In 2013, I was a high schooler with way too much free time on my hands. It was the last few weeks of school and a bunch of my friends and I would routinely skip class to play video games in the back of the library. It was a forbidden gamer paradise. Animal Crossing: New Leaf just dropped and we were all desperate to play it. There was a game where you could go to a town with your friends, become a home makeover demi-god, talk to animal neighbours, and be the mayor? Why wasn't every video game built exactly like that?

Self-expression is the core element of ACNL; it's a feature embedded into every aspect of the game. You choose the colour and style of your clothes and the location and architecture of your dream house, and since there are no pressing time constraints like other social simulators, you even choose what you do all day, every day. It's a game about freedom. I was so incredibly excited when I picked it up, but that feeling dwindled fast. There were no options to have black skin colour or any black hairstyles. A game all about freedom and customization refused to let me be me. It was beyond alienating; out of all the things that could have been excluded, why those things?

I headed straight online to figure out if I had just missed out on an option, but I hadn't. That's just how it was. The wackest part was that the options for darker skin tones were in the game, but you couldn't access them from the start. The only way you could make your skin darker was through a convoluted temporary tanning mechanic that had to be used on an in-game day between July 16 to September 15, during a morning that had a clear sky. Many forum posts with titles like "Can I be black in this game???" or "So... Can your character have dark skin?" popped up as others wondered at the lack of skin tone and hair options. It spurred people to write out their thoughts on race in games, and players were even tweeting directly at Nintendo to express their frustration.