Seriously “White” Sam

Similar to the way that analysing films in the beginning made it hard to watch movies without acknowledging camera shot types, movements etc I have been looking at video games in a different way.

After the lecture on representation and ethnicity in games it made me think about games which I did not think committed any kind of racist bias. A game I played many years ago on PC was Serious Sam: The First Encounter, a FPS game which included a white man, Samuel “Serious” Stone who must heroically save the planet from the invasion extra-terrestrial force of Mental and his space ship which transported hundreds of alien monsters to Planet Earth. The game is set in the 22^nd century, where all humans have been wiped from the planet, all bar one –a white man named Serious Sam who is the “chosen one” to save the planet.

From the outset, the game thus cries out the ‘white man’s burden’ where Sam must go back to one of the locations of the earliest human civilisation, Egypt [which may I add, albeit set in the 22^nd century appears to have remained in some kind of time warp where the city consists of tall sand structures showered with sphinxes] to save the world from aliens. By contrast, Sam is armed with weapons which scream technological innovation and definite human evolution such as his laser gun, giant canon etc. In this way, it seems that Sam (with his American accent) is being portrayed as a more advanced human than those who were living in Egypt.

Upon thinking about this a little more, if Mental’s alien ship landed in Egypt, would it not make sense for the humans to put an Egyptian local in the time warp to save the Earth rather than some white guy who doesn’t actually know the area very well. Furthermore, Serious Sam 3: BFE is marketed with the slogan “No cover. All man” which is suggestive that those who do not look like Sam, do not qualify as men. In this way, it seems like to be heroic and worthy of embodying brave, strength, courageous qualities, a protagonist must be white.

I may be straying a little with this next proposition but I think that the alien race in Serious Sam could also be read as the hypothetical Other race which raises a racism discussion. Amidst Sam’s series of puns he calls out to the aliens “I’m over here you stupid headless freaks” which for the audience psychologically creates a process of Othering and discriminating to those who do not look like Sam does. Additionally, the aliens have no kind of language but instead scream in rages like barbaric creatures. Their appearance is horrible and grotesque, wildly untamed in comparison to Sam’s groomed haircut and t-shirt and jeans combo. The way the aliens charge in herds at you but are mindless like sheep perhaps also serves to highlight a racist undertone of the game where this Other race is intellectually and behaviourally not as cultured as the white race. What is even more interesting is that the kamikazes in the game (which are the only alien creatures to mildly resemble the human race) are simply white guys without heads and this seems to render the black population (even in the alien race) as invisible or not worthy enough of helping to try and take over Planet Earth.

In this way, if the game is read so that the alien race are interpreted in a loose parallel to the way that black people wanted to integrate themselves into North America and Sam is the white guy who must defend the white race from being “taken over” by this different Other race, the game in a subtextual way could be quite racist.