[Editor's note: With two blockbuster games coming out this year featuring Africa as their playing field, only one has managed to get the racism stamp. In the other, Xper actually finds a way to dig up gender issues. Is there anything this guy won't politicize, and when will he stop talking in third person?]

It has been a known fact for a while, but it was made official when Brian Crecente at Kotaku was told that out of the nine different characters you can choose to play as in Far Cry 2, none of them will be female. There are, in fact, twelve characters, and those other three are the women you won’t be able to embody.

We try to break it down after the jump just why this presents a conundrum in the art of game design, and in the process question the very art we are trying to defend.

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written by Jesper Sellerberg \\ tags: Africa, dilemma, Far Cry 2, Features, Gender, Racism

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.

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written by Jesper Sellerberg \\ tags: child, Content, culture, fact, game, Gender, Grand, Marshall, message, part, process, Racism, Ragnhild Mogren, socialization, society, Stockholm, Theft, Trailer

[Editor's Note: In the first part of our two part interview with Ragnhild Mogren, teacher at Stockholm University, we specifically discuss the Resident Evil 5 trailer, why historical baggage can never be divorced from certain imagery and ask what it means to live in the "global village".]

What do we see when we play videogames? What implications do games have on our society, and do games get a free pass because they’re “just games”?

Riding on the wave that is the Resident Evil 5 debacle about racism and culture understandings about mediums that we consume every day, we spoke to Ragnhild Mogren, teacher at the educational programme Multimedia Education - Technology at Stockholm university, about these issues to figure out why not just gamers, but our entire society, should care about what games are portraying and contributing to our culture.

What does a person with no understanding of the Resident Evil franchise, as a game series, think about this piece of film? When asked about what feelings and emotions that comes up just from the trailer alone, Mogren’s response is quite clear.

- If I should interpret this trailer from a hermeneutic perspective, that my previous understanding and knowledge plays a huge part in what I actually see here, then this piece of film is very racist.

Her arguments echo the words of N’Gai Croal and his MTV Multiplayer blog interview, that there are images in this trailer that are perfectly sound to be concerned about.

- This trailer says to me that the black people here are portrayed as Neanderthals, quite frankly. This white figure, on the other hand, is very good looking in terms of the norms and rules of what a good looking man is supposed to look like in our society, even if it’s completely unrealistic. The trailer shows political power in that it presents a sense of historical colonial suppression.

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written by Jesper Sellerberg \\ tags: Africa, Chris Redfield, Evil, fact, Features, game, Gender, Interview, part, person, perspective, Racism, Ragnhild Mogren, Resident, society, South Africa, Stockholm, teacher, Today, Trailer, university