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Do You Care About Race in Games?
There were several pieces up this past weekend, and a resulting lively dialogue, about the role that race plays in videogames. Game|Life talks very cogently on the subject, which got kick-started by a post on the microscopiq site highlighting important black game characters. The article asks "Jade Is Black?", highlighting the role that racial ambiguity can have in making a player empathize with a title's protagonist. Writes Kohler: "Video games put the control of the main character into the player's hands. They ask us to become the character. It's easier for anybody to identify with Jade because Jade can stand in for anything. Ellis wants more black characters in video games, and Jade, if we go by the layout of his article, is his number-one favorite. It is quite possible that he felt a stronger connection with Jade than with other game characters who are definitely black. What does that say about the power of racial ambiguity? " So, do you care about race in videogames? If so, how so?
That pretty much sums up this article. We play the character we're given. We kill the characters we're expected to kill. If it's fun, the game is "good". If it's not fun, the game is "bad".
Why would it matter unless your some racist punk that takes pride in playing a character that matches your skin tone.
That's sort of a stupid question, isn't it? Of course it has to be "black." Because none of the other minorities have ever mattered since 1960, right? Let's think about this: Her name is Jade. She picks the pen name "Shauni." She has almond shaped eyes and black spiky hair. Jade is Asian, you idiots.
I guess this shows I don't care about race in the games. I just play whichever character gives me the advantage.
I don't particularly care about it in real life (beyond a small amount at a subconscious level -- I would love to ditch this, but it's hard). However, I do find it easier to relate to a character who looks like me. That is, I'm most comfortable playing a Caucasian male character. It's easier to get into that character than others. For this reason, I think it'd be nice to be able to define your own character's qualities, but that's not always sensible in a game.
As for other characters, I find I don't really care about their races other than disliking obvious "affirmative action" approaches where the NPC cast is a rainbow of races, obviously only to be PC. I'd rather have consistency between races and storyline. That's the most important thing -- basically, race should not be a distracting feature.
Kratos' race was utterly irrelevant because he was such a nuclear badass motherfucker! ;-) When you're pulling off the heads of giant minotaurs with your bare hands, no one gives a crap about race.
...whatever in Ratchet & Klank, as a Dark Elf in Oblivion, and so on. Lara Croft anyone?
I don't get the controversy either. I'm a big white guy who has been happy playing as a black guy in GTA:San Andreas, as a female fairy in Kameo, as a wolf in Okami (and the new Zelda), as a
The whole point of videogaming for me is to escape to another reality.
Well, dependso n the universe.
If you can get halbreeds I would say they are a race and not a species, if you can't, then they probably are different. And if you can get a Human/Dwarf or a Human/Elf, but not a Dwarf/Elf, then what are they? (Take Shadowrun, I would call orcs/trolls/dwarves the same race as humans, after all they did come from them, however elves are probably different)
We use race because it is the term we are all familiar with, and some of the big names way back when used the term and it stuck.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Now you're just being racist! (cough hack etc. etc.)
Why is it such a big issue if a guy is black, white or green? We here so much bitching about "Black characters are so rare" but no one even comaplsin there are no olive skinned people do they? Life is not made up of 3 colours (Black, white and Asian), it is made up of billions of different varients which go from deathly pale (Slashdot readers mostly) to coal black.
So why don't we whine how some other minority is ignored instead of all this "OMG NO BLACK GUYS!!" thing?
I like muppets.
And if you can get a Human/Dwarf or a Human/Elf, but not a Dwarf/Elf, then what are they?
There are examples in nature where Species A and Species B can interbreed, and Species B and Species C can interbreed, but Species A and Species C cannot- apparently they have diverged too far apart.
So I suppose the humans, dwarves, and elves could share a common ancestor, be different species, and have some limited ability to interbreed.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
This whole argument recently got started with Guild Wars. Nightfall, the third expansion, was set in an area of the game world that more or less corrsponded to Africa/Egypt/the Middle East, and had the corresponding accents and skin tones. The character generator for the game tends towards sin tones that fit into that area of the game world.
Now, on launch, the immediate thing that people started whinging about was that the vast majority of player characters weren't black. Cue people putting threads on boards accusing players of being racist, cue other people telling them to shut up, cue allsorts of childish arguments. People were trying to explain that the area of the world in the game would have run the gamut of skin tones, everyone was getting defensive, and the whole thing was descending into an almost farcical "You're all racist because you won't make a black character" "No I'm not, you're the one who's insisting that I do so." and backwards and forwards from there.
Interestingly, I can't remember the same debate happening when Factions (set in ArenaNet's Pesudo-Orient Analogue) came out. maybe it did and I didn't spot it.
Of course, these are games where you select a skin colour for your player-avatar, unlike the one in the OP. However, I'm with Shadowrun on racism in games. "Why worry about the tanned guy on the subway, when that thing over there has hands the size of your head."
"How fine you look when dressed in rage."
Biologically, speciation is a tough subject that's more convoluted than that. For instance, sometimes they can interbreed, but won't. Sometimes the SAME species won't interbreed - and sometimes they won't interbreed with individuals born too far away from them, but without any kind of clear boundary, just a spectrum where eventually they are "too" different - even though they're the same species. In plenty of examples, what's a species is contested. Considering the breeding issues and lack of popular hybrids, your traditional fantasy "races" are probably not the same species.
But that is SO not the point. The question is why do we call them races. Which I'd say we do in new games because we did in older games, because D&D did, because Science Fiction writers did, because Tolkien did - because stories have for time immemorial, before genetics existed. Personally, I believe the reason for that is that as far back as we have histories, travelers found different people, and they were all humans or at LEAST very close to it. (I'll add that in for arguments about co-existing Neanderthals and hobbits.) And that's where the definition of race comes from - another people with another society, but recognizeable as people.
And while fantasys certainly contain exaggerations... if I stood next to Andre the Giant (when he was alive) he'd certainly seem like a giant, as would basically any football player. A race of people with an average height that was less than a foot taller or shorter than my personal height would certainly make a difference - this joke has been played in every American-visits-Japan story I've heard. Something as simple as a helmet with a bull's horns could account for a minotaur in low light. etc. Except the ears, Elves are just intelligent, agile, long lived people. The vast majority of fantasy and science fiction races don't push the limits of what an intelligent nonhuman species might be - they are all people with certain things exaggerated and certain things suppressed - exaggerated in the way everything else is in fantasy.
I can't believe I'm posting in this thread.
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As an Asian American myself, I would at least like fewer racial stereotypes in games. How many times in games is Asian guy relegated to the "smart side-kick who's good at math and gadgets" or the "obligatory I-know-martial-arts" guy? Or an Asian woman is the "sexy, sleek I-know-martial-arts" girl? Well, I guess you could carry over those same stereotypes into all forms of media (TV and movies as well).
-- jchenx
Really, any game based on an event with a preset construct of races involved. WW2 games like you said are a good example.
Even some of the new instances in WoW make it so Night Elves turn into Humans to fit the storyline of going back in time to save thrall in a part of the game that Elves didn't exist in.
What about a basketball game where you can make Kobe Bryant a 5" skinny white guy? Just doesn't fit.
Likewise, how realistic would a game based on a tv show or movie be if you could customize a predefined character? (Nevermind the fact that these games tend to suck anyways)
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Fighting games are a special case... They've got SO much disbelief to be suspended... I mean, if you're expected not to question whether a top-heavy 5'2" girl could possibly KO a 6'10" 320 lb guy through brute force, I don't think you'll be worrying about the socio-economic implications of skin color in the back story. :-)
um, modern data indicates most of us are mixed, even when we don't think we are.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I remember back in the 80's playing text based games and thinking how cool it was that this new medium would put race aside... how wrong I was. The premis of the article misses the point, it's not the color of the hand that holds the gun that is important... it's the target at the end of the barrel. A huge majority of games these days are promoting an "it's okay to shoot browns (arabs)" mentality and that just fucked up. I wonder who is promoting it? Strange how media and the game world have locked lips.
Maybe the players design their characters to resemble themselves in some way. In the USA roughly 13% of the population is black, and only 4% Asian. Of course you would then have to figure out the racial distribution of the actual players of the game to make a real comparison.
I think that part of the problem is that almost nobody actually roleplays in MMOs to any extent. Most of the MMOs that I've played are more like IRC with avatars, and there is the expectation that people, by and large, act as though the avatar is a conduit for the actual player, rather than the player taking the role of the character. That's actually one of the reasons that I don't like MMORPGs (second on the list, just under the fact that I don't like subscription based games- not because of the cost, but because I feel obligated to play, which takes the fun out of it for me).
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