No fat chicks? A slightly more critical look at APB:R

This week we were shown a slide featuring an image from a game called APB: Reloaded. First released in June 2010 by Realtime Worlds it was something of a flop, the servers being shut down within a few months and the game being sold for a fraction of it's development cost by the end of the year. Re-released as a free-to-play MMO in June 2011 it appeared in the Steam library in December of that year and has enjoyed moderate success.

What I want to specifically focus on however is the representation of race and gender within this game. The game has been praised for its ingame customisation system, youtube has some videos showing just how many options are available. Looking at the options critically in the context of racial representations this game actually performs better than most. Important to note here is that there is no default that the player is confronted with before making any changes to a new avatar, the game randomises all options so you can be confronted with any race/gender combination when you begin the game. A brief wander around the social district (a neutral zone where factions do not fight) you'll see African American avatars that actually look like African Americans, however the emergent behaviour shows a lot of these avatars dressed in stereotypically African American roles, thugs, hitmen, and a distinct lack of black female avatars - the females avatars are overwhelmingly white. These observations leads me to assume many of the people behind these avatars are probably not black themselves. One former member of my clan who identifies himself as "Korean-African-American" and lives in southern California plays exclusively hypersexualised white female avatars.

This brings me to representation of gender. The game did pick up some flak for not allowing players to create overweight women, and that the female avatars in the game were objectifying and too sexual. After the lecture I actually logged into the game and yeah, it looks pretty bad. I thought I'd ask around a few of the players I knew and compare their characters. The players who were female overwhelmingly played female avatars - in itself against the norm - further, those females with female avatars tended to wear more revealing attire ingame than their female avatar playing male counterparts. I should probably note that the age range for both female and male players in this impromptu focus group is around 26-27 and a similar look at a 16-17 year old demographic would likely yield different results.