![]() It's hard for me to even praise Nintendo for including it now when I, and so many others, needed it years ago. My villager can be me now, and I love that, but it took so damn long. It's really rare for me to see my hairstyle in games, but when I created my villager, he had the same cut and the little dude almost pulled it off as well as me. There is a wide range of skin tones and hair types selectable from the start. ![]() New character creation options in Animal Crossing: New Horizons mean it's possible to create villagers that are much more representative of the players who make them.Īnimal Crossing: New Horizons finally gives the players their blackness for the first time in a main Animal Crossing game. It’s evident that we are out here, yet somehow, none of this is truly reflective in games' racial representation. One key thing the study found is that 83% of black teens play games, while 71% of white teens play games. Racial representation in games isn’t a topic that gets studied frequently, but there is a 2015 study from Pew Research Center that takes a look at the people behind the controller. Black people are killing it in the gaming cosplay scene, non-binary black legends like SonicFox continue to rinse people in the competitive fighting world, and groups like Black Girl Gamers have formed to help showcase black women in gaming. I don't know who needs to hear this, but black people play video games. They felt like a band-aid for a situation Nintendo didn’t properly deal with, a weak attempt to pacify an entire crowd that was fed up with fighting to be seen in a medium that doesn't respect them. Masks stuck out like a sore thumb among the Animal Crossing world’s cute aesthetic. New Leaf was eventually patched to match skin tone, but the whole idea of the masks was at odds with the rest of New Leaf. You’d literally just be wearing an uncanny black Mii face on your character's face, leaving the rest of your body pale. But when they were first added to New Leaf, the masks didn’t even properly adjust Animal Crossing characters' skin tone. Six months after launch, an item called a "Mii Mask" was added to the game that gave the player the ability to look like their customized Mii characters. ![]() The audience was quite vocal, but Nintendo never responded to anyone's comments, acknowledged the issue, or made a public statement about it. It spurred people to write out their thoughts on race in games, and players were even tweeting directly at Nintendo to express their frustration. Can your character have dark skin?" popped up as others wondered at the lack of skin tone and hair options. Many forum posts with titles like "Can I be black in this game?" or "So. The only way you could make your skin darker was through a convoluted temporary tanning mechanic that had to be used on an in-game day between July 16 to September 15, during a morning that had a clear sky. The wackest part was that the options for darker skin tones were in the game, but you couldn't access them from the start. I headed straight online to figure out if I had just missed out on an option, but I hadn't. It was beyond alienating out of all the things that could have been excluded, why those things? For a while, the only way to create a character with a darker skin tone in Animal Crossing: New Leaf was to use a tanning mechanic. A game all about freedom and customization refused to let me be me. There were no options to have black skin colour or any black hairstyles. I was so incredibly excited when I picked it up, but that feeling dwindled fast. You choose the colour and style of your clothes and the location and architecture of your dream house, and since there are no pressing time constraints like other social simulators, you even choose what you do all day, every day. ![]() Self-expression is the core element of ACNL it's a feature embedded into every aspect of the game. Now Playing: How Animal Crossing Came From One Of Nintendo's Biggest Failures By clicking 'enter', you agree to GameSpot's
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