Ninety-Nine Problems and a White Knight ain’t One: Ubisoft’s Uneasy Struggle with Diversity

A few years back, a friend of mine joked that we should start a consulting firm for video games. Our sole objective would be for them to bring us in to see their finished product and let them know how terribly stereotypical their characters were before the game shipped. Two titles in particular spawned this idea. When the much anticipated Mafia II, produced by 2K Czech debuted in 2010, the game was received well enough with some outstanding technical achievements (especially if you played it on the PC). However, any people of color that you encountered (which was few and far between until your character went to prison…*cough*…) were among the worst stereotyped characters I’ve seen in the modern era of gaming. While my eyes are always keen to see how black characters are portrayed, the characterization of Asian characters in the game were just unnaturally brutal. You would’ve thought the game’s dialogue was written in the 30s. In 2011, another big hype sequel Deus Ex Human Evolution dropped players into a large branching narrative based in future Detroit. Unfortunately, no choices you made would let you bypass talking to Letitia, the homeless black woman who is now your informant and “honey child” wise sage. While the offense was not as aggressive as Mafia II’s renderings, it was still a bad look, especially for a game that excelled in almost every other aspect. I bring these up to say two things: One, just like all other forms of media and entertainment, you can find a ton o…