Chen is a 2016 National Critics Institute Fellow at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. His subjects include theater, film, music and inclusion/representation in the arts.īefore arriving at the Chronicle in 2016, he worked for the Indianapolis Star, the Lafayette Journal & Courier, the Needham Times and the Boston Phoenix. He splits his time between critiquing performing arts and reporting on the city's myriad cultures and phenomena. Wei-Huan Chen is theater critic and arts/culture writer for the Houston Chronicle. It's like when an outlaw lighting a cigarette fills a pirate's crypt with orange light. I worry that “Uncharted 17” will have the most impressive waterfalls and landslides ever - and that it'll still be a white man who navigates those landscapes.īookmark Gray Matters. But I worry that in 10 years my answers will not have changed. Next time a friend asks, “Are video games art?” I’ll still point to the usual achievements in storytelling. (A stage taking place in Karachi has Arabic street signs. As the comedian Kumail Nanjiani has pointed out, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” spent three years in development - yet no one bothered to look up which language people in Pakistan use.
That's why I can't wait to play " Firewatch.")īut big companies, with all their resources, don't seem interested. (Independent game companies do a better job with art and narrative. It's also about art and narrative, about making better stories, better characters, richer worlds. Big video game companies, it seems, define progress differently than I do. It’s frustrating to see “Uncharted 4” reach such high pinnacles with the world it creates but at the same time show almost no imagination for its inhabitants. How can this be considered normal? To say these games are tributes to action flicks of the '80s is no excuse. Their gun fodder is the usual mass of Russian, Latin American or African henchmen. How is this still a thing? These days, even Disney princesses can save themselves.īut back to "Uncharted 4": Nathan, Sam, Sully and Elena - our four white protagonists - spend most of their time killing people of color. This outdated archetype ranges from "Super Mario Bros." to "Bioshock Infinite." If you have ten hours, I can try to name every game I know that involves a straight white guy saving a girl. Not surprisingly, those male-dominated games stick to a male-driven script.
(Contrary to the stereotypes, teenage males only make up 17 percent of gamers.) When people in gaming use words like "hero," "protagonist," "generic" and "player," they usually mean "white guy." And that's true even though adult women are the largest demographic for game consumers. "Uncharted 4" is, of course, hardly alone: White male characters dominate blockbuster games. I wish companies saw more possibility in the kinds of people their stories feature. That's three straight white men and one straight white women. But here's the thing: The four protagonists in "Uncharted 4" are Nathan, Sam, Sully and Elena.
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