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Racial Issues Alleged In GTA San Andreas, Other Games
Thanks to the New York Times (free reg. req.) for its article exploring possible racial stereotyping inherent in many videogames. The article alleges: "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas... underscores what some critics consider a disturbing trend: popular video games that play on racial stereotypes, including images of black youths committing and reveling in violent street crime." Partially, though not wholly related to a recently discussed article on 'street' videogames, it's also argued: "The issue, critics say, is not that the games' representation of racial and ethnic minorities is as blatantly threatening as the sort found at hate sites on the Web, where players are asked to gun down virtual black or Jewish characters. Rather, the racial and ethnic depictions and story lines are more subtle, and therefore, some say, more insidious."
So we're supposed to ignore the last 4 GTA titles just because the one coming up will have a black character to represent the player?
Only white people can commit violence in video games now? And here I thought people were complaining because there weren't enough minorities in video games, now you can't put them into video games without someone complaining about the way they're portrayed (come on, this isn't like that Duke3D-engine game from a few years ago featuring an Asian protagonist, but then no one complained about the depiction of white people in Redneck Rampage, either).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Don't these people at DMA know that LA gangs of the early nineties were uniformly white?
Oh. Never mind.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
"he prominence of black characters in those story lines is all the more striking because of the narrow range of video games in which blacks have been present, if present at all, over the years. A 2001 study by Children Now, for example, found that of 1,500 video-game characters surveyed, 288 were African-American males - and 83 percent of those were represented as athletes."
e s/2001/
I was curious - how many of the 1500 were hedgehogs? Racoons? Demon imps?
I checked the report this figure was lifted from:
http://www.childrennow.org/media/video-gam
"White characters were the majority in the video game population (56%)" - thats as opposed to 19% being african-american males (see above). That's compared to the real US population which is 80% white and roughly 7% african-american males (see http://www.census.gov/statab/www/poprace.html) - even ignoring for a moment that many games originate in Japan where the racial mix is even more skewed.
The accusations of stereotyping and the narrow range of games including such characters ring true, but the "if present at all" remark is completely unsupported by the figures - if anything african-american males are quite over-represented in games. Although not to the extent of space aliens, who make up less than 1% of the real population.
Living in the UK, I'd ask - where are the asian characters? (apart from japanese/chinese). Our population is about 5% from the indian subcontinent, but I can't recall ever playing a game with indian or pakistani characters.
They've been making hockey games for years. I haven't heard a black person complain about that yet.
This definitely sounds like racism to me. A white, Italian stereotype can go around gunning down anyone he wants, but as soon as he has to kill members of a Haitian gang, it's racist. But make the protagonist black, and all of a sudden it's reinforcing stereotypes and represents racism against African-Americans? Come on! There's a United Negro College Fund. If there were a United Caucasian College Fund, these same people would be crying racist. Yes, it is racist. It's racist that there is such a dichotomy - what's acceptable for one race isn't acceptable for another, and vice versa. This is just further evidence of the absence of racial equality in our society. The fact is, though, that in many regards it's skewed opposite the way many people believe it is.
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The game takes place in Southern California in the early 90s. This was the height of gang violence in that area and most gangs were made up of blacks or hispanics. I'm sure there were plenty of white people committing crimes at the time but that's not the subject matter of this particular game. Screaming racism in the face of documented history is just silly.
I'm just glad that movies and television don't have racial steriotypes. It's good to see that every other form of media has progressed beyond that.