What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?

Not sure that there is a book, movie, or song that has really changed how I see the world. They are so easily digested.

I have, however, played video games that really brought home several points home for me.

Elder Scrolls games, specifically, Skyrim, was an incredibly eye-opening experience. I have done three full play-throughs of the game and each file was easily over one hundred hours. I tend to play first person, so I do not see my character too often outside of character creation and when I actually put on third person view. Mostly due to my poor eyesight. It is easier to see things and be in wonder about the world around me.

It is a role playing game, at the beginning of the game you pick what race and sex your character is going to be. I had played previous Elder Scrolls games before this and experienced this fantasy world racism before. In Skyrim, depending on what you are playing as, the racism and sexism can be absolutely tremendous depending on what groups you are hanging around.

It was jarring every time I encountered it in Skyrim because I may have gone hours without having to converse with one of the non-playable characters. Then I walk up to one to have a random conversation and they call me a slur for being an elf, an orc, an argonian, or khajit. Immediately I remember who I am playing with and feeling that judgement from this character I am meeting for the first time.

Even when I did a whole play-through as a Nord woman, in the Nord homeland, I then experienced so much sexism. Constant comments about being a woman, even though I was the Dragonborn of legend. Being a woman, it was not surprising to hear it, but having experienced all the racism on my other characters, it was surprising to now be dealing with so much sexism in its place.

I love when a video game takes real world experiences and programs them in. It makes the experience much more engaging and really makes you feel the pitfalls of the world you are adventuring in.

A few other shout outs are the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series from Bioware. The bigotry in those games is immense. Even in the futuristic setting of Mass Effect, the various aliens and humans alike have horrible opinions about one another.

All these games force you to meet various types of people. Bigots and non-bigoted alike. They may be bad guys or good guys. They may fall into their stereotypes and they might not. A good role-playing game forces you to look past visual appearances and really get to know the characters around you. You can spend hundreds of hours in the game. You can be the greatest villain or hero of all time in the game world and you will still run into people who will look down upon you for something your character had no control over. You the player had control, but your character did not. They live with the choices you made.

Video games are a large time commitment and to me the feelings they evoke stay with me for a lot longer than any other form of media. In Skyrim, every time I am reduced to my character’s race or sex it reignited those feelings. It would change how I viewed the game and the characters, whether they were bigots in my favor or not.