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Skater XL, the skateboarding simulator developed by Easy Day Studios, is one of two more recent genre entries that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of EA’s Skate. The game plops you in a myriad of selectable maps, each replete with various obstacles (such as benches and rails) to trick over, all while skating as either a signed athlete like Evan Smith or a created character of your own imagination. Skater XL also comes packed with a whole host of community-created mods on console and PC. But strangely, it seems the console mods in particular favor whiter skin tones much more.
On PlayStation 4, where I’ve been playing, the Skater XL mod scene isn’t exactly thriving. However, there are some 501 mods available to download, with new ones added every blue moon (and there’s no way to know when they drop). Most are for decks, hats, shirts, trucks, and wheels, of which there are 459 pieces of gear for your custom character that you can install on your hard drive. Then there are a few really cool community-created maps of iconic locations, like San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza and Canada’s Quebec Skate Plaza. Mods like these bring skateboarding’s rich and rather long history—of culture, of style, of legendary spots, etcetera—to life.
But the game’s character creator and, more specifically, the mods that alter your appearance, are demoralizing. Because there aren’t enough Black protagonists in video games, I tend to create an avatar that either resembles me or has a darker complexion. Skater XL lets you create a character with one of four skin tones—light, medium light, medium dark (my preference), and dark—but the mod you choose to equip overrides whatever hue your character’s skin is. So, say you create a dark-skinned skater, then choose one of the most popular gear mods in the game: Full-Body Traditional Tattoos. Though all the mod does is add American traditional tattoos to your created character, because the base character of the mod is a white dude, you’re now a while dude who happens to have American traditional tattoos. The same thing happens to any created character whenever you equip a mod that has a white person as its base image.
It’s worth noting that while there are a few mods created by the developers themselves (like the Primitive Skatepark), most are designed and uploaded by the game’s fans. Furthermore, it appears that modders get the choice of what skin color their creation takes, seemingly illustrating that the game’s community would rather cater to whiteness.
Read the full article on Kotaku
