Slashdot Mirror
Race and Racism In Video Games
SlappingOysters writes "Racism in video games has been a key topic of discussion in the game industry this year, thanks in large part to the controversy surrounding the Resident Evil 5 launch trailer. In this article, GamePlayer speaks to developers, publishers, activists and journalists about the issue to get various perspectives and insights into how the video game industry is moving forward on the topic of racism. A related piece also has interviews with Sue Clark from the UK's Classification Board and Dr. Griseldis Kirsch, a lecturer in Contemporary Japanese Studies, about how racism in video games is viewed by the BBFC and Japan respectively."
It's ok to celebrate the variation and uniqueness of fictional races, like elves and hobbits and orcs, but you can never think about the differences between real races.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How ironic to think that perhaps (just perhaps) a game developer, or movie director, who isn't at all racist, wasn't at even thinking about race, may have created something based in a certain country. And in that country they just saw people as "people".
And then, the players of a game, or viewers of a movie turn out to actually place more of a distinction on "races" than the developer. They see the skin color, or different shaped eyes, and it becomes an issue to "them" where it wasn't to the creators. They start screaming "racist" and "bigot", when in fact they scream it at people more innocent then them.
Perhaps things like this are rare, but I've seen similar things in my own life. People who I know aren't even thinking about distinctions between so called "races" getting yelled at by people who are.
Racism in any form should not be tolerated. But we should be sure that there's a blanket, derogatory emphasis placed on someone simply because of their group, and not the content of their personal character.
Racism is a lot like the Bible code: if you look hard enough, you can find it anywhere.
I am a game developer. Let me assure you that explicit racism and sexism is long a thing of the past in video games. Today's problem is getting past the archytypical stereotypes that all media reach for when it is 9 PM and you really need to write in a character before you can go home.
In terms of racism, video games have more or less the same preponderance of "Black best friends" as other modern media. There is the spunky old black engineer with only the slightest bit of white hair. There are the seductive, ass-kicking amazonian black women. There is the black player 2 character, who is black mainly so that he looks different from player 1. You won't see any blackface 1930's stereotypes, but you also won't see a lot of black leading men in nontraditional roles.
Gender tends to receive a worse treatment than other media, unfortunately, as A: there are far fewer female game developers, which tends to promote a teenage view of gender and B: gender stereotypes are actually useful from a gameplay context (rescue the princess, smaller / faster / weaker, etc). I haven't ever seen a game where the female character is a worse driver, but I've definitely seen games where the female characters needed to be a bit less of a teenage male fantasy. Female representations in gaming are approximately at the same place as they were in early 90's music videos: better than 10 years ago, but still with a ways to go.
The ______ Agenda
In particular, if your tactic is to simply take an existing work and hack your moral onto it, the product is likely to be weak and, I would argue, even counterproductive. Take Guitar Praise [guitarpraise.com] as an example. Straight guitar hero clone, with "christian" hacked onto it. Whatever you think about christianity, that is weak. It essentially says: "My religion is too sensitive for me to play a game with music that doesn't pander to it; but it also presents no compelling alternative to secular culture, so I'm just going to play a shitty clone with the offensive stuff clipped out." C'mon, either play guitar hero or come up with something that is genuinely inspired by, and an organic product of, your faith. Slapping a decal on somebody else's cultural product just makes you look uncreative and horribly thin skinned.
The Slashdot crowd so often claims to be so enlightened on the religion issue, and claims to have such valuable insights on religion over and over, and then accuses spiritual people of holding ignorant and biased beliefs. Well guess what, my spirituality comes under fire all the time and I have to defend it at work, to my friends and to my family.
I really want you to examine your post. First of all, I went to the website you linked, and it IS NOT filled with Jack Chick propaganda, like you'd lead people to believe. It's almost *exactly* what I'd expect a non-christian video game website to be. Nowhere on the website did it give me any indication that they thought "My religion is too sensitive for me to play a game with music that doesn't pander to it." Secondly, it's all Christian music, so fucking what? Guitar Hero released an all Aerosmith game! Would you prefer that they put a bunch of Christian music into Guitar Hero? Third, you say they made some cheap knockoff clone, like this is somehow unique to the industry. Lets see, we're looking at Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Rock Band World Tour, and Wii Music. After DDR came out, a bunch of other dancing games came out. Sure, innovation is great, but it is rare and acting like it isn't, is just ignorant.
Yes, it might be getting dangerously close to copyright infringement, but that isn't part of your argument. Yes, there are OTHER religious games and people that spout awful propaganda, but you picked to smear one that I think is being respectful. Smearing Guitar Praise for being Christian is as bad as religious people smearing Spore for promoting evolutionary concepts.
around usually fall into the falling categories
1. They need to feel the victim, never wanting to believe anything that goes wrong in their life is the fault of their choices
2. They usually exhibit the worst stereotypes attributed to their race
3. They are so full of hatred (both self and towards others) there is no other reaction they can have
4. They just seek attention or favors by making public scenes knowing that it is far easier to embarrass people than prove an occurrence.
The problem today is that the term is applied to too many instances when bigotry is the real term that needs to be applied if at all. Any slight can be perceived in any manner and the press has this tendency to blow things out of proportion because too many in the press think they are societies protectors and it is up to them to identify what is wrong.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.