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Dear Nice White Gamers,
I am glad that you, unlike the Not Nice Gamers, understand that we don’t live in a post-racial world. It’s nice that you’re able to see the the word “racism” in the same paragraph as “video games” and not launch into the “it’s just a game!”-type knee-jerk reactions that can be summed up as, “”Gamers want games to be taken seriously until they’re taken seriously, and then they don’t want them taken seriously” (hat-tip: Kieron Gillen via Brinstar).
But, Nice White Gamers, you do not deserve the plate of cookies you’re passing around. And, even if you did deserve those cookies, you should not be passing them around. This is because (among other reasons) white people patting other white people on the back for being aware of racism is, in itself, kind of racist.
If a post, written by a Nice White Gamer over a year after the first criticism (made by a POC 1 I might add) was linked in the gaming blogsphere, that offers a shallow interpretation and no links to the more in-depth criticism that has been posted is “the first time I’ve read people actually thoughtfully examine the perception problems of RE5″, you need to stop and think about why it is that you are ignorant of the plethora of writings made by POC (especially when a simple google search of “racism” and “Resident Evil 5″ will at least give you a starting point). I’ll give you a hint, it’s something referred to in anti-oppression circles as privilege.
On that subject, it is a Nice Person fallacy that “considerate” conversation is praiseworthy in every situation. Yes, I know we’re taught the whole “you’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar” line, but “politeness” isn’t a neutral concept. Praising someone who said something bigoted for phrasing it and/or the ensuing discussion “politely” privileges politeness over not saying something bigoted. It puts you on their side instead of the side of the non-privileged individual/group that was targeted by the bigoted remark.
Let me give you a tip, from one Nice White Gamer to another: you aren’t as nice as you think you are. Being one small step above the Not Nice Gamers, who are blatantly racist and/or deny that racism is still a problem, is not praiseworthy; it’s the bare minimum. And, as long as you continue to be satisfied with having only the bare minimum level of awareness, your continued cluelessness regarding oppression and how it operates (and how you, as a white person, benefit from racist systems) will continue to perpetuate harm on POC. In the grand scheme of things, that puts you not on the side of anti-racism, but rather on the same side as the Not Nice Gamers.
For those of you who want to raise the bar and confront your own racism and privilege (in the process hopefully becoming an ally), I’ll give you some advice. Take a breather from posting your thoughts on racism and start doing some reading on the subject. Lurk in forums that regularly have discussions on race, racism, (and for bonus marks, other issues such as gender and sexuality), but don’t participate in those discussions until you have at least a base level understanding of how racism/oppression works and how people (including you) wittingly and unwittingly contribute to it.
Even if you aren’t interested in raising the bar, for the love of little green apples, at least have the decency to keep your thoughts (as they are on something you know very little about) to yourself. If you think a discussion on racism is something you want to post about on your blog, then link what other people (preferably POC) have said on the issue. But don’t act as an authority on the issue (or allow yourself to be praised as one) and don’t act as if your thoughts are new or revolutionary when they’re not (hint: linking other people who have said similar things avoids this misconception).
Seriously.
Sincerely,
A Pissed off Anti-oppression Activist Gamer Nice White Lady
1 POC stands for Person/People Of Color; it is the current standard in most anti-oppression movements for referencing anyone who isn’t white. Sometimes, especially in feminist spaces, you will see the term WOC, Woman/Women of Color. Note to Nice White People: know these terms, use these terms.
* My title is a reference to the “What These People Need Is a Honky” trope, which can be summed up as:
White guy flees from his own culture for personal reasons (to set him up as different from those with white privilege). White guy meets natives. Natives educate white guy. White guy learns the way of natives, possibly also converting a native person who was originally doubtful of him, thereby proving white guy’s worthiness. White guy fights for naties. White guy makes dramatic escape while the native guy dies, possibly trying to help the white guy. The movie then ends with a dramatic coda and captions that inform the audience that despite white guy’s triumph, the Situation Remains Dire.
The key to all this is that the entire movie is about the white guy’s personal growth and realization and that people of color serve only to further the white guy’s epiphanies.
I leave it to you, Nice White Gamers, to figure out the connection between that and my open letter.
I know I haven’t been around much; my life is busy and I don’t have the time to blog that I used to. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Anyway, I’d just like to highlight a post I read today, The Importance of Leadership on Gaming Websites.
Excerpt:
The point of all of this is that, despite claims by games bloggers that they have no control over what random people say on the internet, they actually do have a lot of control over the community on their sites, without even getting into moderation: it’s all about tone.
Tone is why Destructoid and Kotaku are sexist cesspools. When you post sexist headlines like “Jade Smells Pretty at London Games Fest“, when you post pictures of booth babes that are completely irrelevant to your post, when you think the height of humor is using the word “pussy” as many times as possible, you are not only engaging in sexist behavior, you are inviting sexist people to your site and making them feel at home, while simultaneously turning away most women and non-sexist men. It is truly the editors that build their site’s communities.
Joystiq generally does not do the above things, so things are marginally more civil there. However, any time a relevant picture of a woman accompanies a post, there are always a slew of sexist comments that go unchecked. I saw this happen to two posts that went up within hours of each other; the first was about a new executive at EA, who is an older woman, and many of the comments were extremely violent and objectifying (one charming example: “I’d hit it… with a crowbar”). The other was about the Lara Croft model, and since she’s young and beautiful the comments were instead about how much they would like to fuck her. It’s true that the posts did not encourage this sort of behavior the way they might at Kotaku, but at the same time, allowing these comments to remain up does–silence is the same as agreement.
For those of you interested in issues such as video games, online communities, and/or moderation, I would highly recommend giving it a read.
[As one speaker said today, "Pretty much all the games today are the same five games in different packaging."]
I have an Xbox 360. I want to buy more games. I mainly play sports (basketball and baseball) games and I have little interest in shooters with more guns, more blood and guts. I was perusing Amazon and I came to this conclusion: Jesus H there is nothing to buy. I thought Left 4 Dead would be fun but viewing the actual gameplay made it look like CounterStrike with a zombie skin (and since when do zombies leap like the Hulk?). And I didn’t think it’d be possible, but it might be worse than Dead Rising.
But luckily, there is reason to not be so pessimistic after I went to IndieCade’s exhibit/forum/workshop at Open Satellite in Bellevue, Washington yesterday. I went with my Little Broham which meant we weren’t there for very long (he forgot to have breakfast so he had little attention span or energy left after 90 minutes or so) but it was nice to check out some of the more artistic/innovative games that aren’t rehashes of stuff we’ve seen for years and years (because seriously, how many shooters and RPG games (new story!) can people make?) and aren’t meant to be The Game that you play for 80 hours. Merci Grace from GameLayers was there and she spoke about getting into the industry, securing funding and about her team’s upcoming game PMOG. It was interesting to hear about the creative process and how you don’t necessarily have to know all the code in the world (though it does help) to be a part of a creative team. I kinda wished I was still in college so I could maybe try and join in on the video game design fun.
This event/forum/exhibition was hosted by a volunteer that I work with and since it was a cool and kid/teen friendly environment, we mass emailed it out to all of our volunteer mentors. I didn’t stay for the entire thing and some might’ve gone to the later dates, but I was a little disappointed that we were the only match there. Specifically, I was hoping that a few Big Sister/Little Sister matches would’ve shown up because it would’ve been particularly great for them to see and talk to Grace because as we all know, kids (and society in general) still see video games and those behind them as a Boy’s Club.
I have been a semi-regular reader of the blog Feminist Gamers since its conception, but after reading this post I don’t think I’m going to be going back there anytime soon. I admire that Mighty Ponygirl wants to foster a stronger bond between feminists (don’t we all?) but I disagree with her chosen methodology.
If we’re being perfectly honest here, I have to admit that I take her words personally because I’m pretty sure that I was one of those “internet feminists” she was chiding. I say this because she and I exchanged words on a post where I said that I was strongly considering dropping the “feminist” label because I feel that a failure to address privilege in all of its forms is fundamentally incompatible with the feminist quest for equality. If you notice, she pretty clearly references the term “retard”, which was also referenced in the ableism discussion.
Mighty Ponygirl’s attitude is actually a pretty good example of what frustrates me about the mainstream feminist movement. Over the past few months, I would say that the Feminist Gamers blog has become the representative feminist gamer blog to the greater gaming culture. As such, MP has the unique power to influence (to a certain extent) mainstream gamers’ opinions of feminists and female gamers in general. As I see it, she is the gamer version of famous internet feminists such as Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti. Like them, her success is owed to various factors such as being intelligent and witty, passionate, knowledgeable about her subject matter, dedicated to regular/semi-regular posting, and — of course — that ever present element of luck.
However, I would also argue that part of what makes her popular is that she’s a more palatable version of a feminist than, say, I am. As much as I would like to believe myself to be a middle-of-the-road type, I know that I get placed firmly in the “hardcore”/”militant” category because of my steadfast insistence that, while focusing on gender equality is a good thing, it’s not good enough if we don’t also acknowledge and incorporate other anti-oppression movements into our theories and actions. Simply put, someone like me is too scary to be the face of feminism.
Sure, there are times when Mighty Ponygirl can be scary (like when she’s ripping a troll a new one), but that’s a kind of scary that gamers can relate to. The way that she’s scary is the way that they’re scary: ready and willing to lob snark at people who earn their ire. In a lot of ways, she fits in with gamer culture. This is, of course, a good thing; she fits in so people like her, when people like her they listen to her, when they listen to her they begin to understand the fundamentals of feminist thought, and when that happens for enough people feminist thought begins to be normalized.
But when it comes down to it, part of why she’s palatable is because her message doesn’t rock the boat too hard. Although she does help familiarize gamers with the fundamentals of feminist critique (thus giving them the tools to better understand misogyny and sexism and how they operate in gamer culture), ultimately she is asking more for the inclusion of a certain group of women into the clubhouse rather than for gamers to understand oppression and how they (wittingly and unwittingly) contribute to it.
Despite all the words about unity and understanding in the second paragraph of her post, the first paragraph is basically saying that those of us who believe in anti-oppression activism aren’t allowed to express our anger/disappointment over mainstream feminism’s seemingly inability to recognize that women come in more combinations than just straight, white, able-bodied, middle- to upper-class (etc etc). According to her, we should just STFU and accept that some people are assholes and some feminists will only see feminism as a fight for gender equality (which somehow doesn’t include groups like women of color or women with disabilities).
But, you know? I can’t do that. I don’t sit down and shut up like a good little girl when some jackass is spewing misogynist shit in my face, and I’m damned well not going to do it when I see someone who’s supposed to be a feminist contributing to the image of feminism being for rich, cissexual, straight white women only. Women of color? Women. Telling them to take race out of the oppression equation and only focus on gender is like telling them to pretend that they are white and that their experiences as women of color are the same as those of white women (hint: they’re not). Transwomen? Women. Are you really going to tell them that they should keep quiet when some asshole feminist says they shouldn’t be allowed in women’s spaces because they’re really men? What about the woman with a mental disability who has to deal with taunts of “retard”? You gonna tell her that when internet feminist #49058 called an ideological opponent a “retard” it had nothing to do with her?
If it were just one or two assholes, then maybe I could follow MP’s advice. But it’s not. It’s Seal Press and Michfest and how it feels like every month there’s another woman of color being trampled on by some well meaning white feminist who can’t bloody get over her damn self and admit that maybe she was acting from a position of privilege. As long as feminism is “just about gender equality” it will be hurting women. I took on the feminist label to help women, not just to further my own equality.
Maybe I’m just not a very good feminist. But, then, isn’t that the problem?
 Melissa Batten was a Software Development Engineer for the XBox team. Before that she was a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked as a public defender, handling domestic violence cases, in North Carolina. She was also a victim of domestic violence (DV). Her abusive husband killed her a few weeks ago in a murder-suicide after she had moved out and taken out a restraining order on him.
Domestic violence is a pervasive, deadly problem that affects us all. This incident is not an isolated act, nor can it be viewed in a vacuum. We lost one of our own. But there is more to take from this tragedy than it simply being a woman in the industry who died. Batten’s murder wasn’t an outside incident; it was part of a greater pattern of violence against women. It was enabled by a culture of misogyny that all too often trivializes domestic violence and puts obstacles in the way of the victim who tries to protect herself. Even in this case, where Batten did everything she could to get out of her situation and stay safe, her abuser had no problem shooting her outside of her workplace.
As gamers and game industry professionals, it’s our responsibility to take a deep look at ourselves, and our industry, and think about the ways that we’ve enabled a culture where violence against women is not taken seriously. Many gamers think that greater societal problems such as domestic violence and violence against women has nothing to do with their beloved hobby, but they are wrong. For one, games like the GTA series rely on sexualized violence and otherwise reflect sexist dynamics in order to add to their realism. Tying it into an example closer to real life, consider the harassment of Jade Raymond. The violence may have been verbal rather than physical, but it was rooted in the same sense of ownership of women that was the root cause of Batten’s husband killing her before he killed himself.
One way that we can honor Batten’s memory is to get educated on issues such as DV and violence against women and stop denying that they have nothing to do with us and our hobbies/careers.
More on Melissa Batten
Domestic violence resources
X-posted: The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student
In this past week I’ve gotten an influx of commenters on my Resident Evil 5 posts decrying me and my posts as “American-centric”. I did consider writing a detailed post debunking this, but I’m very busy with school and there are better things to spend my time on than engaging with commenters who are trying to use the tools of anti-oppression activists to silence activism.
So, I’m going to make this brief and say it once, and once only.
Deconstructing something from an American perspective doesn’t automatically make it American-centric. Nor is it American-centric to work within a frame that happens to involve American history where American history is relevant.
That there are other racial issues with this game does not invalidate the fact that there are also issues that involve America. Picking certain issues that I find logically or emotionally relevant to the point I am trying to make is not the same as denying the existent of other, equally relevant, issues. That I don’t mention every single possible problem with Resident Evil 5 in every single post I make on the issue does not mean that I am not aware of other issues. Indeed, a simple search on this blog for “Resident Evil 5″ would produce my link roundup which links to posts addressing those issues and more.
Lastly, while I do believe that there is a valid conversation to be had regarding American-centricism and RE5, that conversation is not to be had with people who are leaving comments with no other purpose than to try and silence me by labeling me a hypocrite. It doesn’t work with the “no, you’re racist for seeing race!” arguments, and it won’t work simply because you’ve changed the language into something that hasn’t already been debunked by a thousand other anti-oppression activists.
I don’t know where y’all are coming from, but your playtime on my blog is over.
I have been feeling rather unhappy with Capcom for a while, but this takes the cake:
Resident Evil 5 producer Jun Takeuchi tells Kotaku that calls of racial insensitivity haven’t affected the game’s design. Takeuchi tells the site that the team didn’t “set out” to make a racist or political statement and he feels there was a misunderstanding about the initial trailer.
Takeuchi says there are Arab and Caucasian targets for Chris Redfield’s bullets in RE5 and insists they were always going to be included in the game — despite the initial trailer showing a less ethnically diverse group of zombies. We’ll have to take a “wait and see” approach on whether Japanese developers will continue to fuel the fires of black/white racial tensions across the ocean.
I know Japan is pretty racially ignorant (from my experiences, but here’s a wikipedia entry on the matter), but Capcom is an international company, serving an international audience. The fact that it seems that their research only involved going to the location (without, you know, spending like 5 seconds looking into the history of black/white relations in the US, where their protagonist is from) is bad enough. Takeuchi’s tactic of “it’s not racist because I didn’t mean it!” is infuriating, but expected. I am also not appeased by the inclusion of Arab and Caucasian zombies, because:
- An American killing an Arab. UH, HELLO? How is that not problematic given the current anti-Muslim (which, to the average anti-Muslim American translates to “Arab”) climate in America? And, I mean, with the Afghanistan and then Iraq wars, which made international news, it’s not like Takeuchi has an excuse not to know about those tensions.
- Adding a sprinkling of whities to get gunned down isn’t some magical panacea for racism. It doesn’t address the What These People Need Is a Honky problem, and it doesn’t change the way that the black people, even pre-infection, are portrayed as savages.
I have loved the Resident Evil series, even with all of its problems. I have done my best to play the games, even though I suck at survival horror (mostly because I spend most of the time thinking, “OH NOES TEH ZOMBIE IS GOING TO GET ME!!!111eleven”). I could tolerate stupid shit like Jill being sexualized and put in a dress for RE3, Ashley being completely useless in RE4, and the fact that they apparently thought there’s no difference between Mexican Spanish and Spanish Spanish. I didn’t even mind so much that all of the protagonists were dayglow white (after all, it isn’t like that’s unusual). The abominable trailer for RE5 wasn’t even enough to convince me to not buy the game.
But I can’t take it anymore. I feel like I have no other choice but to boycott Capcom because I simply cannot support what they’re doing.
Capcom/Takeuchi no longer have an excuse. They can’t claim ignorance, because they’ve been made aware of the issues and still chose to ignore it. They quite simply don’t care that their game is problematic from a racial angle. And I can’t support that. I can’t support people who willfully engage in racism even after the racism is pointed out to them by multiple people because they can’t fathom that, in their lack knowledge regarding racial tensions/issues, they could unintentionally create something racist.
I’m about to be twenty-six fucking years old. I’ve grown up. Is it so wrong for me to wish that the games I love would grow up with me?
Have you ever wanted to enter the field of gaming journalism, but didn’t have the time or the confidence in your writing skills to submit an article? Does the opportunity to interact with industry professionals appeal to you? If so, then consider becoming an interviewer for Cerise magazine!
What we’re looking for:
- Enthusiastic people who want to conduct interviews with industry professionals and game-related bloggers by e-mail, phone, or other media.
- Reliable people with enough time to conduct (at most) one interview a month.
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY! You will be working with an Interview Co-ordinator (right now that’s me) who will help you with the preparation and post-interview process.
While much of the co-ordinating will happen via e-mail, we recommend that you sign up for our forums. There, you fill find a number of resources that will help you form your interview strategy, including guidelines and suggestions for future interviews.
This is not currently a paying job, but it is excellent experience for anyone interested in journalism and/or the gaming industry.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in this thread, or alternatively contact me via e-mail. All those interested in the position, please e-mail me directly at andrea [at] theirisnetwork [dot] org.
After one Starforce scare with Dreamfall (which worked out in my favor because Ubisoft dropped the malware due to consumer outcry), and two wastes of money (one due to SecuROM with Sims 2: Bon Voyage, which I’m going to see if I can ebay for at least part of my money back — I made the mistake of opening the box before checking the copy protection — and the other due to Starforce with Obscure, which I purchased several years ago and almost installed on my computer a few minutes ago) I am at the point where I’m not sure I can continue to be a consumer of PC games.
I am not a criminal.
I am not a pirate.
And yet, companies treat me as if I am. The onus falls on me to make sure that I am not buying malware from so-called legitimate companies, rather than on those companies — and some of the biggest offenders are corporations like EA and Sony — not to silently bundle increasingly invasive and harmful copy protection products with their games. Products, I might add, which always get cracked within a few weeks of their release.
Sure, with a very simple google search I could access step-by-step instructions on how to bypass the software. And you can bet your buttons that I looked into it when trying to figure out if I could salvage the 20 bucks I spent on Obscure. But, in the end, I don’t want to have to jump through hoops just to safely play my legitimately purchased game. I also don’t want to risk damage to my machine, seeing as maintaining gamer-quality computers takes a lot of money.
Which means that I will most likely no longer be making any PC gaming purchases, excepting those that use different approaches to copyright protection such as MMO’s and games such as Galactic Civilizations II. I love PC gaming, but it’s just not worth the hassle anymore. I feel like telling all those gaming companies, “Congratulations, assholes, with your bumbling and futile attempts to stop pirates you have just lost yourself a customer who — despite having the knowledge and ability to pirate — has been making a conscious and concerted effort to be a legitimate consumer.”
Oh well, at least I still have console games.
Now, I’ll be honest here. I think that Brian Crecente is an unprofessional misogynist who doesn’t have the writing skills to match his journalism education. Given his track record, I don’t think he’s fit to write articles, much less be put in charge of a majorly influential gaming news site.
Part of this is personal, seeing as he’s tried to take credit for the Iris Gaming Network that Revena and I founded, not to mention was the source of the misattribution of a quote by Guilded Lily to Iris/Cerise that has caused no end of misunderstandings. Oh, and I was none too thrilled that he felt that it was appropriate to allow commenters to make rape threats about the cover model for the first issue of Cerise, especially since the “model” was my friend who posed as a personal favour to me.
The other part of it is just my general aversion to misogyny, which he’s directly responsible for as the senior editor of the site (it’s his job to moderate both the posts by other editors and the comments by readers) and the fact that he thinks it’s appropriate to refuse removal of a dirty picture, posted without permission, at the request of the model. Really, it doesn’t take very much to earn a place on my “misogynist shit list”, but Crecente has really gone above and beyond the call of duty.
So, you can imagine my snort of disbelief when I was reading Nick Douglas’s article, I’m Not Offended, I’m Just Bored: Why Gaming Journalism Should Stop Treating Women Like Meat (via this month’s Gaming in the Media), and came across this quote:
Gawker Media’s gaming site Kotaku, says editor Brian Crecente, goes out of its way to stop boy’s-club coverage.
So, I follow the link to Feminist Gamers in the Gaming in the Media article (they express a similar disbelief that Kotaku is turning over a new leaf; they also link this article by Amanda Marcotte which is worth reading) and come across the following quote from this article by Crecente:
Wow, there are a lot of hateful women out there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are just as many hateful men out there too, but none of them have been given the space in large newspapers to spew their anger at video games and the men who play them, so I’ll limit my ire to them in this post.
The post generated comments such as:
if she wouldn’t be such a c*%t then maybe the child-men she’s hangin with would put down the controller and shag the hell outta that dried up ol prune. — ROYAL_HIGHNESS
Let me guess, last guy she met stood her up for a videogame? I would too lol — IRENICUS-THE ONE AND ONLY
My God I want to slap her in the face. — INTELSILVER
Way to “[go] out of [your] way to stop boy’s-club coverage”, Crecente and Kotaku! I don’t know what I’d do without men like you to champion women’s rights by never bringing up women’s gender when it’s completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, cracking down on threats of violence against women, and distinguishing yourself from other game journalist sites out there by refusing to make inappropriate references to women’s body parts in your titles!
On the over-the-top offensiveness of God Hand (the game the above clip comes from), pat of Token Minorities says:
I don’t think this is accidental. I think this says something about us, as the kinds of people who enjoyed and got used to playing games like Final Fight, where we fed the machine quarters and yelled “Oh yeah?! I’m going to beat your ass!” during every boss fight and punched punk stripper transsexuals all day and didn’t give a fuck. God Hand is laughing at you because you love it, because it has translated all the gendered and racialized images of our games of yesteryear into actual goddamn dialogue and you still don’t really notice it. It’s bringing us back to the Old School, complete with everything that was kind of messed up about the Old School, and so I propose that perhaps God Hand’s inclusion of blatantly Bad Things is actually so pronounced and over-the-top that it actually has a point, a thought-provoking point, and not merely gratuitous, sensational stupidity. Maybe it’s gotten a few people to idly ponder the games they played when they were young, and what they learned from it. It’s messed up, but it’s closer to the Chappelle’s Show end of the spectrum (thought-provoking and possibly educational) than Indigo Prophecy (which is basically ignorant) or Border Patrol (which is actively messed up).
I’m not sure that I agree with him (and would have to play the game to fully form an opinion), but it’s something to think about.
I just realized that I forgot to plug myself here. Via my other blog, The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student, I was contacted to do a piece for Game Career Guide which is now up for viewing here: My Search for a Japanese Game School.
The backstory: Assassin’s Creed is one of the most anticipated games of the year. When Yahoo! is talking about your game on the front-page, you know the buzz is pretty significant. The producer for this game is Jade Raymond who, like the lead-producer of every other game created in the modern age, gives a good portion of the interviews with the press. That is, if you’re a producer of a game and you’re noticeably articulate, you’re the one talking about it, you don’t tell the advertising executive or the intern to do that. As the game is being released, a comic/drawing surfaces, most infamously on the Something Awful forums depicting Jade performing fellatio on male fanboys (not to be confused with the photoshopped nude photos of Jade that are floating around). This comic is seen and shared by members of the SA forums at which point Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka of SA receives a cease and desist/threat of lawsuit letter from the legal representation of Ubisoft telling them to shut it all down and to let them know everything about where they get the image, who drew it, etc. At this point, the story becomes popular outside of SA and other blogs start picking it up, forming their own opinions (yes, just like me and just like this one). The story appears on digg and with it a rash of the most sexist comments (and some countering the sexist comments) appear.
Read the rest…
From Nintendo’s women gamers could transform market:
Japanese women have overtaken their male counterparts to become the biggest users of Nintendo’s Wii and DS machines in a seismic shift that the company said would “transform the video games industry”.
This is tekanji’s total lack of surprise.
I see more women playing with their DS on the train then men. The genres that are aimed at women aren’t confined to crappy “girl games” (which in America all too often equal “simple because teh wimmins brains can’t handle real games”). Women game here, and they are much more recognized for the thriving market that they are.
Anyway, the article is worth a read, even though it ventures into bingo territory a few times.
Yesterday I took my entrance exams for HAL, a famous technical school in Japan, and got in. Starting April I will officially be studying video game design and planning for the next four years.
I took a tour yesterday and the school looks really, really awesome and the guy who’s in charge of coordinating the international students was really, really nice and I’m so happy that I got in that I could die.
So, anyway, yeah, that’s one huge worry lifted of my shoulders. Now I get to worry about finding an apartment, changing my visa over, and getting all my ducks in a row.
ETA: I’ve put up a blog on Iris where I’ll be talking more about this: The Life and Times of a Video Game Design Student
Doubtless many of you have heard (from Kotaku or other sources) about Shanda Entertainment, a Chinese MMO publisher, requiring photographic proof of a person’s sex in order to allow them to play a female avatar.
This information is most likely false! Joystiq has done some digging into the issue and turned this up:
The source of story in the English-speaking world seems to be a painfully short, two sentence “editorial summary” on Asian business site Pacific Epoch. Besides containing scant details or supporting information on Shanda’s policy, the summary contains the eyebrow-raising assertion that players with female avatars would have to “prove their biological sex with a webcam.” While this isn’t impossible, we find it hard to believe that a publicly traded company would start encouraging its customers to send in pictures of their naughty bits for any reason. Besides being ineffective (what’s to stop a player from sending in a picture of someone else?) the system seems overly complicated when a National ID card number could easily provide proof of gender (much as it already does for age confirmation in other MMOs).
Pacific Epoch cites popular Chinese MMO web site 17173 as the source of its information, and while we couldn’t find the original article on their site, we did find a story about some obviously fake Halo 3 branded condoms, which 17173 presented as fact. Combine the questionable editorial judgment with the translation problems inherent in citing information from a Chinese site and you have a perfect recipe for an erroneous story to spread across the internet.
The moral of the story? Just because something looks official doesn’t mean that it actually is. Especially regarding areas in which there are language barriers where we can’t easily verify the source of the information ourselves.
 Since today’s my long day at school, for day four of International Blog Against Racism Week I’m going to do a link roundup of some of the discussion that’s been going on about Resident Evil 5. The primary reason for doing this, of course, is that link roundups don’t take that much time so I can write it in the morning before school and set it to post when it’s the right day in the US. But I also think it’s valuable to see the various different points of the critiques in the same place.
In posting this roundup, I hope to make it easier for fans to see beyond the knee-jerk reactions to the word “racist” (and the implication that race-based critique of a game is implying that the game is racist) and actually understand what the concrete problems with the trailer, and by extension the game, are.
Please note: the following links are listed in order of which link I saw first.
Resident Evil 5 at Iris Gaming Forums, comment by Nashiko:
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good zombie game, but I found it a little strange that not only was RE4 a game full of Spanish cultists who where deemed as inhuman, but it was also the first RE game that had what I like to call the “super zombies”. Not the placid, growling, stumbling undead that we all knew and loved from RE 1 and 2, no, supper zombies. Crazily violent and able to speak. A little more humanized than I care to have my zombies.
On Race in Resident Evil 5 at Heroine Sheik:
Instead of battling zombies in an abandoned house or even in Spain, players will be now be blowing the heads off of the living dead in an African village. That’s right, we’re talking about black zombies. What’s more, you play a commando character who is white whity-ity white. Jesus, I couldn’t even make this stuff up. Even if we don’t play the racism card, there’s a whole mess of issues here: monsters and otherness, the paranormal as a manifestation of our anxiety about real-life conflicts like race.
Resident Evil 5 at Black Looks:
The new Resident Evil video game depicts a white man in what appears to be Africa killing Black people. The Black people are supposed to be zombies and the white man’s job is to destroy them and save humanity. “I have a job to do and I’m gonna see it through.”
This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young… fearing, hating, and destroying Black people.
Resident Evil 5: White Man Shoots Black Zombies at The Village Voice:
Plenty of Resident Evil fanboys are standing up for the game by claiming that Africa is just a setting like any other. After all, why shouldn’t zombies be black? On one level, that’s true.
But looking again at the trailer, I see a different message: it’s not just that these zombies are black, but that the uninfected black villagers are zombie-like too. See all those spooky shots of the villagers before they get infected? It’s as if race itself were a disease. The white protagonist has to fight back or be infected.
Blackface Goes HD? The Case of Resident Evil 5 at microscopiq (x-posted to Racialicious):
With bulging eyes, simian super strength, and a room temperature IQ, we’ve been portrayed as savages beyond redemption. So, when we see images like these, it doesn’t just resonate with the long lived zombie genre, it also triggers memories of so many awful stereotypes — and what those stereotypes have been used to justify past and present. Put down the crazed negroes before they take the white women! And so on…
But perhaps the most troubling part is that these scenes seem to be set in Africa; the “dark continent.” With all the positive steps being taken of late to raise awareness of the good things happening in Africa as well as the urgent need in some parts of the continent, we really can’t afford this kind of step back. We need to find ways to humanize Africans, not dehumanize them.
Race in Games: Culture, Context, and Controversy at microscopiq:
I’m fully prepared to accept the possibility that Capcom is not intentionally drawing on painful stereotypes, but that does not mean they’re allowed to be oblivious to them or their impact. To the contrary, as a company that sells into many markets worldwide, it is very important for them to be aware of cultural issues. If they fell down anywhere, it seems likely to be here — understanding stateside racial sensitivities.
Of course, a trailer is not a full, playable game. But trailers are a way for game companies to manage impressions of their games. If a game is presented in a troubling way in a trailer, folks can and should react to that presentation. As has been pointed out in the comments, a number of interpretations are possible, but I would still argue that certain images in the RE5 trailer are problematic as they are expressed presently.
ETA: Resident Evil 5 at grysar’s livejournal:
“But,” you may argue, “that’s true of most any zombie movie or game. 1) Zombies don’t use guns, 2) In survival horror most everyone is already dead, 3) there’s not a problematic context because they’re dead.” And you’d be right. Here’s the thing, zombie games defuse the fact that you’re mowing down the weak by making them literally inhuman. They are decaying, they do not emote, they do not think. The not running thing is secondary. This isn’t to say that there aren’t political or cultural critiques in Zombie movies, there certainly are. However, they can be a bit more subtle by limiting the humanity of the baddies.
RE4 and RE5 have humanized zombies to the extent that they can’t afford to be subtle about the political/cultural context. The first one dodged this by evoking a situation that might be horrifying in Eastern Europe, but basically doesn’t resonate at all in America. However, RE5 chose a context that they knew paralleled real events. I am baffled that nobody at Capcom stood up during the earlier meetings and said “Hey guys, this doesn’t look good.” I don’t care that they’re Japanese, this isn’t some sort of subtle point. The zombie excuse stopped working when you intentionally made them emotive, angry-mob like, and hard to visually differentiate from normal humans.
I’ve left out ones that I didn’t feel added anything to the conversation, but if you come across an article that you think should be included, please link to it in the comments. Thanks!
For day three of International Blog Against Racism Week, I want to look specifically why games, such as many of the prior Resident Evil ones, haven’t received as much criticism as, say, Resident Evil 5 has.
So, why aren’t critiques of the prior Resident Evil games easy to find? Well, there are a few reasons. As discussed in my previous post, gaming as a field of study is still in its infancy. Gaming blogs discussing issues like race are still few and far between. Despite the re-release for Gamecube, the previous games are (in internet terms) rather old.
And, finally, the last reason I can easily think of, which is what I will be discussing here: The previous games didn’t gather much discussion because they had only the usual amount of racism in them. What do I mean by that? Well, keep reading to find out.
Read the rest…
This week is International Blog Against Racism Week (hat tip to Oyce for the icon). I actually contributed to day one without meaning to, posting a quick rebuttal to the claim that the no one complained about the previous games in the Resident Evil series because it was white people killing white people. To kick off day 2, I’m going to devote another post to the great RE5 wank of 2007 (you can find the trailer that sparked the wank here and a link roundup within the comments over at Iris’ forums).
One of the things that struck me about the discussions on blogs that broached the subject of potential racism in Resident Evil 5 was the way that the same arguments were brought up over and over again, and many of them are iterations of arguments I’ve seen come up when people protest discussions on gender.
The “no one is saying/has said anything about [x thing] in [y] game” argument is the one I will be addressing here. The racist-apologist complainers who bring up that argument do so in bad faith; they aren’t arguing it because the presence of said critique would solve the problem, but rather because they see the argument as a tool to shut down discussion on the game in question. They are, sometimes literally, saying, “You didn’t say anything before, so you have lost the privilege of saying anything now or in the future!” Which is a problematic argument, to say the least. Behind the cut I will explore some of the specific problems with the argument in more detail.
Read the rest…
As a fan of the Resident Evil series one thing that’s been rather amusing about the race wank surrounding Resident Evil 5 is the claim that the rest of the series was all “white people killing white people”. I wonder if the complainers have actually played the games in the series, or if they’ve bought so much into the white normative culture that “protagonists, the majority of whom are white, killing zombies, the majority whom are white” is the same as saying, “the previous games have been all white people”.
On the trailer thread I raised issue with the assertion that Resident Evil 4 fit into that category, and now I’m going to bring Exhibit B into play. The above movie is the opening to Resident Evil 3 and does, in fact, feature both non-white humans and zombies. The ratio isn’t representative of most American cities, but they’re there and that’s enough to make my point for now.
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