Black history permeates all facets of our lives—and video games are no exception. From the 8-bit days to the 4k Ray Tracing present, Black video game characters have occupied various positions; from the precarious period of early sports games in the ’70s, which included titles like Heavyweight Champ and the nameless grayscale sprites, to Spider-Man: Miles Morales as the poster child for a new gaming generation today, Black representation has come a long way.
Similar to other mediums, such as film, music, and literature; Black culture has been, and is, integral to grappling with our collective understanding of video game history. People of color have often been portrayed in popular media as stereotypes and tropes that speak to an underlying structure of racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of systemic oppression. As a Black queer gaymer, the only time I ever saw myself on the screen was through character creation, but that’s just cheating in the context of this story.
Video games are complex systems of visual culture that "create and uphold value systems and hierarchies of one constituency"—often the dominant class at the expense of another, says Soraya Murray in her book On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space, published in 2017. In short, they can be racist too.
But the history of the Black video game character isn't that of failure. Just as in reality, Black characters have strived to break outside of their pixelated parameters to present a more autonomous and complex image of what race can be in the world of video games.
Let’s Play Some Ball: The Sports Role
Screenshot: AlamyMost of the earliest depictions of Black and brown characters can be seen in sports titles.
