The History of Latine Characters in Games

[Music] thank you I'm Joe and uh I'm here to talk to you about the history of latinx game characters and then we're going to talk a little bit about representation and we're going to do a little kind of a crash course on representation in video games um thanks for being here I have to remind you I have to do the official stuff which is please silence your phones we are recording this session um and then also there's a there's a form that they're going to send you afterwards for evaluation it's mainly to tell GDC if I did a good job or not and you can be honest it's totally fine I would like to know if I did a good job or not too um so yeah this is welcome to this talk uh my name is Joe tirado as I mentioned earlier I'm the comms and marketing lead at systemaire softworks we make the game astroneer which is a great game as you totally check out it's awesome um I'm a little biased and I'm also the

co-founder of latinx and games and I'm currently the Strategic director at that organization so latinx and games is a start off as a special interest group under the igda um and we were basically just doing advocacy for people like of Latino Latinos in the industry trying to get them jobs and we've kind of now actually turned that into a non-profit organization um that does a lot of other things and we'll talk about that stuff later but let's get to the actual topic at hand okay so let's talk about what we're covering today um I want to apologize in advance we're going to talk about video games that exist out in the world and that means that I might be critical of a game that you worked on and I I wanted to just say obviously I'm not picking on you specifically and I think that one thing I want to acknowledge is that any representation is actually really important whether it's good or maybe it's not as good I know there's probably people in this room who fight really hard to just get the smallest bit of representation into their game and they're fighting all sorts of systems that are preventing them from doing that

so I'm proud of you even though I might be criticizing the stuff you work on um so we're going to be covering uh we're going to start with who are Latinos and I know there's a lot of Latinos in here I see you guys um but we I kind of want to just put this out there because I do feel like there's kind of a dissonance here with people who maybe don't understand how diverse Latinos actually are um and then we're gonna go through and unfortunately brief history of Latino characters in video games it's quite short um I'm gonna stop at certain points during the talk and kind of talk about why those things are bad or good or actually some Milestones that are really important for Latinos but if I was just doing purely the history only we would be done with this talk in like 15 minutes we would just roll right through it it would it wouldn't be that exciting so I have to spice it up a little bit um then we're going to go through some pitfalls that people kind of run into when they're making games or when they're making media uh my background is not only in games I used to work and make a lot of film stuff and TV stuff

and a lot of create a lot of stories and so I have some experience telling other people's stories and trying to figure out ways to make it authentic to them so we're going to talk a little bit about where people kind of slip up there um and then we're also going to talk about what you can do and that means that could be you as a game developer that can be you as a consumer of games that can be you as a person who is adjacent to games who just like is interested in it so we'll talk about that and then we're going to talk about some takeaways and then we'll do a q a i this is an hour session I don't plan on taking an entire hour it's Friday we let's get out of here you know I know everyone's got flights to catch I thank you so much for being here um so we'll do some q a afterwards I actually kind of want to have the discussion because I do think that there's a I cannot represent all Latinos I cannot possibly stand up here and act like I can just speak for every Latino out there so I really want to hear from people about things that they're dealing with um and I already apologized also wow party over there um okay so I want to just get this out of the way I keep saying latinx and I

feel like sometimes that confuses people or they want to understand what that is so let's talk about it let's just get it done now um so what what is Latino what is Latina what is uh why are we using Latina why are we using latinx these are all terms that have kind of popped up in the last couple of years just as the language progresses and for us we use latinx as a way to signify that we are inclusive of all gender identities all across the board um but the main thing that we also kind of that we hammer on is that like that we're not trying to replace anyone's language we're not trying to tell you that you should use certain words we are using certain words because it fits our area and we're not trying to cater to everyone in the world but unfortunately the debate around latinx or around the term latinae or things like that often is in bad faith we deal with a lot of people who are just trying to detract from actual progress happening in the world they don't want trans people to be included in stuff they don't want people

that are not what they consider the default version of Latino to actually exist and so um we get a lot of pushback because people just don't want that to happen so uh if you have more questions about these terms let me know but like I said we use them just to be inclusive and I will use them interchangeably I will say Latino I will say Latina I'll say latinx there's no one it's going to be enforcing the rule of saying these words and anyone who does that is actually probably not doing it in good faith so um yeah it's questionable okay so who is a Latino this is a hard one um but also maybe an easy one I see like I said I see a lot of Latinos in here um but I wanted to do this exercise so I'm gonna put some photos up and if you think a Latino is on the screen I want you to raise your hand okay do we think that's a Latino do we think I see one hand do we think that's a Latino

I see a few hands maybe a dozen hands what about that do we know who that is a couple more hands okay we're going back so what about that okay some hands are going up so these are all Latinos um the first one is secretary mayorkas we're not a big fan of him yeah as as many people know in the Latino Community but he worked pretty well for this exercise because he is what you might call White passing um but he is Latino and actually has a pretty decent story up until he decided to join the government and carry water for the Border Patrol um amarala Negra is a afro-latina singer um Dominican um born in New York but has Dominican roots and uh is really cool really talented was also on a reality show back in the day if anyone remembers that um and then we got Carmelo Anthony I was very surprised by this one actually while I was doing a little bit of research I was like wait Carmelo Anthony's like oh he's Puerto Rican that's amazing that's awesome because

Puerto Rican and Venezuelan born in Brooklyn and then his mom is just black so he has he's a mixed uh afro-latino um and then the last photo they're not celebrities they're just some people that were in an article about Muslims that are in the Latino community of which there are surprisingly many um and I I put all these up here because I want to say that Latinos are not a monolith you can't just like throw one sentence out there that's going to appeal to all Latinos they cover 33 countries they cover different hemispheres they're they're different cultures different religions um different languages even and so if you're doing representation you got to come correct you got to really think about who you're trying to talk to and who the thing that you're making is for um so I'm also doing another exercise I think this one's a fun one I like food um and I'm sure many Latinos in here agree that food is good um so I'm going to use empanadas to illustrate how different cultures can be super different within one you move over

one city and it's like different so this is an empanada people probably recognize it right um I don't think that's an empanada to me that's not what that is to me because I'm Colombian so for me empanadas are made out of corn if you make your empanadas out of flour I'll eat it but I I'll be bummed about that um there's another one that's more Venezuelan style and they got that little twist that's like kind of pretty or whatever other people don't have time for that so they just slam a fork down on it um and then we got what I consider Empanada there's some Colombian empanadas in there um with some like chimichurri sauce so I say all this because you know you might go and hang out with some argentinians and they'll hand you Empanada and it has raisins and and olives in it and that's cool for them you know I'm happy for them that's not really for me um but within Latino culture there there is that disparity and I think it's actually really beautiful thing it's awesome that that everyone has their kind of own stuff but it does mean that uh just I'm

further illustrating this idea that like they're not a monolith they're not a big group of people that just move around together and do all of the same things they are very different they represent a lot of different places a lot of different ideas and so you should be looking at them and and trying to figure out what ways you can be authentic but also not try to appeal to everyone it's just not going to happen um and in fact trying to do that's actually harmful in a lot of cases um and yeah I I wrote down here that like also my Puerto Rican friends y'all put like ham and cheese in your empanadas I don't know what's going on there but so yeah anyway just don't lump us together it's really problematic and we'll talk about that later uh okay so where they come from we talked about this a little bit 33 countries a lot of territories um and two hemispheres they're on a map because you know white supremacy on a map like South America and Central America look comparable to other places on that but they're actually like twice the size of Europe if you actually put them next to each other the actual land mass is much larger and so it it

illustrates this idea of like how ridiculous is it where you just like look at this land mass and say everyone here is the same and they represent the same things because you would not go to Europe and go hey you're from Germany and you must know everything about Poland because you like share a border like those things are completely disparate and they're maybe in some cases a couple hundred miles away from each other so it's a thing to think about when you're talking about Latinos and when you're creating Latino representation because you might go from City to city and it might be different you might run into indigenous people in in certain places that are completely different than like you know the city people so um you should be thinking about that while you're creating stuff and also what's interesting here that people forget about is that like there's countries here that are not considered Latino like Jamaica is right in the middle of there um a place like Haiti is not considered traditionally like Latino but like it's right there and it's right next to all of these other countries that you would assume are and all these other properties Okay cool so now we're going to do this some actual history stuff I'm sorry it took so long I needed to like

get you all ready and Prime you for um the actual game stuff so we're gonna break this down in order of phases to make it a little bit digestible because like I said if I just sat here and ran through a list on an Excel sheet would be over very soon it wouldn't be that exciting um this is an exhaustive list either I'm gonna skip over some characters because they're just not that cool or they're actually kind of up so um we don't really want to highlight those if we don't have to um but I do want to prove a larger point and we'll get to it later okay so we're in 1982 does anyone know what this is okay there's there's some people here there's some there's some old heads here um Atari 2600 so this is like it looks like this um and the reason why I put this up is because this is technically some representation yeah Pele who's like one of the most popular sports people in the entire planet one of the most famous sports players ever in any sport and uh they brought they wheel him out to start promoting their soccer game that looks like literal dots so this isn't really representation because like you're not

playing as Pele but it is cool the fact that they had him out there um they had these really terrible commercials where he came out and he like acted like he was playing and he clearly was not it was very funny um but I only mentioned this because it starts a much bigger trend for representation in games which becomes important later which is just Sports in general um and I know there's probably a lot of Latinos in here whose first experience with characters and video games that they could actually play that they could relate to were in sports games um so actually the first from my research and all the time that I spent looking at this the first actual character of Latino descent that um not playable yet but a character that actually is like a human and is like a real person um would be I would I would go with piston hurricane does anyone know the original Punch Out game this is like 1983. this is before Mike Tyson comes in there um and this game was if anyone knows about the Mike Tyson game it is horribly uh stereotypical it has some insanely bad like racist stereotypes um in fact piss and hurricane was

replaced by piston Honda in the main game who was like got some of the most like terrible Japanese stereotypes you could you'll ever see in a video game um we have all played it and we've all had fun playing it but like holy oh my God so bad um but piston hurricane was the original character in the original arcade game and he's really cool he's afro-latino he's from Cuba he doesn't have any weird stereotypes they're not like they make a play on his last name because it's hurricane and hurricanes or whatever but like they don't go much further than that and I think that's fine maybe that's a pun it's whatever um but other than that like he's afro-latino and his depiction in the game is actually like not super stereotype like he has an afro and that's actually really cool that's actually really interesting that that happened in like 1983. um so not the first playable character but at least one of the important ones in my eyes as far as like representation goes which is pretty cool all right so we're going to continue with sports I'm going to try and run through this fast I it's very similar idea all of a sudden now all these white people are realizing that there's a bunch of brown people who are really talented and that they could sell stuff

and so they start putting them in everything literally everything so RBI Baseball is another Atari game um they got to deal with the MLB players Association to actually put players in the games but not the teams and so he started seeing people like this so Jose Canseco Fernando Valenzuela and then Andres was like a Legend um and it continues this trend where like for lots of marginalized groups you're seeing yourself in the game which is actually kind of cool the characters in the game don't actually represent the people on the screen right there they're just they're just default but they have darker skin but like whatever it's fine um it's Atari but to the larger market unfortunately your value is still tied to like what you can offer sports teams that's it and these people even when they're outside of the game they were still stereotyped they still dealt with a lot of actually like harmful things even though they were like amazing at their Sports um so yeah we got some baseball and then we're gonna move on to probably one of the bigger representation points uh in just this timeline in general and I just want to like point out here that we're like skipping through a lot of time

we're like about to get to 2033 so like we've just jumped through like 15 years basically and had like three characters and there's a couple in there from like fighting games that we skipped but we'll get back to them later um so same thing goes for FIFA this was the first time a Latino was ever depicted on the cover of the FIFA game um Roberto Carlos who's like a legend super cool um but they did this thing and they've been doing it for years where they like put a bunch of people on there and they try to appeal to everyone um but yeah fifos launched in 1993 and they didn't really have players until like around I think 1998 and even then they just didn't put any Latinos in there which is crazy because it's a Latino support in my eyes um and it was a pure soccer Sam and then all these years later it's like literally one of the biggest games on the planet and they realized how they could do that by catering to Latinos so if you start looking at these covers you see Ronaldinho like five times um sorry this not the best resolution on this image but whatever um just and then you see Messi five

times and he's gonna be on there again afterwards and and I'm sure he'll be in next this year's Edition because he's a legend so they're they're taking Latinos and they're trying to do what they can to just like sell all the things they they they they can um but they're not actually necessarily doing them Justice and honestly we can go all day about like FIFA and how they exploit people let's not do that that's just we know we know what's going on there um so there's why is there this dissonance at this point between uh sports players but then also characters and games because they're on the cover like that's actually really cool but in any other game you do not say Latinos you do not see them represented in any way that's meaningful um and it's really weird because now we have to kind of do a little bit of math and I know this is boring but like it's important um 660 million people in Latin America play uh are exist and then 68 of those people play video games so that's a lot of people that's a lot of potential customers for your video games um and I don't want to encourage you to

appropriate culture in order to just like appeal to these people but I just it does mean that like if if you're doing business or you're doing marketing why are you not thinking about this group of people it's pretty insane um and then in the US nearly 20 of of the country actually identifies as Latino is probably higher because we have terrible sense of stuff and they don't even listen Latino on there you have to just yell at them um but they're the second largest cultural group and it's growing and it will continue to grow and I have a feeling it's going to keep bullying up um so yeah like I said we're not we're not advocating for appropriation but uh any business like come on that's a lot of people and if you're probably not talking to them and you probably should um but speaking of appropriation we have to talk about fighting games um I put this image out there because in a previous version of this talk I talk about how like I use Blanca a lot because like he's the only character in Street Fighter that's from South America but like he's a literal Beast he's not representation um and this image is hilarious so sorry

I just wanted to use it um so yeah fighting games unfortunately we're on a really good track when it came to representation we're like oh people are realizing that like Latinos are actually really talented and they have things to offer the world and and they're they're starting to like be in sports games but like I said that other track is just going completely off the rails and we start dealing with um oh this slide's broken sick there we go perfect um we started dealing with very harmful stereotypes so now that people are actually putting characters that have faces and bodies in the game we're not surprised at what they're doing they're hypersexualizing people they're boiling them down to their like bassist form in order to fit into these games so um one thing I want to say though is that like some of these characters are really cool like I love King I think I think it's awesome I played as king and Tekken a lot and so I you shouldn't be ashamed that like the representation isn't the best because we just take what we can get at any point um that's just how we live um but if you're feeling a little bit of Shame about that we just don't it's it's

not helpful um and in in this time frame I do want to say that like I think Japanese people actually do respect fighting styles and the reason why these characters were added is because they actually have really cool fighting styles like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is really awesome and a lot of these characters is like capoeira from like Brazil and so they wanted to put them in to like have some variety of of fighting styles in the game but they don't actually do them any justice beyond that point um angel from King of Fighters like literally their their bio was like drinks tequila and eats raw Cactus and then plays soccer and then fights and like that's nothing that's ridiculous that's crazy um King has a little bit of background they flesh it out later and he has his lore but like unfortunately even with some of the women in this um you're seeing just like super hypersexualized stuff that has nothing to do with like actual real Latinos which is pretty messed up um so I don't think this is like bad on his face but we and we should be pretty proud that some of this stuff is out there but um it's we can do better we can do better than this and uh we can

give them realistic motives we can give them cool backgrounds we can touch on all the really cool culture that uh Latin America has and make their make them cooler um we are not just another character on a screen to select that's we cannot be boiled down to just that and now we've learned a very valuable lesson which is not all representation is created equal and so if we're talking about this time frame mid-2000s or whatever you start to see Latinos in games but like terrible terrible representation um reinforcing awful stereotypes um and just like in real life this the representation is a really nuanced idea it's you know it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people people can disagree about what good representation means and that's okay that's fine that's we like that um but in some cases putting one-dimensional reductive and frankly sometimes like racist characters in your games is actually making things worse so if you're not doing a good job and you don't want to spend the time doing it I would rather you just like not do it at all because it just it hurts people that

reinforcing stereotypes can create an environment where like you're perpetuating harm and like big and small ways and we should talk about some of those um so we're gonna just also do a little pit stop and talk about some pitfalls um of narrative stuff so [Music] um there's some major areas where a lot of narrative kind of falls short um a lot of them reinforce stereotypes and we'll get into that a little bit later um a lot of characters are super one-dimensional we just showed a bunch of fighting characters who were just literally exist to punch stuff and nothing else and like look hot which I guess is fine um and then there's there's just a lack of care when creating this representation so um thing I think I'm going to advocate for later many times is like Hey how do how do you do this in an authentic way and it most likely includes finding actual Latinos and not just like reading a book or something um and there's many reasons for that and we'll talk about that later and then we talked about this already presenting Latinos as a monolith it just it's silly you're you're fooling yourself if you think you can just like

uh create a one-dimensional character or film in your video game and now you now you appeal to Latinos that's that is not marketing that is not going to actually appeal to the people that you want to sell your names to um and it sucks so now that we're now that we're here some of the major areas around Latino characters start to like break down because they start to go just off the rails so we're now we're kind of in the mid-2000s and some of these stereotypes are terrible um you know we some of these characters on the screen are in GTA and Resident Evil and um ones and Dead Rising and they're just like they're just hot or sexy or like criminals or you know in the case of Carlos like he's a womanizer who also like shoots a gun and kills zombies um but these stereotypes can cause real harm in the real world you can you can draw a direct line from sexualized reductive depictions of women in media to actual misogyny that happens in the real world that's a thing that happens every day people see stuff and they mimic it

um yeah it's it's real um and you can make a direct correlation between the ways Latinos are stereotyped in media um to the like higher incarceration rates that they face you know if you're talking about talking about Latinos and saying they're all criminals and drug addicts and and rapists as we've heard from the Cheeto um that's that's going to perpetualize really bad outcomes for people and and it's not their fault um and so if you're creating media that's also like perpetuating that stuff it's terrible um and then you also might be like portraying machismo which is you know like the sort of Macho thing that people talk about um and if you amplify that kind of stuff you're doing real harm to anyone who doesn't actually fit into that gender stereotype um if there's a very narrow definition of what it means to be a man then that means that all the other people who don't fit in that are now in this really weird situation um that's hurtful and can cause real harm in the real world um so just to wrap it up yeah you're contributing real harm in the real world

if you're if you're like perpetuating this stuff um you're supporting the systems of profession that actually perpetuate harm so if you're making uh the people in your game just be drug addicts or drug dealers because they're Latino you are you're you're you're you're in that wheel of of Oppression where you're saying like hey this is all you can do in your life and that and this is all you are um and then there's this really other kind of crazy thing that happens um and it's happened to me I'm sure it's happened to many of you where you need to maybe you feel like you need to just accept some of these stereotypes because you don't want to fight against that machine you none of us are going to take on white supremacy by ourselves and so when someone says like hey this is what you are and this is what I think you are you might just go like yeah all right fine and accept that and then maybe that becomes part of your personality you start telling yourself that like you are that thing and that's really sad that's a really terrible thing I know I've done that with like um or I've seen people do this with like their name you deal with this thing where you're like oh I'm gonna like dumb down my name because I don't want people to like look at me or I don't if I go on a zoom call they're gonna like judge me

and and treat me differently because like my name is actually hard to pronounce or something like that um but in the worst case is accepting these stereotypes or perpetuating them is is yeah it puts you in a situation where like are you gonna fight everyone who like stereotypes you and like get into a big argument about it probably not and then that means you're just like feeling like and getting down on yourself about not being able to do anything about that that's a pretty helpless place to be in um okay so it's not all bad I know we just talked about a bunch of sad stuff um but there's some cool stuff that's happening in 1998 we're talking about Grim fending a lot this is a great game um aside from representation it's just a cool game in general you should definitely play it um I think they remade it recently so you should definitely do that um so this game is really cool because obviously it's made by double fine I slash the LucasArts not really double fine yet um but Tim Sweeney's there doing his thing and the main character is uh this cool dude named Manny Calavera and he's

actually voiced by Tony Plana who is like a real voice actor who's an actual Latino and so you play as this person and you can make the argument this is actually one of the first playable Latinos granted he's a skeleton but he was a Latino when he was alive which is cool um but yeah I think you could make that argument that like this is actually a really nice place to be in where a studio is making a really cool game and they want to delve into this lore that's maybe not just their own and so they bring Latinos on to voice the characters and I read that like Tony and um Maria who does like the uh the Miche voice they were like rewriting stuff and pushing back in the writer's room and saying hey like this doesn't really land like this is gonna sound terrible with my accent it's like don't do this um and I think that's really cool I think that's like a that's that could be a nice sweet spot where you could live where you don't feel like you are um feeling like you have to appeal to everyone but you do have some people around you who can help you make an awesome game and you don't have to just

cater all the time um for his rep for representation in the 90s this is pretty much as good as it gets which is cool but also probably sad um so more pitfalls uh lack of understanding if you don't have Latinos on your team you run the risk of perpetuating those stereotypes that you want to avoid um people maybe know about this image on the left here um kind of a goofy situation that happened where like everyone was like hey is this a Latino and it's like no he's he's not actually he's an afro-italian person which is cool I think he's a great actor but if you're making a game about the Latino struggle in South America about libertad or something like that having a dude who like is not even Latino be the main character is kind of a tough choice for me um I know you can make the creative choice and and they did but like there was definitely some disagreement there um so without Latinos around you stuff like this happens and you're just like oh it'll be fine right he was in that show he was a Latino on that show I I think that works right um but you also lose out on opportunities to make things more authentic if you don't have Latinos it's

pretty messed up so I would you know if you want to make those creative choices you should be prepared to defend them um or not and I don't think they did very well um we'll cover him or the idea of him a little bit later but yeah this is pretty sad that this happened in this basically last year um we're gonna skip through a couple characters here because we're just there's not like not crazy exciting um but they are cool to just mention um and they kind of play into this idea that of the later of some interesting stuff so ding Chavez from Rainbow Six I like him as a character because he just happens to have like I mean he has a Latino name he has a Latino voice actor which is kind of cool but other than that he's just like a member of the Rainbow Six team and that's awesome I actually think that's a really cool representation he's just there he's a really cool member he's a like a main character in the story um he's not a playable he can be playable in some cases but I do think that he's just like there and he's a supporting character that's really awesome um I also just put Carlos's uh Resident Evil glow up here because it's really

nice he's he's just handsome um and the hair is so good and then in the middle there we got GTA so that's we run into the GTA problem that happens around this time we're like oh my goodness they're they're just you know I get why they're doing what they're doing but uh man I mean you can't get any more simple than being like Europe Puerto Rican and you wear a red flag therefore I must kill you basically and they have many characters like that of of all ethnicities of all backgrounds where it's just like hey you're just a target for me to like you know move through and and complete my game um yeah so there's some other cool characters on here uh that's uh what's his name from Killzone which is kind of cool and then yeah there's another GTA character so I just just talking about how like there are some cool things happening but generally it's pretty pretty whack at this point so we're gonna move to the modern era or what I'm calling the modern era of video game characters and these are the kind of kind of ones that we ran through and then maybe some ones that we're going to talk about but we're going to loop back a little bit

um we we've reached this period that lasted like basically 30 years and we've this is kind of all we have to show for it unfortunately um some of these are cool some of these aren't and we'll talk about some of the cooler ones afterwards I I skipped David Vega I'm sorry he's a really great character in Mass Effect but just time you know sorry um but pitfalls uh Latinos are not a monolith we talked about the Empanada problem earlier right there's so many different kinds they cater to so many different people there's no way to actually be representative of all Latinos all the time it's just not real um and and don't burden the people on your teams and ask them to try and represent all those things that's crazy you know if if you're if you have an ERG and you're just throwing people in a room and saying like hey can you help us do this thing like don't do that it's it's not great um it's just me as a as a person I'm already trying to do my job and I'm trying to deal with my own imposter syndrome and my own problems in my own life and then you come to me and say like hey can you help us like do this thing that's not actually your job please don't do this

it's terrible um but there's a cheat code that for a character representation that a lot of people have been using um I like it um and it's to not be very specific so that's going to kind of carry us over to our next character which is Dom from Gears of War so Dom is a Latino coded character but like in the Gears of War Universe they don't have like you don't go to like South America you know you're just like chilling on some Planet that's like got a lot of bad going on a lot of people trying to shoot you um but he's voiced by a Latino and he has some of his characteristics are based in latino-like family and he's looking for his wife and he cares about his kid so like that part's really cool but they don't go much deeper than that and I think that's actually okay I think this why I call it the cheat code is that like there are probably a lot of people in here who's Latino or latinidad is not their entire personality it is one part of their personality that's kind of cool that informs other things but like it's not everything you are and I think that's actually pretty realistic like I'm not only a Latino I do many other

things I like punk music I make art like I do lots of other stuff that has nothing to do with me being a Latino um but they are rude in that thing and so I think Dom is actually a really cool character because he's part of the team he's a main character you know he's got his little like accent which is cool um but like that's it they don't go any deeper than that and actually works in in my opinion um so yeah don't and and on the flip side like I think I it's more of an advice thing is like don't let people just pigeonhole you as what your culture is you are you are an onion that we should want to peel and find all the things about you that are really cool um so yeah your cheat code is like don't be specific you can you can kind of just like Float by um I don't think you do that forever but I do think it's it can work for you okay so the modern era continued so we've reached the end of this time period and now we're gonna get to 2013 which is actually a pretty cool year for Latino characters um there's a little Indie Studio out of Canada uh they're launching a game that's in uh on a PlayStation stuff and

people are excited about it and it's called guacamelee and um I actually gave guacamelee a lot of crap when it first launched I was a game journalist and I was like the the main character's name is Juan awakate like what is this like what's going on what is Canadians talking about um but I found out later that the actual art director is this really cool person in the Mexican Community name Augusto kikano and he's like he's awesome he wrote this article in uh 2018 where he the title of it is I made guacamelee to create a Mexican hero and it was really interesting perspective because he's one Mexican person working on an 11 person team shipping this game and not for nothing if you got a Mexican there who's like that prolific at Art um you can get a pass you know you can do some of the goofy stuff with some Mexican culture and they do some very goofy stuff like Juan avocate I guess his powers from like a goat like it's so crazy um but it's fun like they lean into it really hard and I think they actually did a really good job with it so I just want to read a quote from his article

because I think it's really telling um and and I want to talk about it a little bit afterwards um so he says how can we stop putting migrant children in cages if we don't believe that they deserve heroic roles in video games how can we stop our leaders from calling us rapists if we don't show protagonists feeling the gut punches of being called less than how can we as a society have Latin Americans caring for others when we believe that they will invade our homes when I say hero I don't only mean do-gooders I mean people that through whom we see the world we need this now more than ever a handful of foreign side looking characters is not enough an exotic Temple deep in the jungle is also not enough a badass sidekick with a Hispanic last name is not enough we need more Heroes which the world is seen if we're to be seen as people not constructs or minorities if you want to see any sort of meaningful change soon we need those in power to amplify our voices and not silence them I think it's a great quote it's an awesome article if you download the slides later please read this article it's in The Escapist um and he

has some really interesting perspectives also which I think are important about giving people room in your spaces to be wrong he's the one Mexican on a team who's making a Mexican game and if you are the type of person who's like I'm Gonna Cancel you because you said a thing that like doesn't match the real world or whatever then you're gonna have a really hard time being a creative person on a creative team and so it doesn't mean that you need to like give a pass to everyone who's doing things in bad faith but it does mean that like in any creative area you should be giving people room to like mess up and be wrong and and give them space to actually own up to that thing and he calls that out in a really interesting way because he was probably dealing with a lot of that um so the modern era continued um we've been missing a very important thing throughout all of this entire uh talk so far and that's women um literally I there is not a single player playable character uh that is a Latina up until basically the last 10 years um which is really sad that's terrible um the pro there's a small problem with

this where um as you can kind of see they're kind of fitting into a very similar theme and I don't I don't I don't want to knock any of these characters like I said earlier I think like just having people in these spaces is actually really radical and awesome and like it is groundbreaking um but we can also be critical and we can also see that there's kind of a stereotype that's being built here which is like hey questionable morals and like you're still a criminal but like you're kind of doing some you're doing it for like the right reasons maybe um and that's the kind of thing that like is cool to talk about and it's interesting to kind of face because I do think that like Sombra was one of the first ones that got launched in 2016 and like Sombra was like they did a full story trailer It's featured very heavily an awesome voice actress um and they're not hypersexualized although like I know some of the OverWatch games from after that point got a little Buck Wild but at least not launched they're pretty good um but unfortunately yeah a few years later it seemed like oh oh I guess Latinos are just criminals also as well um and there's a really awesome article

that I love from Natalie Flores who's a writer in the industry now also a PR person so I'm very proud of her um and I think it tells this talks about this more than that better than I can because um in the AAA FPS genre I have to pick between four women who sadly and we're missing one from valorant sorry who seem to make up the only kind of Latina that can currently exist in this space I have to make compromises only able to play as myself with uncomfortable caveats that never let me forget how non-latinx people see me Linux characters in the media are reduced to morally depraved thieves sex objects and dishonest criminals for all the crimes they're made to do the crime of not letting us exist as more than an unimaginative and outdated stereotype that feels like the gravest one of all um it's a great article in rock paper shotgun you should totally read it and it talks about just that problem of being like I want to be really excited about this and maybe I am but like do I feel bad about that and like that kind of hurts me a little bit um so yeah

there's there's that sort of like wave of uh Latina characters which is really awesome but like we don't really see anything beyond that and we haven't seen any major games that really have Latino main characters which is something we're still missing to this day except we'll talk about one later um but there's there's a positive one here that I really like and it's this young man Miles Morales uh this game this idea this whole thing is a pretty radical idea I think if you would have asked me 10 years ago if you'd have an afro-latino in a major AAA title um I would have been like you're insane you're nuts that's crazy um and also especially the level of detail that they went to in order to actually make this real was like insane I I feel like I like ran around the apartment like playing just watching the mom cook for like an hour being like I cannot believe that they like have it individual platinos in the frying like that's insane um and I think this is where things actually start to like pay off a little bit like this team obviously advocated to like really do this right and really take the time

um and I there's a there's a I'm also going to lean on someone else here that like there's this really Illustrated moment that like made me feel a lot of feels um that I think will help you understand why this stuff is really important it's a video is it gonna play late nights working on spider gear all right let's go [Music] what was that all good little spill get it cleaned up real quick all good it's all right man Ito okay I invited a guest tonight can you get the apartment ready oh um maybe put on some music accept the mood aha really your campaign manager on Christmas Eve well tomorrow's rally isn't going to plan itself thanks for getting the apartment ready mijo hello [Music]

so pretty oh my God my grandma has these my grandma has these she actually paints she she you can buy these and you can paint them my grandma repainted all of them so this is a short clip it's obviously a much longer one and she basically spends like an hour just like having being in her feels about this moment and um I remember watching this for the first time on I think it was on Twitter and just being beside myself that like this could happen that that this is a real thing that people could feel um because it does feel quite radical that like this is actually a thing that like they spend a lot of time on and if you if you ever get to play this game and walk around the apartment or walk around the city in the beginning where people are like hanging out on the street um it feels really cool you know as a porter again is like oh my gosh this is really realistic and um it just it just goes to show how much this kind of stuff can actually impact people in a very positive way especially

um when they've had such a drought throughout the years um also you should check out Ali they're a super awesome content creator and um yeah I highly recommend that late nights working oh sorry okay so now we're in the more modern era and there's actually some really we're getting sort of like the hopeful time I I we're done with the negative stuff um life is strange uh to is an incredible title I really liked it and once again we're dealing with characters who are Latino but like that's not the only thing that they are and and it's a great story I I highly suggest you check it out I know we're kind of getting towards the end here um Judy this is an interesting one um in a game where like some of the representation is pretty awful uh Judy actually stands out as a pretty interesting character they are um queer they are a Latina they you have to you can't just like brute force your way into like Romancing them or anything like that you have to actually be a female character in the game um you have to be a woman and I thought that was really cool I think like Judy stands out as like a pretty radical

character that like breaks um a lot of Hort of things I I think there are moments where like she does get sexualized but I do think that it's uh pretty good in a pretty rough game for that kind of thing um and I put up this character this image of my character in Animal Crossing this happened to me where I was like hey I can actually have a fade in a video game and it like looks like me I think that's really cool and I think that's what you get when you have Latinos on your team who are making art who are doing things who are making decisions you are you are ensuring that you're actually going to get representation that actually matches the people that are in the world um and I think that's really really cool um so there's a lot of cool titles like I said um and I love Judy but there was one part that's also been missing in this entire conversation which is games coming out of Latin America um so this is uh imagine a world where a Mexican game developer is creating a title that's steeped in Mesoamerican history and it has a futuristic twist

and it's led by a woman that Game's real it exists it's called Aztec forgotten gods and it's made by this really cool Indie developing team leonzo who's made some actually really cool games out of Mexico as well it's gonna it's kind of a pattern here we're going to talk about some Mexican game developers I think they're doing some really really cool stuff right now um you should check this game out it's on Steam but it's also a Nintendo and it's it has a full cast of characters it's been it's written by um Alexa Ray Correa who's like super really cool really cool and I've never seen that name out loud so I'm sorry if I said it incorrectly um we met last night and I was like oh my God I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about you in this talk and I hope that you see it one day because you're awesome um but yeah this game is really cool and like obviously uh we're not going to talk about like the gameplay or anything like that but just the idea that like there's a Mexican game developer who did something which like they got their game in a Nintendo Direct that's awesome this was like when I first saw this game I was like oh my gosh it's it's straight up from Mexico this is great

um here's another one that's actually at GDC right now um what if there was a Mexican game uh about Mexico like just a documentary game about Mexicans um and Mexico City and it's actually made by Art that's inspired by Mexican muralists like you can play this game today at the show you can go downstairs and it's there um there's so many really cool developers that are making awesome awesome awesome stuff and if you're not paying attention to Latin America not only are you missing really cool games but you're missing really talented people and um I think if you're worried about trying to make accurate representation in your video games it starts here it starts by being inspired by this kind of stuff um I just want to shout out a couple other Mexican devs I know hyper beard is around I know Romeo is an amazing studio uh Mecca Studios is really cool too um there's some really cool stuff people making awesome stuff and they're actually trying to like grow themselves so if you're a person who's like looking for cool games please contact me I will put you in touch with them and they can show you all their cool stuff

okay so now we're getting into sort of the end here we're talking about just like let's wrap this all up into a nice bow so we can have a conversation about it so we need to make more diverse and authentic representation happen and it starts with one major thing in my eyes please hire Latinos I know this sounds easy um it but it's it actually is it's not that hard you can find Latinos everywhere there's a lot of them as we talked about earlier there's literally millions of them and they're all really talented and I'm just saying that I'm going to say across the board they're all really good at their jobs um but no you should be talking to them I think the question I always ask is like the people come to us as an organization for latinx and games and be like hey I don't know how to get candidates and I'm like okay send me an email and I'll send you a spreadsheet of people right now um we do things like job fairs and we do placement and we do mentorships and we we can help you find Latinos that are really talented that will help you make your games better and on top of that they're going to be they're going to have all this other stuff in their brain that like other

people don't have that will help you have just have a better studio um they're going to help you like make sure that your work passes the Vive check which is kind of fun um Latinos and and any marginalized group they're a valuable asset to your team and I guarantee you anyone here who runs a studio you do not have enough Latinos on your team you do not have enough black people on your team you don't have enough marginalized people in general on your teams like I can just say that out loud and um I I hope you can prove me wrong I I doubt you will um but uh one note on this I also just want to say that like it's not enough to just hire some Latinos and I mentioned earlier throw them in a room and be like you're part of my ERG aren't you so great that's also nonsense um Anita sarkising did a really good talk yesterday talking about how Dei can actually make your culture at your company worse if you're not paying attention to it and I suggest you all check that out it'll be in the vault soon I'm sure um so yeah don't just like hire people and be like all right well I've solved a problem now everything's cool it's no please don't that's terrible um so but we need to create to create spaces where people can make mistakes we talked about

this earlier um you're probably if you're a Latino in this room and you're and you work at a studio you're probably dealing with people saying something like wild stuff sometimes and I know it's probably easy to like sit around and be like I'm just you're canceled that's not helpful for anyone involved um obviously there's a there's a threshold there but like I think it's I think it's really important for both sides to be able to be open to like hey you kind of like didn't do this that great and um we should talk about it but like let's make sure it doesn't happen again I think um I I think we're we need to be over this world where like if you don't understand and you don't include every single person in every marginalized group in every conversation that you have that you're like an evil person that's just not real and um I'm I'm we're trying to push back against that a lot even as an organization like we talk about using the word latinx we use it if other people don't we're not judging them it's fine it's all good um so we need to create spaces where people can actually make mistakes because uh people learn from those they actually learn and they actually don't do hopefully not repeat those in the future and then you have a better

outcome which is awesome um and so of course like I mentioned you should be supporting Latin game devs uh they're really talented and really cool but I do have some questions for some of you here um because I do think that like supports can take lots of different forms so if you're sitting here saying like oh I can't hire anyone right now um when was the last time you interviewed a Latino and just gave them an opportunity to like show you their portfolio when was last time you invited Latino game devs to your showcases or your parties or your networking events like are you making space for those people um probably generally not and and I don't think that you need to like sit here and be like we must Reserve five spaces or something but like hey you come talk to me and you come talk to organization I will bring you 10 game developers to your party and we'll have a great time and you'll meet them and network with them and uh yeah we'll bring it for sure um also like when was the last time you went and played games by developers who are not um you like when was the last time you like played some games from some marginalized uh people or from people from other countries you can go do that GDC right

now I just mentioned a game that's down there um I think like I said support can take many different forms and um I really hope that like people think of ways that they can just like so be supportive without just like saying oh there's too much work because there's very small things you can do every day in order to help with this kind of problem um and then yeah support the games that make you feel seen I I think um this is a big one and people kind of forget about this that like people got to make money when they make games so it's not enough to just oh they're waving at me it's not enough to just uh it's not enough to just like make a game and put it out there like you you want to be supporting these developers because I think there's a lot of developers in Latin America and I've talked to some uh this week who are saying I made this game and it was really awesome and I got a lot of experience making it but like I don't have money to make another game I'm I'm done that's it I'm out of the industry and so if we're not supporting these game developers we're creating a situation where they're trying to learn they're trying their best to to make it happen and people aren't supporting them which is pretty messed up um okay I think that's it for me

I could probably go on for like hours on multiple topics that we covered today I try to cover as much as I can but I did want to leave some room for questions for people because I know this is a lot um does anyone have any questions there are mics on either side that you can walk up to sorry I should have primed you for this now you're not everyone's watching you walk oh yes I can yeah the difference with latinx and Latina because I for language reasons I like latiname more but I don't know if I would ever offend anybody by using one or the other so what are your thoughts on those two specifically so Latin is kind of a newer term though that like we've been using specifically for that reason because latinx is like kind of hard to just like say in general um and so it's an optional term that we've just said like hey Latina is like pretty cool and it and it feels like a

bit more authentic to the actual language itself so it's it's kind of a newer thing that we're like testing out a bit um as an organization we just did a town hall on a big survey that like covered a bunch of different um topics like this and and we found that people actually really liked Latina better than latinx um and so we're having discussions about like what things we might want to do in order to like adopt that more widely because it does feel like it's a bit more appealing to just Latinos in general okay thank you yeah no problem thanks for asking any other questions yeah okay I think I covered it all oh there's someone coming yeah hello hi um so uh my name is Lisa I'm indigenous from New Zealand and I did a similar talk about Maori representation so this was really cool um thank you for sharing everything um I I feel like there's a trend um about sort of showing like minority cultures and games where people only pay

attention when it's in a triple A game and I was wondering if you have any thoughts or any kind of advice around leveraging like Indie Games in smaller communities sorry can you repeat the last part of the question I want to get it right no we're all good um if you have any thoughts or kind of uh ways that we can like Leverage smaller kind of communities in my Indie Games yeah yeah I think um so the question is uh talking about like how we can leverage uh smaller communities in order to like put representation out there is that correct yeah um I think it's I I went to a talk earlier this week that talks about how like you can actually um if you're making a game that's actually talking to a very Niche audience there's actually a lot of really cool things that you can do in order to engage with those people and make them advocates for the thing you're doing like there are a ton of people that really like Golf and if you're making a golf game um you can go directly to the people who are really interested in that and really kind of talk to them and engage with them and I think the same thing goes for

like all sorts of different smaller things within video games I think um something that I I forgot to talk about during the talk is like we're also talk like Latino culture is so deep and and it has so many really cool uh lore things that like and you saw in the Aztec game you'll see it in a bunch of other mixing games if you play them um and it feels like a lot not enough people are are like people want to try and make games for literally everyone and it's just not possible in the same way that trying to talk to all Latinos is just like not a possible thing so I think I wouldn't be afraid of trying to like cater to smaller audiences especially if you're an indie title because I do think that a lot of Indie titles in general they try to cater to every single person and then they don't end up actually succeeding at any of those things which is kind of a hard position to be in thank you yeah but thanks for sharing yeah just uh a little insight on how you might approach um having imposter syndrome you or your colleagues uh being in the software

industry for 20 years I've only worked with a handful of Latinos in what I do in my area so just really interested about that yeah so um I deal with this a lot um I I don't I actually didn't work in Game Dev and then I got a job at this company that I'm at now and they um I dealt with it every day of being like do I belong here and like do they make a mistake choosing me um and the thing that I tell a lot of people a lot of Latinos is like hey the thing that you have is actually like pretty valuable like a lot of people look at their Latino culture or their name or their accent as something that's like not a not an asset and I think you should totally look at it as something like that I I think you bring something to the table that a lot of other people could never bring and if you start framing it in that way it's actually quite interesting and actually like quite empowering where you're like hey I'm like pretty special I'm I'm different than other people but in like in a really interesting way so I think I just encourage people to like look at their their those angles as like powerful and awesome um things that you can actually like hang your hat on a little bit so

yeah look oh there we go it was turned down I got confused um so there's kind of conversations we had at least like I've had them a lot in like kind of movies and TVs about like tokenization things like that and the advice you gave of like when in doubt don't be specific I was a little bit confused by that could you kind of retouch on that I think that a lot of people fall into this trap of like um like for me specifically my culture is not like the only thing that I I am and I think that like what ends up happening is people are afraid to actually put Latinos or put other cultures into their games because they're like I need to like hire five Specialists to like make sure that every single thing is like perfectly aligned and like in the example of Dom from Gears of War um he they do him Justice in the sense of like he feels like a Latino person but like they don't they don't have to lean into all that extra stuff in order

to justify him as a as a human and I think that same goes for any of us right like just because I don't have an accent doesn't mean that I'm not Latino and and no one's walking around looking at my Latino ID card being like are you really a Latino like and so I think um I think it's totally fine to like understand that you you want to do something like that like you want to offer a diverse cast of characters or um but you understand also that like the limitations of what you do so maybe not for AAA games but I think for like indie games like um we're just talking about that super hard to like try and cater to every single person but I do think that there is a bit of like a people just become they have this analysis paralysis of like I If I don't make sure that every single thing is right then they just don't do it at all which actually hurts representation in general so yeah because that's help answer your questions it does okay cool hello hi after I stood up I realized I could just Google your organization answer this question myself but I didn't want to sit back down um at latinx gaming do you all do Consulting I know that you know to solve

some of these issues as you're encouraging hire the communities that you're you know writing about or making games about but do you all have resources at latinx and gaming to talk to folks who are making characters that are latinx yes so I didn't include that in my slide deck which is a big oversight actually so thanks for calling that out um we're we're a nonprofit so we don't we wouldn't charge a fee to like actually do it ourselves but we could work totally work with an organization and we have work with organizations and plug them together in order to like actually make that happen so um part of our work is actually just being a platform for connecting people when they need resources and so for something like that we've connected people with game developers from South America who are looking for jobs or for looking for some work and maybe they just finished a game or something and they have some room in order to consult and so um yeah our organization does job stuff we do mentorship we do connecting with people we have that platform that we've like used to bring people together um so yeah we you should definitely reach out um if you're looking for some sort of Consulting I won't be doing it

but we can definitely find you someone that will cool I think that's it thank you so much this has been really fun [Music]