Both inside and outside black communities, these two styles took on meanings. Inside black communities, cornrows often get worn for their ease of care and dreadlocks can be meant to symbolize religious convictions and/or ethnic pride. But outside black communities, people wearing these styles have been subject to cultural discrimination, with schools and employers refusing to admit students or to hire workers who wear them. Progressive changes in perception have happened in large part because of cultural movers like Bob Marley or Allen Iverson. Dreadlocks and cornrows gradually became part of a visual shorthand that communicated spirituality, edginess, or threat. Afros were controversial once, too, but wound up taking a left turn on the path to mainstreaming. They’re now understood in a comedic way—as a style so outlandish that only the truly goofyludicrous would wear it. It’s telling that the equivalent for straight hair—locks that go down past the shoulders, say—isn’t a signifier of immanent hijinx. Video game producers and art directors put dreadlocks in their creations to draw on that shorthand. “See, our black character is spiritual. Or edgy. Or threatening. Or threateningly edgy in a spiritual way. What’s that?! An Afro?! Boy, this black guy must really funny! Get ready to laugh at him, players!” Look at a natural and what do you think? “Boy, that sure is . . . middle of the road.”

  A hairstyle like mine just grows how it grows. Sure, I get it cut a certain way. But it’s still pretty conservative. Boring. Common. Like I said before, millions of black men have been letting their hair grow like mine since time immemorial. Sidney Poitier. Morgan Freeman. Kofi Annan. Nintendo of America’s Reggie Fils-Aime. Chiwetel Ejiofor. My dad. The people making video games probably see it a few times a day, even if it’s just on TV or the Internet. That’s what makes it so puzzling that a good-looking version of the basic natural has proven to be such a rare beast during my travels through hundreds of video games.

  Usually, I have to settle. I resign myself to picking the black color option out of a customization palette wheel and selecting a cut that hews relatively close to the scalp. The caesar cuts of myriad video games—like George Clooney used to wear in his early days on E.R.— have become a glum safe-haven for my natural aspirations. “Ok, fine,” I tell myself, “I guess I can choke this down. I always wanted to look like a Klingon from the original Star Trek 1960s episodes.” (No, not really. I haven’t wanted that look. No one ever has.) Another black friend told me, “I’ve done this exact thing so many times. It’s this moment in online games, when I’m on a Skype call with my friends waiting for me to join them. I just sorta break down and go, ugh, fine, the caesar is close enough.” Even when I lie to myself and say that the color and density are close to acceptable, I can still see the stringy, thread-like locks fringing around the hairline. Nope. Not black hair. At least, it’s not my black hair.

  It’s the visual texture that’s the trickiest part, I’d imagine. From afar, hair like mine looks like a solid, unified dome. But, it’s actually a particulate mass, made of hyper-tight curls that pretty much resist gravity by growing up and out. There’s a chunk on the left side of my head that grows faster and thicker than the right side. I’ve got to pat it down more. Sometimes, it sticks out more stubbornly and destroys any fantasies I have of rocking a symmetrical ebony corona. In photographs with strong lighting, you can make out the wooly piles of waves where the uniformity has broken back down into unruly almost-tendrils. I understand the challenge in recreating this tonsorial paradox—unified yet individuated, cottony yet coarse—in the virtual visuals of video games.

  So, what then? What will it take to perfect the video game natural? Better processing chips for the graphics cards living inside the computers and game consoles? Bleeding-edge software engines to create the digital worlds and individuals of future games? Both of those inevitabilities would be good starts. But, honestly, that stuff already happens on a cyclical basis. Computing power and coding prowess march along in lockstep with each other, destined to further enable the imaginations of the people using them. It’s the human imagination that is the game maker’s most important tool. And that’s why the birth of the one true video game natural needs one thing. Most simply, there needs to be more black people making video games.

  Any conversation about black hair is, at its roots, about more than the follicles growing on a given body. These talks are really about the intersection of personal choice and inherited standards, the crossroads where we decide what products and treatments we’re going to use to give our hair certain looks. Video games get steam from the friction generated at that crossroads. People who choose to make games or who identify as gamers have historically rubbed up against cultural snobbery and moral panics, the result of standards that dismiss games as mere commerce. Activists like disbarred anti-gaming gadfly lawyer Jack Thompson, or disgraced California lawmaker Leland Yee have tried to influence popular opinion and jurisprudence in ways that essentially would have had games treated as radioactive, world-destroying material. Mainstream media reports about violent video games whip the non-playing public into a frenzy about the evils that video games might be wreaking on our minds. (You, dear reader, might even be one of those snobs or panickers!) So it makes sense that video game creators and enthusiasts like to trumpet their favorite medium’s accomplishments. Some cheerleaders will sing hosannas for the groundbreaking nature of digital interactivity, the core difference that generates a sense of immersion that makes games different from movies or books. Others will invoke a record-breaking 24-hour sales number like the kind notched by Grand Theft Auto V or Call of Duty: Ghosts as a sign that video games are equivalent to or better than the other media they out-earn. Video games are a smart, forward-looking art form, triumphalists say, one that uses its seductive interactivity to absorb, re-present, and re-contextualize all that has come before it. Resistance is futile, non-players. But bring up the medium’s shortcomings and you often get flustered defensiveness in response. One of those shortcomings is in the lack of diversity of the people who are making and are portrayed in video games.

  The modern era of video games—let’s call it the last twenty years or so—has barely seen any black lead characters in big-budget or independent small-team video games. Oh, there’ve been sidekicks and boon companions aplenty. Too many of those have relied on tropes and stereotypes that are embarrassingly retrograde. There’s been Dead Island’s Sam B., a street-tough, one-hit-wonder rapper whose single was, “Who Do You Voodoo, Bitch.” Deus Ex: Human Revolution had Letitia, an indigent woman on the streets of a dystopian sci-fi future Detroit who somehow sounded like she came off the set of the cheesy 1970s cop drama Starsky & Hutch. And a whole parade of hot-tempered brawn-centric bruisers and slangtastic slicksters have appeared in fighting game series like Street Fighter and King of Fighters, with names like Heavy D!, TJ Combo, and Dee Jay, all clearly meant to convey a hip urban lifestyle in the broadest of strokes. And there’ve been dozens, maybe hundreds of other lesser lights (lesser darknesses?) in the deluge of store-bought and digitally downloaded games: men assembled in thrall to gritty hollow machismo, and women constructed to deliver trite sass or lurid titillation. Each one of them burdened with the weight of expectations they can’t possibly fulfill, because for every character like them, thousands of non-black characters get more spotlight and more chance for nuance.

  Where are the games starring a main guy or gal—the buck-stops-here character entrusted with anchoring empathy, narrative, and design ambition—who is a black person? There are all too few. My quest to find and wear the natural I want might not be quite as quixotic if there were games with black protagonists. Mind you, there has been fitful progress in the last few years. In particular, the Assassin’s Creed series from French publisher Ubisoft has found intriguing story and gameplay ideas in the ways that black people have defied oppressive systems throughout history. The main conceit of the Assassin’s Creed games is that they send players to sumptuously recreated cities of centuries past, plopping them in pivotal moments like the Crusades or the Renaissance and letting them encounter luminaries like Leonardo DaVinci. Amidst free-running acrobatics, lurking-in-shadows stealth, and swordplay and gunplay combat, the games in the series have had aspirations of imparting a sense of the political and cultural upheaval of the time periods they’re set in.

  Ubisoft has released two Assassin’s Creed games with black lead characters set during the height of the 18th Century transatlantic slave trade. Assassin’s Creed: Liberation featured Aveline de Granpre, a bi-racial heroine whose French father once owned her black mother. Set in the New Orleans of 1768, Aveline’s adventures find her investigating the whereabouts of vanished slaves and searching for her own long-lost mother Jeanne. The character’s special abilities let her don three separate guises, each with its own strengths. As a high-society Lady, she can bribe officials for access to closed-off areas. She can cause riots while wearing the tattered rags of the Slave. Her third persona, the Assassin, lets her do much of what other lead characters in the series can do, like killing with a hidden blade and using pistols. This game mechanic of switching roles plays off of her bi-racial background, all in the midst of a game set during a time when black people were little more than property. She’s of two worlds and has abilities that let her move through them.

  Players can discover pages from Aveline’s mother’s diary in Liberation. As you collect them, you see her command of the written word increase as she learns to read and write in secret defiance of the real-life laws that denied slaves the power of literacy. Collectible items like this are a well-trod element in many video games, but the historical insight woven into the mechanic here creates unexpected poignancy. You don’t see it happen, but reading the diary pages lets players feel Jeanne transform from someone else’s property into her own person.

  More than a year after Liberation’s release, Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry came out as a downloadable add-on for Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The main game featured pirate hero Edward Kenway seeking his fortune while dodging the armadas of the French, Spanish, and British. His first mate, Adewale, was a former slave who kept Kenway’s crew in line and his vessel seaworthy. The Freedom Cry add-on focused on Adewale decades after his time with Kenway, with a ship and crew of his own.

  Adewale’s time on the roiling seas of the Caribbean wasn’t about getting rich, though. After a fateful ship battle leaves him stranded on Saint Domingue—the island that’s home to the countries now known as Haiti and the Dominican Republic—players controlled him as he sought to liberate slaves and help foment uprisings. I’m a Haitian-American child of immigrants and, personally, Freedom Cry felt like a deeply resonant fictional telling of the history my ancestors came from. Hearing passersby discuss the sub-humanity of slaves doing backbreaking labor, or giving chase to slave catchers pursuing runaways trying to escape to freedom gave me motivations I had never felt before playing video games. One of Freedom Cry’s last sections takes place in a sinking slave ship, with Adewale trying to escape a watery grave. All the while, you’re surrounded by hundreds of kidnapped Africans you know you won’t be able to save.

  Those Assassin’s Creed games tap into the historical circumstances of black people in the Western world for inspiration. But another recent game did none of that and still delivered an interesting character. Remember Me, a sci-fi video game much like the hit British cop drama Luther, is meaningful because it’s not a protest document centered on race. The blackness of their lead characters is incidental. These characters don’t serve as signifiers for any attitudes in their fictional universe. Detective Chief Inspector Luther isn’t tortured because of racism; he’s tortured because he walks the line between legal punishment of serial killer horrors and the temptation of outside-the-law vengeance. In Remember Me, Nilin is a memory hunter, a special operative who invades the psyches of targets to reshape or eliminate remembrances. She doesn’t manipulate people’s memories because she’s descended from a people who’ve suffered horrific erasures. Her motivation for being a memory hunter comes from her family history, not her racial background in particular. By their mere presence and well-executed dramatic arcs, she and John Luther make for strong evolutionary leaps in the portrayal of black characters in their respective media.

  Lee Everett didn’t have a great natural. You can tell that he’s supposed to, but it . . . it’s just not right. Nevertheless, the lead character of the first season of a series of games based on The Walking Dead is one of the best black personas ever created for a game. Though he was an escaped ex-con, Lee’s soulful regret and concern for a little girl named Clementine humanized him out of the bounds of any facile stereotype. He wasn’t quick to violence or emotionally inarticulate. Indeed, the very nature of the game had players steering Lee through an uneasy leadership of zombie apocalypse survivors, with agonizing life-or-death decisions at every turn. He was more empathetic and well-rounded than most other game protagonists, whether black or white. He never felt like an exoticized curiosity. With a few horrifically bad decisions and waves of undead swarming all over me, he felt like someone I could be.

  In the Assassin’s Creed games, Aveline and Adewale’s motivations come in direct response to historical racial oppressions they lived under. Luther and Nilin represent another strategy of creating a black character for popular consumption, where race never gets explicitly addressed. They’re black but not centered by any definition of blackness. The strategy is more subtle in Lee Everett’s particular character construction in The Walking Dead. The institutions that have historically doled out prejudice have largely crumbled in the game’s undead-infested world, but Lee is still imagined in the context of blackness in the American south. The game’s characters mostly hail from Atlanta, and Lee engages with folks who have different sorts of beliefs about him because of his blackness. Fellow survivor Kenny thinks that he can pick locks “because he’s urban.” Another character distrusts Lee’s potential romantic involvement with his daughter. It’s never explicitly tied to race, but the echoes of interracial romance dramas like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner can still be felt in these scenes. And the there’s the question of Lee’s young charge Clementine. They’re both brown, which leaves some folks unable to tell if they’re biologically related or not, regardless of whether they actually look like father and daughter.

  The most hopeful thing about Lee, Nilin, Aveline, and Adewale is that they all come across as different from each other and from what’s come before. If video games are really to be the prime creative vessel of the coming century, then there should be room for blackness—or, more aptly, for the myriad forms of it—inside of the medium. We don’t need the haircuts and poses that communicate a fascination with “the Other”—“Let’s spice up our game with a brown-colored person!”—but ones that reflect an understanding of what it’s like to be a regular black person. It’s reasonable to want more of each strategy mentioned above: games that directly address race as central, games that treat race as purely aesthetic, or at least don’t address it in the text, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions, and games that address race but don’t make it central. This is how the skeleton of a continuum of portrayals can get built. Right now, our skeleton has a clavicle and a tailbone, maybe, but nothing capable of supporting much weight.

  A few years ago, I wrote about my frustrations on the popular video game culture website Kotaku. I called my article, “Come On, Video Games, Let’s See Some Black People I’m Not Embarrassed By,” and the main thesis was about how the medium needs to tap into the phenomenon of Black Cool. This is part of what I wrote:

  What I want, basically, is Black Cool. It’s a kind of cool that improvises around all the random stereotypes and facile understandings of black people that have accrued over centuries and subverts them. Black Cool says, “I know what you might think about me, but I’m going to flip it.” Dave Chappelle’s comedy is Black Cool. Donald Glover is Black Cool. Aisha Tyler is Black Cool. Marvel Comics’s Black Panther character is Black Cool. Their creativity is the energy I want video games to tap into.

  And more:

  In other mediums and creative pursuits, there’ve been the black people who pivoted the conversations, expanded the possibilities and deepened the portrayals about what black people are. In jazz, it was Charlie Parker. In literature, it was Ralph Ellison. In comics, I’d argue that it was Christopher Priest, followed by Dwayne McDuffie. For me, the work of the deceased McDuffie managed to create characters that communicated an easily approachable vein of Black Cool.

  Video games need this kind of paradigm-shifting figure. Not an exec, mind you—sorry, Reggie—but a creative face who steers the ethos of a game. For example, you know what kind of game a Warren Spector or a Jenova Chen is going to deliver. With Spector, it’s a game that’ll spawn consequences from player action. With Chen, you’ll get experiences that try to expand the emotional palette of the video game medium. I want someone to carry that flag for blackness, to tap into it as a well of ideas.

  Since then, I occasionally get responses from people who’ve read the article, asking if such-and-such character from Video Game X passes muster. “He’s not so bad,” the yearning goes. But there’s an addendum I haven’t written for that years-old essay, which is that Black Cool isn’t enough.

  Black Cool isn’t an end, understand; it’s a means to one. It’s a coping mechanism for existing in a world that’s denigrated and dehumanized you. It’s a way to freeze off the small slights and mega-disenfranchisements. You can break them off to keep on keeping on, but doing so still breaks off a little flesh with it, like freezing off a wart.

  Black Cool is a response to being denied a more complete humanity. “Choose not to acknowledge me in my fullness?” it asks “Then all you get is the chill.” The thing that too often goes unsaid is that Black Cool is cold comfort for the practitioner, too. It doesn’t make up for lost opportunities. If you’re cool and broke, you’re still broke. If you’re cool and two-dimensional, you’re just a different kind of caricature.

 

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