Let them eat cake

My learned friend over at The Felted Widget has recently taken it upon himself to "stop worrying and love the black man," in reference to the outrageous racial stereotyping evident in the figure of Augustus Cole, the resident big black badass of Gears of War. He concludes by essentially throwing his hands up in the air:
“I am at a point now where I am so overwhelmed with the political correctness of the scholarship surrounding gaming that I find myself losing touch with what is entertaining in the game by being tripped up by the occasional racial stereotype. While I do consider myself to be a sort of scholar of digital games, there are times when I really just want to enjoy the game on its own terms, stereotypes and all.”

As usual, I beg to differ. Frustration with PC pieties is wholly understandable. But I wonder if “oh, it’s just a game, let me just enjoy it as a game” can ever be a valid response to such challenges. In particular, should we wish to advance the claim that games are poised to make the leap in the wider cultural consciousness from trashy “popular entertainment” to aesthetically-significant genre, as movies and more lately, television, have done, then this line of argument is especially unhelpful. Why should we hold games to a lower aesthetic standard than other audiovisual media? Why should simply being "entertaining" be enough? Fantasy Island was entertaining, but we wouldn't have Lost if somewhere along the way tv audiences hadn't developed a taste for something a little more intellectual stimulating and a little less formulaic.

At the risk of sounding like a PC anti-racist ideologue, I must admit I also find the logic by which my esteemed friend absolves Gears of Wars somewhat bewildering. First he suggests that because race isn't central to the game (as I suppose one might argue it is in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example), the incidental racism is somehow less problematic: “the focus of the game isn't on race, its on liquidating aliens with strategy and reflexes.” He then goes on to claim that games which do focus attention on race as a defining feature of a character are not only inherently racist but crippled as games, because this self-consciousness draws attention away from what should be central, to wit, the game itself: “When race becomes something forced, we are drawn away from the organic construction of plot and we end up even more conscious of race than we were before." So racist stereotypes are OK as long as they are window-dressing, because the greater evil is a game obsessed with race. And that's bad, because it makes for poor gaming!?!

Strangely enough, I think he may be onto to something with that last point (see the rest of my argument below). But it's the invocation of Captain Planet as a supporting example for the latter point that really is a piece of rhetorical slight of hand unworthy of my worthy opponent. Because it at this point he cleverly shifts the argument away from the more contentious issue of whether the use of racial stereotypes is objectionable to the question of whether mandating an inclusive rainbow-palette of characters is desireable: "If Gears of War attempted to accommodate all possible races, all that would be accomplished is that even more races would feel objectified." There is no question that paint-by-numbers PC multi-culti casting saps all the energy from a narrative. One only need recall Katz and Dog, that execreble Canadian-content CTV sitcom of the early 90s which shoehorned every possible minority group into its cast, an impulse which found its apotheosis in the Asian guy in wheelchair. However, race is most often a defining feature of character precisely when it appears "accidental." Furthermore, I fail to see how the awfulness of "positive" representations of racial minorities legitimizes the use of negative racial stereotypes. And the argument that race-neutral characterization would raise the charge of "white-washing" does not seem to me a validation of the use of outrageous stereotypes. Nor does the assertion that stereotyping in games is equal opportunity--"It is a great leveling ground of culture, everyone and their mother is stereotyped"--mean that this is but a harmless quirk of the genre.

Now where the harm comes in is what I want to explore further. Because I don't think the worst racist stereotypes in a game are going to have much of an impact on the real world, in which racism figures large for much more intractable reasons. I think it is the video game as a genre that suffers the most. Racial stereotypes--positive or negative--are in most cases nothing but the lazy writer’s shortcut to characterization. Show me one game that is smart and aesthetically interesting in addition to being fun to play that rests on this kind of crappy characterization. In fact I think the Augustus Coles of the gameworld point to the fundamental weakness of most games on the market today—the writing still doesn’t count for much. Although most gamers are completely unwilling to accept anything less than state of the art visuals, poor writing doesn’t even raise an eyebrow in many circles. I don't believe there is anything intrinsic to the genre to prevent good writing, although it is undeniable that the ever present exigencies of game design have an impact on how games are written. However, there are many examples out there of thoughtfully constructed narratives: think, for example, of the 1,001 Nights-style metafictional twist underlying the first Prince of Persia. By the end of the game everything you have achieved is not only wiped out by the reversal of time, but also revealed to be but a part of the retrospective narrative hinted at in the voiceover and the opening cut scene, so that you the player are simultaneously positioned both as the Prince and as Farah, as actor/author and audience of the tale. And it's still fun to play!

My learned friend suggests that “we must recognize that Gears of War is an unfair representation of race and move on.” But surely, those of us who fall outside the 12-18 year old male demographic and prefer more artistically-crafted games might find a better strategy than simply “moving on”? I am one of those optimists who actually believes that games have the potential to become the next major art form of the 21st century. Why not respond to subpar writing critically—not stridently, through boycotts and so forth, but subversively. Why not use irony?