I’m playing devil’s advocate here. Watch.

With all this talk about how racist, homophobic and sexist video games are, I’d just like to point out the fact that most people simply don’t give a ****. Video games (and I’m talking generally here) are not about being politically correct and portraying an egalitarian world where race, sex, and sexuality is indiscriminate. They’re about having fun and playing to what gaming developers think is believable in terms of casting different characters.

There’s always a grain of truth in every stereotype and its completely human to have a personal bias (positive or negative) in terms of how we think of people with a different skin colour to ourselves, of other sexualities, and of other sexes. For instance, when someone mentions “black person”, the first image that pops up in my mind is for some bizarre reason LeBron James. Why? Beats me. Maybe I’ve been watching too much basketball. But my point is that the first image in your mind will probably be something different to me and other people in the room.

One of the big topics in this course is immersion in video games, which is why I think there are so many stereotypes present in these games. Gamers expect them, and they contribute to immersion because people intuitively accept them as believable. So when somebody points out the racial stereotyping in games like Grand Theft Auto 4, its because they are part of the minority who actually cares and notices that sort of thing. Everybody else is too busy playing the game to think ‘Hey, why are there are no white gangs around?’. Meanwhile, the unconscious part of their brain has found the fact that all the gangs are racial minorities compatible with their notion of the racial make-up of gangs in real life. Nothing crazy there.

On the other hand, think about what would happen if a stereotype was NOT present in a game. I’m just going to use the stereotype of taxi drivers being Indian males as an example. Your character in a game gets into a cab and the driver is a white chick. An extreme example, I know, but it illustrates how you would notice instantly and think WTF. You would potentially then look it up online and find a thread dedicated to the ‘white taxi chick’ where other gamers would talk about and what a WTF moment it was. It would also break immersion because you would be thinking ‘wait a second. I have never seen a taxi driven by a white chick before. This can’t be right. Maybe it’s a glitch.’ You get my point.

Stereotypes help drive immersion. That’s why they’re there.