Portraying different races is nothing new in the history of video games. Very early games including some MMORPGs like world of warcraft, made different, even if fictional, races playable.

You are able to choose between a variety of races in the beginning of the game. There are dwarfs, worgen, trolls and even the sometimes cute but quite powerful pandaren, which are as their name suggests pandas. But if it is no RPG in which you choose who you are going to play as, your player-model is predetermined.

Native Americans like in Prey (2006) or Latinos like in the Just Cause franchise have been protagonists, but more often than not they follow racial stereotypes. Latinos and Blacks are brutally violent, casual criminals and sexually promiscuous in the action/shooter genre of urban/street games. In the sports genre on the other hand blacks are portrayed as verbally aggressive and extraordinarily muscular and athletic.

Adam Clayton Powell III argues that the high proportion of black male characters in sports games have enabled (predominantly white male) gamers to practice what he refers to as “high tech Blackface”, a digital form of minstrelsy that allows white players to effectively try on blackness without being forced to acknowledge or confront the degrading racist history surrounding minstrelsy.

Some even point out the use of “Yellowface” to cheapen and humiliate Asian characters. But there are also some instances where games show their characters in a satirical way as in the Shadow Warrior franchise. In these cases people have to deal with those topics without being immediately offended. Games can be just as biting as any other satire. Sometimes it is just supposed to be funny and not taken seriously.