Games Aren't Numbers

I don't like writing about the gaming community because I usually don't usually think I have anything interesting to say about it. But even though sociology was never my area of expertise I still think the trends this community follows are sometimes interesting and we can learn something from them. Like any community, we are very content with the status quo and get upset when elements are introduced or changed. (The community I mainly refer to is the online community, because it's the easiest to follow and and I assume it's reasonably representative of core gamers.) We like to joke about gamers all being White middle class males who are out of touch with reality, but that got reaffirmed with their reaction to the previews of Resident Evil 5, or rather their reaction to the accusations of its racial insensitivity. When Kotaku first reported about it in 2007 it became their most discussed story for that whole year, and the discussion continues today on blogs and forums. The community can't seem to come to a consensus on whether or not the game should be categorized as racist or not.

In case you haven't been paying attention to Resident Evil in the past few years, the latest in the franchise features a White hero traveling to Africa and killing all the Black villagers. This bothers some people. It may seem obvious why, but the internet has shown that a lot of gamers don't think so. It seems to me that any mature person who lives in a country like the United States (or at least is familiar with US history) should be able to understand the situation when an issue like this pops up. As N'Gai Croal says, the trailer and gameplay released so far uses imagery with a racist history. It doesn't matter if the developers intended it to partake in that history or what sort of context is established surrounding the gameplay, that history exists. If gamers really are the middle class White stereotype then there's a good chance they've never actually experienced much racial conflict and can't understand this history either. And there's nothing the internet loves doing more than arguing about things it can't understand or relate to.

I think part of the reason why gamers are so up in arms about this is because it wasn't just accused of "using images with a racist history" but rather it was accused of "being racist". This automatically assumes that there are only two possibilities, that the entire game is racist or the entire game is not racist. It shouldn't be surprising then when people start arguing for or against these two extremes. Headline-reading nerds don't always like to consider that the world isn't defined by binary conventions.

But even if you can relate to it, race is like religion and politics in that you don't need a college degree before you think you're an expert on it. IGN, our favorite lowest common denominator, provided a good example of that a few weeks ago. The author fills two pages with faux professionalism and the "let me show you how it all is" attitude. But of course she doesn't actually have anything to say and just rambles on about nothing for two pages like a ninth grader regurgitating factoids into a rushed essay. This doesn't exactly help RE5's case much, and makes the whole debate look like a sensationalized non-issue (which perhaps it is).

There's also the possibility that there are just a lot of racist gamers on the internet. It's not particularly rare for middle class Whites who never had to think about race, and probably think of themselves as too intelligent to be racist, to actually keep some kind of latent racism. The internet's reaction to Soulja Boy holding a webcam and talking about Braid was a good experiment in showing that dormant hostility manifest in a lot of people. Whether or not that's reappearing here is up for speculation.

And of course there could be plenty of other reasons why gamers on the internet feel the need to argue for years about the racial content of a videogame. I'm no psychologist or sociologist so my powers of deduction are limited. But there is definitely something wrong.

During this whole post I've been pretty hard on gamers, unfairly hard on them. I can't reasonably just find the most immature examples and use them to represent "gamers" as a whole, and I hope no one thinks I'm trying to do that. Remember that I play games too, and the reason why I'm hard on other gamers is because I want the community to mature. I'm glad issues like those surrounding Resident Evil 5 exist because they show how the gaming community is developing and where we stand right now. The central issue is the kind of thing a lot of us thought was only in the past, but it's clearly still relevant and the gaming community clearly doesn't know how to deal with it even today. I look forward to a future where the gamer demographic catches up with the rest of society.