What Am I?

It’s not immediately clear where I’m from just by looking at me, speaking to me, or observing me. There’s a few reasons for that.

The Dominican Republic (the D.R.), where my ancestors are from, hardly ever comes up. That is, unless we’re discussing baseball. If it does ever come up outside of hackneyed stereotypes, it’s only ever as a foot note in the story of colonialism. If you remember your remedial World History class, then you know that Christopher Columbus “settled” Hispaniola – now Haiti and the D.R. – for the Spanish Empire. Even the name Santo Domingo, the current capital of the D.R., was named after a Catholic priest.

My mother was born and raised in the D.R. She was adopted, so we can’t be completely sure where her descendants came from. She hasn’t taken any kind of ancestry test, but I suspect that her blood would reveal some European heritage. Her skin is olive and her hair is fine, likely a reflection of white expansion. She immigrated to the States in her late teens with my father, where she immediately had my sister and I. When she got here, she barely spoke any English at all.

My father, also Dominican, was raised in New York. He traveled to the D.R. often and lived there for a time, where he met my mother. His family members are known, and their numbers are considerable. His skin is darker than my mother’s, his hair is curly, and his lips are full. English was his first language, and his Spanish is somewhat labored and imprecise. Even more labored though is his commitment to ethical monogamy. He had one other nuclear family that we knew of and countless other partners that we didn’t.

And then there’s me: I am a 2^nd generation immigrant, who has no ties of consequence to his parents’ country of origin. They bought into the propaganda early on that this was the best country that humans could ever conceive of. My parents believed that what this place had to offer should supersede the cultures that they came from. As a result, they imparted that indoctrination unto me, further alienating me from the Dominican Republic. I’ve visited only a handful of times, and only ever as a kid.

I was born in New York and have come of age in Florida, resulting in my having a very loose emotional connection to either state. I’m naturally suspicious of authority. I was a child raised in poverty. As an adult, I am another one of the hundreds of tugboats crashing into the cliffside that is the American dream, desperately searching for the lighthouse that history’s apparent over-achievers built, with no discernible culture of my own to anchor me.

When Did I First Feel Represented In A Video Game?

Truthfully, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a time when I’ve felt represented in a video game. I generally try not to let that detract from my enjoyment of them, though it’s certainly affected my interpretation of my people. More accurately, it’s led me to not even consider them at all, much the same way that game developers don’t consider them. When I consume media of any kind, I’m looking into the lives of other people. I’m a voyeur, learning about stories that aren’t and could never be mine.

It never used to bother me before. But now, in this new world order that largely seeks to marginalize otherness, it bothers me a great deal. As a kid, I suppose I wouldn’t even have noticed if I saw a version of myself on any screen. I wouldn’t have been looking for myself in my video games, that’s for sure. No, I mostly wanted to escape myself at the time. That’s less true nowadays.

Like so many 90’s era latchkey kids, my television largely raised me. Mama TV introduced me to other hobbies through Digimon, Pokémon, and Yu-gi-oh. She walked me through the birds and the bees with shows like Boy Meets World and Saved by the Bell. And, if we could afford it, Mama would present me with video games, the equivalent of putting ecstasy in my morning milk. Games introduced me to worlds that my young mind could never have imagined on its own. They opened me up to the possibility of having possibilities. Having been raised with limited options in so many ways, video games made me feel an abundance that I’ll forever be grateful for.

But video games also failed me in a lot of ways too. Anyone who’s played games for long enough knows that there’s a fair bit of witchcraft involved in suspending a player’s disbelief. Developers mask their invisible walls with detailed foliage. They sprinkle just enough variety into their side quests to hide the fact that there’s only a few categories of questlines over the course of a 100-hour open world. And the most egregious limitation of all, and especially true during the 90s and 2000s, games are incapable of telling stories outside of the scope of their developer’s limited cultural backgrounds. So, it’s no wonder that I didn’t see myself in my games. Why would I? People like me weren’t in the room when games were being made.

Why Does It Matter?

Representation matters. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There’s something incredibly gratifying about seeing yourself in your favorite mediums. Do you imagine that a kid of color will ever have the notion of dreaming beyond themselves if they never have someone that looks like them reaching the very mountains that they seek to climb? Role models are hard to come by. Kids are more jaded than they’ve ever been. The cat’s out of the bag: we live in a system that perpetually favors one type of person. It’s not even out of malice anymore. It’s the result of years and years of social engineering, and no amount of putting your head in the sand is going to change that. It’s only after people make some noise about it that we start to see changes in a more positive direction.

Games like South of Midnight, set in a fictionalized American Deep South, are a promising result of what it looks like to have developers take into consideration the values of different cultures. But we need more games that represent more people. Most of the greatest video game protagonists, and some of my favorites, are white men. Not because they have better stories than the rest of us, but because those are overwhelmingly the stories that we’re exposed to. They have had a claim to powerful narratives. They’re allowed dimension. They’re allowed to ingratiate and captivate an audience. Theirs are the journeys that have been allowed to have merit. And the more those stories are told, the more they’re going to be consumed, and the less oxygen there’ll be for stories about anyone else. And the cycle continues.

Games were a huge swath of how I spent my time as a kid, and they naturally exerted some influence on my psyche, on how I was raised. I wish we had held games to a higher cultural standard back then. At least then I might have developed some connection that I was lacking in my home life and to my culture. I might have had the hubris to dream bigger.

That’s obviously too high a bar for game developers of yore to have cleared. They were still trying to figure out what piece of plastic to release their games on or how best to utilize a completely new piece of hardware. Not really issues that they have to worry about anymore though.

That begs the question: What exactly is their excuse nowadays?

How About You?

I’d love to hear about a time that you felt represented in your favorite video games, if for no other reason than to live vicariously through you, wherever you might come from.

Did I miss any games that I might have related to in my youth? If so, I’d love to hear about those too.