Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both

[Fuzzy_logic]

Look, putting aside blatant, egregious racism, racism is usually a trend, not a lot of good concrete examples. It's very hard to pin down, which is why it's hard to get rid of.

Making a game with one protagonist isn't intrinsically racist. In fact, it's often necessary. Development and animation costs are one reason. Also, complex storytelling a la Final Fantasy works best with a single, predetermined main character. (Although sometimes, as in Deus Ex, you can let players pick a skin tone without changing anything else in the game)

There's also nothing inherently wrong with telling tories about white people. There's nothing wrong with white people. many interesting white people have lived, and many interesting stories have been told about them. There are some stories that *require* a white protagonist, and plenty more for which a white protagonist is perfectly appropriate. Making a game about a single, white protagonist is not, in itself, a bad thing.

But the fact that the overwhelming majority of games with premade heroes have white heroes? That's ridiculous, and it needs to change.

[cthulhu]

1188247067[/unixtime]]

1188245842[/unixtime]]
Older males (33-38)

I find that hard to believe... that stat doesn't really sound especially likely, unless they just play games that I don't. The majority of people I've met playing online games have been like 14-22. There have been a few who were older, but not many.

I'm not even sure how you would survey the average game player anyway, so the whole thing is suspect.

I think online gaming is demonstrably popular with the younger set as opposed to gaming fullstop. Might be a factor.

[Username17]

There's nothing wrong with telling a story with a particular main character. There's nothing racist inherently about having that character be white, nothing inherently sexist about that character being a man.

But... and this is a big but... there is something fundamentally racist and sexist about the industry when each particular game happens to have a white malel lead over and over again with little respite.

Just the fact that it takes you a damn long while to come up with Samus and Carl Johnson should show you just what a pervasive problem this is.

---

Sure. 80% of the American population is white. But that does mean that 20% of the videogame stars should be black - and that isn't close to true. And despite the men's club atmosphere, the fact is that women outnumber men in the covetted 25-30 demographic of videogame players.

Any particular game isn't racist for having a white protagonist. But when in the entire history of the industry there have only been eleven which actually had a black protagonist, and one of them was Shaq Fu - you know something is horribly horribly wrong.

It's just like how you can hire a white man over a black man and have that mean nothing at all. But if you always hire a white man over a black man you're a clan member.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

What Frank said except that coming up with Lara Croft is quite easy. I'd say the problem is combining a traditionally white male industry with the concept of a hero being 'just like me but cooler'

Funnily enough most of my guild in WoW were 20+

[Crissa]

Older gamers can and will pay for subscriptions, whereas younger gamers tend to not.

The Wii as an example of not having much memory to use? This game system by default has a customizable avatar and player settings which could be used to choose a different race/gender for the main character of any game played upon the system.

Also, what ever drove someone to make the ignorant point of 'most of the people I game with are the same race/gender as I am!' - c'mon, duh. People tend to create circles of community with people of similar race, gender, hobbies, and even body mass index! Of course there's exceptions to the rule - I know mostly guys instead of girls, for instance - but that's just how the statistics fall.

This is, of course, why we talk about the privilege of race or gender or weight or whatever separates people. It is that bit of not knowing what it would like to be without it - something you would never know you had unless someone told you that it existed.

-Crissa

[CalibronXXX]

1188283198[/unixtime]]Sure. 80% of the American population is white. But that does mean that 20% of the videogame stars should be black

I'm calling bullshit on this one, it's just bad business sense to make a main character that would appeal to a smaller percent of the market when a character that would appeal to a larger percent of the market is just as appropriate. The only times it makes sense from a profit point of view to have an exclusively black, or other minority, character is when it actually makes some sort of difference to the story or character personality. Customizability is another reason/way to include minority characters, but then you need to look at cost of implementation versus how many sales this customizability is likely to garner.

[cthulhu]

or to make the point better, some non zero per entage of games should be in africaajns

but they arn't for a reason

[Manxome]

While I understand a desire to have different groups more represented...I'm frankly scared by the direction you're taking this.

Institutionalized racism in the industry would, in fact, result in a systematic trend towards having all the protagonists from one group...but that doesn't mean you can reason backwards from such a trend and conclude that the industry must be racist. There are other possible causes of such a trend.

And I particularly disagree with the idea that every single individual game on a list can be totally blameless and yet somehow the group as a whole can be racist. The trend might be more suspicious than an individual example, but the only way the list as a whole demonstrates racism is if actual specific games on the list were designed the way they were because of racism, and that means that the individual games are at issue.

You seem to be taking a guilty-until-proven-innocent position on this, and that's flat-out unfair. Especially when the sample size of games produced by any particular team is usually too small to even indicate a trend.


Crissa: Perhaps my earlier sarcasm was insufficiently clear, but it doesn't even matter how much memory or horsepower the system has for purposes of character customizability...at least not in any significant way. The computational resource cost is insignificant, especially if you're only actually using one possible version at any given time.

The cost is that it takes programmers and artists and writers time and effort to create all the different options and cause them to interact properly with the rest of the game--and much moreso in a story-driven single-player game than in, say, Wii Sports. If all the character has to do is float around and swing a tenis racket, and all you want to do is change a few basic parameters like color, then sure, it's fairly inexpensive. If we're talking about Final Fantasy and the characters have voice actors, subplots, and a whole library of unique weapons and abilities that all require their own art and animations--it becomes prohibitively expensive very quickly to multiply the number of possible protagonists. And the more detailed your art, story, etc. are, the higher the cost. And when you get into a position of any given player only benefitting from a small fraction of the work your development team put into the game, profitability becomes a serious concern.

And there's an additional marketing cost due to the fact that having a recognizable, iconic character--such as mario, sonic, samus, etc.--is immensely valuable, and if the main character from your game actually has a thousand possible appearances, you lose the ability to market based on the character's appearance. There are hundreds of pokemon, but as far as marketing is concerned, pikachu is probably more valuable than all the rest of them combined.

[Fuzzy_logic]

Of *course* it's "guilty until proven innocent." That's because virtally everyone alive is racist. I am racist; you are racist.

For most of human history, racism wasn't even thought of as a character flaw. It was expected and praised. These days it's substantially less popular but still quite prevalent.

I am not saying that the video game developers are engaged in a conspiracy to keep the colored man down. I'm saying that, in most of these cases, the idea of a nonwhite main character probably *never even occurred to them*. That's racist.

I don't run around calling each and every game racist, because you can't easily know *why* things are the way they are. But the assumption that the default human being is white is a racist assumption, and if that's why your hero is white then congratulations -- you're racist.

Again, that doesn't mean you want to join the KKK, it just means you're slightly less cosmopolitan, sophisticated, open-minded, or whatever you want to call it, than in an ideal world. Since *everyone* is less awesome in reality than we really wish they were, I don't think of this as a deadly insult, just a fact of life.

[RandomCasualty]

1188283198[/unixtime]]
Sure. 80% of the American population is white. But that does mean that 20% of the videogame stars should be black

This is a freaking joke, you're proposing affirmative action for imaginary characters.

I mean seriously... come on.

Why is it always blacks that are somehow the most important minority to represent? Why aren't the hispanics or the asians getting all up in arms about not being represented? What about gay or lesbian heroes? There are a heck of a lot of minorities out there... I personally find it pretty despicable that blacks seem to get some higher important position over everyone else. Like it's okay not to give hispanics, Indians or Asians any representation, but by God, when anything doesn't include blacks, it's automatically racist and discriminatory!

[Voss]

But according to Frank's statistic, there are only whites and blacks in America... so, problem solved- there are no other minorities.

[Manxome]

OK, if you consider an unconscious tendency to have an imaginary object you're creating look similarly to the majority of real objects of that class that you've actually seen during your life to be "racist," then sure, racism is running amok. But if that's your definition, then I don't think that racism can or even should be eliminated.

If I want to draw a basket of fruit, I will tend--without even thinking about it--to include fruits that I see or eat a lot (e.g apples) rather than fruits that I don't encounter very often (e.g. starfruit). If you think that's even slightly evil, unfair, or "close-minded," then I don't even care about appeasing your sense of justice.

If you're angry about people deliberately screwing blacks or who hold considered opinions that their race/gender is inherently better or more worthy than others--which actually does happen and needs to be stopped--then I'm on your side. If you're just up in arms because kids' drawings of people tend to be the same color as most of the people they see on a daily basis, I don't even want to hear it.

[Crissa]

You have the money, Manx, and therefore the privilege.

...If your picture is to be placed in a community that produces starfruit, I think they might be a bit put out that their product is not a suggestion.

Just like women and non-white races are a bit put out that they can't choose to buy a game where the hero is like them.

No one said it was a crime, just that it was unfair. In the US, even minorities rate whites higher than other minorities because of this base racism in media. It's not true in other places not dominated by our media (which is very little of the world).

And Frank lives in a state that the majority is Hispanic and native. But the largest minority in the US in the last census was Black.

-Crissa

[Manxome]

If you mean unfair in that minorities are at a disadvantage if they want to purchase media with heroes who look like themselves, then I agree. People who like any less-popular product more than a popular one are at a disadvantage because the producer of the unpopular product doesn't get the same economies of scale, and so the unpopular product is harder to find and/or more expensive.

If you mean unfair in the sense that someone acted unjustly and is culpable in even the slightest degree, then I disagree.

People who like imported foods over native foods are also (generally) at a disadvantage in that it costs more to bring the food they prefer to them and so they have to pay more for it, but that doesn't imply that there's something wrong with the market or that anyone anywhere along the line has acted even slightly inappropriately, or even suboptimally.


Also, I'm not sure how you've concluded that I "have the money" or what you think that has to do with the discussion.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

In America, first you get the money. Then when you get the money, you get the power. And when you get the power, you get the women.

[Joy_Division]

I think people also need to remember. A disproportionate number of games come out of Japan. Black people aren't even on their radar.

[Crissa]

Ahh, yes, the invisible hand of the market means lack of culpability. Not that 'unfair' has anything to do with 'unjust' or 'illegal'. You're totally missing the point of this thread.

PS - women outnumber men. Why aren't there more positive women game rolemodels?

-Crissa

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Because women don't game. It's like me complaining that Lifetime: Television for women have so few men that aren't scumbags. It's because men don't watch Lifetime: Television for women.

Gaming? Same thing.

[technomancer]

I think this thread needs a little on-topic schlock.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20040605.html

[tzor]

I'll admit that I am racist, although over the years I get less so. I always joke that there aren't any "black" people in the US (although there might be a few) just people of various shades of light to dark brown. I remember seeing someone who was an exceptionally pure black/blue who was an ambasador from somewhere in Africa who made an everquest drow seem pale.

Women video gamers (in numbers) are a recent occurance. Most video game companies didn't know how to react to the young girl video gamer market. I was working in Acclaim when they tried the Mary Kay and Ashley contract. To think they actually had a booth with the ECW wrestlers.

[Manxome]

1188343566[/unixtime]]Ahh, yes, the invisible hand of the market means lack of culpability.

I don't think I said that. I said that some things have a higher production cost than others due to reasons not under anyone's control, and that people who like things that cost more get a raw deal, but that that's no one's fault.

I suppose I am making an assumption that people somehow pay for the production cost of what they want to have, but I think that's ultimately true in pretty much any economy, not just a free market, and it's got nothing to do with supply and demand or the "invisible hand." Even if you try to get around it with command economies or forced labor or theft, the same labor and raw materials whose fruits you are acquiring by force or theft still could have been used to produce more of something else.

The alternative here seems to be that some unspecified persons are somehow obligated to produce a specific product for you (at a particular price?) and are culpable if they do not. I have difficulty seeing what realistic conditions, other than prior agreement, would cause this to be the case, but if you believe that it is, I'd be happy to hear why you think so.

1188343566[/unixtime]]Not that 'unfair' has anything to do with 'unjust' or 'illegal'.

Lots of people treat the words "fair" and "just" as synonyms, at least in some contexts. I don't recall bringing up law.

There's still a huge difference between saying that something is inconvenient for you and saying that someone is obligated to change it. Saying that the situation is unfair in the broadest sense certainly does not establish the latter.

And if you're trying to say you didn't mean to imply that anyone was culpable, then you really should know better than to call people racist and sexist without further elaboration, because those words are generally taken to imply culpability.

1188343566[/unixtime]]You're totally missing the point of this thread.

Threads that make us laugh or cry? Probably. But as we're directly responding to each other, I don't think you're likely to be any better off in that regard.

1188343566[/unixtime]]PS - women outnumber men. Why aren't there more positive women game rolemodels?

Well, if women outnumber men, then the majority of people who are not creating "positive women game rolemodels" are women, so if we're not prepared to use more complex reasoning than looking at total population, I guess we'd be forced to blame women for the dearth.

If we're actually going to consider such factors as the fact that game creators and game purchasers are not representative of the population as a whole, and the various motivations that go into producing a game, then I believe a number of possible reasons have already been suggested.

[the_taken]

Those games insult me, and I'm a guy.

I believe my sister is a good example of the average video game girl. She played the LoZ:OoT 'cause she believed Link to be hawt.

[Nerem]

Wanna know why most games have few black people? Most game designers are Japanese, who see themselves (and most everyone really) as 'white'.

[NineInchNall]

Actually, Japanese people want to be white. They have a really weird psychological hang up regarding the West.

[the_taken]

It's because of our hair colours. They only have two, we have, like what? 50?