It’s another ordinary work day. You roll out of bed and head to the office, when a police officer stops you. “Can I get some identification?” he asks. You stop and comply, or refuse — but either way, the officer logs you into the system for the “next time” anything else occurs.
As you continue on your way, a woman walking toward you shudders and clutches onto her handbag. At work, your boss calls you into his office, telling you to “take it easy for a while,” because you’re making “everyone else look bad” by staying late and working too hard.
These are just a few of the human interactions the user faces when playing An/Other — a first-person video game created by Ryerson University master’s graduate Jordan Sparks for his final thesis project. It’s a “blueprint,” he says, for how games should evolve to “understanding attitudes regarding race in the public consciousness.”
After dedicating several years to researching video games geared to social change, Sparks found a huge deficit in games addressing the experience of racism, even though games with a first-person narrative could be an effective way to gain insight.
At the start of the game, the user is unaware of the character’s identity, but undergoes encounters that evoke feelings of suspicion and fear — being followed while shopping at a grocery store, for example, or being carded by police officers.
“Whenever you try to get people to relate to the idea of racial issues, they tend to dismiss it and see colour as something exclusive or that it doesn’t exist,” Sparks says. Instead, video games with a first-person narrative allow players to undergo encounters from the “inside looking out.”
It isn’t until the end of the game, when the character returns home, that the camera pans to reveal the identity of the player — a black man. Sparks has found that perspective to be rare; in his research, he discovered the majority of users playing in a first-person narrative assumed their character was white and male.
“I wanted to remove identity from the equation, allowing people to understand it from a human perspective,” Sparks says. “I want the player to know that even in these mundane, everyday situations, people of colour will find simple tasks … are made more complicated just because of the colour of their skin or background.”
In his initial iterations while refining his thesis topic, Sparks had the idea of An/Other at the back of his mind, but was nervous about pursuing it. “I had a lot of difficulty choosing my topic; at first I wasn’t on board with it, because it’s difficult to tackle something like race in a game.”
It was only after he had pitched the idea to professors and began thinking about his own encounters with racism that he overcame those doubts and decided to give it shot.
“This game is inspired by my own collective experience, but it is not solely about me, and not even specifically about being black,” he says.
Since launching the game, Sparks has tested it out with several players and found the reaction to be surprisingly positive and rewarding.
“People who played it were very interested in suddenly talking about the issues they faced in the game, or things they were confused about. That’s what I wanted,” he says. “I want people to start thinking about these issues, not ignore them or believe they don’t exist.”