The Litmus Test for New Racism

MTV Multiplayer is back with two new interesting pieces, one of which is the extension of the Black Professionals in Games series - an interview with Felice Standifer, of Sony US, on being a black woman in the industry. It’s a good read, and I dig that it opens up the race and gender angles a little more, especially after the first two pieces were with black men.

The other piece is N’Gai Croal of Newsweek’s Level Up, again, this time on the Resident Evil 5 controversy that I posted on way back when.  This piece, and the subsequent trainwreck of a discussion that ensues in the comments field, is typical for practically any conversation about race, but especially race and video games, that happens on the Internet. Sadly, plenty of people are convinced that if you’re not wearing bedsheets or gassing people of the Jewish faith, you’re not a racist, and anyone who talks about racism these days is “making it an issue”.

So! In the spirit of public education, I’m going to offer a brief questionnaire. It’s like one of those stupid quizzes from Cosmo, except this time you get to out the insidious racist depths of your soul. The test is simple: first, read the article, then go ahead and give yourself one point for each of the following sentences you could conceivably agree with:

“People who call this racist are being too politically correct. Relax! It’s just a video game. Save your energy for fighting Real Racism - talking about things like this could just make people not like you.”

“How come it’s only racist if there are black people in it? I think THAT’S racist. No one cried foul when the white zombie inhabitants of Raccoon City were killed by the dozen. Or the Spanish villagers in RE4!”

“It was made in Japan, so it can’t be racist! They probably didn’t even know what they were doing!”

That’s it! Got your score tabulated? Let’s see…

3 points: You’re hopeless. Stop reading this blog now. You’re probably one of the dozens of annoying commenters I’ve added to the spam filter.

2 points: Also hopeless, and one of the annoying spam-filtered commenters, but you might have slightly better sense than the 3-point people. Still, you should probably go. That way.

1 point: I was pulling for you, you know, the way you made it through two of the sentences without agreeing. 1 point? Really? Was it that profound that you just had to nod your head? Get out of here.

0 point: You’re probably writing this blog entry.

As you may have figured out, those three sentences were all paraphrased from the comments section; in general, the detractors have all more or less fallen into at least one of those three groups. Let’s take another look at these responses and see what we can dig out of them:

People who call this racist are being too politically correct. Relax! It’s just a video game. Save your energy for fighting Real Racism - talking about things like this could just make people not like you.”

1. This way of thinking presumes that we have finite amounts of energy when it comes to locating racism. Wrong! It’s actually surprisingly easy, once you get the hang of it, because there’s so MUCH of it.

2. You’re right that it might make people not like me. However, the people who wouldn’t like me because I point out that it’s racist are, well, racist. Suffice to say that their opinion doesn’t make me sleep any worse at night.

3. I am relaxed - you’re the one getting all defensive over something that’s “just a video game”. Maybe you’re getting defensive because you’re, um, racist? Just a thought.

4. You’re drawing distinctions between “real problems” and “not real problems”. Protip: Yes, starving children in XYZ country is indeed a problem. But so is an industry that makes billions of dollars off of exploiting racist imagery. Especially when the people who consume those images are the people who are in general positions of economic privilege, and who will eventually end up in a lot of the world’s important places. Besides, if you want to preach at us like that, sell the PS3 and join the Peace Corps. Then maybe you’ll have a leg to stand on.

“How come it’s only racist if there are black people in it? I think THAT’S racist. No one cried foul when the white zombie inhabitants of Raccoon City were killed by the dozen. Or the Spanish villagers in RE4!”

1. Because most of the people doing the commenting on this are commenting from an American perspective, and the USA was built on the backs of black people in chains. This country has a legacy of systematic oppression of people of color - a legacy that continues to this day, mind you - so of course history is going to affect the way we read certain images. And no, saying it isn’t doesn’t make it so.

2. As my previous post indicated, shooting white people is a surprisingly popular activity. That’s why most people didn’t complain about the previous REs. Everyone loves shooting white people. We people of color felt kinda bad about the Spanish villagers in RE4, but that was because they were poor, and we knew what that was like. They’re still white.

3. I think you’re a moron. A racist moron. 

4. Ever wonder why there weren’t that many zombies of color in Raccoon City? Probably because we all had the sense to GTFO at the first sight of white people doing crazy shit like eating brains. You’d be surprised at what kinds of survival skills brown people pick up when living among the color-challenged folk.

“It was made in Japan, so it can’t be racist! They probably didn’t even know what they were doing!”

1. The original intent of the author doesn’t hold nearly as much weight as the cultural and historical context in which the text itself is being consumed. That is to say, it doesn’t matter if Capcom Japan knew what they were doing or not when they created the RE5 trailer, it’s still being watched by Americans with a certain racial common sense.

2. I can’t think of many parts of the world where black people haven’t had to put up with some racist shit or another. Certainly Japan has its own racist baggage with black people, so even if we were to say that the author’s intent did matter, it hardly lets them off the hook.

3. You clearly don’t know what you’re doing, but that doesn’t make you any less of an asshole.

Peace and love,

pat m.

The Hottest Man of Gaming, In Color

At long last, the moment you’ve been waiting for! But first, allow me to make a few brief remarks.

It wasn’t easy wading through folders full of images of men. Hot, young, sweaty men. Asian men, black men, Latino men. Kickboxers, commandoes, ninjas, special operatives, wrestlers, vicious criminals, mystical voodoo warriors, and so on. Men with lithe builds, men with bulging muscles, men with special powers, men with big guns - how could I only pick 13? And once I decided upon the men, it was even harder to try to rank them, as if a number could truly express the boundless depths of sex appeal that mere images could express. Somehow or another, though, I did it - and, at long last, we’ve got our winner, taking home the Token Minorities Sexy Man Crown: give up for Dudley of Street Fighter III: Third Strike!

Of course, Dudley wins an obscene amount of points for subverting a stereotype: yes, he is black, and a boxer, like a few dozen other fighting game characters out there, but he’s not a practically illiterate thug (shame, Balrog!); no, he’s a classic dandy British gentleman, through and through.

But we couldn’t talk about Dudley’s sex appeal without discussing his ineffable sense of style,

or the class with which he conducts himself as a gentleman boxer. He even throws roses!

To be sure, he also breaks our sex-o-meter with his juggle combos, high-low mixups, and those tricky resets he’s got with his Hurricane Upper. Honestly, though, it’s his backstory that’s got us enraptured: he entered the Third Strike tournament because Gill stole his father’s antique car. Seriously. No one messes with the Dudley and gets away with it, least of all some red-and-blue-naked-carjacker-punk. Dudley’s got class in spades, especially when it comes to his automobiles - and, what’s more, he’s even got two different cars in his intro animation, depending on whether he’s player one or player two. It’s this kind of attention to detail that gets Dudley first place. Congratulations, Dudley, you truly are a sexy man of color among sexy men. I’d let you Corkscrew Blow me any day.

pat m.

The 13 Hottest Men of Gaming, In Color, Part 3

Eddy Gordo of Tekken infamy opens up big for us today at 5th place; honestly, there’s no way that the impeccable grace and, uh, muscles of a well-trained capoeirista weren’t going to make it somewhere on this list. The fact that his moves are kind of hard to get used to blocking, and his penchant for juggle combos has the dubious honor of being acknowledged in a Dane Cook standup are really just icing on the cake. Props to Namco for giving us the dopest Brazilian character ever to grace a video game, and shame, shame, shame on Capcom for giving us Rikuo (a fish-man), Blanka (a green headbiting monster) and Sean (like Ryu and Ken, but he sucks). Seriously.

Coming in at fourth place is Rico Rodriguez, from Just Cause, also known as the game I had never even heard about until I started looking for Latino video game characters. (That’s “Just Cause” as in, a cause that is just, not ‘just ’cause I feel like it’. Common mistake.) As far as I can tell, it plays like Grand Theft Auto mixed with a liberal dose of CIA insurgency. Wikipedia tells us:

Rodriguez has been described by developers as being “the child of one thousand comic books and action movies. He is James Bond, Mad Max, Jason Bourne, El Mariachi, Wolverine, Punisher, Rambo, Tony Montana, Han Solo and Vincent Vega all rolled into one. With a touch of Enrique Iglesias to top it all off!”.

That’s pretty sexy. I guess I’m a sucker for classic bad boys, though I’ll admit that he’d be even hotter with some Marxist revolutionary leanings. Oh well - everyone needs a project.

Third place gives us another bad boy who needs no introduction; it’s none other than Carl “C.J.” Johnson of GTA: San Andreas fame. A gangbanger and a mama’s boy, a street hustler and a legitimate businessman - all classically sexy. That he’s the star of a sex scandal second only to Paris Hilton’s - the legendary Hot Coffee saga - only cements his legacy. It’s anyone’s guess as to whether C.J. is down for the Boondocks-style (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmO2m15WAc) thuggin’ love, however.

We’ll wrap up today with our second place finisher: Nick Kang, from True Crime: Streets of LA. The renegade cop approach is perpetually sexy, as is his penchant for martial arts, fast driving, and gunplay. What’s more, he’s voiced by Russell Wong, complete with the same sense of style - gotta love the sunglasses - that we saw him show off in Romeo Must Die. As much as it breaks my heart not to be able to give everyone’s favorite hapa policeman first place, though, the fact is that most of his appeal really just isn’t HIS - see the image for the uncanny similarity to Chow Yun Fat’s character in The Replacement Characters. Still, Kang’s a high-scoring homage to all the bad-ass Asian men out there, and really, once you see who our Sexiest Man of Gaming is tomorrow, you’ll understand there’s absolutely no shame in taking second place.

pat m.

The 13 Hottest Men of Gaming, In Color, Part 2

Yesterday saw Token Minorities get more traffic than it’s ever had before. Nice to know that no matter how many people I piss off about Japan, or Indigo Prophecy, all it takes is some straight up old-fashioned objectification of hot men of color to bring in the hits. So! Today I’m going ahead with the next installment of the 13 Hottest Men of Gaming, in Color: 9th-6th place. Brace yourself for The Sexy.

The Paladin from Blizzard’s Diablo II takes the 9th place crown away. I might as well admit here that I have a weakness for tall, dark, and handsome, but the offensive and defensive aura skills, which benefit the whole party, indicate that he’s a pretty giving guy in the sack, and even better - he’s a team player. Also of note: Zeal means fast hands, and Conversion could make for some kinky mind-control fantasies. I don’t really want to think about anything that involves Fist of Heavens, however - that just sounds uncomfortable. Unless, you know, you’re into that kind of thing. Rock on.

Guy leaps out of the crime-ridden streets of Metro City, in Capcom’s Street Fighter Alpha and Final Fight series, to snatch 8th on my list. Ninjas are sexy, and ninjas with unconventional running high-low mixups that are hard to use and get used to are sexier. If that weren’t enough, Guy is so sexy that he got an SNES game practically devoted to him - Final Fight Guy - because his lithe, wiry body couldn’t be contained by an SNES cart with notorious honkies like “Yeah…I went to prison” Cody and Haggar the Wrasslin’ Mayor.

7th place goes to the woefully underappreciated Great Tiger, Champion of India in the arcade classic Super Punch-Out. Although he’s on the older end now (just turned 50, apparently), his lightning-speed jabs, affinity for cats, and the unabashed pride with which he rocks his turban in the ring ranks him right smack in the middle of our list. And really, winquotes like “I have purred long enough! Now hear me roar!” seal the deal. Rippling 8-bit muscles have never looked quite so delicious, though the ’stache is a little much.

Capcom’s got another strong finish in their 6th place contender from Super Street Fighter II, Thunder Hawk. Like Great Tiger, he’s one of the few strong men representing his people, and he does so in spades…in fact, his arms are practically representing right through that flimsy little jacket. Anyone looking for a denim-and-leather-clad-biker-bear of a man probably won’t do any better in the video game world than T. Hawk. Here’s to hoping he doesn’t get re-wardrobed when he makes his HD debut.

Tomorrow: 5th through 2nd place!

pat m.

Token Minorities Presents: The 13 Hottest Men of Gaming, In Color

Okay, so 90% of the hotness that people talk about in video games is generally about the female characters. Occasionally, however, we get a Hottest Men of Gaming list like the one mentioned in the last post. Never have I seen, however, in my eight years of writing about video games, even one Game Guy list that included people of color to any significant degree. (Girls of all races, creeds, and colors are ogled in the Gaming Girls lists. Hurray for color-blind sexism.) So! As Jay-Z says: this is history in the making.

Number 13 goes to a Capcom character by the name of El Stingray from the long-forgotten pro wrestling arcade game, Saturday Night Slam Masters. He is not to be confused with El Fuerte, the latest addition to the Street Fighter IV cast. (For shame. Luchadores do not all look the same.) El Stingray makes it on to the 13 Hottest Men of Gaming list for a handful of reasons:

• His butt looks great in spandex.
• Actually, he looks pretty darn good in general for being 16-bit.
• At 5′5″ and 163lbs he’s a catch for the men and women who like them wiry and muscled but not too tall.
• His arch-enemy, the Great Oni, is nicknamed “Pale-faced Devil”. Honestly, anyone who fights against pale-faced devils gets a standing ovation from me right there.

Wikipedia says he’s an “ultra macho ladies man” so guys, no luck there. On the other hand, he does wrestle in spandex with buff, sweaty men. Hmmm.

The #12 spot belongs to one Michael LeRoi, from the Acclaim game Shadow Man. Being of questionable living status doesn’t seem to stop people from wanting to have sex with Lucas Kane from Indigo Prophecy, so being an amnesiac-zombie-hitman-cum immortal-voodoo-warrior shouldn’t stop our Shadow Man from making it on the list. Maybe the zombie slave thing means he’d be more of a bottom than a top? His soul belongs to one Mama Nettie, a centuries-old voodoo priestess who inhabits the body of a woman in her twenties, and she has to have sex with him to maintain her eternal life. Older women, submissive sex, and a penis charged with voodoo energy - yum. Plus, apparently he was an English Lit major in college. I wonder how many times people have called him “articulate” or “well-spoken”.

Joe Higashi from Fatal Fury and the King of Fighters series won 11th in my heart and mind, partially because I have a soft spot for Thai boxers, partially because I gotta admire a character whose movelist changes probably no more than twice in the many games he’s appeared in, but mostly because he shows you his cute butt when he taunts.

Finally, Lieutenant Samir Duran of Starcraft: Brood War notoriety gets 10th place for his sexy voice alone. The fact that he can use Lockdown and Cloak only adds to his kinky sex potential appeal. He would have placed significantly higher if it weren’t for the fact that he is Zerg-infested at one point in the game, and I don’t want to find out of that’s transmissible through bodily fluids.

That’s it for today - tune in tomorrow for 9th through 6th place!

pat m.

The 25 Hottest Men in Gaming

So Bonnie over at Heroine Sheik posted an interesting breakdown of the “types” of men generally found in this (admittedly rather lackluster, this-post-is-worthless-without-pics) list of the “25 Hottest Men in Gaming”. Do you like your men brawny? Slender and effeminate? Pyramid-headed? And so on.

The assumption that both sites leave untouched: white. That’s right, the list in question is full of cracka-ass-crackas, something that no one else seems to notice. While the original list doesn’t have any pictures, I scrounged up a few pics of the individuals who seemed to have promise as potential non-whiteys. Behold:

Altair from Assassin’s Creed:

Hwoarang from Tekken:

And Iori Yagami from King of Fighters:

Even the ostensibly Asian guys, Iori and Hwoarang, look pretty white to me. Incidentally, I didn’t know that Iori played bass guitar. Nice.

Looks like my next feature is going to have to be hottest men of color in video gaming.

pat m.

God Hand Is The New Final Fight

To the unenlightened: God Hand. The commercial really says it all.

I picked up God Hand under the recommendation of the Select Button forums, where people widely hailed it as one of the best games on the PS2. My tastes don’t always fall quite in alignment with many of the posters there, but they won’t fail to provide interesting suggestions, to say the least. And, just to get this out of the way; if this were a game review, I’d be talking about how God Hand is definitely in my PS2 top five, no question. But it’s not, so I won’t. I’d rather talk about things that I like to talk about. (Reviews, you gotta pay for.)

God Hand is the Final Fight of the 3D generation of video games, right down to oranges and bananas the size of your torso that restore your health. However, where Final Fight was, in its era, simply one of many beat-’em-ups that held a late-’80s-early-’90s aesthetic, God Hand translates that feel to the PS2 audience. Final Fight has Poison, an originally female character that Capcom USA declared was actually a post-op FTM transsexual because they felt that punching transsexuals was more family-friendly than punching women. God Hand has the ridiculously gay Mr. Gold and Mr. Silver, the spanking finishing move which is only usable against female enemies, a fat Latino Elvis as a main boss, a boss encounter that begins with “The only bitch here that needs training is you! “, and a female civilian character who, upon being rescued from enemy torture, tells you, “They kept on spanking me…but then the strangest thing happened. I started to like it!”.

In Final Fight’s heyday, of course, no one paid attention to video games, except to say that Mortal Kombat and Doom were teaching children things they probably shouldn’t learn. Now, well, some people pay attention to video games, I suppose, though except for perfect storms like GTA’s “Kill the Haitians” bit, not a whole lot of people are going to pay attention to things like gender and race and sexuality in any video game. So I imagine that God Hand’s joke is largely lost on a lot of the gaming audience at large; the post-16-bit-kids probably just think it’s wacky and offbeat and maybe like the fact that it lets you spank women, and the pre-16-bit adults, judging from Select Button’s reaction, appreciate it as a game that throws back to the car-smashing, take-no-shit nonsense of Final Fight, Streets of Rage, and our childhoods. I imagine that if any of the more critical students of video games have played God Hand, however, they might be puzzled, like I was; somehow, the game gives us a main character with the emotional depth of a teenage boy watching Die Hard, a set of female characters that don’t really wear much in the way of clothes (except the protagonist’s sidekick, though you do unlock pictures of her posing cheesecake as you progress through the game), and for god’s sake the spanking move, and doesn’t elicit much in the way of an indignant reaction, at least not in me, and I’m the guy who got pissed off at Indigo Prophecy so clearly something is up.

This kind of discussion is always a little tricky, especially on the Internet; most people want to hear that “word XYZ” is either okay or not okay, or worse yet, they don’t really read the stuff we write and isn’t everything just all in fun anyway, guys, it’s just a video game for crying out loud, there are Real Problems out there and why are you wasting time writing about video games (or playing video games) when you could be out there helping fight AIDS in Africa if you really wanted to Make A Difference. Usually these people are the same ones who post things like ‘there is no more racism’. I get one of these comments every few days.

The truth is, of course, that it’s too simple to just say that This Word Is Cool, or even that This Word Is Cool (But Only If You Are Black/Female/Queer/Etc.). Words, and images, and their meanings, are highly sensitive to context, and it is often the context that determines people’s emotional reactions. So if you are genuinely concerned about whether This or That is Okay, you’re going to have to accept that, really, the only way to find out is to ask people, particularly the people that it might not be Okay to, and if they say No, it’s Not Okay, don’t argue with them or try and reason with them. (If, on the other hand, you just want to look like you give a shit, then you can go ahead and argue with them and remain more or less free from public censure. Life.) So if anyone out there actually reads this post before commenting, don’t get all pissy with me because I think that God Hand is not as offensive as Indigo Prophecy or the Resident Evil 5 trailer and therefore I am a hypocrite. Instead, drop me a comment saying you’d really like to talk about this, and maybe you’d like to buy me a Jamba Juice or something. Word.

Ahem. Context.

God Hand takes itself completely seriously while laughing its ass off at you, because you think it’s totally awesome. “Takes itself completely seriously”, insofar as it’s internally consistent, and while it’s plenty goofy, it doesn’t do a whole lot of fourth-wall-breaking humor. While the characters are outlandish, they’ve also got plenty of depth and appeal; the fat Latino Elvis demon isn’t just a fat Latino Elvis demon, he’s a genuinely interesting character with a range of emotions. So is the dominatrix demon, and even some of the bit characters. In fact, probably the only one who doesn’t really have a whole lot of depth is Gene, the main character. This is probably because his response to pretty much any situation can be paraphrased to, “Oh yeah?! I’m going to beat your ass!”. (Try it with your own running commentary during the game - you’d be surprised at how well it works.)

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).

pat m.

Keep Your Game Boy In Your Pants, Thank You

Not much to be said here about the latest boys-behaving-badly incident in video-game-land that hasn’t already been said. Feminist Gamers has a good roundup of all of the coverage. All I gotta say is that it looks like an Asian guy did the comic. For shame, Dave Cheung. This is not how brothers ought to bust the stereotypes.

pat m.