Honestly, this video did bring up a couple good points. Unfortunately there were more stupid points then there were good ones.
Like are people seriously still harping on about RE5? The game takes place in fucking Africa and they're fucking zombies.
So this essentially boils down to "Don't be lazy when writing characters of colour", because apparently the poorly written white characters don't mean anything but the poorly written black characters are racist.
Like so many other things they examine how a minority group is affected by a problem and assumes it must be due to their minority status, completely overlooking that the same problem exists just as much outside of that group.
we're still doing the "resident evil 5 is racist!!!" bit?
I like how every one of his examples is about 1 single race being discriminated. Also It's funny how he thinks it's be better to have distinguished character races (IE Negroid, Caucasian, Mongolian) instead of just selecting a skin tone.
Who the fuck gives a shit about the skin colour of god damn video game characters.
Like seriously unless it was some arcade shooter called Nigger-Shootout where you kill black people and is specifically rewarded for killing black people and you get bonus points for throwing jews in ovens, who would give a shit about who you can kill in a game?
Dying Light is really popular right now from what I can see and I am playing the shit out of it personally, there are shitloads of black and brown zombies in that game, but there are also a load of white zombies, and it's set in a city in the middle-east, it makes sense that there are loads of black and brown zombies, since black and brown people are the majority there(quite sure White Zombie is a band name by the way, haven't listened to them) and its not like you get an achievement saying "Good you threw a molotov at a horde of zombie niggers" for doing that, no? Is there a side-quest where you have to pick up airdropped zyklon-B and use it to gas a whole shower room full of jewish zombies? There is not.
My point is that unless the game specifically rewards you for killing a human or human-like being based on their race, religion, disability or what they got between their legs it is not an issue. If the reward or penalty for killing an enemy is the same for all enemies of that type, difficulty, whatever regardless of what they look like, then it is still not an issue that you can kill a black guy as a white guy.
If the player decides to kill or otherwise abuse a NPC because of their race, or colour it is not the game developers fault, then it is the players fault, and why even give a shit in the first place, it is a video game character, it does not feel pain, it might say "ow" when its hit points go down and then go "AAAARGH" when you kill them, they don't actually suffer, they are just dumb objects who move around in an environment trying to either defeat you, help you or do none of that and talk about a local snack they like or whatever, when you shoot it or hit it, a variable or two goes down and a sound effect is played, that ow that black mercenary or zombie utters when you "damage" it might as well be a stock fart sound or canned laughter, have you heard of a real life being that reacts to pain by farting or very forced laughter? I sure haven't.
Hope at least some of it made sense.
Did anyone get Nvidia 3d Vision popup when watching the video? Never got this ever before.
[QUOTE=NeverGoWest;47162571]Who the fuck gives a shit about the skin colour of god damn video game characters.
Like seriously unless it was some arcade shooter called Nigger-Shootout where you kill black people and is specifically rewarded for killing black people and you get bonus points for throwing jews in ovens, who would give a shit about who you can kill in a game?
Dying Light is really popular right now from what I can see and I am playing the shit out of it personally, there are shitloads of black and brown zombies in that game, but there are also a load of white zombies, and it's set in a city in the middle-east, it makes sense that there are loads of black and brown zombies, since black and brown people are the majority there(quite sure White Zombie is a band name by the way, haven't listened to them) and its not like you get an achievement saying "Good you threw a molotov at a horde of zombie niggers" for doing that, no? Is there a side-quest where you have to pick up airdropped zyklon-B and use it to gas a whole shower room full of jewish zombies? There is not.
My point is that unless the game specifically rewards you for killing a human or human-like being based on their race, religion, disability or what they got between their legs it is not an issue. If the reward or penalty for killing an enemy is the same for all enemies of that type, difficulty, whatever regardless of what they look like, then it is still not an issue that you can kill a black guy as a white guy.
If the player decides to kill or otherwise abuse a NPC because of their race, or colour it is not the game developers fault, then it is the players fault, and why even give a shit in the first place, it is a video game character, it does not feel pain, it might say "ow" when its hit points go down and then go "AAAARGH" when you kill them, they don't actually suffer, they are just dumb objects who move around in an environment trying to either defeat you, help you or do none of that and talk about a local snack they like or whatever, when you shoot it or hit it, a variable or two goes down and a sound effect is played, that ow that black mercenary or zombie utters when you "damage" it might as well be a stock fart sound or canned laughter, have you heard of a real life being that reacts to pain by farting or very forced laughter? I sure haven't.
Hope at least some of it made sense.[/QUOTE]
He states the argument against this in the video, that modern racism isn't so much lynchings and legal boundaries, it is cultural and subtle. I do agree somewhat that something doesn't have to be Ben Garrison levels to be racist, but it is in that ambiguity of what is subtle racism and what isn't that his argument hides.
The entirety of what he states rest on representation of minorities and the assumption that if there isn't equal representation it is racist, or moving the goalposts even further if it isn't a perfect representation that includes their identity as black while not giving any stereotypical or commonly associated black attributes which are arbitrarily named as harmful. Not only is that absurd, it isn't actually racist, it just isn't working counter to racism and floats in the middle ground of not helping or hindering racism, same place as where the general public sits.
That's where most of the complaints are, that games aren't perfectly anti-racist and up to their lofty ideals of a perfect world, so it's not good enough and it's racism. The fact is that the world isn't perfect and most media just reflects how people actually are, yet they would prefer if the media depicted the world as they want it to be hoping that by showing it as perfect, the world will become perfect. It's garbage, and there's a reason why there's so much criticism of activists focusing solely on media representation to the neglect of everything else.
He talks about how that assassin's creed game basically treated the slaves as collectibles, but it's really hard to make a game that treats anyone as a person in its mechanics. Even in something like a bioware rpg, there will always be the best dialogue option or whatever to get closer to the outcome you want.
I like how he showed a clip of Token Black while talking about token black characters.
Lmfao this is so racist.
"A non-white character is always lesser than a white character when he is an NPC" is what they're saying.
Like how did they not see how fucking racist that is because they're literally judging them by the color of their skin. I'm saying it's better to be racially blind, but holy shit anything other than the dumb mindset in the video.
[editline]18th February 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=kila58;47162543]I like how every one of his examples is about 1 single race being discriminated. Also It's funny how he thinks it's be better to have distinguished character races (IE Negroid, Caucasian, Mongolian) instead of just selecting a skin tone.[/QUOTE]
What's even more dumb is that point contradicts the point he made on Gerudo's from Zelda. If Gerudo's have similarities because they come from the same culture, it's tokenism. But if there is no race and it's just a slider, there's no races?
Garbage video.
"games like call of duty and medal of honor use different skin colors, most recently middle easterners, to show whose the good guys and whose the bad guys, like jerseys on a sports team"
can't speak for medal of honor but aren't like 80% of the cod enemies russian and 99% of them covered up by armor and masks and shit to the point where you can't even see skin?
[QUOTE=Ninja Gnome;47163340]"games like call of duty and medal of honor use different skin colors, most recently middle easterners, to show whose the good guys and whose the bad guys, like jerseys on a sports team"
can't speak for medal of honor but aren't like 80% of the cod enemies russian and 99% of them covered up by armor and masks and shit to the point where you can't even see skin?[/QUOTE]
Also ridiculous logic because [I]it's a fucking war[/I]. In case you haven't noticed, wars, in general, have a habit of being a battle fought between two countries. Those two countries may or may not have ethnic differences, and war-based media will probably focus on the contemporary wars of the period.
Without making up a storyline (which is totally fine), how [I]could[/I] you play a contemporary American soldier in a videogame fighting anybody [I]except[/I] Middle Eastern terrorists or Russians, since those are the only two kinds of people the USA has any likelihood of fighting anytime soon?
[editline]18th February 2015[/editline]
I'm sick of people saying "Well, the game developers didn't tell you [I]not[/I] to do this thing, so they must be complicit in encouraging it!"
[I]THAT IS NOT HOW VIDEO GAMES WORK[/I].
[QUOTE=chunkymonkey;47162385]Honestly, this video did bring up a couple good points.[/QUOTE]
Does it? I'd like to know which points he mentions count as good.
Gotta love how they featured the homeless woman from Human Revolution when the whole point of her character is that she's putting on an act because she's a police informant.
Pay her for information and she stops pretending
I'm just confused about the whole racism examples, like is he saying it's racist for zombies in Africa to be black and middle eastern terrorists to be dark skinned?
silly automerge is silly
[QUOTE=Rossy167;47163661]I'm just confused about the whole racism examples, like is he saying it's racist for zombies in Africa to be black and middle eastern terrorists to be dark skinned?
silly automerge is silly[/QUOTE]
I think he's doing the whole "white man goes to foreign land to kill natives" thing, which I actually think is a problem, but he's explaining why that is poorly.
I haven't played a modern military shooter in a while, mostly because they just keep retreading the same ground over an over again, but when I was into them some odd years ago there were an alarming number of shooters where the main enemies were just "middle easterners". I know that's somewhat changed now but it's still a problem thanks to what's been left behind
I'm going to get a little psychological as to why so bear with me:
We, as humans, tend to define ourselves by the groups that we're a part of. It doesn't matter if the group is through our accomplishments or if it's simply designated. We also tend to believe that our group is better than any other group, regardless of the merits for said claim. This is why you still feel that you 2/6 baseball team is better than highest ranked in the league right now or why your country is better despite that they have the better military/healthcare.
Often this manifests into people believing that the qualities that these other groups posses, just by being different from yours, are bad. This is known as ethnocentrism, and unfortunately by placing so many people of a certain race/creed against the player will create this divide. It dehumanizes them to an extent and creates animosity in some of the groups of players. The other team is against me, they are bad, what qualities about them are bad. Maybe not a lot, but enough to the point that I started hearing things like "sandniggers" coming out of people's mouths whenever I would play one of the games back then. And yes, these prejudices linger unless one is aware of what's happening.
I swear this kind of shit is original sin 2.0
[QUOTE=doomkiwi;47163839]I think he's doing the whole "white man goes to foreign land to kill natives" thing, which I actually think is a problem, but he's explaining why that is poorly.
I haven't played a modern military shooter in a while, mostly because they just keep retreading the same ground over an over again, but when I was into them some odd years ago there were an alarming number of shooters where the main enemies were just [B]"middle easterners"[/B]. I know that's somewhat changed now but it's still a problem thanks to what's been left behind
I'm going to get a little psychological as to why so bear with me:
(social identity theory)[/QUOTE]
They don't tend to be middle easterners so much as terrorists, it's your problem if you can't distinguish (well not really). But really I don't see an issue in killing terrorists in a power fantasy game about killing terrorists. It's simply a plot, modern day's biggest adversary (well, most vocal and violent adversary, seeing as you can't have Private Protagonist fighting off socioeconomic inequality) are terrorists and therefore a game in which the main mechanic is shooting people is going to have to find people to shoot. It's not really any more deep than that.
If terrorism wasn't a big thing and Nazis were Private Protagonist would be killing Nazis... and people would be moaning about racism towards Germans.
I do so much love the use of Latisha from deus Ex HR, when the voice actor for the characte3r (who is black) was the one who suggested/wanted to play a slum queen of sorts.
Another fucking white douchebag talking about racism in video games while ignoring any semblence of context. "RE5 is set in Africa, and so the vast majority of the enemies are black/African? THAT'S DISGUSTING JESUS CDHRIST" While ignoring the inclusion of Sheva.
I'm also a little confused by the inclusion of Mass Effect (and inquisition). He says that they include darker skintones, but actually ignores them as any indication of race. Is he actually under the impression that skin color not being indicative/specific of certain races as bad, or the fact that in-universe people don't actually give a shit about the color of your skin? Either way it's a retarded point to bring up in his argument.
[QUOTE=Rossy167;47163921]They don't tend to be middle easterners so much as terrorists, it's your problem if you can't distinguish (well not really). But really I don't see an issue in killing terrorists in a power fantasy game about killing terrorists. It's simply a plot, modern day's biggest adversary (well, most vocal and violent adversary, seeing as you can't have Private Protagonist fighting off socioeconomic inequality) are terrorists and therefore a game in which the main mechanic is shooting people is going to have to find people to shoot. It's not really any more deep than that.
If terrorism wasn't a big thing and Nazis were Private Protagonist would be killing Nazis... and people would be moaning about racism towards Germans.[/QUOTE]
I'm not stupid, I know that they're "terrorists" (except when they're not? Terrorist is such a loose term now. We slap terrorist onto every single middle eastern or muslim badguy in their own country. Despite the fact that we're in their countries). I'm not saying anyone is gonna go "hurdy blurdy bloo dem peoples is sandniggers", it's more subtle than that. What I'm saying is that people have a tendency to see people in groups that are against them, look at their common traits, and label those traits as "bad" or "worse" than their own. It's not a problem if this only happens in a few video games but the market was oversaturated to the point that yes, it did start to leak into the real world.
We dehumanized the nazis to the point where they're just cannon fodder, but they share enough in common with Private Protagonist (or whatever stupid name you wanna call the main character) that many of the traits aren't seen as negative by the player.
[QUOTE=doomkiwi;47163997]I'm not stupid, I know that they're "terrorists" (except when they're not? Terrorist is such a loose term now. We slap terrorist onto every single middle eastern or muslim badguy in their own country. Despite the fact that we're in their countries). I'm not saying anyone is gonna go "hurdy blurdy bloo dem peoples is sandniggers", it's more subtle than that. What I'm saying is that people have a tendency to see people in groups that are against them, look at their common traits, and label those traits as "bad" or "worse" than their own. It's not a problem if this only happens in a few video games but the market was oversaturated to the point that yes, [b]it did start to leak into the real world[/b].
We dehumanized the nazis to the point where they're just cannon fodder, but they share enough in common with Private Protagonist (or whatever stupid name you wanna call the main character) that many of the traits aren't seen as negative by the player.[/QUOTE]
You mean that after 9/11, years of war against Arab countries, and a huge amount of public hatred towards Arabs, it was CoD having Arab bad guys that caused people to start calling them Sandniggers?
I think it's more likely they picked that up from other sources and an online climate with no filters or civility caused them to express that garbage freely. Not only is the narrative of "Arabs bad, Americans good" stronger on news channels than in those games (and is nearly non-existent in the multiplayer), the amount of exposure and mental immaturity people would need to be brainwashed by the game is ridiculous.
Media influence needs to have a strong narrative and high exposure. Television depicting the world as violent and exciting is a strong narrative. News media only showing Arabs when related to terrorists is a strong narrative. Occasionally having black or Arab villains and also sidekicks or heroes along with whoever else they want to be the villain today certainly isn't going to influence people to the same degree.
In case of "realistic" shooters it makes perfect sense to me. You play as a U.S. soldier in middle east so of course most enemies will be brown. Same way you play Allied soldier in WW2 Germany so of course enemies will be German nazis. If that counts as racist now then I have little hope for politically correct gaming future. "Whites murdering minorities in games" propaganda is reaching conspiracy nut level.
Some people have too much time in their hands, if you look hard enough at anything, you can find something to get offended about - especially if you forget what context means. This type of reasoning is quite troublesome though, because it's a risk to have minorities for the fear of offending others and getting bad reviews (e.g. RE5).
[QUOTE=bunguer;47164274]Some people have too much time in their hands, if you look hard enough at anything, you can find something to get offended about - especially if you forget what context means. This type of reasoning is quite troublesome though, because it's a risk to have minorities for the fear of offending others and getting bad reviews (e.g. RE5).[/QUOTE]You don't have minorities or women? Bad game. You have them? Bad game. Feel bad for the devs.
He's literally acting like any Black NPC is racist. Like, all NPCs should be there to facilitate reactions to the player's actions and to help advance the story.
Also that DX bit is bullshit, people do still talk like that and you can find the weapon vendor entirely by yourself. Not to mention you wouldn't bat an eyelid at her at first so it's not like it's an encounter most players end up having.
[QUOTE=doomkiwi;47163997]
We dehumanized the nazis to the point where they're just cannon fodder, but they share enough in common with Private Protagonist (or whatever stupid name you wanna call the main character) that many of the traits aren't seen as negative by the player.[/QUOTE]
Aaand we've dehumaized muslim extremists (sorry, I know terrorist is just a racist buzzword now) to the point where they're merely cannon foder. Can't you just accept that they exist entirely to contextualize game mechanics?
Also, if you have a problem with Private Protagonist you have a problem with me using a alliteration in a generalization to belittle the faceless, namless and meaningless 'characters' of Roach, Private Rodreguez and Sergeant Can-You-Tell-I-Haven't-Played-an-IW-CoD-Campaign-Since-MW2 (his mum remarried a lot).
[editline]18th February 2015[/editline]
I feel like by now I've demonstrated I'm not taking this seriously enough to contribute anything other than stupid attempts at humour. I mean that Ganondorf comment alone was enough to send me spiralling into apathy regarding the perspective this guy took.
snip
[QUOTE=itisjuly;47164287]You don't have minorities or women? Bad game. You have them? Bad game. Feel bad for the devs.[/QUOTE]
Don't forget to include gay/trans characters
[QUOTE=Fangz;47162314][media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkSsojaiPgs[/media]
American Tax dollars at work people.[/QUOTE]
I thought it was revealed that Letisha's personality was brought to the table by her VA rather than the writers of the game?
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