Leave it to the feminists at the lefty online rag Jezebel to find something racist, sexist or some other “ist” about everything and anything – including Pokémon Go - the popular free-to-play, location-based augmented reality game developed by Niantic.
So what’s Jezebel’s beef with the wildly popular game? It only offers limited customization when creating a player – specifically the lack of skin color and hair variations. According to Allya S. King – author of "The Invisible Girls of Pokémon Go" -- “Black girls are often forgotten by the gaming industry, and Pokémon Go is no different.” Except....there are light-brown and medium-brown options:
Pokémon Go offers limited customizations when you create a player. After choosing your gender, you have four options for skin color: a default peach color, a slightly tanned color, a light brown color and a medium brown color. Hair comes with color options, but every style is straight. (A recent update offered more options for clothing and hair colors, but the four skin colors and straight hair remain.)
King then launches into a long diatribe of what it was like being a black girl in the 1970’s and the lack of diversity there was when it came to television characters and toys to play with – especially dolls:
My dad wanted us to see black skin tones in our toys in the hopes of counteracting everything we saw in the whitewashed world. (He also forbade us from watching shows like The Brady Bunch. If the show didn’t have at least a singular regular-occurring Black character, we weren’t allowed to watch it.)
If you’re a Black girl or if you’re raising a Black girl, you know the drill when it comes to animation, illustration, gaming or entertainment as a whole. The representation is nonexistent, poorly executed, or just missing the mark.
King writes about additional criticism of the game – that the game’s PokeStops are in more white neighborhoods than poorer non-white neighborhoods, and is hardly in any rural areas…but the main gripe of King’s piece is her issue with the avatars and why there aren’t more options for skin color and hair type. According to one African-American game developer, “Pokémon Go is a Kanye West-on-George Bush moment in gaming. Nintendo doesn’t care about Black girls.” Forget for a moment that the question was about Niantic, not Nintendo.
Casting aside the wild metaphors about racism and "invisibility," this is about business – and with everything in business, it comes down to numbers. Even King herself admits, “The most recent demographics from the International Game Developers Association cited the number of game developers who identify as Hispanic/Latino or African-American at a low 10 percent.”
And this is a game based on Japanese anime, so the characterization is going to be stylized. As Ian Miles Cheong argued on Heat Street, "It should be noted that it isn’t as if white people only come in a single shade of color, or that anyone in the real world even resembles an anime character with gigantic eyes and an almost non-existent bump for a nose. Furthermore, every player character has the same crude facial structure, height, and body type."
