Fortnite has Solved the Issue of Identity Politics

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Enough is Enough

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The issue of “representation” is a tricky one in western society, often boiling down to various minority parties finger-pointing and demanding more mainstream entertainment and leadership roles. There is no clean solution for this type of racial anxiety as there is actually no solution. The precise reason why I actively condemn the racialization of issues is because the quality of representation is highly subjective and no amount of appeasement will satisfy all parties. I completely understand the emotional impulse to want more of your social or ethnic group represented on TV, in movies, through video games, and so on, but this type of dialogue as it stands now devolves in hatred thrown at individuals and companies without complex solutions. Scarlet Johansson is a common target.

The reason this is an unsolvable problem is that the desire for “more representation” comes packed with the question of when is there “enough representation”? Is there a point where black or asian or latino Americans are satisfied with a specific ratio of their representation in films? Black Americans make up roughly 12-13% of the population, should Hollywood be precisely proportional? Should it not be allowed to breach the number and make up 20 or 30%? These are difficult, probably impossible questions, which is why they shouldn’t be asked so bluntly and without complex reasoning. Unfortunately, there isn’t much room for reasoning in social-media soundbites and Buzzfeed “articles.”

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Attempts at appeasing this type of racialized anxiety are becoming more frequent, and the results are terrible. Just looking at gaming for instance, the artificial push to offer more ‘representation’ has created amoebas of entertainment like Mass Effect: Andromeda’s weird United Colors of Beneton feel with the shallowed characters that happened to be straight, or gay, or female, or asexual. It has also caused artificial cries of WOLF like when Kingdom Come: Deliverance was accused of white supremacy because the game had no black people in its medieval setting of Poland. P.S.: there were no identifiable numbers of “non-whites” in medieval Poland. In fact, there are extremely low numbers of non-whites in modern Poland.

This causes ‘representation’ to create an additional problem: are these productions actually diverse or is that diversity being injected as some pandering technique? We’ll never no, and that underlying suspicion always persists. Again, this reinforces the lose-lose Catch 22 we find ourselves in when it comes to diversity in media. Nobody actually wins.

The Real Solution

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The absolute best situation is for our culture to stop caring. Sometimes there will be movies with black stars, sometimes games with yellow protagonists. These things should remain unconstrained and unpredictable. But of course, it’s unlikely that our modern society will take a rational and idle course.

The second best situation, one which is perfectly embodied by the game Fortnite, it to make race a non-factors. For those that have never touched the latest worldwide addiction, Fortnite is a free-to-play action shooter that runs along a “battle royale” theme of elimination. What is subtlety unique is the randomness of both the gender and appearance of your character each rounds, which is chosen by random. In any instance, I could be blazing away as an asian girl, black dude, white gal, or any of the ambiguous ethnicities and identities in between. Other than an aesthetic, skin color, gender, and appearance have no affects on the gameplay and the developers have opted to make it a random component.

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And it works very well. No complaints of representation from anyone since the premise of the game isn’t rooted in a particular culture or point in history. Pure gameplay that has no need to be racialized.

I suspect this will be harder to pull off for games and other forms of entertainment that are more fueled by story arcs. But honestly, and I’ll throw in a bit of my opinion here, if you care that much about the skin color of your protagonist, divorced from the story, than I don’t think you’re much of a gamer, much as an avid reader wouldn’t choose novels just because of the hero’s race. My 2 cents.

So what do you think? What should we do about this issue of representation?