EA has a new blog post in the #PlayAs1 series. The company's Diversity & Inclusion team created the series to explore the lack of diversity in the games issues, and give EA staff a chance to “help change this story by writing a new one”. Female staff write these blog posts to talk about their own positive experiences, whether for EA to show off its comparatively strong emphasis on diversity or just to encourage women and girls who might want to work in the industry.
This new post is from Ann Lemay, a writer on the Mass Effect series. She was responsible for the decision to make the character of Nyreen in the Omega DLC for Mass Effect 3 a turian. Apparently, the character was originally an asari, a local gang lord “with no particular relation to Aria or anything else to make her stand out”. While Nyreen was already pipped to be a female character, all asari are female, so the decision to switch to a turian with “a definite Paragon bent as a foil to Aria” was meaningful because it meant creating the first female turian to appear in the game.
The main message Lemay wants to convey is that she came up against no real barriers with this move. While the lead designer “nodded pensively” before he headed off to ask about budget and time, Nyreen was approved “barely one week later”. Lemay emphasises:
“In all of my years in the videogame industry, this request process was the simplest and smoothest I'd ever gone through, particularly for the creation of a significant female character.”
And in her opinion, that's the way it should be.
“Creating diverse and engaging female characters—or any character that isn't both white and male—should not be such an issue. If we can move beyond the resistance to such characters in our games, both as non-player characters and as main protagonists, I honestly believe that we’ll end up with richer narratives and a broader audience, and the industry ends up with a bigger and more interesting playground.”
It's hard to disagree with that.
