Why Straight White Guys Shouldn't Always Play Games As Themselves

Jacked Assassin

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The only place where I still (try) to play as a Male Heterosexual Caucasian is Saints Row 2.

Once I got into Saints Row The Third I switched to an Orange Russian Cat Girl because there were things in the game I didn't want to do as a Male Heterosexual Caucasian. Oddly enough as my Orange Russian Cat Girl I ended up with a crush on Pierce Washington. Then Saints Row 4 happened. Dang it Volition you ruined my fan-fic.

....

I mean.... Yay!.... I'm glad that's over!....

Also I'm still mad about not having my own Lesbian Khajiits in the console version of Skyrim.
 

DEAD34345

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Weird. I played all the way through The Walking Dead without giving one tiny thought to Lee's race. There was that one inappropriate comment by Kenny played for laughs, and other than that the fact that Lee was black didn't come into the story at all as far as I'm aware.

His race "tints almost every interaction with game"? I'm genuinely surprised that anyone could take that from the game at all.

This whole article has just made me suspect I'm operating on a totally different wavelength to many other people on this subject. To me, unless it specifically directly affects the story, things like race and gender are mostly irrelevant in games. Playing as a black guy generally doesn't affect my experience of a game in any way whatsoever, same with playing as gay people, women, muslims, or probably anything else you can think of. More variety would be nice, I suppose, but it just doesn't matter much to me.

I never understood why it was such a big deal to some people, but I guess I'm just experiencing games differently. I'm not sure if that makes me the weird one, or them.
 

the December King

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You know what? I'm tired of human beings anyways. In games, I mean.

Let me experience something totally different and new. Give me a protagonist with more than one head/information input. Imagine that- a split screen for your characters vision! Or four or more limbs, that respond to different inputs- getting used to that would be so tricky, but if you could master it, how weird and different would that be?

Don't give me a human who rose to the challenge in an oppressed world of blah-de-blah. Give me a giant monstrous spider, who has webs and poison and can hide like no one's business in the shadows, and can naturally climb cielings and has dozens of really tiny male suitors, just hanging around willing to wait on her hand and foot, because she's that cool and it's totally culturally acceptable in their giant spidery society, and...

Dammit, waaay off topic. Sorry.

So, in summation, I want to play a game as a spider.

Stuff your humans.
 

Nieroshai

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I think your words say far more about you than anything else. Just playing a black character tells me nothing about black people or what it's like to be one. Playing the opposite gender is exactly the same. To me, despite gender dysphoria, male characters are still as alien as ever to me because I don't FEEL their perspective.

If you were to have your way, people wouldn't be able to tell the story they want without worrying about a quota list. People write what they know, and we shouldn't fault them for that What we NEED is designers and writers who have these other perspectives to enter the industry.
 

Natenanimous

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I always choose a female character if there's an option. I like to role-play in my games, and I simply find female characters to be more interesting for that purpose, since I can imagine a different experience from what I'm used to in my own life as a straight white male. And I should note that I can imagine that different experience whether or not the developer built it into the game. In Skyrim there's no real change in the game if you choose a man or a woman, nor if you choose a human or an elf or an animal race. But I play a female Bosmer and I imagine my actions in the game based on that choice. If a Nord likes me after I help him out, I think that Nord's an okay guy and decide that the whole racist Nord thing doesn't apply to everyone. But then later I'm sitting at the bar in an inn and the innkeeper says, derisively, "What do you want, elf?" So I get up and leave, and don't give him my business. I sleep under the stars that night, aware that there are people in Skyrim who don't like my character. I love that stuff. I enjoy building my own context and meaning.

Some of my favorite games are those where a female character is the default and only option. The latest Tomb Raider is a good example. Beyond Good and Evil is another. I also loved Oni (does anyone remember that?), a fun action game with a kickass female protagonist. It's just ... more interesting to play things from that other side, to consider that other perspective. I'll take female characters in fighting games. I always played Peach in Mario Kart. All my WoW characters were women.

But I can also appreciate playing a male character who's different from myself (which would be all of them). I role-play the hell out of Geralt of Rivia, or Booker DeWitt, or Solid Snake. The important thing, in the end, is that the character is well-written, and that there's enough in the game for me to form my own experiences with. Stepping out of my own life and into another life, experiencing and creating stories in a way that I could never do in reality, is for me the primary joy of gaming.
 

The_Amazing_G

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I already do this whenever I get the option. I mean that's the thing; so many games have a non-optional white-bread heros that I just get bored with it. So, whenever I have the choice, I break the monotony.

But then again, when I played a woman in the Elder Scrolls Skyrim (I always play women in all the Elder Scrolls) I was accused of "taking advantage of my lust for the female form". Yes, seriously.

However, I am going to continue playing women whenever I feel like it, and if I get the chance to play someone of a different race, I will take advantage of it. In Saints Row 2 I played as a black guy, and those were fun times. There is a scene in the game in which the leader of the gang (my black character) and an intentionally annoying sidekick type character(who also happened to be black) are driving in a car and arguing about the radio station. So it led to the situation of two black gangsters arguing over whether classical music or Paramore was the better choice. It was pretty funny.
 

hentropy

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Putting aside the normal reactionist "rabble rabble" normally found in these threads, I do agree with the premise that playing as characters that are of different races is a good idea, and I speak mostly from experience.

Probably the sentiment that bothers me the most is that RPG characters don't really change much when you give them a different race- and that's true if you are talking simply about what is programmed into the game. But I've always liked the story aspect of RPGs because I can come up with my own motivations and even backstory for the most part. I was always under the impression that it was the way you were supposed to play those games dating back to the tabletop roots- you were never truly supposed to be playing yourself as much as a role outside of your own.

Probably the most interesting experience was playing as a black woman in Mass Effect (who I also gave the external characteristic of being Muslim, although that didn't come up much, though in the one or two spots where it did it added a lot to the story as I saw it)... who knows what human race relations are in the 2180s, but it's doubtful that it is completely resolved and there is tension at all. She was a do-gooder in the first game, trying hard to represent humanity in the most ethical and peaceful way possible, but cracked a bit in the second after seeing the worst of the Terminus and then gained back a good bit of her do-gooder conscious in the second. Even if I would have played more or less the same game with different personal attributes, it just wouldn't have felt quite the same. She was her own character with her own story- she wasn't me or anyone else. And I feel the same way about my other RPG characters. If someone says that it doesn't matter because it's just a different coat of paint and it's just an empty sack, I would say they're not truly getting the most of the setup.

I truly don't know if I can map out the things I learned about myself or others by doing that, but I have to say that it was one of the most enjoyable playthroughs I had. It's perfectly possible to have a similar experience with a straight white cis male, but it just seems like we've been made to play very many angles of that, forcibly, over the course of the gaming history. There have been good character, bad characters, complex character, polarizing characters, and 'love-to-hate-em' characters who all fit the white straight male archetype- and there will be more. I would simply say that you should play as a variety of characters not because of some kind of social importance- but simply because it's more fun and interesting that way. And I should be allowed to say that adding in more female and minority characters into games that don't allow for character customization makes them more interesting and better without being accused of being some kind of tumblr activist and SJW.
 

Olas

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Charcharo said:
Olas said:
I get that. Good thing I also stated black and white in that.
I know, I wasn't trying to accuse you of anything, I just wanted to illustrate something that a LOT of people overlook.

I notice race only when its brought up in the storyline. If I were to be a black person and someone is acting racist against me, then sure I will notice it.
Otherwise I will not :p .
Almost the same goes for gender.
There's nothing wrong with "noticing" race (or gender), and frankly, even if I take seriously the notion that anyone CAN be completely ignorant of it, it's probably not even desirable. Being 'color blind' as well intentioned and idealistic as it might be, can also make someone not see racism in the world when it clearly exists. If 7 out of 20 people are all 'randomly' stopped and checked for drugs, it shouldn't be treated as a minor detail that those 7 people happened to be black while the 13 people who passed through undisturbed were all white.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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theluckyjosh said:
Xsjadoblayde said:
I do feel quite bland and boring to others when i admit im straight and pasty white and male. It is a self conscious thing. However, i like to think the almost non-existant self-esteem, chronic depression and anxiety and willing to self destruct, sort of makes up for that...right?

...Right?
We like our heroes for their virtues, but love them for their faults? :D
Hehe. That being a question makes it quite amusing. ;)
 

DataSnake

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MarsAtlas said:
I'd like to point out that Cart Life is available for free, and it is a great game.

theluckyjosh said:
However, when you open with "you straight white guys", you imply one demographic, and only one, has a problem.
With, probably unintentional, subtext of "...and the rest of y'all are all the same."

And you lose a lot of the good the message might otherwise have done.
Well,

a) It seems like he pointed out in the article that it benefits people across all groups by sharing such experiences.

and b) What is the pre-dominant demographic of defined videogame protagonists again? An implicitly or explicitly straight, white male. Now how many stories actually try doing anything with that? I would argue, Far Cry 3, Spec Ops: The Line, and LA Noire.
I'd add BioShock Infinite to that list. Say what you will about that game, but the plot definitely requires that Booker be a white guy.
 

Redd the Sock

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I think that's more a writing problem in general.

I mean, the thesis is problematic here as it assumes playing as someone else is limited only to skin color or orientation, when the reality is, with the exception of actual soldiers playing call of duty, there probably isn't an example of any game character that resembles the player to any great detail. I mean, yes, visually I'm a straight white male, but how many games star 30 something office clerks with minor weight issues? We play precisely for the different experience: to be the soldier, the warrior, the adventurer, the survivor, the hacker, the alien, anything we aren't.

The experiences you talk about have to be part of the narrative, not the external features. I can play an Asian character easily enough by slipping in a dynasty warriors game, but there's no part of the game where that impacts the experience. People seem to clamor for a female link, but to me it'll just be the same poorly written justification for a fetch quest with a different batch of polygons. Hell, what was the Assassin's Creed thing about: fucking multiplayer where there is no story and appearance literately changes nothing. Meanwhile the opposite can occur even with white characters: wondering if the gang lords want to blast your lily white ass in Far Cry 2, or being an elf or mage of any color in Dragon Age, or being the upstart human (siding with the dangerously pro human movement) in Mass Effect.

Since most games' stories and characterizations exist purely to move the plot along, nuance like that even getting attempted is rare, ultimately reducing diversity to the pallet swap that separated Mario and Luigi at first. What you want requires two tings: the first it fixed characters. We can't have character customization and have sweeping differences to how the story plays out based on appearance and orientation without a metric fuckton of extra writing, voice recording and programming. The other is talented writers that can portray such nuances without coing off like a captain planet script, or "pity me" self insert fanfiction. Cultural politics stops informing and starts being humorous if you deal with one dimensional overt prejudice. Part of what mae the Lee / Larry dimanic work that way way is could be racial, but is also might not have been and as the player, do you take it personally, or you you realize you're a recently convicted murderer and someone that knows that has every right to pre-judge you.

Just to end on an example: in comics I liked the character Steel one of the replacement Supermen after his death. He was black, but he grew up in the projects, lost his parents during a demonstration and brother to gang violence, and had a unique view of the world and life that impacted the book and how he handled things. You don't get that by just making Clark Kent black and telling the same story trying to slip in a scene of racially based bullying.
 

Single Shot

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There are 2 types of people in this world:

1) Those who role play their characters and couldn't care less about their race, gender, species, sexuality, ect... so long as the character is well written capable of sucking them into its universe.

2) Those who play games as themselves and get broken out of the game if it strays too far from their own reality. Weather they're straight while males (thank you title) or black bisexual women they demand the game be tailored to their own lifestyles backstories.

Group 1 will be happy with most games which are well written where player character is something they want to be/experience, and being suitably hyped up also helps. They also like games where the player character is a blank slate they can project and properly role play with. They are the primary demographic because they're actually quite easy to produce for.

Group 2 will never be happy with anything because no character will ever be 'their' story. They will constantly demand more games made with their specific rage/gender/sexuality/weight/looks options even if the player character is a blank slate, yet past attempts show that these groups are either too small, unfocused, or cheap to actually support games development.

As for the article, it seems like common sense. If the writer didn't choose to make it click-bait by claiming only 'straight white males' can be effected by these changes of character viewpoint it might have even been readable. Come on escapist, that's racist as fuck and editors should be catching this shit. You're either suggesting only straight white people can be uneducated about different perspectives or that everyone else is too dumb/uncultured to understand different viewpoints. Either way you're making a massive generalisation about a large percentage of the worlds population.
 

Imp_Emissary

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the December King said:
You know what? I'm tired of human beings anyways. In games, I mean.

Let me experience something totally different and new. Give me a protagonist with more than one head/information input. Imagine that- a split screen for your characters vision! Or four or more limbs, that respond to different inputs- getting used to that would be so tricky, but if you could master it, how weird and different would that be?

Don't give me a human who rose to the challenge in an oppressed world of blah-de-blah. Give me a giant monstrous spider, who has webs and poison and can hide like no one's business in the shadows, and can naturally climb cielings and has dozens of really tiny male suitors, just hanging around willing to wait on her hand and foot, because she's that cool and it's totally culturally acceptable in their giant spidery society, and...

Dammit, waaay off topic. Sorry.

So, in summation, I want to play a game as a spider.

Stuff your humans.
Spiders are highly underrepresented. The only game I know of where you play one was that one on the Wii.

If they can make a Spider-man game about once a year, they can probably figure out how to make a game about the
[http://s105.photobucket.com/user/ihatephotob1/media/18kxckgvp2oe1jpg_zps4950402f.jpg.html]

:D Aw. Look at the babies.

xD They will destroy their mother's enemies.

As for games made with human/humanoid protagonist. Making them female, a different race, or whatever shouldn't be nearly as challenging as making a game about a spider. Unlike non-humanoids, all you have to do most of the time is change the story a bit/plan the story out with this in mind.

The only reason it would be hard to do is if you already started making the game and are too far along to change it meaningfully. Or as Rath noted,
 

Arakasi

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Playing The Walking Dead I never once acted differently that I ought to because of my character's race, sexuality or age (unless of course those things were actually brought into question). Perhaps one should re-examine one's own prejudices.