Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Hot on the heels of ASUS' Twitter ad disaster and nearing the anniversary of the ultra-condescending Xbox One form email (which I prepared a free-to-use response for at the time), it seems like as good a time as any to share one simple truth with you all. Maybe you already know this (ASUS and Microsoft sure didn't) but it's surprisingly easy to avoid making an ad that will offend your customers.
There's a trick to it, and it's a trick that applies well beyond the realm of advertising to writing, art, and just about any creative field that could conceivably ever need to represent a person attached to an idea: All a creator has to do is ask themselves "why" (and care about the answer.)
If the person behind that ASUS ad had stopped to ask themselves why they chose to depict the Hardcore Gamer as male and the Casual Gamer as female, the answer probably would have sounded something like "because guys play serious games and girls play Candy Crush". This might be something that that person accepts as a fact, but everyone makes mistakes. If they were willing to honestly appraise that statement, or look around online to get a sense of how female gamers respond to the term "casual" and how often it's used against them, they probably could have come away with a much different (and much more tone-aware) approach to the ad in question.
The strange thing about asking "why" is that sometimes the best answer is no answer at all. As important as it is to represent (or at least be aware of) the real life backgrounds and struggles of diverse groups of people, it can be just as important to show them simply existing -- doing everyday things and activities shared across various lines. There's no reason for the man making waffles for his daughter in commercial X to be Sikh, but there's no reason for him not to be either. That's not "pandering" or "token diversity"; that's rejecting the idea that "white & male" should be media shorthand for "default & average". Representation matters.
This trick isn't foolproof, and it will only take you so far. Asking yourself "why" you've chosen to define a character a certain way makes it easier to unpack and digest your own prejudices only if you actually care to unpack and digest them in the first place. If you don't, then asking "why" won't do you any good. You'll find some form of justification for everything if that's what you really want. So maybe the real secret is to actually care about other people and how what you're doing impacts them -- even people whose backgrounds and experiences don't line up perfectly with your own. How revolutionary.
TweetJanine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.
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