People of color are more visible in games today than ever before. We’re even seeing many taking center stage, such as Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Or

The gray area of casting for characters of color in games

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2021-05-29 18:30:04

People of color are more visible in games today than ever before. We’re even seeing many taking center stage, such as Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins, Alex Hunter in FIFA 17’s single-player campaign “The Journey,” and Kait Diaz in Gears 5, not to mention the rosters of Overwatch and Apex Legends.

Yet even if that appears to be progress for people of color, it’s not always the case behind the scenes. Making a woman the face of the macho Gears series may be a bold move, but if you go by her last name, Kait is also a Hispanic woman being played by a white actor, Laura Bailey.

It’s far from the first time Bailey has played other races, including a Chinese woman in Binary Domain and, most notably, black mercenary Nadine Ross in Uncharted 4. Similarly, we’ve seen other white actors taking on roles of other ethnicities, such as Troy Baker as Hong Kong-born dictator Pagan Min in Far Cry 4 or Melissa Hutchison as Clementine in Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. Bailey even reprised her role of Nadine in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, alongside Claudia Black who plays Chloe Frazer, an Australian woman with Indian heritage.

Whitewashing is prevalent in all other kinds of media, too, but it’s more ambiguous in games. Rather than facing censure, many of the above performances have even been rewarded with nods from BAFTA and The Game Awards. That gray area precedes games to the animation industry, where actors frequently voice other genders and races, some even done by the same person. In these circumstances, the vocal performance ultimately matters far more than the person’s background.