Ian Bryce Jones's lecture this week brought up ethical and economical implications of the relationship between the amount of content produced by game developers and the amount of content consumed by fans. For Jones, the encouragement of modding communities is an approach developers and publishers can take to prolong the life—and, by extension, profitability—of their games. But the example he gave ofThe Sims' Black modding community and the places the ensuing discussion went were particularly evocative for me, so I just had to look further into the matter.
I've been playing (and watching)The Sims for the better decade of my life. But I never play as myself. Rather, I create new characters imbued with my personality traits, and this way I can identify as the Sims I create, if only by proxy. With each iteration of The Sims, I try again and see if making my likeness feels right, and over the years, I think I've got my Negro nose right, and my lips look okay, but then I get to the hairstyles... and I run into the same shit. Either I get a buzzcut so my Sim's hair is too short to be any hair texture, or I give my Sim a corny, 70's, globe-looking Afro that somehow looks like spray-painted cauliflower. Never mind.
So, no wonder my ears perked at the mention of a Black modding community forThe Sims. I only played Sims on Mac, and so many mods are unfriendly to that, so I never could really get into modding my game: it makes sense that Jones's lecture was the first time I'd heard of this. On a perfunctory search on Black Sims modding community, I came across a 2017 Dazed article by Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff that covered some of the big names in the game, interviewing Ashleigh Nicole Tribble and other notable modders on the topic. Jones explained in his lecture that the major incentive for developers and publishers to encourage modding communities is that fans effectively perform uncompensated labor, what he reluctantly called "playbor"—even though modding a game is a part of the way players choose to play and have fun, it's still essentially uncompensated labor. Brinkhurst-Cuff paraphrases Tribble's thoughts on "playbor," writing: "According to Ashleigh, making custom content requires an 'extreme' amount of graphic design skill and time, but the majority of users give away their content for free because of the moral cause: they believe that it’s important for black people, who for so long have battled to see themselves reflected in the mainstream media and in positions of power, to have representation in the virtual world."
Sure, playing around with code and customizing your game is something that can be enjoyable to players. Building a community around these customizations is social and rewarding just in itself. But if all of this coding and community-building is only done in response to marginalization, is it fair to simply subsume it into our definition of play and call it a day? Just as Tribble noted, Black creatives forgo compensation for the need for representation as a moral cause. Not to be trite, but it's 2018: these issues aren't silent anymore, and developers should be held accountable for their ignorance and complacence. The exploitation of Black labor is certainly nothing new in American history. Tribble's comments highlight greater issues about access to resources that keep Black people from pursuing and being successful in STEM careers. According to the International Game Developers Association, only 3 percent of video game developers are Black, a figure that's only risen by 0.5 percent in the past decade.
I'm just a regular-degular-shmegular player. And I'm allowed to just be that. It's not my job to develop new hairstyles and skin tones and nose shapes into my games. I don't even like computer science. But it is my job to make some noise about this issue, and you're lucky I'm willing to do it for free.
The issue of representation in life sims (especially The Sims) is a really interesting one, and it seems like a pretty gaping hole in a game that sells itself on the diverse set of experiences that you can make the characters live out. I mean, the game has expansions where you can become a vampire and go to space-- and I'm no good at stats, but I think it's more common to be black than a space vampire.
But in thinking a little further about this, I think part of the issue boils down to one of respectful representation. Because games like The Sims, at their core, are "simulators", and rely heavily on procedural generation-- all the way down to…
Jaire, thanks for the grounded and thoughtful post. The Sims' ridiculously stereotyped hairstyles for black avatars make me wonder about the mindset of the game's developers when they were designing this — it's as though the avatars were designed less as convenient avatars for black players and more as roles to be played (pun intended) by non-white (and if we're being real here, probably specifically white) actors. So in a way similar to how memes of black people have been used in racial ways, the Sims' sort of superficial impersonation could be disturbingly reminiscent of blackface, or at least the exoticization of blackness ("oh fun, I can be a black person now!"), as well.
But also, since you've brought up…