As an introductory activity, we encourage game designers to place their games across the eight spectrums, which may help anywhere in the game design process from pre-production, to playtesting and iteration, to quality assurance testing and polishing, etc.
While we provide descriptions to help place games along each spectrum, these are entirely flexible, and game designers may arrive at different conclusions. There are often no right or wrong answers. Rather, the framework is meant to help tease apart the nuance of racial representation and spark conversation around game design amongst cross-functional teams.
We also present six case studies of games that engage in race in different, interesting, and meaningful ways. After each spectrum, you will be able to see where our team places each game. The intention of sharing these case studies is to give example of what a potential game designer may do with these spectrums. Reasoning for placements can be found after the spectrum explanations.
As acknowledged in Table 1, our team do not always agree on placements and our framework does not often prescribe clear cut “right” or “wrong” answers.
We emphasize again that these placements within the framework are not judgments of “good” or “bad” representation – in fact, we selected these games because we thought they offered thoughtful points of view when engaging race.
Here are all six case studies alongside placements among the eight spectrums.