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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?
Different races get different stat bonuses! When I want to make a good warrior, I go with a Dwarf. When it's a mage I need, I go for some sort of Elf. Jeez, was this question really necessary? :)
IAALS.
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".
I don't care about race in real life, so why should I care about it in-game?
Having said that, when one thinks about different races in a game having different stats, I would venture to guess that the large number of these references to "race" are actually references to "species"; to use a popular example, a Tauren is different from a Troll in much different ways than a [African(-American)|Chinese|Japanese|Native-Americ an] is different from a Caucasian.
Aikon-
I kill Nightelves in WOW all the time. I would never dream of killing an orc.
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
This reminds of me of Kratos, from God of War. I know that he's "spartan", and all, but from the way they designed the character, both in appearance and voice, I always thought he seemed more like a black guy than a white guy. And since his skin was covered in ash to make him perma-pale, it made it even harder to be sure, for lots of the game. At least, in my opinion. Maybe others dont agree.
I thought it was a nice touch, though, all-in-all. I mean, there's a bit of "badassness" to certain black character traits, both physically and in attitude, and I think Kratos's personality is a lot stronger than it would have been if they hadnt borrowed those traits. But I have to admit, if Kratos had been modeled after Ice-T or something, I probably wouldnt enjoy the game nearly as much.
Personally, I get tired of the whole racism debate. Ive always felt this way about japanese games. I dont like it when the characters are DECIDELY Japanese. I liked Cloud (from FFVII) a lot more back when it was unclear what he was rather than now, when he has been remade into a more clearly japanese appearance. Really, unless race is a specific issue in a game's plot, I think it should be left out as much as possible, so Im all for the racial ambiguity thing.
http://www.theregister.com/2007/01/30/lily_white_a nd_not_loving_it/
I'd agree that Barret of FF7 is a poorly implemented stereotype, but FF8 has one of the best black characters in any game with Kiros. Although he's only playable in the Laguna flashback scenes, he's smart and capable, and most importantly does not "play the race card" or in any way call attention to his race. His scenes were some of the best parts of the game.
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.
Let's see if I can recall. Nazis and Red USSR communists are always evil. Vietam asians are generally bad. Japan WWII is bad, but afterward is good. China WWI & WWII is good and after WWII is neutral. France is never bad per se, but seeing as we were settled from England; well of course France or "the French" will always be slanted negatively. England is typically the good ole mother country except any games based from the Civil War backwards. Whenever we fight the English, we fight against evil unjust monarchs. Ever since the Desert Storm and/or Desert Shield, any nameless Middle East dictator has been a safe villian for the US or good military to invade and beat up. Now a days, its also Islam or unnamed "bad" muslims for the sake of our religious terror war. Oh, let's not forget any aliens. All aliens are always evil and must be destoried before they take over. Einstein is always the good German Allied Scientist. You can always tell who the good guys are based solely on which side Einstein is on.
The author is missing several key black characters I remember along the way, some from the 1980's. MIKE TYSON from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. The black player from Smash TV. (I don't remember ever fighting over who got to play who.) MICHAEL JORDAN from Jordan vs. Bird. (Believe me, no one wasn't buying this game to play as Bird.) JAX from Mortal Kombat.
I usually pick a black character - they're harder to see in the shadows!
Yeah, those hortas from TOS episode 26 - The Devil in the Dark, are pretty sweet...
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 like fightin games and shootin games and wrestlein games too!
I quit!
What does a character from Johnny Quest have to do with gaming?
Well, if you're playing as Haji, they always stop you at the airport.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Why would it matter unless your some racist punk
Yeah! Or, if you're some twit that doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're" - causing some people to think that maybe it's never about race, but about culture. Some cultures emphasize things (like articulate communication) that are hugely helpful in some pursuits, and others emphasize other things. Obviously your culture doesn't sweat the details of whether or not the people you're bitching to can actually parse your words in a useful way. But, hey, to each their own. Just don't get cranky when people make snap judgements about your character when the equivalent of visual cultural indicators (in this case, the way you communicate) immediately dispose people to thinking less of you. It's not racism, it's culturalism... and (hint, here!) it pretty much always has been. For much of human history, race has been a pretty good indicator of cultural affiliation. Those days are pretty much completely gone now, obviously. So instead, you just watch what people do (or whether they care to differentiate between the possesive "your" and "you're," the contraction of "you are"). Screw skin pigment... do you play characters that match your culture? I'm honestly asking.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
No, I do not.
I guess Jade is a black name, because Jade in MK3 was black too (i think) and looked kinda like her.
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.
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."
That's wraslin, you uncultured slob.
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."
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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Hating someone because they look/act/think different then your is pure ignorance. Any culture that promotes this behavior is crippling humanity.
While, as platitudes go, that's not as bad as most... you can't really assume that all actions are equal? Personally, I feel very righteous in thinking less of someone of their thinking and acting includes a demonstrated willingness to kill me because I don't worship their god(s). Should I really feel completely neutral towards (or ever embrace) a culture that thinks my wife shouldn't be allowed to drive a car or be out in public without me escorting her? Should I consider as equal (or, equally worthy) a culture that would consider it appropriate for me to kill her if someone raped her? These things are not tied to race. But when you get enough people who hang out together and handle things like that the same way, you've got an identifiable culture.
And to suggest that if I dislike such a culture that it's me crippling humanity (because I'm not treating everyone equally)... well, that's just moral relativism, pure and simple. I hope you can see the irony in proclaiming that a person's behavior (say, in their dislike for a certain culture's ways) is something you can't stand. Because in making that proclomation, you are doing exactly the same thing.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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
I was a little perturbed when GTA: San Andreas brought out a black protagonist. Not because I'm racist or anything, but because the game had previously centered around white Mafiosos. A black character brought all sorts of racial stereotypes with him, which had to be incorporated in the game. I was afraid the game would involve more street-gang type crime, instead of the grandiose organized crime that you saw in the previous games. In the end, they did a good job of fusing the two together though.
I was pretty offended by the implications of the race of the main character in GTA:SA. Not because he was the first black GTA character, but because he was also the first one that could SWIM!!! WTF kinda sense does that make? Was he also the first that could ice skate?
Rainbow Six: Vegas would be nothing to me if I couldnt play co-op as the black guy. Only the black guy can hold a machine gun in one hand, and a glock in the other, while hiding behind a blackjack table and "capping asses".
The game would be 15% less fun if I had to use the aforementioned arsenal as a white dude.
Ditto GTA: San Andreas. If you weren't playing CJ, you'd be stuck with some lame Eminem-like wigga. That would just plain suck.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Do it because it's what FITS. I hate it when developers just throw in some black dude or something just to make minority players happy. But by saying this, I am insinuating that a 'generic' character is therefore white. This is somewhat true. A generic character should fit in with the surroundings, and so if the game cast is primarily white, he should be white. If it's primarily black, then it's more fitting for a generic character to be black. But since games aren't about the ordinary if you're going to grab from outside the norm, you might as well go all out. Barrett is probably one of the most memorable black characters because he's so extreme. Perhaps I'm hitting a stereotypical vein here, but Jade is perhaps the perfect example of mass culture views. Jade seems 'off' because he's not what we typically expect a black person to be. This isn't necessarily wrong, but if a developer puts a black character in a game just to be diverse, then that's missing the mark. Give him some personality.
I love race in games. My favorite right now is Mario Kart DS.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
For games where different races represent different starting properties: I'd care only because of those properties.
For games where different races exist with the purpose of having a more personal experience by means of an avatar: hell yes and not just race either. Kind of pointless to have a customised avatar if you can't even customise these basic differences in appearance.
For any other game: not at all. I'm no hedgehog, Japanese prince(ss) or Italian plumber either, but that that never stopped me from playing any of those games.
Applies for nationalities as well, playing some loony state in C&C Red Alert squirmish was more fun than being US/Russia *once* again, while when properties don't matter I'd surely pick a nation I actually like.
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.
Feh. Time was when programmers used to hang out on Slashdot. I thought the title was about race conditions in game programming!
Turns out its something to do with skin color, which being a disciple of the great Dr. Colbert, I don't see anyway.
In games I usually play with a darker skin for the simple reason that white skins generally just don't look too good. (am I the only one who in NWN1 had all females with light skin look like they had a 5 o'clock shadow)
I also often play a female, for no other reason then that I prefer the look.
But what I mainly play is "me". For instance I rarely take the romance options for the female character I play because either they are stupid or as a hetero male that is a bit to close to being gay and we can't have that can we? Why if I felt for that hunky piece of man meat and melted away in his strong arms.... Right, who is up for some rugby. Just us men, groping each other on the field Damn...
In the first two GTA you played probably a non-descript white guy. Later that turned into an italian and finally a black guy.
But in these cases it is more then a skin. I play my olive skinned female woodelf as a chaotic good "lesbian". In these GTA games I am the mafia italian and the gangmember black guy. There is NO option for me to play the game except as in these roles. Well except not to play.
As a non-criminal, the role of a mafia gang-member is already a bit of a stretch. I do not have a fantasy about being a criminal at all and certainly not with the background of the GTA criminals. The mafia member in Mafia (pretty similar game in many ways) was however sympathetic to me.
The black dude? Sorry, zero connect. Nothing he does (and the game asks me to do) agrees with me. He is scum with not a single redeeming value. Worse, he ain't even very good at it.
The problem is that you ain't even allowed to think you are playing the bad guy. I liked Tie-Fighter (until it dragged into you being sorta the good guy after all because there was an even bigger evil then you), when you were serving the empire fighting that rebel scum. I happily play the nazi side in a WW2 game but don't expect of me to see them as anything but soldiers serving one of the greatest evils.
It is not about black/mafia culture either in GTA. In NWN2 they make a whole point about religion and those who do not believe in a god or only fake it are said to go to a form of hell after their deaths. Well FUCK THEM. My religion is nothing and so be it. I am playing a role and that does not involve kowtowing to some beard in the sky, even if in that universe they are real.
I will not play a religious freak.
But did I not enjoy the GTA games? As a movie, yes. I played them as watching a movie. Perhaps that may have been the idea and I am just wrong in thinking you have to be the character. But it was one of those movies were you do not care if the hero dies, and perhaps even cheer as he buys the farm. The anti-hero if you like.
I am quite certain that people who want "blacks" in video games do not want them ala GTA. Or maybe they do.
Am I just an idiot for wanting to play a character I can agree with? Just ask your average male to play a homosexual. Lesbian? SURE, but MALE homosexual. EEEEEEK!
It is offcourse typical that the article talks about blacks when there are so many more races and for that matter many more underrepresented groups. When was the last time you played a lesbian jewish asian hermaphrodite. Oh, yeah, last week. God I love NWN2.
Deus EX (both versions) gave you a choice of skin color (but not sex)allowing you to choose your race. Provided you wanted to play from a small selection of the genetic variation of either africa, europe or asia. For instance, no aboriginals or indians etc etc.
It also made the barest of impact on the game. So why was it there? The apperance of PC correctness as you say. Keep it.
Do I care about race in a game, no, it is just a skin. But the person I am supposed to be in that game got to be something I can indentify with. That I cannot identify with the black gangmember in GTA has nothing to do with his race. If the game had been set in japan with an asian gangmember it would not have connected for me either.
it is WHAT the character does that matters, not wich texturemap has been applied. Mmmm, perhaps actions should be more important then apperances in games. Nah, if that worked we would have it in real life already.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.