Here is a copy of it, all credit goes to Ernest Adams.
The Designer's Notebook: Not Just Rappers and Athletes: Minorities in Videogamesby Ernest Adams
So here I am, a few years back, firing up Baldur's Gate for the first time. This is gonna be great! A huge multi-disc CRPG with a decent storyline and tons of gorgeous artwork, the reviews tell me. I can't wait. First things first, though; gotta create my avatar. Forget the suggested, pre-built person they give me -- this is my big chance for self-expression. I'm looking through the portraits available trying to decide what kind of a person I'm going to be. Nice selection. Hey, there's a black woman! I can play a black woman! They're scarce as hen's teeth in computer games. She's got her head tilted back and her eyes half-closed in the snootiest expression imaginable, and she's holding out her hand for it to be kissed - what an attitude! I warm to this lady immediately. I'm gonna be her and we're going to be a Heroine together.
So I play along through the game for a while, gathering my posse and talking to bartenders and killing things and selling slightly dented armor down at Ye Olde Dented Armor Shoppe, the way you do, and after a while I decide to check out the gnoll fortress. After seriously whomping on a whole lot of gnolls, I come across this female mage being kept prisoner down in a pit. So I get her out of the pit and she joins the party. She's called Dynaheir (weird name… a descendant of Alfred Nobel, presumably). Her stats are pretty good, but she's an Invoker, limited in the kinds of magic she can perform. She'll do until somebody better comes along.
However, there's something odd about this woman. Unlike everybody else in the game, the clothing in Dynaheir's portrait doesn't match the clothing that her character is wearing in the main window. In fact, her character's clothing really matches my portrait. What's going on?
A quick look at a Baldur's Gate fan site gives me the answer. I've accidentally stolen Dynaheir's head. I unknowingly used her portrait for my own character, so the game has substituted a different one for Dynaheir, one that doesn't match her character. The Heroine of this story wasn't really supposed to be a black woman. There's only room for one black woman in this game, and she's a second-rate mage being kept prisoner in a pit.
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 | Dynaheir. | |||
Now, this isn't meant to be a criticism of Baldur's Gate. It's a wonderful game, one of the best I've ever played. But my experience does point up a longstanding problem: there aren't enough minority characters in games, and the ones we do have are confined to too narrow a spectrum of roles. Back in 1999, the New York Times ran an article called "Blood, Gore, Sex, and Now Race: Are Game Makers Creating Convincing New Characters Or 'High-Tech Blackface'?" It was a worthy question then, and one that doesn't seem to have received an answer in the intervening four years.
The first black character that I can remember in any video game was Julius "Dr. J" Erving, in one of Electronic Arts' first titles, Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One-on-One, a basketball game. The machines it shipped on had such limited graphics capabilities that it was essential for the athletes to be different colors so players could tell them apart. (If I remember correctly, Larry Bird was white -- bright white -- and Dr. J was actually orange. The background was black.) So began a long tradition of black characters in games… as athletes. Tiger Woods has been a huge seller, too, but that doesn't have much to do with black people in the larger social context.
More and more games are starting to feature rappers and hip-hop music, and some games are beginning to incorporate black urban slang as well, for its "cool value." There's a debate among black game developers about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Some people think it means that games are finally starting to recognize the energy and vibrancy of hip-hop and rap music. Others see it as the publishers co-opting that music simply to put more money in their own pockets -- primarily white pockets -- trading on the popularity of hip-hop to sell games. A few people are concerned that it could actually be a form of stereotyping.
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| ||||
| Tiger Woods: huge seller. | |||
I don't have a personal stake in that debate, but I do know that publishers follow the money. If it's financially profitable to include (or exploit, if you prefer) hip-hop and rap, they will do so, and if it ceases to be financially profitable, they will stop. My concern isn't about whether the publishers are right or wrong in incorporating this hip-hop and rap music and youth culture. My concern is that, if that's the only way in which we depict black characters, then it definitely is a form of stereotyping. If all our black characters are cool young men spouting urban street slang, then we're ignoring the rest of the black population, and creating an artificial impression that that's what all black people are like. People don't stop being black when they hit 25. They don't stop being black if they live in the country or talk like Sydney Poitier.
Personally, I don't feel that this (as some would argue) is caused by a culture of racism in the commercial game industry. If there is racism in commercial gaming, it seems to me that it derives from ignorance and inattention rather than malice. Of course, there will always be a few examples of actual malice, in nasty homemade titles like Ethnic Cleansing, but they're certainly not part of the commercial mainstream. No retail store is going to stock overtly racist games; no publisher is going to advertise them.
But racism that derives from ignorance and inattention is still racism. Japanese games often depict black characters with exaggerated negroid features. Japanese developers may know that their domestic market doesn't mind, but they probably aren't aware of how this will be perceived in the United States, where there is a long, unhappy history of drawing blacks with clownishly exaggerated features for its "humor" value.
Unfortunately, the animé style prevalent in Japanese games traditionally exaggerates everybody's features, so it's sometimes difficult to distinguish between a peculiarity of the style and the influence of an actual racist attitude. But regardless of the underlying intention, a little more sensitivity couldn't hurt. An American developer probably wouldn't ship a game to Japan that depicted Asian people with slanted eyes and buck teeth.
The TV show Law & Order is one that seems to have gotten this right. Set in Manhattan, it incorporates a complete cross-section of Manhattan society. African Americans in the show are portrayed as prostitutes and gangstas, but also as high-priced lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, teachers, and of course cops. The African American characters aren't either tokens or stereotypes; they're people, doing whatever it is they do. It's an example to learn from.
The TV show Law & Order is one that seems to have gotten this right. Set in Manhattan, it incorporates a complete cross-section of Manhattan society. African Americans in the show are portrayed as prostitutes and gangstas, but also as high-priced lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, teachers, and of course cops. The African American characters aren't either tokens or stereotypes; they're people, doing whatever it is they do. It's an example to learn from.
You might be asking yourself, "Who cares? They're only games." But games are not "only" games any longer; they're an increasingly powerful and meaningful part of our society. They don't merely reflect our culture; they help to create it. The answer to the question "Who cares?" is "A lot of your customers, actually." The same people who care that there aren't many books written, or movies or television shows made about black people (and Asians, and Hispanics, for that matter; or in Britain, Pakistanis and West Indians). It's not just a question of finding work for black actors; it's a question of acknowledging the presence of minorities in society and making them feel included as customers we want to reach. Just as little girls get tired of reading adventure stories featuring only male characters, so black people get tired of playing videogames that feature only white characters. Why alienate potential buyers when the fix is so easy?
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| Def Jam Vendetta leverages hip-hop and rap culture, and has been credited with injecting new life into the wrestling game genre. But is it also perpetuating stereotypes that we ought to be trying to break free of? | |||
It's not as if there are no black characters in games - obviously we can point to Barrett of Final Fantasy 7, Eddy Gordo of Tekken, Taurus of Interstate '76, and others. They're fairly common in fighting games. But in most of those cases minority characters are included simply to add visual variety. The more important question in my mind is, "Could Duke Nukem have been black? Could Lara Croft?" Duke Nukem's attitude towards women is such that, had he been black, 3D Realms would probably have been accused of portraying black men as sexist. But I think Lara Croft could easily have been black. Would Tomb Raider have sold as well? Maybe I'm being naïve here, but I think it might. Men didn't have any trouble getting over the notion of playing a female character; I'd like to think that whites wouldn't have any trouble getting over the notion of playing a black character. If they don't mind in sports games, why should they mind with action-adventures?
In any case, there's a lot more that we, as game designers, could be doing. For example, we could deliberately play against type, reversing the tired old stereotypes. Two film examples come to mind, movies that were groundbreaking for their time: Lethal Weapon and Se7en. Lethal Weapon was a mismatched-buddy flick with a twist: instead of pairing a young, hip black cop with an older, conservative, white cop, it gave us Danny Glover as the 50-year-old suburban family man, suddenly having to deal with Mel Gibson as his rash, hotheaded partner. In Se7en, made a few years later, Morgan Freeman plays a quiet, middle-aged homicide detective who always dresses impeccably and spends his evenings in the public library, opposite Brad Pitt as the loose cannon. In both cases, the combination is interesting and enjoyable. We don't often see middle-aged black men acting as guides and mentors for young whites. But we could, and we should.
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| Lethal Weapon: buddy flick with a twist. | |||
It's possible to do this badly; a lot of what made those movies work was the chemistry between Glover and Gibson, and Freeman and Pitt. With actors of less stature, the result might have been awkward or laughable. But the biggest hurdle was making the decision to do it at all. For us, that decision is long overdue.
I want to see Morgan Freeman as a lead character in a game. I want to see Whoopi Goldberg and S. Epatha Merkerson. I want to see Sydney freakin' Poitier, I don't care how old he is, I love the man. And Denzel Washington and Laurence Fishburne and Queen Latifah and Beyoncé Knowles. And Chris Rock and Halle Berry and 50 Cent. I don't want only want to see them in urban environments, whether committing crimes or fighting crimes -- I want to see them everywhere, doing everything, being all kinds of people. Take all of Joseph Campbell's archetypal character types: Hero, Mentor, Ally, Trickster, and so on, and I want to see black characters in every possible role. Not just as rappers and athletes. It's time the game industry gave minorities their due as full-fledged members of the cast.
Another brilliant article: http://www.tannerhiggin.com/2010/10/colorblind-character-design-in-videogames/
Ambiguity
Non-white characters are a shameful rarity in videogames and when they are present (aliens and monsters don’t count) they’re often so ambiguously raced as to be completely indeterminate. I was reminded of this a year back while playing Resident Evil 5 cooperatively with a friend over Xbox Live. About a third of the way into the game I made a comment about how Sheva Alomar, the black female character, was perhaps designed to allay concerns over racism that erupted after the initial blitz of promotional footage. My friend responded, “Sheva is black?”
While I was surprised by my friend’s misrecognition of Sheva, the more I thought about Sheva the more I began to see the ambiguity. Her accent is a blend of American, British, and South African. Her features are what might be considered traditionally white especially in the facial logic of videogames. Most importantly her skin is that familiar shade of light brown used by many game developers, as well as in Hollywood film and animation, to signify a safe and “attractive” blackness/brownness which recalls the disturbing racist denigration of dark skin tones which are so pervasive they’re even present within racial groups.
Since that conversation I began to notice that Sheva’s ambiguity is not an isolated case but rather a strategy commonly used in videogames. For example, consider the following characters:
Alyx Vance (Half-Life 2)
Jade (Beyond Good and Evil)
Commander Shepard (Mass Effect)
There are exceptions, of course. For instance, Border House recently explained how Bioshock 2‘s Grace Holloway was a rare instance of mature black womanhood being done right. And in RPGs like Mass Effect characters are extraordinarily editable and allow players to approximate whatever physicality they desire. However, Commander Shepard still adheres to ambiguity in official promotional materials and is the suggested template when the player is prompted with creating a character. While players may or may not use the suggested option, any changes are understood as deviating from the standard Command Shepard, both literally and figuratively.
So what might be the motivation, from the standpoints of the developer and publisher, to create ambiguously raced characters? In some cases the character might fit the logics of the world they are trying to construct or the mixed heritage of the character. For instance, Half-Life 2‘s Alyx Vance is both Asian American and African American. I think Alyx is an example of a wonderful character whose ambiguity is productive and not gratuitous, especially given the fact that her father, Eli Vance, is one of the few excellent older black men in games. Alternatively, benevolent developers could be trying to create characters that represent a large variety of people. So before I proceed, let me be clear: in some cases I think ambiguous characters make sense and are productive.
Eli Vance (Half-Life 2)
But what does concern me about the trend toward the racial ambiguity in games is the possibility that ambiguity is adopted as a way to effectively occlude large swaths of difference from videogames in favor of forms of representation more palatable to a presumed white user base. To put it another way, I fear that race is being censored to the point of disappearance, whether done with positive intentions or not. The result is a gaming landscape dominated by whiteness.
Chris Kohler explored this issue in a slightly different way on Wired back in 2007 when he expressed confusion over what race Jade from Beyond Good and Evil was. He couldn’t tell if she was meant to be Asian, Black, White, Latina, Arab, or otherwise. He concluded that she seems to be none of the above and all of the above and that this indeterminacy is precisely what the developers were going for. She’s a racial everywoman able to appeal to any market. Instead of creating characters of varying races and ethnicities developers create a character like Jade who stands in for all non-white difference.
Colorblindness
What’s most interesting to me about the article is the comments section. Wired readers represent the standard responses to discussions of race in videogames that many readers of this post will be all too familiar with. Allow me to paraphrase these arguments.
Anti-racist activists who battle against this colorblind silencing of racial inequality find themselves caught in a bind: we want to destroy racism and end racialogical thinking but race continues to affect and define people’s lives; as a result, we must maintain race in order to describe and diagnose oppressions. And perhaps the most difficult concept for those less experienced with critical race theory to grasp is that race is a manufactured and segregating force but its also a useful cache of culture and history.
In an adept game of trickery, colorblind ideologues that choose to ignore existing inequalities, for whatever motivation, place the guilt on progressives for calling attention to the problems caused by race because to do so requires an attentiveness to race itself. From the perspective of the colorblind, racism now is found in the identification of race even if the attentiveness to race is pointing out an injustice.
Racial Alchemy and White Hegemony
Videogames predominantly function as colorblind media and the trend toward complex character creation systems or racial ambiguity in character design are effects of this colorblindness. So while videogame audiences are increasingly diverse (e.g. African Americans spend more money on games than whites) they adhere to a colorblind marketing strategy that appeases the desires of 18-35 white males. The result are gaming experiences that offer two equally less than desirable choices: on the one hand, characters fulfill stereotypical notions of racial others or, on the other hand, in what’s coded as a “progressive” move, difference is an amalgamation of otherness that divorces itself from the pressing racial politics of the every day in favor of an ideal post-raciality that doesn’t exist. Videogames and their ambiguously raced characters present the best case scenario for whiteness. Gamespace becomes a past/present/future free of troubling politics and division where the violences of difference are solved and the only racial others are beautiful white people with almond tans.
And don’t get me wrong: there’s a place for this kind of fantasy because, in some cases, it is motivated by a progressive desire to see to the end of race. But when ambiguity is the sole option, post-raciality is transported from the realm of dream to myth. Ambiguity, as a mythic construction, thus occludes substantive engagement with the very real differences that manifest themselves in daily life which, rather than being ignored, need to be described, understood, and worked through.
Evelynn Hammonds (2000) has written about this vision of a racial future, where race disappears in a mixing of genetics that levels current racial categories. In her study of a speculative fantasy of future-race conducted by Time in 1993, Hammonds diagnoses how our mythic post-racial futures often are strictly controlled and manipulated in the interests of dominant powers. In her example, Time used computer morphing technology to create “The New Face of America” by mixing together the photographed faces of individuals of different races. Hammonds points out that to even embark on this peculiar alchemy is to assume that “the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors in the Crayola crayon palette” (315). Compounding this clear adherence to racialized thinking, the “cyergeneticist” in charge of creating the composite face has not organically or naturally generated “The New Face of America” but manufactured it. Hammonds expresses this point eloquently: “With the Time cover we wind up not with a true composite, but a preferred or filtered composite of mixed figures with no discussion of the assumptions or implications underlying the choices” (312).
My interpretation of ambiguously raced characters in videogames is similar. What troubles me is how these racial amalgamations, similar to the “morphies” Hammonds studies, are created with a set of investments driven by market research and sales numbers, and in productive contexts that are significantly lacking in diversity. The premise of amalgamation is that all races mix into one, but built within that premise is an uncritical acceptance of a priori racial separation. It’s no surprise then that what we end up with in games are non-white characters that are expressed through the lens of whiteness, suppressing the beauties of real world differences to the point of indistinction. When ambiguous characters are understood as racial amalgams appealing to white desire, we see that ambiguity doesn’t solve race; in fact, it does the exact opposite. Racial ambiguity represents difference as deviations from a white norm.
The only way to stop this destructive raciology is to stop envisioning our past, present, and future, in and outside of games, as the flattening of all difference into one race and instead embrace an infinite continuum of difference.
09/05/2011
Trying to shed some light on why games always favour the 'good guys' as playable characters:
http://my.spill.com/forum/topics/who-wants-to-play-a-world-war
Another brilliant article: http://www.tannerhiggin.com/2010/10/colorblind-character-design-in-videogames/
Colorblind Character Design in Videogames
AmbiguityNon-white characters are a shameful rarity in videogames and when they are present (aliens and monsters don’t count) they’re often so ambiguously raced as to be completely indeterminate. I was reminded of this a year back while playing Resident Evil 5 cooperatively with a friend over Xbox Live. About a third of the way into the game I made a comment about how Sheva Alomar, the black female character, was perhaps designed to allay concerns over racism that erupted after the initial blitz of promotional footage. My friend responded, “Sheva is black?”
While I was surprised by my friend’s misrecognition of Sheva, the more I thought about Sheva the more I began to see the ambiguity. Her accent is a blend of American, British, and South African. Her features are what might be considered traditionally white especially in the facial logic of videogames. Most importantly her skin is that familiar shade of light brown used by many game developers, as well as in Hollywood film and animation, to signify a safe and “attractive” blackness/brownness which recalls the disturbing racist denigration of dark skin tones which are so pervasive they’re even present within racial groups.
Since that conversation I began to notice that Sheva’s ambiguity is not an isolated case but rather a strategy commonly used in videogames. For example, consider the following characters:
Alyx Vance (Half-Life 2)
Jade (Beyond Good and Evil)
Commander Shepard (Mass Effect)
There are exceptions, of course. For instance, Border House recently explained how Bioshock 2‘s Grace Holloway was a rare instance of mature black womanhood being done right. And in RPGs like Mass Effect characters are extraordinarily editable and allow players to approximate whatever physicality they desire. However, Commander Shepard still adheres to ambiguity in official promotional materials and is the suggested template when the player is prompted with creating a character. While players may or may not use the suggested option, any changes are understood as deviating from the standard Command Shepard, both literally and figuratively.
So what might be the motivation, from the standpoints of the developer and publisher, to create ambiguously raced characters? In some cases the character might fit the logics of the world they are trying to construct or the mixed heritage of the character. For instance, Half-Life 2‘s Alyx Vance is both Asian American and African American. I think Alyx is an example of a wonderful character whose ambiguity is productive and not gratuitous, especially given the fact that her father, Eli Vance, is one of the few excellent older black men in games. Alternatively, benevolent developers could be trying to create characters that represent a large variety of people. So before I proceed, let me be clear: in some cases I think ambiguous characters make sense and are productive.
Eli Vance (Half-Life 2)
But what does concern me about the trend toward the racial ambiguity in games is the possibility that ambiguity is adopted as a way to effectively occlude large swaths of difference from videogames in favor of forms of representation more palatable to a presumed white user base. To put it another way, I fear that race is being censored to the point of disappearance, whether done with positive intentions or not. The result is a gaming landscape dominated by whiteness.
Chris Kohler explored this issue in a slightly different way on Wired back in 2007 when he expressed confusion over what race Jade from Beyond Good and Evil was. He couldn’t tell if she was meant to be Asian, Black, White, Latina, Arab, or otherwise. He concluded that she seems to be none of the above and all of the above and that this indeterminacy is precisely what the developers were going for. She’s a racial everywoman able to appeal to any market. Instead of creating characters of varying races and ethnicities developers create a character like Jade who stands in for all non-white difference.
Colorblindness
What’s most interesting to me about the article is the comments section. Wired readers represent the standard responses to discussions of race in videogames that many readers of this post will be all too familiar with. Allow me to paraphrase these arguments.
1. It doesn’t matter what race Jade is because she’s an alienThe common thread between the above comments is an ultimately reductive post-racial colorblindness that seeks to solve the problem of race by getting rid of reference to race all together: “We’re all equal so stop talking about race already.” The problem with this, as Nick Lalone most recently pointed out in his gloss of Lisa Nakamura’s Digitizing Race (and other texts), is that “blindness to color doesn’t work because there are cultural differences between races/ethnicities in society.” It’s incredibly convenient for people already well off—or free of the burdens of racial discrimination and damaging socio-historical circumstances—to want to dismiss race because it saves them from having to acknowledge and deal with the divisions, discriminations, and racisms that continue to oppress. Colorblindness effectively closes the case on racial inequalities mid-session preserving hegemonic power structures that privilege whiteness. Business continues as usual, but underneath a rhetoric of equity.
2. Jade isn’t a race because she’s a videogame character.
3. Trying to attribute a race to Jade is racist because race is a myth.
Anti-racist activists who battle against this colorblind silencing of racial inequality find themselves caught in a bind: we want to destroy racism and end racialogical thinking but race continues to affect and define people’s lives; as a result, we must maintain race in order to describe and diagnose oppressions. And perhaps the most difficult concept for those less experienced with critical race theory to grasp is that race is a manufactured and segregating force but its also a useful cache of culture and history.
In an adept game of trickery, colorblind ideologues that choose to ignore existing inequalities, for whatever motivation, place the guilt on progressives for calling attention to the problems caused by race because to do so requires an attentiveness to race itself. From the perspective of the colorblind, racism now is found in the identification of race even if the attentiveness to race is pointing out an injustice.
Racial Alchemy and White Hegemony
Videogames predominantly function as colorblind media and the trend toward complex character creation systems or racial ambiguity in character design are effects of this colorblindness. So while videogame audiences are increasingly diverse (e.g. African Americans spend more money on games than whites) they adhere to a colorblind marketing strategy that appeases the desires of 18-35 white males. The result are gaming experiences that offer two equally less than desirable choices: on the one hand, characters fulfill stereotypical notions of racial others or, on the other hand, in what’s coded as a “progressive” move, difference is an amalgamation of otherness that divorces itself from the pressing racial politics of the every day in favor of an ideal post-raciality that doesn’t exist. Videogames and their ambiguously raced characters present the best case scenario for whiteness. Gamespace becomes a past/present/future free of troubling politics and division where the violences of difference are solved and the only racial others are beautiful white people with almond tans.
And don’t get me wrong: there’s a place for this kind of fantasy because, in some cases, it is motivated by a progressive desire to see to the end of race. But when ambiguity is the sole option, post-raciality is transported from the realm of dream to myth. Ambiguity, as a mythic construction, thus occludes substantive engagement with the very real differences that manifest themselves in daily life which, rather than being ignored, need to be described, understood, and worked through.
Evelynn Hammonds (2000) has written about this vision of a racial future, where race disappears in a mixing of genetics that levels current racial categories. In her study of a speculative fantasy of future-race conducted by Time in 1993, Hammonds diagnoses how our mythic post-racial futures often are strictly controlled and manipulated in the interests of dominant powers. In her example, Time used computer morphing technology to create “The New Face of America” by mixing together the photographed faces of individuals of different races. Hammonds points out that to even embark on this peculiar alchemy is to assume that “the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors in the Crayola crayon palette” (315). Compounding this clear adherence to racialized thinking, the “cyergeneticist” in charge of creating the composite face has not organically or naturally generated “The New Face of America” but manufactured it. Hammonds expresses this point eloquently: “With the Time cover we wind up not with a true composite, but a preferred or filtered composite of mixed figures with no discussion of the assumptions or implications underlying the choices” (312).
My interpretation of ambiguously raced characters in videogames is similar. What troubles me is how these racial amalgamations, similar to the “morphies” Hammonds studies, are created with a set of investments driven by market research and sales numbers, and in productive contexts that are significantly lacking in diversity. The premise of amalgamation is that all races mix into one, but built within that premise is an uncritical acceptance of a priori racial separation. It’s no surprise then that what we end up with in games are non-white characters that are expressed through the lens of whiteness, suppressing the beauties of real world differences to the point of indistinction. When ambiguous characters are understood as racial amalgams appealing to white desire, we see that ambiguity doesn’t solve race; in fact, it does the exact opposite. Racial ambiguity represents difference as deviations from a white norm.
The only way to stop this destructive raciology is to stop envisioning our past, present, and future, in and outside of games, as the flattening of all difference into one race and instead embrace an infinite continuum of difference.
09/05/2011
Trying to shed some light on why games always favour the 'good guys' as playable characters:
http://my.spill.com/forum/topics/who-wants-to-play-a-world-war
'I DO! if the video game industry ever had the balls to do it, would you play a game where you played as a Nazi trooper in one of dozens of fronts?
Why not play a singleplayer game where YOU are the oppressor. Why not play a singleplayer game where you play as a Japanese soldier fighting in Portuguese Timor? or play as a Nazi trooper fighting for his life on the island of Crete or in North Africa?
Or hell, even as a Viche French/ Free French soldier, either or, doesn't matter. I'd want to play as something else rather than an American Army guy with a husky voice or a Soviet, even though Soviet campaigns are usually my favourite :D
Or even go as far as to play one of the resistance movements across Europe and Asia during the war, why not pick up a rifle as a Croatian freedom fighter, or Danish, French, Italian partisan fighter.
Would you play a game with any of those options?'
Do Germans play WW2 games?
http://uk.gamespot.com/forums/topic/25662945/do-germans-play-world-war-ii-games
The DiGRA website proved to be extremely useful for articles and essays on the subject of racial respresentation.
http://www.digra.org/dl/search_results?general_search_index=race
In particular this piece about GTA3 greatly helped me:
http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06276.49210.pdf
After talking about Lost Planet I wanted to understand more about the development and character choice, so I was fortunate do discover this interview.
XBox Gazette - 23/10/2006 - Lost Planet interview with Jun Takeuchi
http://www.xboxgazette.com/interview_lost_planet_en.php
Why not play a singleplayer game where YOU are the oppressor. Why not play a singleplayer game where you play as a Japanese soldier fighting in Portuguese Timor? or play as a Nazi trooper fighting for his life on the island of Crete or in North Africa?
Or hell, even as a Viche French/ Free French soldier, either or, doesn't matter. I'd want to play as something else rather than an American Army guy with a husky voice or a Soviet, even though Soviet campaigns are usually my favourite :D
Or even go as far as to play one of the resistance movements across Europe and Asia during the war, why not pick up a rifle as a Croatian freedom fighter, or Danish, French, Italian partisan fighter.
Would you play a game with any of those options?'
Do Germans play WW2 games?
http://uk.gamespot.com/forums/topic/25662945/do-germans-play-world-war-ii-games
The DiGRA website proved to be extremely useful for articles and essays on the subject of racial respresentation.
http://www.digra.org/dl/search_results?general_search_index=race
In particular this piece about GTA3 greatly helped me:
http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06276.49210.pdf
After talking about Lost Planet I wanted to understand more about the development and character choice, so I was fortunate do discover this interview.
XBox Gazette - 23/10/2006 - Lost Planet interview with Jun Takeuchi
http://www.xboxgazette.com/interview_lost_planet_en.php
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