way up to this first way to start breaking these molds but it's very important to start with this point the first thing you need to do is and CIS white gender cisgender able-bodied white men as the default in your games uh it's kind of weird right we've all seen this before where we're told that they are the most relatable uh that people that aren't all the above aren't and I've never seen a report where people said that this is true uh so uh now that I dropped some heaviness I just want to have a little quiz for you guys so this is about uh relatability and popularity there is a a 9s Urban sitcom uh starring and named after a well-known comedian he has a few friends and a notable Nemesis uh one friend is a neighbor who comes over and takes food the another friend is bald wears glasses

and has job Tres and in one episode the main character's apartment is robbed and he contemplates leaving this show is very popular for its time slot uh does anybody have any guesses just blur it out Martin is the correct answer I can forgive you for maybe thinking Seinfeld but no um so you know now that we talk about this so a lot of what the stories that we have and the setups can be read multiple ways and it's really up to the creators to fill in the blanks none of the basic setup for Martin or Seinfeld call for anybody in particular so you know we've seen these images a lot often with different configurations of white dudes that sometimes randomly throws the Prince of Persia in there because people again make images that still they don't even know they just assume all the white characters are just in everything and uh it's kind of weird because these characters often play a big helping of generic archetypes right it's like sad depress dad angry War guy uh the guy who

is supposed to be Nathan Drake but with less of a budget and a completely different genre and a much worse script that was written in half the time but hey Nolan North is playing the character I feel uh most these characters aren't that interesting not of themselves and a hell of a lot them look like each other and if we remove characters uh driven by white imperialism like Drake whose Destiny is to steal from cultures and Destroy stuff while doing it uh Max Payne who murders hundreds of Brazilians under orders of other lighter skinned Brazilians and Michael from GTA V who is a rich guy complaining about his life and gets in trouble because his inflated ego tells him he can do whatever he wants all the while dragging a black guy along for the ride you get rid of them you're basically left with this in my opinion of course uh what we have are these three guys who are all made by Japanese developers Frank uh West is a critique of Journalism in a game that is a critique of the US beef industry

uh Francis York Morgan is a really interesting Ode to Twin Peaks and naked snake is a man who is decidedly Anti-Imperialist and hates the government and decides to set up his own military base in Africa so I just want to talk about uh like like none of these characters are interesting by default I'm just going to go back for a second and my argument isn't really to just stop making white protagonists it's just that you need to get rid of that as your default in head you have to really start working really hard to justify why you have to make a dude who's white and if you take those steps to actually really justify why you're doing that then hopefully you will make a character that will be a lot better and won't just start murdering a bunch of brown people just for the heck of it um so I mean you got to really think why is the nihilist often sexist sometimes mildly or overtly racist manipulative grumpy snarky imperialist character relatable to players the lengths that people go to to

make the case for these characters is often very ridiculous so case in point we all remember the Ghostbusters but wasn't there a fourth one there he is so Ernie Hudson was actually interviewed recently I'm going to read you a bit of this interview uh when I originally got the script the character of Winston was amazing and I thought it would be career changing the character came in front came in right at the beginning of the movie and had an elaborate background he was an Air Force Major or something a demolitions guy it was great the night before filming begins however I get this new script and it was shocking the character comes came in at page 68 after the Ghostbusters were established his elaborate background was all gone replaced by me walking in and saying if there's a steady paycheck I'll believe anything you say and so basically he panics he can't sleep he goes and talks to the people he's like what happened and they're like we wanted to give bill muray more stuff to do and what did they

give Bill Murray to do uh he basically is the loser jock lovable sexist TR from the ' 80s he's the worst of the three scientists he doesn't care about his job he tortures a guy with electroshock therapy basically because he wants to sleep with the woman on the right he stalks her uh he basically feigns interest in her because he also wants to sleep with her he goes to her job and waits for her he also goes into her house under false pretenses because he actually doesn't know anything about ghostbusting so he goes to her house doesn't listen to any of her problems and just wants to nail her and then they kiss and have a baby just in time for episode for the second movie and so Ernie Hudson talks about this and he says you know we talk about every man characters in games and this is what Ernie Hudson had to say what people think about Winston well he's sort of an Everyman this is what people say uh he's kind of the guy who helps the audience

understand and then Ernie says I love the character and he's got some great lines but I felt like he was just kind of there and ironically this is what games writers use when talking about why they make these white dudes the main character what the audience sees in Winston is a mostly apolitical shell of a person and every [Music] man now I want to talk about this game talk about the last of us uh people were really happy about Ellie's existence and they should be uh but and they were also very happy with the DLC but I think like what if Ellie was the main character you know instead of grizzled Joe Joel and you know it's really weird because when you know you're Grizzle Joel in just the game mechanics Ellie is an inin invincible character that just runs around with an AI that actually can't kill her so then the whole story of him being a protector doesn't actually work because she just you can watch the AI just like try to hit her and nothing happens but also like Ellie's then the subordinate role in Joel was in the main role but what if Riley was in the main

role and Joel was in the subordinate role now we um like if you were if you were Riley and you were maybe the character that needed to be protected or whatever but you could also give out orders to the person who's supposed to be protecting you and then you have to worry about getting hurt all the while not being a grizzled dude but actually being a queer black girl starring in a game that would be pretty awesome and it actually doesn't take that much work as writers if you were to take this stand on this Grand stage of AAA you would make the games industry better for it uh who better than one of the biggest Studios also right to make that the standard who is more per protected and if they aren't doing it like who can so more steps uh be specific about your characters be detailed and be deliberate so now that we've started with a blank slate for who your default characters are you should work on making

your characters that are unique and very explicit in who they are this might kind of sound obvious but even in a text light game you can create compelling characters by choosing a few explicit character traits and having a few Choice quotes that explain who your character is in general being deliberate is also very important so when I started working on treachery and Beatdown City my goal is to make the fighting game characters that I'd love to see in one so these are my characters Bruce on the left is a black man born of a family who is a millionaire he grew up in the projects his family was good friends with the local Chinese family and got a lot of his sensibilities like his love of anime from that relationship he's always been exceptional in math so he skyrocketed in school and was able to use his instincts in the stock market he loves caare and gundo a lot of his a lot of these details are fueled by people that I know like one of my best friends is Chinese I learned about anime from him uh Lisa to to the right is a Puerto Rican woman who

has always been middle class she's in the police academy uh she's taking after her dad because he kind of really wants her to do that but she just wants to be uh a forensic scientist and she really wants wants to be a MMA champion and she fights in a lot of underground fights that end up sometimes getting broken up by the police ironically uh Brad in the middle is a Texas born man of Royal Spanish and Mexican indigenous descent whose family had to flee Mexico into America therefore they are illegal when he was younger he was an independent wrestler until being called up to the big leagues where and falling out over his family's Heritage made him lose his job and his title and now he works as a community center worker helping the poor he's a wrestler and has a sense is very sensitive about it being called fake which Lisa does often to mess with him but she also really looks up to him so there's you know there's also issues right uh so beyond the heroes that I worked on making the enemies have

a very distinct variety of characteristics of varying genders and racial ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds every character has a one page to describe who they are this helps me not only write their dialogue but know what neighborhoods they should be in what it means to not be in that neighborhood Who their preferred people to hang out with are why would the cops come to help them will the cops fight alongside them it makes some very interesting encounters that leads into the game playay like what happens when a punk is hanging out with a local bar socialite it's been a very monstrous task actually I've been working on this for very long time and I know none of the characters are perfect but the effort to put the effort put in creates very satisfying dialogue in the game overall so now talking about maybe missing out on specifics this is Cole from uh Gears of War and I want to talk about him for a little bit so just bear with me a little bit these next two clips are going to be kind of interesting but So Co train is a main

state of Gears of War and he was based on a character named Terry Tate who was in some rebot commercials and it's an actor playing a football player and he was voiced by it was voiced by this guy Lester Spate and so that sounds kind of cool right they're like being influenced by other media so this is Terry Tate hey Laura hey Paul oh that's not Terry tape hey buddy you know you can't bring that weak ass stuff up in this humpy bumpy you killed it Joe you make some more you know that baby El you at for a long day a long day cuz triple te up in this bit

some people said I was crazy when I brought Terry on board but I'm a firm proponent of Paradigm breaking outside the box thinking and since Terry's been with us our productivity has gone up 46% break was over 15 minutes ago [ __ ] I am an enforcer man don't nothing go down in my house it's 100% hard baby sure I jack a few fools I give them the pain but sometimes it's about intimidation you know it's my games sorry all right I'll see you [Music] later check rer check rer get ready for the pain woman the Pain Train is coming got it's don't hurt me please don't hurt thank you thank you but what's really impressed me is how Terry's become part of the fure family he fits right in here surprise K

happy birthday as profits increase the margin reaches a second break even Point here after which Enterprise falls into loss any questions so now look at uh his video game counterpart Jack plug in and see what you can find we cannot allow the ders to pollute the surface we must bury their infection here the world is right for their hours D Squad is in your house [ __ ] you hear that [ __ ] your grum ass [ __ ] are going down like way down dead down so down you ain't going to even know what's s huh your ass is going to be quiet yeah that's enough of that um so it's interesting right uh so Cliff blazinski is quoted as saying those of you citing Cole as a bad stereotype guys that's just Lester being Lester but if you look at the two characters in 2

minutes uh Terry Tate is developed way more than Cole who took about three games to get to that point uh to get to anywhere plausible of like not just being a cartoonish black person uh like when you look at Terry Tate he's a part of office culture throwing birthday parties he is valued as a team member for his intelligence which can be seen by him performing presentations and yes he tackles people because he has to uphold Civility and often apathetic and thoughtless office World which lacks basic decency most of the time and he works because you wish you were him or you wish somebody like him was around this is why the Comedy Works and this was also not the first version of the commercial they aired one during the Super Bowl which was a lot more tackle heavy so obviously they thought about his character and they wanted to develop him further whereas you know that's about 2 minutes to develop his character where as Cole took two games which is about saying waiting for two full seasons of a TV show it's like you know two 10hour games and so this kind of

bleeds into like Luther with on km Peele uh Obama's anger translator Luther's job is to express the the pent up feelings of the president he is less articulate and jumping and shouting but the skit these behaviors are about are not are who he is as a person they are what he has paid to articulate he is an actor playing an actor this can be seen when he either says something the president didn't mean to say or when he backs off of the actual president in real life this is why this skit works really well because he's a paid actor and then they also went to the length of going in real life to flip the the situation it's pretty interesting so I just want to you know speaking about specifics this is Clementine from The Walking Dead this is her parents she's black no question about it I will be talking about this later so give your character a world view give a character player a world World Views that's really important

because uh it might seem kind of obvious but you know player characters world view should be reflected by the world around them without them having to speak for all people that's also very important this calls back to focusing on being specific Lincoln clay I I I like bits of Mafia 3 I think overall it's pretty decent but I can't get over the fact that he's very apolitical and aside from a small handful of missions where he's like real mad at really overt racism like the KKK he's very in the middle about his feelings I mean I feel like he's basically John Cena uh he his beliefs are hustle loyalty and respect and he won't kill women that's those are his only Scruples in life and this is pretty weird because as a black man in the south in the 60s uh he seems he should be a lot angrier and the fact that he doesn't reminisce enough about you know the war like being in the war that he was just transpired he doesn't have PTSD it's like he forgot everything that's going on he's essentially not a person he's just a shell of the players

to use he's the inventional black man who murders and feels No Remorse which is a big problem see he has a good time right like no PTSD here uh is seemingly unbothered by the current state of the US mostly and he's so happy when he's with these people and I actually really wish there were more scenes about this because uh like in this game they basically uh this is what I would like to just do in the game like that's all I want to do the whole time and I think that's what link that should have been his first thing to do right just go kill all the KKK but the first thing he does is kill a bunch of black people which is kind of weird like he gets a he the thing is go kill the Haitians that's the mission uh which we heard about in another game a long time ago that seemed to spark controversy and now it sparked zero controversy and it's kind of weird because the player doesn't ask a goddamn question about this because he's just a classic puppet for the player to inhabit he's a shell of a black man and then there's the issue where his best friend he's actually really interesting I like

this dude a lot but he's the classic white niist angry dude uh who's the driver of the story there's even like an extra after credits bit with him which is kind of interesting he's basically the main character and that's really weird because if you're making a story about a black dude and then you define him by a white guy that's a little weird also like and speaking about like I don't expect like Lincoln clay to speak for all people that's not my issue with it my issue is that you know Luke Cage on Netflix Stars a guy who like a lot of people like a lot of people who watch the show like but he's actually a pretty conservative dude and he's the hero he doesn't like like young people's culture he think that they're like uncivilized he constantly critiques people and you know a lot of people watching it would probably disagree with his political views but because he's a black dude who reflects bullets and can just fight the cops people like him like Method Man's a fan of him on the show and it's actually one of the most beautiful things I've seen So speaking about this we need more than two more than two not just two

people in of in important roles in a game of marginalized descent like because you know one of the key things is we are not a monolith so there's this show a different world it was amazing show it stars uh it kind of stars over the time this guy Dwayne Wayne he actually starts in the first episode he's in the women's uh dorm room kind of just harassing all the women and it's not a good look but actually what happens 5 seconds after that he he gets thrown out of the women's dorm room and you don't see him for five episodes and the show switches to focus on a group of desparate uh black and white women and their problems and that's pretty interesting because like they the show for the whole even though they open like the shot is actually Dwayne Wayne looking at the camera talking to the camera and he's not the main character and he's actually brought back to run for Mr Tillman in a alone man running in a beauty pageant which uh uh everyone tries to like

Heckle him and uh it's interesting cuz like women are barking at him whistling at him to basically pay him back for all of the sexist comments and add uh Behavior he's had and he owns it and he says I deserve that but also we all need to look at each other cuz we should all stop doing this and the show eventually shifts to him and he uh ends up he's like a math whz he uh got a perfect score on his sat and he uses that as part of his pickup lines and he eventually graduates as top of the class and becomes a game developer who knew so quick story this is Fast and Furious series this is Tes he is a hacker and a technical expert he's been in the series it's up to eight now or whatever next year I love the movies he's been doing it for a while uh this is Roman Pierce Roman Pierce represents toxic masculinity of the group he is also kind of a coward and everyone makes fun of him for it the two of them are very opposed and they along with

everybody else have to go rescue a hacker named Ramsay no one knows who Ramsey is uh we only know that they're on this bus when they rescue Ramsay Ramsay is an attractive black woman and ludicrous just falls in love he's just like wow you heck you're way better than me and everything I just want to get to know you and tyes just wants to augle her and like that's not what hackers look like and T's response is what do hackers look like so basically what we have is you have a very short concise discussion with two black men that has checks and balances and tackles the social norms of hackers and programs what programmers are uh end scene stop murdering us to follow the plot further plot so this is Watch Dogs 2 which I think is interesting it stars a black guy and everyone wants to clap for it I like Marcus I think he's cool but who else is in this game right uh we have dead mouse and a cool lady on the

side who is actually very cool and then here's another key art we add green hoodie dude you know a sign of greatness then we have Rob Zombie added to the group and I kept hearing about this black person on the dead SE team here he is it's actually really hard to find keyart for him because of a lot of things uh he exists basically to walk around in one Mission with Marcus to allow him to have a conversation about racism which is weird because him being used as a standin to do this is racist and then he's dead immediately after talking about racism in Tech the other black the only other black person on the team is killed his death doesn't matter his life didn't matter he is a one-dimensional character basically there to be deos X blacka he is murdered by this Gang This gang is a less than one-dimensional Mexican gang that is basically just be there to be the bad Mexican gang don't do that you can't just write a black character and then just throw every

other minority under the bus so but they really do build up this dude they build up da Punk all the way and you know it's really weird because like he's not that interesting like they just want you to like he's a lonely dude he's a hacker he wears a mask that's basically who he is but they keep putting him in missions and it's like why is he white I don't know like but they keep putting you into these missions so they probably should have just killed him you and so like they would have killed him a guy that you've been spending a lot of time with that would have been awesome but what if they just rewrote him as being like a Mexican guy who's also in Tech and he's talking to you and he's like man I'm a brown person too that's really awesome we're in Tech and he likes this mask because he's really big into Lucha libbre and in Lucha lib you basically wear your mask until you die then you kill that dude that you spent like 10 hours building up and you really care instead of just killing the one dimensional black dude and then you bury him in his mask like

you would a Lucha Luchador like El Santo who's on the left only showed his face once in public and it was right before he died avoid defining your characters by trauma and oppression uh in story I actually this is a bit of a story about me uh I had this problem where I'm writing these characters uh for the game and I'm trying to do something like about New York and it deals with uh fights that come from like wrong-headed conversations occasionally and I defined my characters uh in ways where I kind of made the White characters symbols of gentrification and the black characters and other Brown characters as symbols of you know hood mentality and that basically split them up into like people of different economic statuses and social statuses and that's really bad and it's like if you define Somebody by being poor or being harassed or being Brown and the way people treat them then you're just robbing them of their agency and I was was doing this and I finally sat down and I basically took all the

characters I did a review of all of them I compared them to each other I compared them to the world that I expected them to be in which is fictional futurism and I decided to just stop and change and go in a different direction so every I kind of took parts from everybody and I made them all a little deeper uh so getting deeper uh I wanted to just bring up this show amen it's very interesting show which is about a pastor in Philadelphia and he wants to keep everything in his church firmly under his control and so we learn a lot from this intro like he just gets out of his car plays Double Dutch gives everyone dap on the way in and he's got Swagger and you know the interesting thing is he was actually created by this dude on the right uh Ed Weinberger he's the only son of a Jewish B butcher they are very different people he got his start writing jokes for the comedian Dick Gregory and he would tour with him during the Civil Rights era so he kind of learned a lot and he basically says that working for dick Gregory is why he is successful he has founded numerous

shows co-created numerous shows like taxi and that's what I'm trying to say is that if you want to be great at what you're doing you basically have to work as hard as possible this guy would drive around this dude this was his first job he would do odd jobs for a comedian who was way better than him to learn everything that he could and then he went on to write like a shows about black people and everybody else and also you know I don't want to I don't want to go without about Robert Townsen who's on the back on the side he made Hollywood Shuffle which is an amazing movie about how black people are treated in media so one more quiz uh there's a show about a bunch of friends it's another Urban sitcom uh one of the friends could be called quirky and some of the friends sleep with each other uh this show was also very popular uh any guesses Living Single not friends uh friends was based on Living Single so I mean I guess I

don't have much time so I'm going to just quickly oh yeah I actually have no time so I'm just going to end on this uh don't stubb in Replacements MLK and Malcolm X are not the same as Charles Xavier and Magneto even though Marvel wants to tell you that Magneto is based on Charles on Malcolm X because Magneto can throw an aircraft carrier a th000 miles across the world and blow up an atomic bomb and Malcolm X just wanted people to start treating black people right that was his endgame if you think that this is equal to this then you should stop writing zootopia was a bad movie it used animals to separate people but we're all the same animal if this conversation would be between two foxes not a fox and a rabbit or two rabbits we're not separate we're like black people aren't carnivores and white people aren't vegetarians like that's not the way it works and even the writer about it basically said said that it was supposed to be this Nuance thing and it's not

nuanced at all uh I kind of ran out of time so thank you oh yeah one last thing one last thing all these women are black but they were all played by white people same thing here Neil dman said it was totally cool if someone at the top of a studio is telling you that it's totally cool to put people in digital blackface you need to take a stand about it you might have to quit you might have to like rally you might have to do something you might have to put this person in their office on a different on a different world they like they uh protested just because he was censored on radio if you can do that they're college students you can protest somebody who's running your studio who just decides to dress someone up in digital blackface thank [Applause] you