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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?
http://www.theregister.com/2007/01/30/lily_white_a nd_not_loving_it/
For the most part, gamers think of their games as completely hermetic fantasy worlds that don't interact with reality. Of course, in hindsight we see that there are many real world influences on the content of our games - just like when we look back at the Science Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. So for the most part, people don't see race in games because they're usually treated the same way we treat race in the real world. In 20 years, when we have different opinions and habits with regard to race, a racial message will probably be far more evident.
On the other hand, when we see a game that approaches race differently from us - for example, the Left Behind game that gives evil/"unsaved" characters Arabic names - we see a clear message. So most people here will claim that, while some games certainly have racial elements, their games don't.
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
I played a racist character in Everquest for a while, which to my surprise genuinly upset people.
I played a dark elf and would not team with any of the light races, except in some cases when they clearly were evil. But even then, I would act racist to for example ogres and trolls, making clear that I despised them and considered them inferior, while in contrast being moderately respectful to other dark elves.
Almost every day someone would send me a private message complaining about my racist attitude, and many a dwarf was surprised to get a friendly reply which explained that I was roleplaying.
I thought it was rather strange that even though we were playing characters, and I am obviously not a dwarf-hating dark elf in real life, a lot of people couldn't accept racism in the game. Maybe it means that there is something good in humanity. Or maybe just something silly.
But to answer the question, do I care about race in games, I'd say: no, except when my character has stereotypical attitude or dialog. But that's not strictly related to race. I find it very hard to indentify with a character if he keeps talking in a way that I would not.
I think that the ambiguity in "Jade" reflects a change in racial attitudes and also a change in marketing. Many companies are tapping into multiracial and biracial characters because they often appeal to a larger audience.
Whenever somebody choses a character in a video game and plays that character, I agrue, in some level that they are identifying with that character. I mean you control that character's actions, you die when that character dies etc. so there is at least a little bit of your time and attention and perhaps even emotion invested into that character. Each of these people thought that Jade was a different race/ethnicity because in their mind, their hero character is represented by somebody they are more able to identify with "an arab", "of Eurasian descent", "black", etc. This is positive. Wouldn't you rather chose who your hero's are instead of accepting what somebody tells you who your hero is?
As a side, I think that there are more racially ambiguous and multiracial characters in sci fi and fantasy because the idea that "mixed" is the future. I think that this can be a bit of a double-edged sword. While think its good to have positive media images of mixed-race people, i think that sci fi can leverages stereotypes create characters.
Example #1:
George is stronger than normal humans, but savage and primal because he is half and half human.
This example is common, and there's not too much wrong with it. But how many people feel that there is a large leap between this first example and this next one:
Example #2:
Take something like the Jade character above. Jade does math better than the average character because she's asian and runs faster because she's black. This ties into to stereotypes. 1. Asian people do math well. 2. Black people run fast.
Hey- for the second example these are both positive stereotypes, why do I bring it up? Positive stereotypes can be just as negative stereotypes. This description degrades the character's performance to a characteristic of race. Maybe the jade character does math well because she has a PhD and runs fast because she ran track and field. This form of stereotyping for multiracial characters is often called "Hybrid Vigor" or "best of both worlds". The flip side of it is "Hybrid Degeneracy" or "worst of both worlds". In the end, video game characters, just like people, and should be judged and evaluated as individuals- not races.
It's a undisputed fact that Black people are over respresented in media. Black people make up 12.12% of the US populace according to the last census. They make up 20% of all media characters/talking heads in media according to some studies. This occurs because Asians of all sorts are under represented (1% of charcters 5% of the pop). Hispanics as well but not as severely. I do imagine that the quality of this over representation is poor.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."