Flow It, Show It, Play It: Hair in Digital Games

Abstract

This paper proposes digital hair as a lens through which to explore a number of issues surrounding culture and representation in videogames. While the difficulty of creating hair which looks and moves in a photorealistic manner is notorious in both animation and digital games, the effortless ability to create hair which carries with it social and cultural meaning has not been examined with the same fine-tooth comb. Sociologists and anthropologists from Sir Edmund Leach to Emma Dabiri emphasise how hair can carry a multitude of social, cultural and political meanings, and this paper argues that many of these are carried over into digital worlds. These meanings are examined here in terms of the colour, length, and texture of digital game characters’ hair in relation to culture, gender, and race, providing further avenues for the exploration of representation in digital games.