Ebonix (Nyjah Udogaranya), a technical artist who has spent over a decade creating custom hair content for life-simulation games such as The Sims, is speaking out about the video game industry's continued failure to represent natural Black hairstyles. She says developers still default to stiff, uniform "Killmonger locs" — named after Michael B. Jordan's Black Panther character — because the underlying hair-rendering code was built for straight hair and struggles to replicate coiled or kinked textures convincingly. This shortfall has fuelled huge demand for her fan-made content, with her Patreon now exceeding 115,000 members.

The problem has deep roots, from stereotyped depictions of Black hair in 1970s arcade games to the limited, largely immovable hairstyle options offered even in modern titles like Tekken 8, Spider-Man 2, Apex Legends and Horizon Zero Dawn. Industry efforts such as Dove and the Open Source Afro Hair Library's 2023 "Code My Crown" initiative, plus some free downloadable content from EA for The Sims 4, have made small inroads, but most natural hairstyles remain locked behind paid expansion packs costing $10–$40. Udogaranya has since turned to academic research, including a 2024 paper on coding techniques for highly coiled hair, to try to build better, more accessible tools herself.