Reply to Zombie Apartheid

Oh my gosh I totally agree with you... The fact that the example about the white woman being mauled by black zombies as racist is totally taken out of context.

Which is why the trailer had such a reaction in our class that day. Because it is taken waaaaay out of context, all of us only saw it as "RACIST" because we were talking about racism in games so we're more likely to notice it. Because I know that the Resident Evil series is about zombie-bashing, I didn't notice the supposed racism vibe like the "cleansing" thing but I only noticed the fact that these people are infected!!! However, being in that context at the time, I was looking for the racist comments and stuff and of course the idea of "cleansing" popped into my mind as racist.

So yeah, the trailer's kind of taken way out of context in my opinion...

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.

Liberty City is the Truman Show!

Oh yes, where going back to the world of Grand Theft Auto, where would this paper be without it? Any who, when I listened up to the idea of alterbiography I understood it as an individual story made up around the player within a videogame as a coming together of human, AI and environmental interaction. My brain lurked back into an idea of Grand Theft Auto 4 and how a the most random occurrences can happen if you just put the controller down, sat back and watched the game… Really, try it. A chain of events can just unleash chaos on the quitest of streets as the game AI clumsily goes about its day. I’ve witnessed road rage that turns into a shoot out, ambulances running over pedestrians, cop cars being stolen, helicopters falling out of the sky, even a stray hot dog cart blowing up an intersection. Now you have to wonder to yourself, is the game always this crazy when I’m not around?.. Well no, as unlike Kevins example where he saw wolves being ‘wolfy’ in the distance, GTA’s population just fades away. I think of it like the Truman show, everyone merely performs their ‘scene’ when your around and when your not looking, they no longer have a use and so the great ‘director’ has them disappear… This always gave a break away from the Immersion of the game, as if you looked to far through say a sniper rifle, you’d notice empty streets before the ‘director’ see’s your look, and throws in his cast. A similar thing happens with speed, if you go to fast Mr Director can’t keep up and once more the road becomes empty. The game is really playing a little bit of a lie, as although the essential ‘world/city’ is big, there’s only really a few blocks active at one particular time. Why did you fool me so…

To find out why I can’t play a video game?(3)

These days, because of learning this paper I recall the fate that I experience with video games from child to adult. So I want to simply summarize it in this post. Firstly, I need to state that I do not like playing video games very much, the amount of the video games I engaged are probably less than ten. Then I am going to talk about the video game experience I have and analyze the reasons for this particular experience.

Although the development of video games in China is a little slower than Western countries, in Beijing’s shopping mall it is very easy to find the video game section when I was a child. However the memories of these are lacked in my head. If I look back from today I find some possible reasons for this situation. First of all, no one in my family play video games and I was influenced by family environment very much. Secondly, the price of video games is not very cheap at that time, and the economic condition of my family is not very good, so my parents were unable to buy me any games to play. Thirdly, because I am a girl and in people’s notion that girls should play dolls or soft toys, so parents did not want me to play video games which are about killing and shooting. Therefore my impression of video games is killing and shooting as well. Until today, this paper helps me to find out that some games in fact have incredible high artistic quality. Killing, shooting and playing are definitely not the key point in these games. In general, my parents did not worry about the negative effect of video games in my childhood.

Later, about ten years ago, computer started to be popularized in China. In my fourth year at primary school, my school offered computer science class. In class we learned how to operate a computer so the games I first met are Mine Sweeper and Card games which are self-contained in Windows 2000 system. Due to the Windows provided the introduction and guide of these two games so I found that playing them was easy and fun. But maybe in gamers’ eyes these two simple PC console game cannot count into real video games. I remember that I played Mine Sweeper and Card only in the computer class. And about the PSP that was popular at school in that period, I only saw someone play it, but I did not play it. Actually I never touch any handheld game console until now. Maybe because I do not have any interests on video games, I do not even have the curiosity to borrow and try it.

Two years later, I started middle school. Until then my father bought me a laptop. Of course, it should be used for study not for play games. At that time I was indulge in reading online novels. These online original novels wrote the story about how the heroine travels through time from modern to ancient. She often went back to the ancient dynasty and fell in love with prince in royal family. Because the popularity of this kind of novel, game developer seized the opportunity to quickly develop the online games which are based on the traversing novels. At that time I did not know the details of game information such as game type, game platform and game developer; I even cannot remember anything about the game now. The only thing I remember is that the exciting feeling I had when I saw the game. This is because I cannot travel through the time in real life and the word-narrative stories are not that vivid and lifelike, I decided to play the game resolutely and determinedly. I registered an account and chose a heroine, and then I started the game. My main purpose of playing the game is to falling love with the prince but I despairing found that the prince is only a computer designed and controlled cartoon character. He can only say certain words and do certain actions. And I have to running through the whole Forbidden City to do various tasks, in exchange of the opportunity to talk to them. These tasks are nothing but use the keyboard to deliver the avatar to some places and then click mouse a few times. I felt so bored about the completion of these tasks.

The reasons I cannot play the game smoothly are summarized below. First of all, I cannot read map in the game. I often lost in such a big Forbidden City. But in reality I can read map very well, even the electric edition Google Earth. Secondly, these tasks are not really doing actions, they are only clicking mouse and typing keyboard. These simple actions cannot bring me satisfaction and pleasures. My home is in Beijing, so I can really go to the Forbidden City and hang out there for a while. The latter will bring much more fun than the virtual Forbidden City to me. Thirdly maybe because I don’t have any game “cell”, most times I cannot find the way to play the games if it does not provide some introduction or guide. I often stuck on a scene and cannot figure out how I should do to complete the tasks. Later someone told me that to let the players explore how to play is also one of the purposes of the game developers. And this process is exactly the fun part of playing game. Unfortunately, I cannot enjoy the fun. In my mind, playing is the most important and funniest part in a game, not to figure out how to play. Thirdly, I found that you need to pay money almost for doing everything in the game. For example I have to buy beautiful clothes so that I can earn a chance to date the prince. If you do not want to spend any money then you always stay in a low level or have to bear many constraints, such as you cannot do a particular activity because you do not meet the level requirement. But I really do not want to spend money on virtual world because I feel that my money does not exchange any substantial things back. So I gave up this game very soon and go back to read those novels again.

After that I tried to play other two video games, but they were failed as well for the same reasons above. And the worst is I could not even hang on for 3 hours in those games.

Last year I met a classmate who was crazy at playing games. So I asked her to teach me how to play. She told me to search some walkthroughs and to play follow them. Thus I got up the courage to start a new game march. However I felt terrifying when I face to the extreme long walkthrough. I did not think I can remember so many settings, functions and steps those are necessary to getting pass in the game. Moreover, almost all the game guides I searched in Google did not mention some of the problems I met in the game, may be because I am really stupid when played games. I gave up game again in the frustration of killed by a little monster five times but still could not find a solution.

In conclusion, it is very hard for me to entre the virtual world. Sometimes I even think the virtual world is not meaningful because it does not exist substantially. Furthermore, playing becomes a painful process sometimes when I do not know how to play. These are the reasons I cannot play a video game.

JIWEI LI

Procedural Rhetoric

Hi Rod here,

I wanted to talk about procedural rhetoric in games. My first thoughts were fears of the old records and tapes with recorded messages hidden in the text and could only be found when played backwards. But I guess as most of those fears were untrue, so will any fear be of video game messages I am sure. Just like a story, the narrative of any game is a version of that story. Even given the free parameters to roam around and make your own decisions inside the game framework, you are in fact telling the story of the developers, albeit your own version. How one gets through each stage of a game may come down to personal choices, but you are still ultimately (with obvious exceptions) getting from point A to point B in most games. So you get the Alterbiography as explained in class today. You could have some variant of a story in a book by reading chapters in a different order, or skipping and/or mixing parts of a movie on a DVD to suit yourself-(I particularly liked the Pulp Fiction example) But games alone have the ability for the player to have control on the "how" one gets to (or sometimes does not get to, the player could be killed off!) the final destination. I had not thought of games in this way before.

The other area I wanted to touch on was the "Pleasure of recognition" that Mark brought up in the tutorial yesterday. I never had a term for this until then. Isn't it amazing how just throwing the odd little quirky item at people in either a game or other can change the way one feels about a game or film, it could even be as simple as a few words or some sort of object. For want of a better example "Far-out" gives reference to the flower-power in the sixties. (Not that I was around then but anyway).

Feel free to comment if I am on the wrong track. But interesting anyway.

See you in class...

Zombie Apartheid

Well wasn’t last Friday an intense class! I wasn’t so convinced that Resident Evil 5 was as racist as some might have felt. So I decided to get out the game in order to make an informed decision. Here are my findings….

The main character in the game is Chris Redfield. He is a white American male, late 20’s and cut like a bull. You might remember him from previous game. Within the first few cut scene he establishes himself as someone who is sensitive to the fact that on a global scale, Americans have a bad rap. This generates the vibe of “Yay he’s not on of those confederate-dick Americans.” Throughout the game Chris works along side a female African character, Sheva. The poster girl for the right of blacks and woman, get out of town. 

Look it's the United Nations

In the spirit of Half-life 2 Chris and Sheva have and egalitarian relationship like Gordon Freeman and Alyx whereby they save and assist each other equally. In this way the game is not so much about a white guy killing a whole bunch of them Negros but rather two heroes, representative of both white and black people, fighting a common enemy… Mother-fucking Zombies.

Now I have quite a lot of respect for the zombies in the game. Aside from be the aggressor these zombies hardly have a negative characterization, like being portrayed as a bunch of lazy porch monkeys or hood rats. The zombies are strong, intelligent, fight quite systematically and most important of all and most importantly THEY ARE NOT ALL BLACK! There Arabic zombies looking and even white zombies. Bet you didn’t think Redfield would pop off his own kind!

Is that Eminem?

In class it was mentioned that there is a cut scene in which some “black” Zombies attack a poor innocent white women. Boy do I have news for you! It just so happen that white woman is a zombie who has a razor sharp tentacle head and you have just stumbled into her trap. I don’t know how you interpret this but I believe this is enough evidence to accept that the game seek to single ethnicity by establishing them as the enemy. Also a point in class I raised was that the game is set in Africa, so the fact there are black people walking about getting infected with the T-virus seem quite reasonable.

My final point relates to the theories we have been exploring in the lecture. Many of us have probably come to accept that violent videogame do not make people violent. We have become aware of terms such as hypermediacy, which acknowledge that we have the capacity to acknowledge something as part of a media construction. Or the concept the Magic Circle in which whatever we do with in the game-space is only happening within the game-space.  I’m mean the kiddies didn’t strike the Bodo doll hoping to make it cry (Psychology inside joke, wiki Bodo Doll Experiment).

This is Immediacy

First of all these are not real humans, or real black people, they are fiction computer generated image. Second, incase we should forget this there are moments of hypermediacy within the game, like when a this human-like character head open up into something that looks like a Venus Fly Trap, to remind us that we are playing a game and these are not real people. Third, most of the gaming community doesn’t play these games to have a good lynch, do they?

This is Hypermediacy

Anyway, this is just my experience and opinions on the game. I have come to the conclusion that the game doesn’t come across as racist. I’d highly recommend renting it out A) because it’s an awesome game and B) because maybe you might want to come to your own conclusion about Resident Evil 5.