The recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has put race in America at center stage. But what effect does race have on video games? Willie Jefferson, writer for The Houston Chronicle, recently lambasted the video games industry and said he was disturbed by “racist undertones cropping up in games.” He cited Left 4 Dead 2 as a prime example of racism because many of the zombies are African-American. Jefferson claims that the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer evoked images of Hurricane Katrina. Jefferson also disapproves of Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood because it features a Confederate officer as a main character. Many writers who have treated this issue have claimed that basically this is a bunch of b.s. and that Jefferson is crying wolf. I am inclined to agree with them.
But my dismissal of Jefferson does not mean that I believe that race is being treated perfectly within the industry. That would just be an ignorant assumption. Dmitri Williams, social psychologist and assistant professor at the Anneberg School for Communication at USC, recently conducted a study on the race of video game characters. It looked at the top 150 games in a year, across nine platforms. It did not look at first-person game characters that the gamer never sees, and it did not look at game characters that are non-human. The results were weighted according to game sales. This weighing is an essentially innovative move because it shows the results in proportion to what games are actually being played.
The results of the study were not too shocking: an overrepresentation of white men and underrepresentation of women, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly. These results also determine that the video game industry has done worse with racial representation than American television.
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Women were also slighted. Only 10% of playable video game characters were female (and I could say a lot here about the very sexist representation of those characters). This is very bizarre as now women make up 40% of gamers.
African-Americans were the only group that appeared in games in proportion to how they appear outside the virtual world. However, almost all of these characters were characters who reinforce stereotypes: athletes or thugs.
It disturbs me that there was such an uproar over the Gates incident, yet all of the vile attacks toward woman, whether emotional or physical goes pretty much unchecked.
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Hillarysworld -> Women's Issues -> New study explores racism, sexism, and ageism in video games (Examiner 7/29/09)
