Why We Should Care - ‘Racism and Sexism in Games’, Pt 2 of 2

Link To Part 1!

[Editor's note: in the second part of our two part interview with Ragnhild Mogren, teacher at Stockholm university, we discuss why the message games send out are important to our culture, and touch on racism and gender issues with Resident Evil 5 and Grand Theft Auto IV as backdrops]

The medium is the message

The famous quote from late media analyst Marshall McLuhan is being uttered when the argument that the trailer is clearly playing off of horror concepts come up. The trailer is obviously, for a lack of a better term, cool. It is professionally edited and effective at provoking a horror sensation throughout the film. But why do we so seldom in the videogame culture stop to think about why a certain aspect of something is cool? It’s just cool and that’s good enough, it seems. Games are being excused because they are “just games.”

The way the message is being transported is the interesting thing, not the message itself, according to McLuhan’s theories. We live in the “global village”, and the technology has to be viewed as an artifact, a cultural artifact.

- Both when we choose a message and when we send out this message, can we ever assume that this message is going to be received as we intended it to. But, we can assume that we somewhat share the same understanding of cultural codes within said culture. “I am formed by the culture and I am forming the culture”.

We will never be able to mediate a message without it having a cultural significance or connection, and in turn we interpret that from our own cultural baggage. No matter how “fair” you depict a fighting scene between a white and a black person, we will always apply constellations that he is black.

The gaming culture has been a small subgenre in the past, and because of that, according to Mogren, such issues that dealt with gender or ethnicity never “needed” to be lifted to a higher cultural standpoint, because they were, in fact, “just games”. The notion that we don’t need to explain anything or take responsibility because we’re all in the same boat and understand each other is now getting erased. Times have changed, and now every grandmother is aware that her grandchild is playing this computer game called World of Warcraft. Games are forming the culture we all are participating in on a daily basis in this century.

Games mean different things for people in different ages, and in order to develop our understanding of our reality we must bring our understandings of the cultural terms we use today with us. But how dangerous can it be if you’re never aware of the historical content behind an image?

- I get connotations to slavery from this trailer, but a ten year old child doesn’t have the same connotations I have, obviously. If a child is left alone a lot and doesn’t have an adult to reflect with over the message that is being mediated, it is potentially dangerous to expose this child to large amounts medial content.

Numbness is a term often used in this context. You get exposed to these images and don’t get upset and then you’re being put out in a society where you’re supposed to get upset; that is problematic. An emotional disruption probably needs to occur at an early age for a child to start taking in the actions seen on screen and letting them affect their social interaction. The moral development of a “normal” child could potentially be damaged by witnessing and consuming large amounts of medial content, and that presents a problem in the society later on.

The danger with an early emotional disruption in a child has to do with socialization processes, according to Mogren. The primary socialization process (in the early childhood) is laying the groundwork for the norms in our society, in fact. We will then bring this baggage from the primary process with us through new environments and socialization processes to make sure these processes don’t get disrupted in any way. It is quite simple; disrupt the first primary process and it affects the following.

- In that sense, we can have problems with the socialization process we have in a game, for example. Media plays a very large part of children’s primary socialization process today, and the early socialization we experience helps us in future socialization process. If we don’t have the means to handle these impressions it can be extremely problematic.

Gendering censorship

Another game that has people questioning its position on the shelf right in front of young children is Grand Theft Auto 4, and when asked about what makes GTA so controversial, Mogren was more than keen to answer.

- When it comes to gender issues as strong as this, there is where I draw my line. Just the fact that you can pick up prostitutes, beat them up and throw them out in the bush is very, very problematic. Even if it is a very small part of the game and not even a part of you don’t want it to be, it does raise serious concerns. Reports on rapes are rising because I believe it does happen more these days. I think it has a lot to do with the more scenes you see about this at an early age in movies, not just movies but videos on the Internet and YouTube, and even in games, the more unattached and numbed you become.

Female protagonists are hard to find in action games like GTA, even though we have Metroid Prime, Portal, Heavenly Sword and Perfect Dark to name a few who feature a female protagonist, you can still count them on your hands. Start naming games that feature male, beefed up space marines and you suddenly need more than two hands and a pair of feet to get them all down.

But the biggest problem, according to Mogren, is the constant objectification of women in the media. The woman is more than often referred to as an object that is there to give weight to the strong and brave male lead character. However, when it comes to GTA, the problem goes even deeper than objectification.

- Here it’s not just objectification of women, but in a very transparent and honest way a depiction of women as something you can do whatever you want with. The more of these depictions we see the more it becomes legitimatized.

We talked about how the world has become less discriminating, and with that we have opened up our eyes to these issues. That is why art and media have a responsibility when it comes to gender issues, to not depict women as a stereotype of someone who is just there to get “boned”, pardon the expression.

Stereotypes be damned. While fun to mock, too much toward either end of the spectrum is actually more than a caricature there to make you, the grown up responsible adult, laugh at. While women in movies and games are often objectified, the male counterpart is equally extreme toward the other end of the spectrum. They help play off each other to increase their inherent attributes. The muscular arms of our male space marine protagonist are perceived as even more muscular next to the skinny arms of our skimpy object for a woman in need.

- The male is the active one, the strong, the wise; the one with power, the woman is inferior. If you have a lot of these depictions then it will become a part of a lot of young people’s socialization process. There is a social danger here. You have to apply self-censorship.

Is censorship the way to go? Are we coming to a point where artistic integrity is being questioned just because you have to think about that kid who might have been raised by the television? Even if we push it so far off the edge that we do it tongue-in-cheek, do we have to constantly balance it? Should we create a list of things “to think about” when producing medial content?

We can’t expect everyone to receive our intended message, but we can make people think about why these things are being shown. Games and movies are about letting people get into a world where the rules don’t apply anymore. It is fun to shoot an innocent bystander in GTA because you’re not supposed to, it is wrong. It doesn’t go any deeper than that. It is fun because we constantly want to break the rules of life.

Isn’t art about evoking an emotion and making people feel and/or think? If we apply censorship, we hinder our evolvement as a society. But if we allow everyone to see everything without repercussions, our culture will suffer in the end. It is, like Mogren says, a balance act.

- I am not for censorship, I am a proponent of self-censorship, but it is a constant balance act. Sometimes you have to let moral issues get the upper hand. You can’t show just about anything without a moral consciousness or respect. An open debate is more important than censorship, and to keep inappropriate content away from young people.

More From Kezins

• May 8, 2008 -- Why We Should Care - ‘Racism and Sexism in Games’, Pt. 1 of 2
• June 29, 2008 -- We’ve All Heard it, The Wilhelm Scream: Video Games [UPDATED]
• June 10, 2008 -- Poll: Will ‘Saints Row 2′ Be Better Than GTA IV?
• August 28, 2008 -- PlayStation Store Update, August 28th Edition
• August 21, 2008 -- Looks Like ‘GTA IV’ is HUGELY Popular