From Darkly Grizzled to Black Male Hero: Reconsidering Gaming Protagonists

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the cliché of the grizzled, brown-haired hero, wondering just what it is that keeps them at the top of the game-protagonist heap, and what encourages designers to keep on designing them. I’ve been thinking about these men, so similar, and about Lee Everett of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Lee is a complicated character to place among game protagonists. He’s a father figure in a game era thick with them, and he’s not just a strong character but an unquestionable hero; he may have his moments of moral ambiguity, and it’s possible for the player to make them even more difficult, but no matter what, he pushes himself and everyone around him, keeping the group going until there is no group, and keeping his charge alive and safe until his story ends. Lee’s not a brooding hero; a former professor, he’s a smart hero, and a capable one, and he’s one of the best parts of the series.

He’s also a criminal, convicted of murder in what seems to have been a crime of passion; when the game opens, he’s on his way to prison, a detail that colors our first interaction with him and serves as the underpinning of some other key moments in his episodes. I remember sighing at this initially—and still, sometimes I wonder if there wasn’t another way to accomplish the development of Lee without framing his backstory around murder—and thinking, of course. We get a black male hero, but of course he’s a criminal. Are there any other kinds of black men in fiction? It seems to be prison or the military or both. But Lee’s story breaks away from the most common stereotypes immediately. He’s no trope; this is a nuanced, complex individual, and while his status as criminal is ripe for analysis, it isn’t the central question here. That question is: is Lee a great character? Yes, absolutely. One of the best black protagonists in games? Yes. But he also doesn’t have a lot of competition.

It’s easier now than it once was to find a game with a nonwhite or non-male protagonist, or a game that allows the player to design their own identity, but even so, black men are often relegated to side roles. Supporting characters, friends, mentors or allies – this is where you’ll find the highest concentration of black men, outside sports games, at least. Back in 2009, the virtual census of video games conducted by Dmitri Williams, Nicole Martins, and others, found that black characters are present enough to create realistic worlds, but that was the broadest of measures – literally, the percentage of black characters in some capacity in games was comparable to the presence of African Americans in the 2000 U.S. Census. The researchers noted that “outside of sports games, the representation of African Americans drops precipitously, with many of the remaining featured as gangsters and street people in Grand Theft Auto and 50 Cent Bulletproof.” Representation in games is more than a matter of numbers, but rather a confluence of multiple factors, and the reality is that games, and particularly game heroes, are white, so white, in fact, and so similar, that their sameness has inspired memes and jokes by the dozens.

So the question, then, is why. While demographic research exists reflecting who buys games, across ages and genders, a lot of factors are not as frequently measured when it comes to categorizing actual players in terms of ethnicity and other forms of identity. We know games are a powerful medium, continually growing in popularity, and it stands to reason, based on the research we do have, that not all of those players are white males. Perhaps not even a majority of them. So why the continued proliferation of white male characters?

Or, if we’re going to take the discussion away from numbers, how are stories affected, or not, by the ubiquitous white male protagonist? After our consideration of Lee Everett, let’s look at another protagonist cast in the role of father figure in a post-apocalyptic narrative: Joel, from The Last of Us. Joel loses his beloved daughter in the initial zombie-like outbreak and, twenty years later, is tasked with escorting another young girl, Ellie, across the dangerous landscape of a destroyed America. The Last of Us has been described as good example of gaming diversity by some, with several black characters in important roles, and nuanced presentation of queer characters. Joel, however, is white, brown-haired, with an unshaven face—all the characteristics so common among game protagonists.

Looking back now, I wonder: what changes in this game if Joel is black? Hispanic? After all, he’s from Texas. That could have easily fit. But would the story be affected by shifting Joel’s race? Joel, who has already suffered through great loss, might have been impacted by also having been a racial minority, particularly if racist attitudes persisted through the apocalypse, though Ellie, born after the outbreak and a product of a post-apocalyptic society, may not have held the same attitudes about race as contemporary Americans.

But we don’t know. We don’t see enough of society in the main narrative of The Last of Us, such as it is, though life seems harsh and hard. In The Walking Dead, which takes place at the beginning of the outbreak, however, we are privy to developing post-apocalyptic attitudes, and one of the strengths of that story is that the narrative engages with Lee’s race. The writers do not shy away from demonstrating, rightfully, that the white people around Lee have some racist tendencies, with remarks about his “urban” qualities. While there was potential for more engagement with race in the story, particularly later as the second season developed, the characters were busy surviving. There was a lot going on. Zombie narratives, particularly in film, have often famously incorporated elements of race, in foreground or in background, that have served to enrich the story, deepening ties or conflict between characters, and showing us something about our expectations, as with The Walking Dead.

Would The Last of Us have been able to engage with race in that way? So much of the game is spent with Joel and Ellie alone, or with people who know Joel, that there may have been little room to explore such a dynamic. Two of the friendly strangers encountered at one point, Sam and Henry, are themselves black, and race is no issue there; everyone is surviving as best they can in an unforgiving world. But the fact that it isn’t an issue is what leaves me continually asking: why couldn’t Joel have been black? Why not Joel and Ellie? Would the game have been irrevocably changed if they had been nonwhite characters? While just essentially changing skin tones can lead to its own set of problems, if race has primarily fallen away as an issue in that world, then why not? And if nothing would change, what does that tell us about the potential for these stories and the ethnicity of protagonists, and how they might open up? Just as with The Walking Dead, Joel’s story in The Last of Us has redemptive elements; complicating that further might serve to deepen the narrative, challenging expectations not only of other characters within the story, but our own, as players, potentially resulting in a more affecting experience.

But perhaps another of developer Naughty Dog’s franchises poses a better opportunity for this thought experiment: the Uncharted games, starring Nathan Drake. Nathan Drake is the very spirit of the typical white male protagonist, an everyman treasure hunter with a ready quip and smile. In interviews, it’s been said Drake is seen as an amalgam of men like Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly, portrayed by Nathan Fillion, and Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Indiana Jones, men whom we grew up watching. These men are innovative problem solvers and gruff, capable killers; they always have a joke at the ready, either before or after drawing a weapon. But these men, and a dozen others, have been fronting action movies since the action movie existed, and if they aren’t like Harrison Ford or maybe Bruce Willis, they’re Nicholas Cage and Matt Damon, Jason Statham and Robert Downey, Jr., or Mark Wahlberg, Chris Pine, or maybe Shia Labeouf. Pierce Brosnan. Chris Evans and Hugh Jackman. They’ve got brown hair and similar bodies, and sometimes a fair layer of five o’clock shadow. If you prefer your action dudes with lighter hair, you can always pick someone like Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt, or Daniel Craig. Take any of these action heroes, or all of them, throw in a little Lara Croft, add a coyly half-tucked shirt, and you’ve got Nathan Drake.

While these aren’t the only action stars in the world, they’ve headlined a long list of films. They’ve dropped hundreds of one-liners, and hundreds more bad guys. We’ve seen all their movies, even the boring, badly acted movies that still managed wide release. Did we need to birth them anew, to relive those adventures one last time?

Dwayne Johnson delivers a great one-liner, after all. Idris Elba could read a grocery list and many of us would listen, nodding along (yes, milk, mmhmm). Will Smith has built a career on his ability to lighten up even the darkest moments. Vin Diesel. Wesley Snipes. Maybe not as iconic for some as Harrison Ford, but not everyone gets to live forever as Han Solo and Indiana Jones. But a game action hero modeled after any of them, all of them? Sounds great. What do we lose?

Maybe you’re thinking… but if Nathan Drake is descended from Sir Francis Drake, wouldn’t he be white no matter what, and the whole game falls apart if we play what-if and consider a nonwhite Nathan Drake? Well, that angle is complicated enough in the game world, but out here, many people have ancestors across races. A black Drake could be essentially identical to the scruffy, brown-haired Drake we’ve got now.

But perhaps you’re thinking, wait! Nathan Drake is Colombian, right? This idea has been bandied about since we learned Drake was in Colombia at 15, but in appearances and presentation, he seems white, a fact seemingly confirmed by the slow-moving film adaptation of the franchise, and the men bandied about, officially and unofficially, for the titular role. All have been white men. But even if we grant that Drake might be Colombian, there’s nothing in his character that supports that, and even gamers who crave Hispanic heroes have rejected Drake as representative. No matter how much we talk about being “post-racial,” we are certainly not to the point at which a character’s heritage and ethnicity doesn’t have the possibility to mean a great deal to groups they represent. There are legions of gamers looking for themselves inside games, and finding instead only more white men.

Nathan Drake is a much-discussed character, particularly for his interactions with people of color (and by interactions, here I often mean violent interactions), and for his aw-shucks immortality, but it’s the latter that makes him an interesting candidate for a race swap. Imagine, for a moment, a guy who’s got the whole world in his pocket. A guy for whom everything is going to work out, action-rolling his way through endless adventure… and he’s a black man. It would be as exciting as all the discussions around potential black actors for James Bond, and like those discussions, could help open up our ideas of the potential of the action hero, and what that potential might look like. Drake can be read many ways: as a little thoughtless and a lot lucky, as determined, as confident, as plucky and possibly even abrasive. He’s an extended wink and nod to male power, and putting that into the hands of a nonwhite character might have revolutionized the game industry. Though would that further complicate the criticism of Drake mowing down people of color in his various adventures, or merely change the tenor of those discussions? Or would a top-down change of game narrative be necessary if the stories were structured around a hero of a different ethnicity?

Naughty Dog doesn’t present the only opportunities for considerations of race-swapping male protagonists, though; Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series presents another excellent example in Desmond Miles. Miles is tagged by some as nominally white with mixed ancestry, by others as primarily Italian-American, and the website TV Tropes includes him on the page for characters who are “ambiguously brown,” though the explanation merely says he’s not clearly white or nonwhite at first glance, as part of that mixed ancestry that serves as foundation for major aspects of the franchise. Desmond Miles’s heritage allows for a variety of game stories within the franchise. But for all that, he’s awfully white-washed, from presentation to background. Would a darker-skinned Desmond Miles have changed the game significantly? His ancestry need not have been altered significantly, or at all, but merely presented differently.

It’s too late, of course, for Drake, and for Miles; they are who they are. We look instead now to the future, to the next big thing. To the next franchise anchor, the next brooding man, or funny one, in the spotlight. To development teams planning such games, and such characters, I say: consider that no matter what you do with him, no matter how you build him, a white male protagonist cast in the same cloth as so many games that have come before, and so many films that have come before that, does nothing to advance the industry. No matter how special your grizzled, brown-haired everyman is, how unique he isn’t, how special his role in saving the day, or the world, or the heist, he’s been done, and maybe now it’s time to do something else.