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Activision's GUN Misfires With Native Americans
jkdove writes "Gamergod.com has published a news story reporting on the backlash from Activision's western shooter, GUN. From the article: 'In reaction to the content of GUN, the Association for American Indian Development has started a boycott against Activision. They have requested that certain explicit violence and stereotyping be removed from the game ... Ultimately, the Association for American Indian Development simply wants to see the content corrected in respect of the Apache people ... Even though the historical period portrayed in GUN was fraught with racism, Activision's decision to publish a racially stereotyped videogame represents a serious misstep in social responsibility.'"
Who cares? GUN was the worst game I bought in the past 3 years. It was just about as dumb as a video game could get. After killing some 200 Indians with my pistol that never ran out of ammunition, riding around on a stupid wagon and in general dumb dialog, I took it out of my PC and put it on the shelf, to be ignored forever. Cowboys and Indians are cool. Westerns are cool. GUN was stupid, mundane, and boring. The best thing for it is to ignore the stinker of a game and wait for it to get into the 2 dollar bin and then disappear.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Seriously- why does everything have to be PC?
It's not just PC, you can get it for all the consoles... : p
This guy's the limit!
Come on people, relax...it's just a game! It's not like Activision is telling people go out to slander and kill Apaches. Not to mention it's a period game that takes place in a time when hostility towards the Apaches was very high.
I don't agree with what happened in the past, but that can't be changed and people should know, understand and learn from history. Let's educate people with accurate history instead of trying to re-write the past in order to cover up ones shame.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
In reaction to the content of GUN, the Association for American Indian Development has started a boycott against Activision.
Considering no one is buying this game anyway, what does this "boycott" mean to Activision? Three lost sales, maybe?
Ah yes, politically correct idiots are trying to re-write history. Not that GUN is exactly history but it's set in a different time with different values. I guess next someone should go through Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to replace all instances of the word "nigger" with "African American". What will they call the character Nigger Jim; "James from Africa"?
No one is trying to rewrite history, but this game certainly is offensive and inaccurate and may very well promote racism. If someone publishes a game called, "Kill the Nigger" that feature KKK members torturing blacks in a historical context, I won't buy it and I'd probably join in a boycott. If some people find Tom Sawyer to be racist and detrimental, well they are free to boycott the publishing company. No one here is advocating censorship. No one is arguing that this company does not have the right to publish this game. What they are arguing is that no one should be willing to give money to people who behave this irresponsibly.
The first half of the game COULD be considered insensitive, if taken completly out of context. But in the second half, the main character realizes he was wrong for fighting with the Apaches, that the Apaches are simply defending their land, and teams up to help them.
The main character also single handedly destroys a U.S. military base and butchers the solders inside, and kills the Marshal, and the Governor of the Terroritory, and literaly thousands of other people too, all of whom are stereotyped as bloodthirsty rednecks, so it is not like Apaches where singled out.
The story is really bad, the acting is worse, but it certainly doesn't portray any single group as the bad guys.
A lot of people here have missed the point. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn may have contained the word "nigger" but they were not racist books. Anyone who thinks they are really needs to actually read them; while some of the characters definitely have racist views the books actually portray black people as, well, people. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn find that, despite what the adults tell them, their actual experiences show that black people are just people, like them. There's racist speech and racist remarks made by characters in the books, but the books themselves are supposed to show how black people are really just people.
According to the article, GUN isn't like that. GUN instead portrays American Indians soley in a racist fashion. The characters in a period piece are allowed to be racist. It's expected that an American during World War II would hate Japanese. (But, interestingly enough, not Germans...) Japanese characters are allowed to be racist against Americans. However, Japanese characters in a World War II film shouldn't act like a racial stereotype. They should behave like a Japanese person during that time actually would.
Yes, you can't ignore racism. It's real, and it should be acknowledged. Pretending it doesn't exist is wrong. However, falling prey to it, and portraying the world based on racist views isn't right either. There's nothing wrong with having racist characters in a game. There is something wrong when the game itself reinforces the racial stereotypes.
The Association for American Indian Development contents that GUN reinforces racial stereotypes, and the article appears to agree. Having never played the game, I have no way of knowing if they're right, but if the game really does display American Indians as racial stereotypes, they have a valid point.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.