Do You Care About Race in Games? 322
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?
Of course I do! (Score:5, Funny)
Race, race, race (Score:2)
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I guess this shows I don't care about race in the games. I just play whichever character gives me the advantage.
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If you can get halbreeds I would say they are a race and not a species, if you can't, then they probably are different. And if you can get a Human/Dwarf or a Human/Elf, but not a Dwarf/Elf, then what are they? (Take Shadowrun, I would call orcs/trolls/dwarves the same race as humans, after all they did come from them, however elves are probably different)
We use race because it is the term we are all familiar with, and some of the big names way back when used the term and it st
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There are examples in nature where Species A and Species B can interbreed, and Species B and Species C can interbreed, but Species A and Species C cannot- apparently they have diverged too far apart.
So I suppose the humans, dwarves, and elves could share a common ancestor, be different species, and have some limited ability to interbreed.
Biology vs Etymology (Score:5, Insightful)
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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And, yes, I have no life.
-Eric
Re:Of course I do! (Score:5, Funny)
-Eric
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-matthew
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Vapid - Look it up (Score:4, Insightful)
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I had more fun playing the GLA and China in C&C Generals than I did the US, despite them being stereotypical and "evil", in a fashion. They had units I could devise more "fun" strategies with, instead of just rushing to aircraft and bombing the hell out of everything.
Re:Vapid - Look it up (Score:4, Interesting)
But what about the expansion pack? They had that black Ghost! He's no stupid menial laborer. So that's a positive portrayal of black people, right? Whatsisface, Duran... traitorous, backstabbing, double agent Duran. OK, nevermind. I'm not saying we need the Supreme Court to order a quota in video games or anything, but would it have fucking killed Blizzard to have a single, positive portrayal of a minority?
Re:Vapid - Look it up (Score:4, Funny)
Why would I have to look it up? Do you think you are the only one who knows what "Vapid" means? I'm willing to bet most people here don't need to look it up.
All my favorite lifeforms... (Score:2)
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This is an issue because....? (Score:2, Interesting)
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-
Re:This is an issue because....? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for other characters, I find I don't really care about their races other than disliking obvious "affirmative action" approaches where the NPC cast is a rainbow of races, obviously only to be PC. I'd rather have consistency between races and storyline. That's the most important thing -- basically, race should not be a distracting feature.
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Why not?
Unless the color of your character's skin is somehow central to the plot line, it shouldn't matter.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of too many games where skin color would be a significant factor that could not be scripted around.
I'm sure someone i
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Re:This is an issue because....? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even some of the new instances in WoW make it so Night Elves turn into Humans to fit the storyline of going back in time to save thrall in a part of the game that Elves didn't exist in.
What about a basketball game where you can make Kobe Bryant a 5" skinny white guy? Just doesn't fit.
Likewise, how realistic would a game based on a tv show or movie be if you could customize a predefined character? (Nevermind the fact that these games tend to suck anyways)
Re:This is an issue because....? (Score:5, Informative)
You must not have seen that movie.
It had Tom Cruise in it
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325710/ [imdb.com]
It ain't race, it is culture (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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What, you didn't know?
I'm definately racist (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I'm definately racist (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'm definately racist (Score:5, Funny)
Here I was a regular white guy (human) trying to hang with the bad guys and you darkies were all 'you can't camp orcs with us because you aren't evil enough' - I thought to myself, shit, I dig up dead bodies and prop them up around the campfire so I don't have to eat dinner alone and I'm not evil enough to hang with you because my skin is white? How much more evil could you possibly be?
Lucky for me I was a LOT more evil than that - made me an honorary citizen of the Nek city and everything.
After that it wasn't so much a matter of skin color as it was 'come on necro, share the camp - we don't care if you can solo the whole camp or not.'
(I didn't get my taste of REAL racism until I went to the dwarf island. Those motherfuckers HATED me - I wasn't afraid of any of the monsters, but the dwarf milk-vendor-lady would put a beat-down on my necro ass that would have made a DRAGON proud.)
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Another racially ambiguous character (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought it was a nice touch, though, all-in-all. I mean, there's a bit of "badassness" to certain black character
Re:Another racially ambiguous character (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get the controversy either. I'm a big white guy who has been happy playing as a black guy in GTA:San Andreas, as a female fairy in Kameo, as a wolf in Okami (and the new Zelda), as a
The whole point of videogaming for me is to escape to another reality.
Re:Another racially ambiguous character (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it such a big issue if a guy is black, white or green? We here so much bitching about "Black characters are so rare" but no one even comaplsin there are no olive skinned people do they? Life is not made up of 3 colours (Black, white and Asian), it is made up of billions of different varients which go from deathly pale (Slashdot readers mostly) to coal black.
So why don't we whine how some other minority is ignored instead of all this "OMG NO BLACK GUYS!!" thing?
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I'm not sure where you get that; he didn't sound or act "black" to me at all. If anything, Kratos' stereotype was "pr
a take on second life's color (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ugh. Thanks for the NSFW warning. (Score:2)
Problems? Diffuse the Issue: Skip to Xenophobia. (Score:2)
So far the greatest way I've found to diffuse any tensions -- at least in Gears of War -- is to bring up the obvious issue at hand: dont be afraid of or pick on another ra
FF8 makes up for FF7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:FF8 makes up for FF7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Barret acts no different than a lot of white anime characters. I've seen more money hungry brutes coloured white than I have black infact.
Take Gaido from Super robot taisen Original generation. In Japanese he speaks normally and doesn't stand out at all, yet in the Atlus translation he has a jamacian accent. Absolutely no reason for this other than Atlus decided it.
Is Gaido a black steriotype or is it just a shitty translation? Maybe if we discussed Bo Bo Bo we'd have issues, but Barret isn't one of them.
Jade is black? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Jade is black? (Score:4, Insightful)
What is important though is that Jade is a strong female minority lead character. Even more rare she is a bad-ass, but neither a sex-bombshell nor a raging murderous psychopath like most "strong" female leads. She's compassionate, thoughtful, basically peace-loving, but also carries around a can o' whoop-ass that she will open when needed. Really, more characters like her is not a bad thing.
Anyway, there is some but not as much insight in the article as they wanted. Nevertheless I just want to talk more about Jade, one of my favority protagonists in video games this century, from one of my favorite games this century. Beyond Good and Evil was released in the same year as Wind Waker, and as much as I liked that installment BGE was a better Zelda in almost every way. The cell shading was done better (and ditched for the water, where more realistic graphics were used thank god). The dungeons were just as spralling and intricate, but also felt more like a single structure rather than a series of disconnected rooms. The mechanics from stealth to fighting to puzzle solving were more fun. The story was more interesting, as were the characters. Jade in particular was very memorable. The game was unfortunately short, but they just let it be short but satisfying instead of padding the game out with annoyance. Loved that game.
Mountains, Molehills (Score:2)
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Races no, nations yes.. (Score:5, Funny)
Missing several black characters... (Score:4, Informative)
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In First Person Shooters (Score:2, Funny)
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And of course, in women's tennis, I always root against the heterosexual.
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Top Secret references are all too rare these days. Most
I view race the same way... (Score:2)
I care if you are respectful.
Invisible Messages (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Yeah! I love racein games! (Score:5, Funny)
Learn proper english. (Score:3, Funny)
Color doesn't matter, character type does. (Score:2)
I don't care if your character is black, white, or asian. I personally like "white" characters if I had to choose, but
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Because the white scientist he works with gets a much better paycheck and gets to stay back at the lab.
-Eric
No (Score:2)
No (Score:2, Informative)
Oooh THAT Jade (Score:2, Interesting)
Racial Ambiguity and Sci Fi (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I care. I like it. (Score:2)
At the same time, I don't want some overly-politically correct game that makes it's roster while celebrating Chrismahanukwanzikah. I just like to see a cast of characters that throws in a bunch of variety to keep th
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And the people who complain about parallels between fantasy races and real-world cultures (oh noes, the trolls have Jamaican accents!) can sod off. You have to get your material from somewhere.
... I don't care about the race ... (Score:2)
And that doesn't even make me a sexist.
Being a guy-that-almost-studied-fashion-design a famous phrase comes to mind: "We all dress the women we'd like to have - or, more precisely, would like to be." (from a male Designer
You could very well easyly apply that to WoW:
We all play the hot Night-Elf chick we'd like to have - or, more precisely, like to be in RL.
In fact, coming to think about it, I'm playing my male Dwarf Priest o
Guild Wars (Score:2, Insightful)
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 boa
Blacks over represented (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Blacks over represented (Score:5, Informative)
Source HTML [64.233.167.104]
-excerpt from link:
"Primary Recurring Characters: White (80%), African
American (15%), Latino/Hispanic (2.0%), Asian/Pacific
Islander (0.8%), Multiracial (0.6%), Native American (0.3%),
Indian/Pakistani (0.3%), Apparent Minority (0.3%),
Arab/Middle Eastern (0.1%)"
It's the first reference I found. It's an ip address because it's a google digest of a pdf. I had different numbers from another study. but the general gist is right. The actual proportions of race in the us are:
White 74.67%
African American 12.12%
Asian and Pacific Islander 4.46%
Other 5.99%
source [wikipedia.org]
Most of us won't care (Score:2)
Morrowind? (Score:2)
That aside, I think it's almost funny that the article is so focused on black presence in games...I've never thought about it much, but I have always found it kinda weird that whites are so dominant even though most of my favorite games are from Japan. Still, as a Caucasian myself, I'm happy with it. As other people have
Fewer racial stereotypes in games would be good (Score:3, Insightful)
GTA: San Andreas (Score:2, Informative)
Race in games (Score:3, Funny)
Depends on the game (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What does (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if you're playing as Haji, they always stop you at the airport.
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I don't know if the reason is I'm not a gamer. I just wanted to understand how racing/chasing could be a factor in non-racing games -
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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. Bu
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Well, I think that takes care of any questions about your culture.
Who the hell do you think your are calling me a twit just because I didn't feel like using a contraction.
Well, since "your" and "you're" don't meaning anything at all like one another, you might as well as have used the word "brick" or "xylophone" instead. I rather think people are twits if they are sitting in front of a globe-spanning network in
Re:Play the Race Card (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's pretty funny.
Not racist (obviously!). Pointing out that someone who is making a one-sentence rant about "punks" might want to make one of the key words in that rant actually function, grammar-wise, in its intended role. I'm scarcely perfect, typing/editing-wise, especially when doing five things at once. But someone else's more-than-slightly witless jab (followed up, classicly, by a "people who disagree with me should be
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I use to to have a tv like that. You do get used to it, but you should probably buy a new tv.
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Other than him, though, I agree. Kobolds have gotta die.
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Of course I care about race conditions! (Score:3, Funny)
Turns out its something to do with skin color, which being a disciple of the great Dr. Colbert, I don't see anyway.
Way to go. (Score:2)
By the way, thanks for drawing my eyes to it. Oh, and for confirming it. I might've just brushed it off as some random Slashdotter messing with people, but no, you've handled that one.
Good job!
Saint's Row: I played as an Asian (Score:2)
In Saint's Row, you can totally customize your character's appearance. So I made him look exactly like me (an Asian-American), although perhaps bit more beefier and muscular. :)
It seemed silly at first, but it fit in pretty well. For those who don't know, Saint's Row actually has you dealing with gangs of various different ethnicities. There's your stereot