Microsoft’s Project Natal Doesn’t Care About Black People?
by Latoya Peterson
I spent a lot of last week traveling and grinding on deadlines, so I missed most of the E3 coverage coming out of the gaming sphere. While I plan to catch up with BawdyJane on what she spotted there later, one project in particular caught my eye.
Dan Hsu over at BitMob has the goods:
During E3 2009, journalists, developers, and even Hollywood celebrities got wind of the secret demonstrations Microsoft was giving to select individuals and were pulling every string they could find to get in. Even Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto went to the secret area of Microsoft’s booth and got a private VIP demo.
Demian and I got to give Natal a go, and we came away extremely impressed…and neither of us are of the easily impressed variety….
“No matter how many buttons you put in a controller, you can’t get this kind of fidelity,” says Natal Creative Director Kudo Tsunoda. We’ll see later if gamers (especially the hardcore) even want that sort of fidelity, but what we’ve seen so far supports Tsunoda’s statement.
The device measures 48 different joints on your body, so it’s able to distinguish your hands from your forearm, your forearm from your upper arm, your upper arm from your torso, and so on. It can detect forward and backward 3D positioning as well, unlike old Vision Cam games that see your silhouette as a 2D physical object. It even knows how fast you’re moving your body parts toward or away from the television (keep the snickers down to a minimum, please).
Awww, yeah! Reminds me of what they were going for back in the day with those clunky virtual reality helmets everyone swore would be the new hotness. You can even use your feet to kick at things instead of keeping all your movement from the torso up, as indicated in the shot below:
Whoo! So I was properly geeked…until I caught this little note:
When game consultant and former Newsweek writer N’Gai Croal gave Paradise a test drive, however, the game had trouble reading his steering actions. The footwork (gas and brakes) worked fine, but Croal couldn’t steer his car at all. It wasn’t clear whether this was a problem of calibration differences between Tsunoda and Croal’s very different body types, or if Croal’s crazy dreadlocks threw Natal off. But it was working just fine when Tsunoda was at the “wheel.”
It’s not about the dreadlocks, Shoe. N’Gai is brown-skinned. Sensors did not compute. Damn it, gaming people. Race issues are harshin my squeez again.
Luckily, this was a technology issue and not a character or plot issue, so instead of denials, we actually got a swift statement back from Microsoft. Gamezine.co.uk reports:
Research into the issue resulted in a study concluding that near-infra-red cameras did indeed struggle to read movements from those with darker skin.
However, Microsoft has responded to these worries, telling Gamezine that all ethnicities will be able to use the technology.
“Last week at E3, we gave a taste of what to anticipate when Project Natal launches. As we mentioned to everyone who had the chance to play, we were working with tech demos and, as we all know, these can be temperamental,” Microsoft told Gamezine.
“The goal of Project Natal is to break down the barriers for everyone to play, and it will obviously work with people of all shapes and ethnicities at launch.”
So hooray for Microsoft. They are handling the situation and should have it fixed before Project Natal hits a store near you. And, as another thing in favor of Microsoft, it appears that N’Gai’s copy could have had a glitch. Other folks with dark skin (like Sugar Ray Leonard) tested the game and appeared to be able to participate just fine:
However, the whole situation got me thinking about the assumptions inherent in gaming, particularly within character design and applications.
One of the reasons I really enjoyed Ryuta Komaki’s presentation on mixi at RESI was that his research proves that we can program our own biases into the technology we create.
In this case, it does not appear that Microsoft failed to do due diligence and test with a range of skin tones. This error seems indicative of the technology used, and a long standing issue to boot.
But what about when people are programming characters? Or testing technology like this when there may not be any brown skinned people in the room? How do assumptions of who is representative of a gamer and who is playing impact the final results?
In the paper I presented at RESI, I used an example from 2007 when Acclaim moderators assumed whiteness as a default. In their game Dance, the default avatar was white. When a black character asked why he had to pay for a darker skin to personalize his avatar, the moderator replied that black was an extra feature, and therefore, had to be paid for.
THE REASON, there is no available choice at the moment is because, being white doesn’t necessarily have to represent you color in game. To change your skin color in the game, IS a special feature. It makes you STAND OUT. Therefore, your going to have to pay for an extra feature. Maybe in full release, there will be a bit more leeway, but for now you have to stick with what you got and test the game, and don’t worry so much about your character they’re going to be wiped regardless… We didn’t mean for this to be a racial bash. But the default skin tone we have in DANCE! is white. If you want something extra your going to have to pay. Nothing in life is free.
Tekanji from the Official Shrub Blog breaks down the core assumptions at play:
This situation is, perhaps, one of the most clear-cut examples of how the privileged groups are normalized and the non-privileged groups are Othered. First of all, this game seems to be still in the development stage; they’re testing out game mechanics and the like. Just as with Fable, as I discussed in my gender-inclusive video game thread, treating a female option as an “extra” rather than an intrinsic part of a game that supposedly lets you be anything, Acclaim’s Dance treats white as the default and non-white as an extra feature. As one of the moderators on the board explains, “Black is an EXTRA feature. It makes your person look unique, so that is an EXTRA feature. Therefore, you having to PAY for it.” [...]
Acclaim wasn’t aiming to be racist. I would say that no successful company — at least none that want to stay in business — tries to be racist. But the whole point about privilege is that you don’t have to try to be bigoted, but you have to actively try not to be bigoted because of the way the bigoted point of view is normalized in society.
See, privilege is about not having to see yourself as the Other. The moderator quoted above — and the company he represents — don’t see the hypocrisy in saying that they didn’t “mean for this to be a racial bash” and then in the very next sentence say that “the default skin tone we have in DANCE! is white”. They don’t think of it as racist because in our society being white is “normal”, it’s the “default” and it’s certainly nothing for anyone to get worked up over.
White people, who do already have it so that the avatars “represent [their] color in game” (and in most games, movies, tv shows, comic books, books, etc), have the luxury of seeing race as an extra, as something to do to make yourself unique and stand out. People of colour, who aren’t automatically represented in this game or most other parts of society, don’t have that luxury. If they want to have their avatars represent someone like themselves — something a white person doesn’t have to think about if they don’t want to — they have to pay. They get to see themselves be Othered and then told that they should be grateful because they are seen as “unique” and something to be desired. What is a fun accessory for a white player is a necessary component for a player of colour who wants to have the same ability as the white person to allow their avatar to represent their real life self. Privilege is not having to think about how the “extras” afforded to you come at the cost of allowing non-privileged groups the same basic representation that you take for granted.
Video games – and development – are new and exciting fields and when we are experimenting with new technology, glitches are going to happen. But one thing the field needs to remember is always to question the underlying assumptions surrounding how we test, how we develop, and who we are developing for. Microsoft handled this situation well, but they are an exception to the rule. Most houses prefer to pretend these issues don’t exist, or try to justify bad decisions (like charging for a skin tone issued freely in real life.)
Other gaming spots, take a lesson from Microsoft. If it’s an issue that lies within your control, just fix it.
(All images pulled from the Bitmob blog)
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
brarian wrote:
I can’t believe reality is mimicking television (specifically the corporate satire Better Off Ted). In one of the episodes, corporate has added special sensors to all doors, lights, and anything else that can turn on — and the sensors can’t see black people.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 12:54 pm ¶
Eric wrote:
It doesn’t help that technology, especially high technology is something that is typically restricted by access and income to the very privileged, and in the United States, that means white ninety-nine percent of the time. Unfortunately, lower income people and POC aren’t regularly the ones developing and experiencing the kind of technology that will ultimately dictate what gets developed and used for the masses down the line.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 1:00 pm ¶
Lyle wrote:
brarian, that’s exactly where my mind went — followed by the thought, “If any company were to unintentionally imitate Veridian Dynamics, I’m not surprised it’s Microsoft.”
That Better Off Ted, BTW, was amazing. It sadly summed up corporate attitudes towards diversity at some companies.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 1:01 pm ¶
Sara wrote:
I also thought of Better Off Ted – glad to see that Microsoft’s response wasn’t “we’ll just have white people mimic the movement’s for you”
But seriously, this post makes a great point – particularly in technology, creators tend to be white and male, so they see their “avatar” as the default and everything else as the other. If you’re lucky, you get a single female or person of color thrown out as an option (ok, maybe you get 3 people of color – black, lighter brown, and Chinese-ish). I’m glad Microsoft responded promptly, and I hope other companies do the same.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 1:25 pm ¶
gatamala wrote:
Nothing in life is free. Especially not the costs of having darker skin.
Now…if bathroom sink manufacturers could do something about their “motion” sensors…
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 1:42 pm ¶
Moviegirl wrote:
I don’t know Eric that seems like a cop out. If the technology is for medical purposes then it will be consumed by people of color or by anyone with Insurance to so to just say they are the developers and in turn make the technology about themselves is an incredible limited view and will cost them money down the line. Case in point, I went to the dermatologist to have dark points removed from my face and was willing to pay top dollar for the laser treatment. The Dr told me that laser treatment on people with brown skin might actually darken the skin thereby cementing the mark. He stated plainly that they didn’t have the technology yet to work with darker skin tones.
Hyper pigmentation is a problem that mostly affects black and brown people and they would gladly pay if they didn’t have to deal with it. Just my thoughts.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 2:05 pm ¶
Celeste wrote:
Well if we’re to be charged for brown skin and female gender, I’d rather just have it bundled into a yearly tax that I pay once instead of getting nickled and dimed randomly. Just a flat black tax and a flat woman tax. Anytime someone wants to charge more you could say you could show them your receipt for that year’s tax and you wouldn’t have to pay any extra fees.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 2:08 pm ¶
Eric wrote:
@ Moviegirl
I think your point kind of reinforces my original argument in a way, unless I’m totally misunderstanding your words. The fact that laser treatment is not available for darker skinned people, for the purposes of removing dark spots at least, is telling in that the designers of the technology did not consider POC at all in development. In general, and I understand I’m stereotyping here, I would suspect that this is because the designers themselves are white/light skinned, and the question of utilizing said technology was never brought up in development because there was never a dissenting/diverse voice and point of view. Like this post’s original article, white is the default, black or brown is “extra.” Even worse that this idea is applied to the realm of health care, where actions are potentially life threatening.
I do take your point about the demand and money being there. I was generalizing about access, and certainly, there are lots of POC who have the means and desire for certain kinds of technology. But I do think it is an industry that is driven by the privileged and those in power, which leads to situations where technology does not match the needs of the general populace at all.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 2:27 pm ¶
jen* wrote:
that’s right, Celeste, it’s all about transparency! LOL.
no hidden fees, no fine print. one flat rate.
Oy.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 2:34 pm ¶
Jeremy wrote:
I know this comment doesn’t add much to the discussion, but I just wanted to say that this was a great analysis of the situation. I hadn’t been following Microsoft’s responses too closely, but this was an excellent re-cap, and thoughtful take on it.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 2:56 pm ¶
thewayoftheid wrote:
@brarian
I was JUST about to reference BOT.
But yeah, this harshes my squee.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 3:01 pm ¶
Moviegirl wrote:
Yea I agree Eric. I guess I thought you were being an apologist for the designers.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 4:34 pm ¶
Notebook wrote:
On the skin color thing, that is odd that there’s a game out there that actually charges you for getting a dark skin color, when I played several games that don’t–one of them is a free 2D MMORPG called Maple Story that I was hopelessly addicted to eons ago. Another is Phantasy Star Universe, another online game [well, it actually has a offline mode, but it's not that great]. I’m unsure of whether or not the previous game in the series had it though. Another multiplayer online game I haven’t played but has the option of dark skinned characters is Monster Hunter.
Considering that there’s been many games that don’t offer different skin color as something you have to pay for, I hope DANCE! is just an exception.
Another game, Soul Calibur III suffered from a similar problem that DANCE! had–with it’s character creator mode, you couldn’t make any really dark skinned characters at all. The best you could do was light-skinned–which was definitely odd, considering there was a dark-skinned character in the roster! Granted, there was also plenty of problems with the game, like saves becoming corrupted and possibly destroying everything on your memory card, but I digress. I don’t know if the next game in the series, SCIV, fixed that since I don’t own a 360 or PS3.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 5:06 pm ¶
shah8 wrote:
I object to tekanji’s point that media companies don’t try to be racist to survive. Plenty of them, I think, *do* try to accomodate white supremacy memes, which pretty much counts as mandatory racism. It’s not exactly an uncommon fear that a game or a movie will gravitate to a “Only BLACK people would buy it” ghettoization if the product is too friendly to people who aren’t white males.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 7:27 pm ¶
BSK wrote:
Wow! I had no idea that such issues existed technologically. I don’t know what’s more troubling: that there are rarely enough (any?) brown people in the room in order to ensure that a newly developed technology is compatible or that the people developing the technology don’t even bother to consider how skin-tone (or other physical characteristics) can impact technology that relies on physical characteristics.
Posted 16 Jun 2009 at 9:12 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
Waitaminit. If Sugar Ray Leonard could use the game fine, then it seems the example you used doesn’t fit with the others, no? That says to me there’s a glitch here. The other examples — having to pay extra for a black avatar– that’s just wrong and silly to boot.
The whole avatar thing shows the way that capitalism can reinforce privileges. Especially when the default is catering to a privileged majority of the population.
@Moviegirl– before you call the technology of dermatology racist, there are real differences in the way skin with more melanin in it (even if it isn’t obvious — some light[er] skinned people have larger amounts than you’d think) reacts to treatment. Stuff that looks ok on dark skin sometimes would be completely wrong for me (a lighter skinned person) and vice versa.
My wife and I deal with this daily. Both of us have psoriasis. Hers was pretty severe at one point. She’s a person who gets really, really dark in the sun (she’s Southeast Asian) and while the treatments work pretty well, it ain’t perfect. If she were darker the discoloration would probably be much less obvious or invisible (there’s a whole set of reasons for this, but the short version is that the treatments involve UV light). But it isn’t the case, and she’s left with having to bleach.
In my case, the “default” color (the one you get out of the sun) is even lighter, so while there are things I can do I have to say the redness can be really, really visible if I am not careful. A guy I used to know who also had it (a medium-toned Latin dude) and for him the redness didn’t show as much (it was covering enough of him and subtle enough that you couldn’t tell easily) though his irritation was always worse.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 7:03 am ¶
BSK wrote:
Jess-
I don’t think moviegirl was calling the technology itself racist. Technology is what it is; it does what it does and doesn’t do what it doesn’t do. Rather, the fact that technology has been developed (and re-developed and perfected and re-perfected, etc, etc, etc) for white or fairer people, but no “treatments” have been found with people with darker color, points to racism/bias/privilege in the development of this technology. How much better is laser treatment for fair skin now than it was 10 years ago? I would venture to say it is significantly more efficient, cheaper, and more effective than previously. If these strides can be made for fair skin, why can’t the same strides be made for dark skin? The argument is not that dark skin is *harder* to treat than lighter skin or that it cannot be treated. Rather, the norm is set by light skin, and everything is based off of that. So, whatever goes into accounting for white skin just is, and everything beyond that that goes into accounting for darker skin is *more*, *extra*, or *harder*. Sure, there is a difference in how skin tones respond to different technologies (and vice versa). No one is arguing against that, or arguing that technology itself is racist.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 6:06 pm ¶
Titanis walleri wrote:
“Another game, Soul Calibur III suffered from a similar problem that DANCE! had–with it’s character creator mode, you couldn’t make any really dark skinned characters at all.”
I think it’s theoretically possible, since there’s a few dark-skinned NPCs in Chronicles of the Sword mode iirc.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 6:12 pm ¶
Jess wrote:
@BSK — laser treatment for both dark and fair skin has advanced at the same rate. The problem is that dark skin has a lot of melanin in it, and that reacts to light. You don’t like it, have a conversation with God about why He set up certain laws of UV absorption the way He did.
That’s the thing: skin reacts to light differently, depending on several things, and unfortunately some are “race” based, though the amount of melanin in the skin is actually rather independent of that (just ask an Italian or a Malagano).
In any case, Moviegirl’s dermatologist actually did precisely the right thing. He told her a certain treatment wouldn’t work, because of the way her skin was. And there’s been a ton of research (it’s actually a hot area) into the function and effect of melanin.
I don’t dispute that norms of beauty are set by the powerful a lot of the time. But remember, it isn’t like antibiotics don’t work on black people.
In the case of dermatology, while cosmetic dermatologists may be pushing all kinds of bad stuff, I have to say there is a vast, vast difference between Dr. Zizmor of “beautiful, clear skin” (New Yorkers know who I mean) and the guy like the one who cared for my spouse. It’s the difference between the guy who does breast jobs for living an the one who reconstructed my body after a rather nasty motorcycle accident.
Access to health care can be a race issue, no question. And I would be the first to tell you that a big problem with modern medical research is that it seeks profitable drugs, rather than looking at problems that need fixing. (We could live without another Viagra clone, but it would be great if people did more work on other stuff).
But that’s a different thing. Too often people say things like “why don’t e have X” as thought it were easy or there was some kind of conspiracy. It doesn’t work that way.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 11:09 pm ¶
bluemorpho wrote:
@Jess – “laser treatment for both dark and fair skin has advanced at the same rate.”
Is that a researched position, or a statement of belief? I doubt anyone on this blog has that kind of information (dermatological research scientists – holla!) but it makes a lot of sense to ask the question on this blog.
Do we really believe that people who fund R&D for pharmaceutical and dermatological companies are equally informed and concerned about the needs of white and non-white consumers? (Remembering that the future marketability of a product is going to drive the direction of R&D). They might be waking up to it around now-ish, but the whole history of laser treatment and similar cosmetic and plastic surgeries?
Um….prolly not.
“Too often people say things like ‘why don’t e have X’ as thought it were easy or there was some kind of conspiracy. It doesn’t work that way.”
It doesn’t have to be a conspiracy to be an event of mass ignorance and indifference that results in less good care options for POC. It is “that easy” to ignore the needs of POC when your default is set to white. When normal and human and standard means white. And when a huge swath of the white population in a white supremecist society thinks this way, it might as well be a conspiracy for how effectively it renders POC invisible or Other.
It works exactly that way.
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 8:23 am ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:
@bluemorpho –
Do we really believe that people who fund R&D for pharmaceutical and dermatological companies are equally informed and concerned about the needs of white and non-white consumers? (Remembering that the future marketability of a product is going to drive the direction of R&D). They might be waking up to it around now-ish, but the whole history of laser treatment and similar cosmetic and plastic surgeries?
Really good point. I’ve actually been working for some time now on a series on race and health care but there are some parts that really trip up discussion.
Anyway, I spoke to a health professional whose been working in breast cancer advocacy for about 20 years. We talked a lot about the failure of clinical trials. Traditionally, clinical trials exclusively done on white men. This is why it took them so long to understand that a stroke may manifest differently in women – they always tested men. The same thing happens in clinical trials to this day.
Now there are many reasons for this – Tuskegee Syphilis experiment among other things -but minorities participate in clinical trials far less than whites do for various reasons (treatment facilities being too difficult to get to, too far, not worth the amount paid, can’t make the time commitment, mistrustful of medical establishment, never notified about the trial). So, if there is something that happens that makes a drug more or less effective for a minority, the testers generally will not know.
The health pro I spoke to gave a recent example. One of the big pharma companies was testing a new drug. They didn’t really recruit a lot of people. And the results from the drug indicated that it would be more effective in black women. However, only 2 black women were in the sample group, which doesn’t really indicate anything, so they ended up scrapping the trial.
It isn’t as simple as “antibiotics don’t work on black people”but there are some very real considerations about the effects of drugs on varying populations and the complications that can arise. And these complications are generally unreported as medical research often operates in a predominantly white space.
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 8:43 am ¶
atlasien wrote:
– Laser treatment for both dark and fair skin has NOT advanced at the same rate
– Laser treatment is available for darker-skinned people… based on newer technologies
I’m not a dermatologist, but I have had laser hair removal. Since my clinic is in a location with a lot of well-off darker-skinned people, the clinic promotes darker-skinned laser treatments like crazy.
See this link:
http://www.wifh.com/color.htm
There’s absolutely medical racism (white = default clinical subject) involved in this area, but money and demographics go a long way to ameliorate it.
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 10:33 am ¶