shihku7 said:
Most video gamers in the USA are white conservative males
I'd be inclined to disagree with that. The white male thing, yes, but
conservative? Gamers are young, for one thing, and one of the strongest correlations in politics is that people tend to drift right with age. More to the point, I don't think we're using the same definition of "conservative" the way most gamers respond to any perceived attempt to censor their pastime for reasons of morality or decency.
Your post here seems pretty laden with other straw men - Conservatives think America's greatness is tied to its whiteness? Conservatives feel threatened by minorities? I think there's a different term for the people you're referring to (hint:"racist") - but I don't want to turn this thread into an abstract political flame war.
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On to the article. If any market forces are responsible for a regressive presentation of race, it would be not so much racism in the market, as the expectation of developers or publishers that there will be racism in the market. This is an expectation that's never been tested - has there ever
been a mass-market video game that presented a challenging view of race? If so, was it successful? And if it was not, was it strictly racism on the part of the audience that caused it to crash, or was there some other reason, such as feeling preachy, or not being well-designed? The default state of a creative work these days is to feature the mix of stereotypes (racial or otherwise) that the current era considers either funny or adequately accurate. Games, being extremely expensive, have been demonstrated to deviate from "default" in as safe a manner as possible.
If I am talking to a person online, and they describe their house, my first instinct is to imagine the layout of their house being identical to mine (or one of the houses I've lived in, anyway). This is usually wildly inaccurate, but that's the assumption I make first. In the absence of details about a situation, a person believes the situation to be similar to other situations with which s/he is already familiar, in as many ways as possible while still conforming to the known details. In the United States, most of the people that an average person interacts with (especially in suburbia) are white, simply because most of the
people are white. Accordingly, in the absence of details to the contrary, your average person is going to assume that everyone they can't see (and who does not act in a manner similar to one of the dominant stereotypes if the day) is white. The same thing happens with gender, class, sexual orientation, age, and intelligence. Similarly, if all you know about a person is "an asian male who uses the Internet for gaming," you're going to fill in the blanks with details borrowed from the nerdy middle-class Asians you've known or seen. And if you don't know many, then it's the dominant stereotypes of the day that are going to be used.
I don't mean to make stereotyping out to be evil, here. We have to use stereotypes simply because we don't and indeed
can't know everybody on a personal level, and so in order to think of them, we need a generalization (which is a statistical tool and nothing more) to keep things straight. The problem is not stereotyping, but rather inaccurate stereotypes and stereotypes based on the wrong criteria.
In a given society, racism exists as a direct and immediate consequence of the belief that race is in any way predictive of a person's behavior (which it is, but only to the extent that there is a loose correlation between ethnicity and culture). This is the core of the argument that ignoring race can make racism go away. The problem is that everybody has to do it in order for it to work. It's not really viable as a solution on a national or global scale, but it's effective enough for a single person's life.
All of this is the deeper social issue, however. If you want to deal with the race issue in games, this is how you do it: next time you're making a game whose characters resemble humans and who don't have race as an important part of their character, color one or two of them a different kind of pinkish-brownish-freckledy-orange, and tweak the nose a little. Maybe the main one, it doesn't matter. Pick them arbitrarily. Keep their writing and behavior the same - nothing belies a forced and insincere commitment to diversity than a minority character whose minorityhood is at the core of their character - but draw them differently. Just draw them differently. Do nothing else. Make the whole game with all of them being white (or Japanese, or purple wireframes), and then when everything is finished, change the model (and voice actor, if needed - voice is, after all, a part of race).
To spread by example the notion that race is something that doesn't deserve a second thought any more than eye color does, unfortunately,
does require giving a second thought to race - but the best example to give is with a non-contrived situation. If your characters' races don't matter, then obviously it doesn't matter if you change them. It's unfortunate that what should be solely an aesthetic decision has to be a statement, but if you have to make a statement, then that, I think, is the statement to make.
I'm probably not making sense any more.