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.
SO Brazilians are green skinned monsters that can create electric fields to you? Cooool.
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.
There's active racism. It's the virulent kind. The asshole with shaved heads attacking people on the street.
There's passive racism. It's just as evil, but not as out in the open. It's the asshole in a suit and tie who prefers to hire certain kinds of people for certain kinds of jobs.
There's latent racism. It's in no way malignant. It's when someone honestly doesn't think about races or and differences between them, but they can accidentally say something stupid or offensive. Like when Tony Snow made his "tar baby" comment.
In video game development, I see latent racism. In many games all of the central characters are white. The game developers probably never even though about racial issues. They just made a game. Being rendered invisible is almost as hurtful as being actively discriminated against. In the first several GTA games the central character is white. In San Andreas, the central characters are almost all black and THAT'S when people notice. I salute Rockstar for making an effort.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.