Three considerations for improving diverse game narratives and characters

gamesindustry.biz:

In the past decade, video games have gotten visibly more diverse than titles with just straight white men as the player character or on the box art. But more diverse-looking games doesn't always mean that narratives have necessarily gotten richer or less problematic, especially when many major studios still consist of predominantly white teams.

Founded in 2018, Sweet Baby Inc. is a Montreal-based narrative development and consultation studio, with credited projects include God of War: Ragnarok, Goodbye Volcano High, as well as recent hits Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Alan Wake 2.

While it can work with developers at any stage of a game's development process, its mission is to collaborate with game developers to tell better and more inclusive stories where representation isn't just on the surface but integral with the design of a game and narrative. That is also something that company co-founder and CEO Kim Belair believes is best done earlier rather than later in a game's development.

"If [a developer] comes to us too late and goes, 'Make this game non-problematic', there's almost nothing we can do about it," she tells GamesIndustry.biz. "It's too late to change a character or what they say, so all you can do is remove, and you just end up in a situation where a character's been made to 100%, and now you're removing that fullness."

Belair's advice to developers doesn't include easy solutions to magic your way out of problematic narratives that are only outwardly diverse, or just to get a 'pass' (although this is something she says some developers have approached the company for). Instead, it comes back to making room for adding genuinely new perspectives, which also means having a more diverse team in the first place.