Hollywood feels most comfortable with black leads in stories of brutalising oppression, such as 12 Years a Slave, Mudbound or Precious. These narratives often achieve mainstream and critical success. Understandably, the games industry uses Hollywood as a source of inspiration, but this means it's telling the same old stories of black men and women as criminals, slaves, sassy sidekicks, servants, bad mothers or prostitutes, if they appear at all.
Last year, Watchdogs 2 and Mafia III were applauded for their portrayals of the black experience. In Watchdogs 2, Marcus gently subverts the familiar formula of a black man in an urban setting because he's a hacker, rather than a gangster: he's more familiar with his laptop than a gun. The game does deal with microaggressions, such as facial recognition technology not recognising black faces, but ultimately Marcus is in a familiar inner-city setting with a hip-hop soundtrack.
Also released in 2017, Mafia III was a departure for the gangster-themed series, featuring the debut of its first black lead, Vietnam veteran Lincoln Clay. Set in the 1960s against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the game doesn't shy away from the racism of the time and has been praised for its writing. Sadly, it still falls back on the familiar story of black struggle.
Even in Assassin's Creed: Origins, the first game in the series to be set in Africa, when the player comes back to the contemporary world rather than the historical Egypt conjured by Animus technology, the people in control are white. Once again, black people are relegated to history. They are not the masters of the technology on which the Assassin's Creed story hinges; they are phantoms from the past.
Occasionally, games do imagine a hi-tech future with black people and women as central figures, in stories that don't focus on their oppression. Both Fullbright's Tacoma and Dontnod's Remember Me managed this, but they are notable exceptions. Coding aliens as black is a trap that games often fall into, a recent example being the Angara in Mass Effect Andromeda. Jaal, the main character amongst the Angara, is played by a black voice actor; we later discover that they are being enslaved by another race.
If the only future for black characters in games is being thinly disguised as the exotic other, or reduced to the role of space slaves, it's really time to move on. Black Panther shows games a way to change the narrative.
