After completing my video review of the recently released game The Sinking City by Frogwares. I headed straight to Youtube to watch other people’s reviews on the exact same game. As with any game I get assigned to review I’m extremely careful not to consume any opinionated content on that game so as not to influence my take on it. But I’m super eager to see what others have to say in comparison once I’ve solidified my critiques in video form. So I click on IGN’s video since they are probably my most trusted source for news and game reviews and more or less I find myself in agreement with many of their writer John Borba’s points. We felt very similarly about many aspects of the game but I immediately felt an incredible amount of shame because John mentioned something that I purposefully left out.
A large number of the black characters seemed to reuse the same facial models making many of them virtually identical to one another. It was jarring enough for me to take notice of while playing but I, a Black male, made a conscious decision not to address it in my review. While John ,a White male, used the massive sounding board that is IGN’s YouTube channel to comment on it. My shame stems from my reasoning for leaving the critique out; I didn’t want to rock the boat.
I’ve been making video content about games for over 5 years now but only a few months ago I was hired as a reviewer for Gameumentary, a YouTube channel with 27 thousand subscribers and growing, to contribute to their 2 minute reviews section. When I write my reviews they need to be under a certain word count and very concise in order to fit the format; but I can’t blame that constraint for why I cut the issue with black characters. I instead wondered what the backlash could possibly be if a Black guy complained about the Black guys in a video game. I wondered if my editors who review my drafts would suggest I cut the critique, leading to possibly awkward feelings of silencing a racial issue since they are also White males. Would I have felt worse if I didn’t fight to keep it if that were to happen? I never even gave them the chance.
I don’t think omitting it hurt the integrity of my review because I do make mention of other technical aspects and my overall opinion of it comes across the way I wanted. But if not for John’s review which I’m sure the developers at Frogwares would have absolutely watched, maybe they’d have never even realized that something was wrong. And I’m ashamed that as a representative of that minority group I chose to stay quiet about it while someone outside of it didn’t. Granted, John Borba being a White guy does afford him the privilege of not having to think this deeply about this critique before adding it. But at the same time it affords him the privilege to have never even thought to bring it up, so I do commend him for recognizing the issue. But for me, was it my responsibility to do so? I’m going to be thinking about that from now on.
