You're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

The representations of race and culture is different in every game. Race and culture is a part of our everyday lives, we cannot escape it. It is how we live our lives and perceive both ourselves and others. So the question is, how do you make a game that fairly and equally represent race and culture?

In my own opinion, you cant. You can get pretty close, but there will always be something that hasn't been made quite right. For example, when playing Skyrim the player gets to change the character to suit what the player would like the character to look like. This is great as it puts the responsibility of race and culture equality out of the developers hands and into the players. Except right from the start the first character you see is a white male. The developers have decided that the default option is therefore a white male. So what about if the computer randomly generated a character with mixed characteristics for the starting character that could be change therein? The game would have a great start, except when you would come across a character in the game.

when a player is playing a game they take their preconceived notions of race and culture and apply that understanding to the characters in the game. If the player sees a character that doesn't look human yet has a big nose and has a lot of money then some will apply the stereotype of a Jew to that character. here is where we encounter another problem then. How can developers create characters that either will not trigger preconceived notions or if they do they can be completely incidental. Perhaps the games characters should also randomly generate with different features. Is this the answer to a game world that is free from our preconceived notions of race and culture? I believe that although it would be a great step forward it would still not solve the problem. No matter what you do someone will find a flaw in game and will be able to claim that it is racial or culturally offensive.

This of course doesn't mean we don't try. A saying I have always liked is that, if aliens came down to attack humans they would not see different races they would just see humans. Just like when we see a cat, it is a cat no matter the colour. I propose that it is not only games that need to change, but us players as well. We need to stop looking at things and only see colour and instead simply see humans. This is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon so for now we will keep changing the games...