A Criticism of Race Portrayal in Games

Joystiq points out (and comments incitefully on) a two-part examination of African-American roles in videogames on the site Black Voice News. Series author Richard Jones takes the videogame industry to task for the numerous poor images that young black people have to compare themselves to. He singles out Carl Johnson, the protagonist of GTA: San Andreas as an example. Jones also acknowledges that 'the video game industry is all about money', pointing out the unfortunate lack of black designers and illustrators in the industry to sway the creative choices of publisheres and developers. He gives a call to arms to black players, saying they should focus some of their passion on the skills required to make games. They'd get rich, he says, and work to reverse some of the negative stereotypes that non-whites are subject to in games. The Opposable Thumbs blog takes a critical look at his argument, offering up another side to the story. While it's obvious that Mr. Jones doesn't have a great grasp on the games industry itself, he would seem to make a few valid points as well.

I doubt that...

They'd get rich, he says, and work to reverse some of the negative stereotypes that non-whites are subject to in games.

If rap music is any indicator, the trend for negative stereotypes in video games won't change that much regardless of the game designer's skin color. Besides, with a few big name exceptions, who gets rich in the video game industry anyway?

We need more?

Look, the greatest game of all time already has a black protagonist: Shaq-Fu. I mean, after encountering that masterpiece, how could you ever want to play any other game?

huh?

The Opposable Thumbs blog takes a critical look at his argument, offering up another side to the story.

And in that blog we get this line:

His argument falls apart, though, when you consider that almost every game in recent memory that has you taking on the role of a character allows some sort of racial customization.

Which honestly, is a ludicrous assertion. MAYBE if you limit "taking on the role of a character" to RPGs, but most games have you taking on the role of a character, and most of them don't allow any customization whatsoever.

inciteful comments

If anyone else had written it, I might think that "comments incitefully" was a clever pun. But as it's Zonk, I'm afraid it's more likely a Malapropism.

Gordon Freeman, anyone?

I mean, everyone knows he's Indo-Afro-Latino-Cau-freakin'-castic. The only thing he's not is Laplander. What we need are more Laplander game designers. Then we'd be playing some reindeer games, man.

Re:Gordon Freeman, anyone?

Cau-freakin'-castic

Caucastic? Is that like some brand new description of Charlie Brooker [wikipedia.org] or something that I haven't heard yet?

"He's caustic...he's sarcastic...he's CAUCASTIC!"

It doesn't matter who develops it

Look at rap music ...
For the most part, Rap music has the worst portrail of black people and it is created (for the most part) by black people ...

Simply having more black people in the industry is not going to change how black people are represented in games

GTA:SA might be a bad example....

...seeing that it is the fourth game in a series where all the other anti-hero protagonists have been white guys.

I'm not saying that the GTA series is a good role model, but I don't see how it is inherently racist that the PC is a black man.

They might start with the music industry first....

African-Americans play a BIG role in the music industry, unlike the game industry, so you have to wonder why so many of them persist in portraying themselves in such a negative fashion there. Gangsta rap has been the worst thing for race relations since the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King -- and for the most part it's not white musicians making it.

How about random/user-defined populations?

I've been wondering recently with people talking about race in games why the games can't be adjustable. Although I've most recently played games on the Wii that seem to let you create different race individuals, apparently many do not let you do that. It would seem useful to allow the user to adjust things to look like his or her community, or like a different community. It could be done by parents, or just for fun. When I was a kid we had Wizardry II (Apple ][) and IIRC you could select Dungeons and Dragons style races like dwarf, mage, etc. Ultima and the rest of the genre too. I didn't realize games created roles for kids to look up to, but certainly I was looking in the Wii selection for faces that I wanted to be. I had lots of fun doing it but actually they ought to provide more combinations, it took a while to find one I really enjoyed "being".

Yeah, Elves are not as cool as people think

And are Orcs really soooo bad?

Previous Games

In the first GTA3 you were an unnamed white hoodlum in NY. In the second, you were an italian mobster in Miami. In the third, you're a black gangbanger in LA. The series plays on stereotypes and nothing is sacred. In all of them, all races were equally depicted as villains. It really isn't fair to decry their depiction of African Americans unless you include their depiction of homosexuals, hippies, latinos, bikers, cops, jews, lawyers, etc...

The GTA games have always had a heavily satirical slant to them, and anyone who has actually played the games would be able to tell you that.

FF7 Berret Quotes

Post Final Fantasy 7 Berret quotes here. I'll start: "But that's for Marlene's schoolin'!"

Minorities

The biggest problem is that racial minorities are just that. Minorities. As such, most games are geared toward the majority. Which, in North America, is your white middle-class suburbanite teen. And the only thing that a lot of them know about minorities is the stereotypes. It's so much easier to make money feeding on people's preconceived notions that worry about educating them.

The real solution? Dilute North America so far that we all become one race.

I can't but think

that we get 2 articles about this in one month because it's February [wikipedia.org]..second /. article here [slashdot.org]

I personally never noticed in a game about shooting thugs what their race are. It's a shame that racism still exists. Even the blatantly biased commercial for the superbowl about Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith. What really keeps racism alive is these arguments about it. How many people have played Max Payne or Dead to Rights and really take notices of the color of the digital skin of the guy you're shooting? The links in the summary surely will open up heated debate. In the article "Psychologists agree that if your race is always the thief or killer, then after a while you start to think that's how you should be, or you think that's how your people are." ... Well, what about in games like Dead To Rights where the white cop just goes through the street shooting people? So does that make white kids think they should become vigilante cops?

I'm not saying that Mr. Jones is incorrect. I'm saying it's how you are raised. You can't just blame things on games and movies. Society needs to change and become more acceptable. Take a lesson from Star Trek.

Daikatana

I think it's time we applauded Daikatana for not allowing the player to leave without his African-American buddy, Superfly.

Moo

While we're on this topic, i would like to point out the apparent age discrimination on slashdot in moderators. The popular comments far outweigh intelligent ones in high moderations.

One good example - Guild Wars Nightfall

The latest chapter of GuildWars, Nightfall, is set in a Northern African inspired area of the GW world, has quite a few positive black and vaguely Arab/Mediterranean characters. Now, as the protagonist in an RPG, you get your standard character customization, but it seems to me they included more options for the various ethnicities one would expect to find in North Africa (then again, it may just be me; of course, I also thought the Factions chapter included more Asian ethnic options as well, which is appropriate given the Asian theme of that chapter). So, you don't have to be a black character, but a number of your comrades, allies and such are, and are cast in the role of hero alongside your own in a fantasy setting. And the thing is, none of them are really ethnically stereotyped, and if you're not paying a lot of attention, it's easy to overlook while playing. In short, I really like the way they handled it in game.

Second Life

Except for the furries which seem to be all around in Second life, most people are white, or some other typical shade of human with less frequency than they are white.

I'm green. When people meet me, they usually say "Whoa dude, you're green". Fucking stupid. Why NOT be green? It's bizarre that most human characters in second life are boring human colors which you can just go to the mall to see. And if they're animals, they are just big versions of things you can see at the zoo.

Why don't Second Life people dress up like animals that you can see at the grocery store? There's no reason why you couldn't be a big talking salmon, but I've never seen one. I don't recall ever seeing a cow in Second Life either. Or a chicken. Everybody's a cum covered fox or kitty it seems. Maybe a wolf, but it'll actually look more like a coyote with tits. Monkeys are in short supply too. Everybody loves monkeys and apes. Why haven't I met bigfoot in Second Life yet?

Racism in video games like Second life is way more than black or white. Fucking Kermit the Frog was right about it not being easy to be green.

It's a Good thing...

It's a good thing that the first four GTA games weren't about some white guy....

Oh wait...

And of course the Arabs and Persians and Jews all get off scott-free because they control the media...

Of course the gay characters are _never_ stereotypes...

And the "sex workers" of the world are always portrayed in the most positive and even-handed light possible...

And the "spics" and "rice burners" were perfectly valid and even-handed portrayals of racial norms as well...

(And we all know that cops are just corrupt dealers and killers with legal enforcement powers that can be convinced to leave you alone if you change your clothes or drive your bike through just the right spot in the local mall parking lot.)

I don't hear this guy protesting the treatment of and message presented to the youth of any _other_ "minority".

ENOUGH WITH THE EMOTIONAL STUBBED TOES ALREADY!

The sad fact of the matter is that GTA wasn't portraying "black people" as anything, it was portraying the "black gansta stereotype" and it was _even_ somewhat even-handed since the main character was "acting against type" by trying to straighten out a mess as much as make one.

And before you re-stub your emotional toe on the word "stereotype", please keep in mind that every non-proper noun _IS_ a stereotype. Teacher. Cop. Politician. Meter Maid. Brother. Sister. Nun. Clerk. Priest. (etc od nausium). Every single damn one of those words come with a precompiled message and set of expectations. That's all a "stereotype" is. "Baseless racial stereotype" is a different concept all together.

The actual problem is that the "gangsta" movement has deliberately manufactured a stereotype that someone doesn't like, but this is being hoist on their own petard. Heck, the members of that self-created group probably thought the portrayal was totally cool.

You cannot save people from their own damn selves, nor should people who make a bad image for themselves garner sympathy.

As far as the "game makers", well, they know that a game based on the law-abiding middle-income family guy from suburbia, who goes to work and pays bills on time and attends a baseline church and plays a friendly game of poker once a month with "the guys" WOUDL MAKE A TERRIBLY BORING VIDEOGAME.

I'd say "They tried to make a good game, so sue them" but I am sure somebody somewhere with a bruised medula would do just that.

And P.S. I didn't like or play the game when my roommate brought it home because _NONE_ of those stereo types interested me. I kind-of liked Vice City because the soundtrack was interesting and the action wasn't skewed beyond the empty plot of Miami Vice. But I didn't whine about the game much either, except when it was interfering with me using the TV for something valuable. (I'd say "like NASCAR or Pro Wrestling" but I fear the irony would be lost on the stupid and someone would take that seriously and dub me "raciest" without regarding context, so let me put "watching firefly" here instead.)

Woe betide the Hispanic on the 360

Is it just me, or does anyone else get the sneaking suspicion that game devs see latinos and think "target"?

I played the demo of the new 360 shooter "Crackdown" on the weekend. From a race relations perspective, on the plus side you get to pick the race of your character and have a fairly wide range of options.

On the negative side, you then spend the next hour of the demo killing latinos. Lots of them.

One example does not an argument make, you say? Arguing from analogy is bad logic, you postulate?

Well, take a look at the Saint's Row demo, also available to you from the kind folks at XBox Live. Load it up, sit back and .... kill some latinos.

Coincidence, you sputter?

Okay, sit down, relax and pop in the disc for a little GRAW. The great thing about this game is that you have HUGE range of guns available ... for killing latinos. Sure, there are some asians to kill as well, and I'm admittedly not that far along in the single player campaign (can ANYONE get used to the squad command d-pad stuff?), but so far it's pretty much been a latino shooting spree.

Now I'm a white guy, and a bit dense when it comes to the social niceties. I'm the kind of guy that forgets valentines day despite the fact that the secretaries in my office had hearts pasted on everything that wasn't self-mobile for days in the lead-up.

So when I tell you that I notice this stuff, it's rampant.

Jade from Beyond Good and Evil

There was an interesting article [wired.com] where the main character had an ambiguous race. Players were welcome to decide if she was asian, black, or perhaps some humanoid alien of some kind. Personally I just thought she was smart, cute, and sassy, always a winning combination.

Reverse Racism?

Keep in mind that often when a positive black character comes along, he is accused of being an "oreo" or something to that effect. Even if you had something like a black cop as the hero, people will call it "stereotypical" if he still says "whats up, dog?" to an informant or fellow cop. But if he says "Well there my dear friend, do you have any news on that narcotics shipment coming in a fortnight?" he would be accused of "not really being black." Its like people are EXPECTED to act according to the stereotypes to be a "real" member of their race.

It's all Black or White

Why does everything about race in America have to have a negative connotation? Why is it all about the stereotypes?

Every time you read some self-centered interest group going on about the treatment of (fill in ethnic, racial, religious) group in a game it's hard to decide what's worse; the whining or the fact that the game makers are taking advantage of these fractures in American society.

What is most depressing is that there doesn't seem to be any possibility of resolution within anyone's lifetime. I'm not talking about rainbows and angels "peace and harmony", I'm talking about no-one giving a flying fark what race you are. It shouldn't freaking matter, but America just seems to want to keep the divide.

I happen to be Caucasian, my wife happens to be Asian. We have taught our kids that they represent the future of humanity, where races mix without fear of discrimination simply because it reaffirms the fundamental truth that we are all just human beings. That color of skin matters less than what they strive to be and how they help move mankind as a whole forward. That should be all there is to it.

Elephants in the living room

There are a few here. Along with some misunderstandings.

1) Why is it perfectly mainstream and acceptable to link sympathetically to a site called "Black Voice News", when if you did the same thing for a site called "White Voice News", you'd be instantly accused of wanting to gas 6 million people?

2) "The video game industry is all about money"... um, ok. Like any other form of media, it's an immense power that has a small ability to make some money on the side. The ability to shape the minds of millions of people to an extent that movies can't is worth far more than any revenue stream that could be derived from games. 10 billion a year is small potatoes on a world scale. An Iraq war alone costs an order of magnitude more. For someone who has the resources to promote such a thing, the game industry is cheap at multiples of the price.

3) "The problem is that our youth and adult players see themselves as players and not designers or illustrators." It's far more likely because of inherent genetic limitations of IQ wrt population size. It's simply unrealistic to expect large numbers of Black people to be effective in creating video games, the same way it would be to expect the White working class players of video games to be putting out content that has mass appeal. (Obviously there will be a small minority who will.)

I've got to give Richard O. Jones credit though. He does capitalize the word White when referring to race, something that Blacks, Jews, Asians, and Hispanics have benefited from for decades now. It's nice to start being recognized as a people for once. Maybe "our" media will follow suit one day? I'm not holding my breath.

Not a good way to start an objective article

As a man who plays a lot of video games across a lot of platforms and genres, I like to think that I have a fairly good understanding of the representation of reality rendered by most games.

Riiiight .. Just because a fisherman fishes all day doesn't mean he knows the eating habits and reproduction cycles of the fish he catches.

FF12

I suprised there hasn't been more about FF12. The only dark skinned character is an actual bunny that lives in a jungle. That definitely caught my attention.

GTA is a bad example?

Have these guys actually played the other GTA games? White dudes doing really, really bad stuff. The fact is, in GTA:SA you don't actually need to be particularly evil to complete it, and the main character does at least have his own moral code and is trying to make things better for the majority of good/innocent people.

I don't think GTA:SA even has kill frenzies any more.

... have to compare themselves to?

Series author Richard Jones takes the videogame industry to task for the numerous poor images that young black people have to compare themselves to.

Have to compare themselves to? Black kids can only identify with black characters in videogames? That's what I call racist!
By the way, I'm white and I enjoyed San Andreas very much. Although I'm quite certain it was not the main objective of the creators of the game, I now perhaps can identify a bit more with people that grew up in different circumstances than myself. But I'm not supposed to, I understand. I'll start playing the ignorant white male again, right after I've hit the submit button, mkay?

Games portrayal of terrorists

>>
If games have a blind spot about race, I'd have to admit that it's the appearance of Indians, Muslims, Sikhs and the other eastern peoples as "terrorists" in most situations.
>>

Darn straight, we need to have more diversity among our terrorists or budding lesbian Latina Shinto suicide bombers will suffer from depressed self-esteem.

(Sidenote: Aladdin, in his zillion incarnations. The entire freaking cast of Prince of Persia. You can play as Tehran Airlines in Aerobiz, and if you manage to get past the fact that your region is in ceaseless war (because in real life that region is in ceaseless war) you can even make a profit at it -- it was my favorite "conquer the world" scenario after I got bored of winning with easy starts like Tokyo, New York, and London. I suppose Japanese RPGs have a distinct lack of Muslims but then again they have a distinct lack of Catholics, Jews, and people with hair which is not neon and spiky.)

Are you sure?

and all asian people go kung fu fighting.

In my games when japanese girls fight agains enourmous tentacled monsters they don't go kung fu fighting. I think my games aren't stereotyped.

Re:There's no such thing as race.

Race is a social construction.

I'm an Orc, you insenstive clod.

KFG

Re:There's no such thing as race.

Just to elaborate (but not correct you), the whole idea of "sub-species" is non-scientific. Species exist in nature - they describe gene flow between individuals. The idea of a sub-species is just a sometimes-useful taxonomic grouping, but ultimately has no basis in biology.

Re:Yup, and thanks to affirmative action

Yup. And really, race is such an absurd concept! The differences between races is at best superficial. Therefore, race doesn't exist, take your pills and go back to sleep.

Re:There's no such thing as race.

Races exit, and I'm not talking about homo sapiens only, they are less defined than subspecies, but that doesn't mean they are SOCIAL constructs (any clasification is a construct).

There is no white and black races, there are about 4 "black" human races and 3 "white" ones, and lot more "yellow" and "brown". I agree that the clasificacion itself is not static, just like when talking about dogs, the classification of a dalmatian or a dobberman is a contruct by an organization (having several definitions of the perfect -insert race here- dog).

But few people would argue that a dobberman and a dalmatian are the same kind of dogs, yet even less people would argue one is more dog than the other, that's the point with races they are biological clasifications based on fenotype, and they are not supose to be casts.

Casts are social constructs and we (humans) have the tendency to use casts and base them on anything from races to propertys, beliefs, genders, ages, etc. and then asocciate the social worth of the cast as innherent (and exclusive) to an attribute used to define that cast or perhaps even to another attribute that should not not even related at all.

BTW homo sapiens is a biological clasification based on genotype, and is the only known (accepted?) species to be human. Human is an ontological clasification (not social), but like any other attribute it has suffered these "cast syndrome" repeated times through history.

Re:There's no such thing as race.

Race is a social construction. The term race is itself "racist"...

There are different cultures, obviously, and also different skin colours and other superficial appearances.

Are you for real?

Humans migrated across the globe in an era when separating meant limited or no contact (or breeding) with groups elsewhere. Specialization to the environment -- basic evolution-in-the-small --, and traits being exaggerated through group inbreeding, measurably changed each group in ways much greater than skin color. Some races (look up the term "racist", btw) are taller, or darker, or with larger or smaller noses. Some races are allergic to milk while others are not. Some are susceptible to conditions like MS, while others are not. Some have diseases that only their race contract.

Some races, in a general sense, are better at some things than other races (while it's okay to say, for instance, that one race is dominant at physical sports, don't dare mention race in the context of intelligence).

While global travel/movement means that eventually, far in the future, we'll all re-merge into one race, simply brushing it under the rug under some PC nonsense doesn't help anyone.

Re:There's no such thing as race.

Race is a social construction.

Then why do different "races" have different physiologies (eg: asians have less alcohol tolerance, negros are more susceptible to certain diseases, etc) ?

Re:There's no such thing as race.

I should probably clarify and say that I am talking about the general idea behind affirmative action, not necessarily how it is actually implemented.

Again, I would say that the concept behind affirmative action (which includes sex, by the way, not just race - since it has to do with the problems facing women in hiring, etc. as well) is not racist in concept. The idea behind it, as I mentioned above, is that if left to their own devices, people with hiring power had and have a tendency to skip over qualified minority applicants over white and male applicants. How much of this is still a problem is hard to tell (not to mention how many people there are who would still pass over a minority applicant if given a choice).

I would say that low intelligence applicants are a different issue. Affirmative action shouldn't be used to make someone hire someone with lower intelligence. I can certainly grant that this does happen though, and I would agree that that is wrong. In a perfect world at least, the purpose would be to avoid the most egregious problems; something where an equally qualified minority applicant is passed over in favor of a lesser qualified white or male applicant.

I think it is also true that this has fueled contempt and racism, although again I think this is because people like yourself seem to distort the purpose of it (and also because some companies, etc. seem to misunderstand the purpose of affirmative action). Certainly someone with your perspective (who says that the purpose of it is to help people with lower intelligence get hired, etc.) would not like it.

You mentioned "higher intelligence/SES blacks do not need assistance at all" - but that's exactly my point actually. Those ARE the main people affirmative action is designed to help; the reason the concept came about is specifically because you had situations where a black person with higher intelligence was passed over anyway in favor of a white person specifically because of their race.

Is affirmative action perfect? No, clearly not, and clearly there are problems with how it is seen and implemented. But I will still stand by my original point that the idea behind it is necessary and important.

Re:Incitefully?

Ok, who let Clipy on slashdot? I thought the "No Office-Assistents Alowed"-sign was clear about that.

There is such a thing as race

- if by race, you mean genetic differentiation related to ancestry in humans.

Of course, much as we can discuss "is there such a thing as a chair" (or any choice of labelling) all day long without any results, we can try to obfuscate the reality of human genetic differences all day long using word games like "there is no such thing as race".

In everyday use though, there is indeed a social component - what is considered "black" in the US might not be considered "black" in Nigeria. For everyday use though, the social conception of race corresponds surprisingly well to the underlying biological reality.

Here is a neat summary of the current state of affairs:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/01/race-current-cons ensus.php [gnxp.com]

"I. Genetic variation in humans forms clusters that correspond to geography

The fact that one can cluster humans together by geography based solely on their genetic information was most convincingly demonstrated in two papers (the second one is open access) by a group out of Stanford. These studies looked at several hundred variable places in the genome in 52 populations scattered across the globe. The hypothesis was as follows-- on applying a clustering algorithm to these data, individuals from similar geographic regions would end up together.

I've put a representation on the right, where colors represent poplations-- on top is a pattern of variation that would lead to no clustering (the colors all blend one into the next) while on the bottom is a pattern of variation that would lead to clustering (there are subtle but noticable jumps from yellow to green, for example, though there is much variation within each color). Note that the lack of clustering would not mean that all populations are genetically the same (in the top figure, yellow and orange are not "the same" even though you couldn't find a fixed boundry between them).

But indeed, the researchers found the situation corresponding to the bottom figure-- the individuals formed five clusters which represented, in the authors' words, "Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas". Some populations were exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions in biology)-- they seemed to be a mix between two clusters, or could even form their own cluster in certain models.

But in general, the second model in the figure is a good fit for human variation based on the spots in the genome used by these researchers-- continents correspond to clusters, and geographic barriers like the Himalayas or an ocean correspond to those areas where a "jump" from one cluster to the next occurrs.

II. Clusters and race

The fact that humans cluster together based on genetic information could, in theory, be entirely orthoganal to the concept of race. However, at least in the United State (where this has been explicitly tested), this is not the case. The most important reason for this, in my mind, is that the ancestors of European-Americans and African-Americans were not randomly sampled from the globe (there's a bias towards points on the globe that are quite distant), and this non-random sampling accentuates the genetic differences between the two groups. But in any case, the reasons for this are irrelevant to the argument; let's look at the data.

The basis for this assertion comes from a paper (open access) by a different set of researchers at Stanford, who assembled a group of Americans who identified themselves as either African-American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. They followed a similar protocal as the studies in the first section-- they took DNA from all individuals, looked a hundreds of different DNA variants, and applied a clustering algorithm. They then looked to see if their clusters corresponded to self-reported group. And indeed, in 3631 out of 3636 cases (99.85%), the individuals were clustered by the algorithm into the "correct" racial

Anthropology

Social anthropology is about as scientific as most other social studies diciplines - i.e. not very scientific at all. Genetics (a real science) is where the cutting edge work on human genetics and relatedness is done - anthropology hasn't been in the game for a long, long time.