It found that, "With the exception of African Americans, the representation in games bears a strong resemblance to the game developer workforce itself," i.e. There's a 2009 study that examined representations of race in video games. Race How Video Games Can Help Us Explore Ideas About Race They were just interested in the exotic part." "I mean, they were just obsessed with samurai, and with Asia, you know? We would call them people who have 'yellow fever' today, but they didn't understand what it was like to have somebody 'ching-chong' you, or they didn't really know any of the difficulties of being a racial minority. "I coined that term in the late '90s to describe why I saw so many white men creating female Asian avatars that were half naked," she says. Namakura says that choosing a character outside of your own identity can risk turning into what she calls "identity tourism." it doesn't bother you, then you feel like, 'Well it isn't that big of a deal.'" "So if somebody comes up to you, and you're playing a black character and they call you the N-word and. She says that because you don't actually live in the body of the character you're playing, the abuse you experience as that character becomes much easier to dismiss. "I would call it toxic empathy, " says Nakamura. Players on the receiving end were not getting a window into life as a black person or the stresses of everyday racism they were witnessing over-the-top expressions of white supremacy. Some players, though, thought the setting gave them permission to carry out virtual lynchings of black characters and unrepentantly use the N-word.
#Black and white game code skin
So while the character customization in its online mode allowed players to choose from a wide range of skin tones, the computer controlled KKK treated everyone the same. Red Dead Redemption, with its old timey spaghetti western setting, tried to skirt around issues of race. Rust is also a unique example not every game is able to depoliticize itself as much. But Lisa Nakamura, director of the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan, says for a white kid to experience racism while playing a video game "does not actually improve the suffering of other people who he's aligning himself with, because he still is benefiting from his whiteness in other parts of his life."Īll Tech Considered How One Video Game Unflinchingly Tackles Racism With History And Raw Interactions It's easy, almost comforting, to think that embodying a video game character that looks different from you gives you an elevated understanding of those people. What got weird was when they tried to claim another benefit: In an interview with the video game website Kotaku, Rust's lead developer, Garry Newman, said, "I would love nothing more than if playing a black guy in a game made a white guy appreciate what it was like to be a persecuted minority." It doesn't take place in a society where historical power dynamics affect everything. The characters have very little personality outside of the player, and they all play exactly the same way. Everyone is born into the game an adult, naked and afraid, facing a vaguely post-apocalyptic death parade. That's all well and good.īut Rust strips race of context, making an attempt at neutrality. The developer, Facepunch Studios, said that it was a utilitarian decision so players would have consistently identifiable features, and that within the Rust world, attributes were doled out in a random and even spread. Like, can video games be a vehicle for allyship? There's a lot to think about, especially when it comes to figuring out when it's acceptable to play a character you don't share a race with. But this is actually a question a lot of people have. In the time since you wrote this question, you say that your son found that making characters of color didn't help his cause, and that he stopped doing it. He's a good kid and really wants to be an ally.
We spend a lot of time talking about race, and when I discussed digital blackface with him, he told me that he is trying to fight underrepresentation, discrimination, and racists in the games he plays. Sometimes he will choose a black or brown skin for his character. My 11 year-old son loves playing online video games like Roblox and Minecraft where he can create his own avatar. She reached out to us because her son was trying to counter racist bullying in the games he played, and wandered into the tricky territory of appropriation:
#Black and white game code code
But is there the potential to do more than that? This week on Ask Code Switch, we're answering a question from Catina in Northern Virginia.
Most people who play video games just want to have fun.
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