10 Things Non-Gamers Don't Understand About Gaming
8. Representation Means More Than In Any Other Art Form
It's certainly been refreshing to see media as a whole embrace the spirit of representation over the last few years, with a tendency towards greater inclusivity for women, persons of colour, the LGBTQ community, and minority groups as a whole.
But representation is never more meaningful an issue than it is in the gaming world for one major reason: interactivity.
While it's undeniably important for people to see people like themselves in movies and on TV, the fact that games literally allow players to take control of a character for dozens if not hundreds of hours makes inclusion so much more important and resonant.
Now, this isn't to say that every game should have customisable characters, but that games with custom protagonists should absolutely allow as much granularity as humanly possible, in terms of gender, skin colour, sexual preferences, and so on.
It's an argument which non-gamers might perceive as trivial in the grand scheme of pop-culture, but giving players the ability to create themselves down to the finest detail, no matter their characteristics, and insert themselves into an expansive world for hours on end is the ultimate form of self-actualisation in media.
It's something that movies, books, and TV just can't compete with, yet for those who've never picked up a game before, it's easily missed.