to·ken·ism
ˈtōkəˌnizəm/
noun
the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.
Tokenism is not actual equality, it is the appearance of equality. For kids in high school, this might not be one of the things they notice in class, or at home, but they are still exposed to it. Very few people notice the tokenism in their daily life, but if you play video games, you know exactly what it is. Here are some prime examples of tokenism in video games today.
Halo Reach
The Halo series is near and dear to the hearts of many gamers. The story of the games and development of well-established characters from Master Chief to Cortana is undoubtedly rich.
However, Halo Reach, the 2009 prequel to the main series, introduced a variety of new characters in the new Noble Team, each with different abilities and personalities. The featured characters are Carter, Kat, Jun, Emile, Jorge, and Noble 6, who is the playable character.
Kat is the subject of the tokenism in this installation. Kat is the only female military character in the game, so she is given the generic characteristics of a female fighter in shoot ‘em up games: little guns, a troubled past, and a snappy attitude towards her male counterparts.
She is never portrayed the way Emile and Jorge are—as big gun-wielding badasses who are nearly invincible. Even in choice of weapons, it is clear who’s tougher (Kat with a pistol or Jorge with a minigun?).
She is the team’s technological mastermind, and for all the times that coms go down or mysterious signals are identified, Kat is tasked with getting to the bottom of it. This is essentially the only advantage she has over her other team members, however slight it is. Even in her death, Kat is not given an equal amount of carnage or bravery as the other Noble members who die, especially since she is the only character to not kill multiple enemies while she is being killed.
Kat is a complex character, and she does have some abilities and power, but she’s at nowhere near an equal level to the male characters in the game.
FIFA 16
We all know the jokes about how you dominate 90 percent of the possession, but then your friend scores some completely ridiculous game-winning goal that was the most BS thing you’ve ever seen, right?
However, no matter how crazy the goal is, the goal scorers are consistent throughout the franchise. Goals are netted by Messi, Ronaldo, Ibrahimovic, Neymar, and… Abby Wambach? That’s right, FIFA 16 features the women’s national teams as well as the men’s. So how is tokenism related?
Well, how many times has someone told you, “Yo Joe Schmo, you hear about that sick goal in the WMLS yesterday?” I know for sure that I haven’t heard it, let alone knew that there was a women’s version of the MLS (Major League Soccer).
Women are seriously underrepresented in the world of soccer, not just in games, but in the real world. FIFA has spent nearly $900 million on soccer, with only 15 percent of it going to women’s soccer and its events. The men’s team made more money losing to Belgium than the women’s did becoming world champions. This has me very suspicious about their inclusion in the latest installment of the FIFA games.
Call of Duty: Black Ops
“What do the numbers, mean Mason?” Even a game with the appeal of Black Ops is not immune to tokenism. It doesn’t have the happiest of storylines: I mean, you’re trying to save the world from a crazy Russian who wants to drop toxic gas on the capitals of major powers around the world. Charming. However, its plot is very complex and players are completely engulfed into the gameplay.
You hardly even notice that the first character to die is the ONLY black character in Black Ops. Despite the play on words, Joseph Bowman (voiced by Ice Cube) is, in fact, the only character in Black Ops who is not white. He is extremely loyal, and is portrayed as an able-bodied ally with a little bit of attitude. Despite his lovable characteristics, Bowman meets an untimely death in the first half of the campaign, cementing the symbolic involvement of his character in the game.
Tokenism isn’t the first thing that people think of when video games are the topic, yet it is a prevalent issue in the gaming world. The impact that tokenism has on people may not always be obvious, but it definitely has altered how people see both video games and real life. Not only in games, but in the workplace and everyday life, tokenism poses a threat to true equality in a world that strives so hard to reach it.