Ten years ago, one of the first PS4 games I played was Sony and Sucker Punch’s much-hyped Infamous: Second Son. It was a marvel of new graphical technology, with a breathtaking-for-the-time open world city, tons of amazing hardware-accelerated physics effects for the game’s superhero combat — and the constant and tremendously unfortunate presence of popular voice actor Troy Baker depicted in digital redface.
I couldn’t stand it, so I bailed out after just a couple of hours of play — and looking back at it now it only feels all the more problematic. I’m shocked that it still exists at all.
Yes, Second Son is about a fictional indigenous man named “Delsin Rowe,” and I’m ashamed to share a last name with him. He’s a beanie-wearing 24-year-old street artist played by at the time 38–year-old Troy Baker, and he’s also of the entirely fictional “Akomish” Native American tribe. The game wears its indigenous representation as an incredibly awkward badge of honor, and it’s steeped in a pile of clumsy stereotypes rather than just incorporating real cultures from around Northwest Washington.
