A History of Insensitivity

When film critic Roger Ebert challenged the assertion that videogames are art, the rallying cry against him in our corner of the Internet was enormous. Titles as varied as Shadow of the Colossus and Super Mario Bros. were put forward as examples of work by real artisans. But if we want videogames to be considered a true artistic medium, we should accept that games must then be judged by a different, expanded set of standards. No longer is it acceptable to sweep things behind the curtain of "it's only a videogame." And nowhere is this more critical than the current of insensitivity that has moved beneath the surface of this industry from the outrageously shameful days of Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600 to the stereotypical dialog of Cole Train in the popular Gears of Wars series.

Gamers typically equate insensitivity and intolerance in videogames with issues concerning race. This is an understandable instinct since race is where the gaming industry around the world has made its most obvious mistakes. Perhaps no widely known videogame is more despicably racist than Mystique's Custer's Revenge, released in 1983. General Custer's reward for dodging a phalanx of incoming arrows is sexual satisfaction with a bound Native American woman. Yes, it is a rape game made all the more sorrowful by piling race on top of it. Vile from all angles, to be sure. Custer's Revenge was not carried by most retailers but still managed to sell modest numbers in the wake of a predictable (and entirely valid) uproar from women's rights groups and Native American activists.

The reprehensible Custer's Revenge for Atari 2600.

The point of invoking Custer's Revenge is to show that no one territory has a monopoly on insensitivity. Custer's Revenge was created in America, a nation with no fewer than 400 years of history marked with serious chapters -- many on-going -- concerning race. The last fifty years are fortunately filled with examples of great progress, particularly the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But many of our sins and misdeeds were also broadcast around the world, only to be picked up by countries and cultures without our racial and ethnic diversity. Without a doubt, we have a direct responsibility for some of the questionable videogame content that has been produced in other territories, specifically Japan.

Prior to World War II, Japan was almost completely composed of the ethnic Japanese with tiny fractions of Chinese and Koreans. It was largely an insular society with very little direct exposure to people of African heritage or African culture. Guess where a majority of it came from? It was imported from the West -- America and Western Europe to be more precise. After the war, when Allied soldiers occupied Japan, even more Western culture flooded the country and left a lasting impression.

Unfortunately, Western pop culture in the first half of the previous century is full of shameful depictions of African heritage. Cartoons are larded with grotesque caricatures of Africans with exaggerated lips, popping eyes, and dim intellect. White actors donned blackface and indulged horrible stereotypes. Black performers put on minstrel shows. Pickaninnies, golliwogs, and Sambos were toys. All of this was imported, so it should come as no surprise that this is what Africans appeared like in Japanese videogames:

The pickaninny stereotype in Tom Sawyer doomed it from a Western release.

For obvious reasons, Square's Tom Sawyer for the NES never saw the light of day outside Japan. Jim is presented as a culmination of multiple stereotypes. It's ugly to look at now (as it was in 1989), but try to view it in the context of imported culture. This is not to say that Japan is by any means a nation of racists. There have been enormous strides since then with real moves away from garish racial stereotypes. However, residual stereotypes have survived localization censorship or at least efforts to make changes needed for the cultural sensitivities of other territories.

Take Barret Wallace from Final Fantasy VII, for example. The character is given an honorable mission in the game. But just try to read his dialog. Every other character speaks in mostly complete sentences -- the translation is a bit iffy in places. Barret, though, speaks with stilted slang. Whereas other characters say "maybe," Barret spits out "mebbe." In one instance, Barret solemnly advises the team that "Ain't no gettin' offa this train we on..."

While Barret is not even remotely as unfortunate as Jim from Tom Sawyer, he stands out because his dialog is written as if it was run through a broken ebonic translator. This is not a unique situation to Japan, though. Many videogame characters created around the world with African heritage are assigned stereotypical dialog based strictly on the color of their skin.

Why do Barret and Cole Train speak differently from the other characters?

Flash-forward to Augustus Cole, the "Cole Train," from Gears of War. Yes, his back story is a pro-athlete and there is a degree of over-the-top showmanship that comes with that career. But his dialog and antics exist in Gears of War as comic relief. Whereas every other character is appropriately dour about the end of the world, here comes crazy Cole Train shooting his guns in the air, cursing in every sentence. "S--t yeah, baby we got the hook-up! They given us a big-ass dinner!"

Contrast this with Captain Anderson of Mass Effect or Dr. Eli Vance of Half-Life 2. Both characters have African heritage, but neither speak in dialog written specifically for a black character. They are simply characters in a videogame that happen to be black.

Kung Fu Chaos While the majority of the conversation over insensitivity in videogames deals with depictions of characters with African heritage, this mirror can and should be turned on a number of different cultures. Asian characters in many videogames over the last two decades have been presented with various stereotypes. Have you played UK developer Ninja Theory's Kung Fu Chaos for the Xbox? The game vainly attempts to wrap itself in the mantle of satire (specifically poorly-dubbed kung fu action movies), but its caricatures of Asians are downright unpleasant and the purposefully butchered "Engrish" dialog is as subtle as Mickey Rooney's grotesque performance in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

When IGN Xbox editor Ryan Geddes reviewed Destroy All Humans: Path of the Furon in late 2008, he specifically mentioned a Chinese kung fu master that speaks in an over-the-top stilted accent. You have to ask why developer Sandblast even bothered. When you must fall back on jokes at the expense of somebody's ethnicity (the game also presents a stereotypical Italian mob boss -- is there any other kind of non-Mario Italian in videogames?), question whether or not you should be using humor at all.

It doesn't stop at Asians, either. Hispanic characters are also often presented through a myriad of stereotypes. Complaints have been leveled against games like Chili Con Carnage for its shortcuts, despite the game's obvious attempts to be lighthearted in a way that Kung Fu Chaos completely fails to do. The new fighter El Fuerte in Street Fighter IV is obviously based on the successful WWE wrestler Rey Mysterio. We get that he is a Mexican luchador through his appropriate name and costume. Why go the extra step and name his moves ridiculous things like Fajitas Buster, Tostada Press, or Guacamole Leg Throw? Yes, the character's back story includes a love for cooking, but no other fighter in the game has a move set with ethnic-tinged names.

Makoto It is not just race and ethnicity that are treated with a less than sensitive hand in games. Homophobia is a rampant problem when playing online games, but the issue rarely comes up in the games themselves. While there have been plenty of over-the-top representations of homosexuals and cross-dressers in games, such as the leather daddy Ash in the Japanese version of Streets of Rage 3 or the police chief in Go Go Ackman! (who looks pretty much like the Hard Gay television personality in Japan), no series goes as far as the Cho Aniki franchise of shooters in Japan. Starring a pair of overly muscular men wearing little more than thongs and indulging in a number of suggestive poses, the Cho Aniki series has never come to America. There is a degree of silliness to the game -- it does not necessarily come across as mean, but it is at the expense of gay people.

What is more striking is the absence of gay characters in Western videogames. Few games released in America feature openly gay characters and they run the gamut from the lisping lovestruck Makoto of Enchanted Arms to the matter-of-fact Tommy in Indigo Prophecy. While the pantheon of videogame heroes is certainly expanding to include more non-white characters, gay characters have yet to really find purchase.

Religious intolerance, a serious issue in the modern world, is not nearly as prevalent in videogames. Western faiths have served as inspiration for many, many Japanese games such as the Shin Megami Tensei series and use of religious symbols is not uncommon. Nintendo went out of its way in the eighties, though, to strip games of any religious symbols and even went so far as to not publish the game Devil World in America due to its design. (Incidentally, Devil World is the only game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto that has not appeared in America.) While researching for this article, no notable games with anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic characters or messages came up. Only Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed inched up to the realm of blasphemy with its ending, which will not be spoiled here for gamers that have not played the entire adventure. In the same breath, though, that game does a remarkable job recreating the Holy Land without using any cheap stereotypes.

Circling around to the issue of the depiction of African heritage in games coming out of Japan, two titles in recent history have prompted new debate: LocoRoco and Resident Evil 5. When LocoRoco debuted for the PlayStation Portable in 2006, gamer Alejandro Quan-Madrid questioned the game's blindness to sensitivity due to the game's enemies, the Moja. The Moja are small black creatures with large, red-lipped mouths, popping eyes, and dropping dreadlocks-esque hair. It takes serious self-deception to not see the similarities between the Moja and the golliwog caricature.

Did Sony pull the game or make any changes in LocoRoco when it shipped outside of Japan? No, and the Moja even appear in the recently released sequel. But it is interesting to see just how far the ripples of early 20th century iconography have traveled, even if there is no offense remotely intended.

Resident Evil 5 is just the newest chapter in a necessary discussion.

Much more has been made of Resident Evil 5's plot and setting, which places Chris Redfield in a fictional African town where something has turned the locals into crazed monsters. Redfield is white and the majority of his targets are black, although his partner throughout the game, Sheva Alomar, is from Africa. Surely there was no intention by developer Capcom to make any sort of social or racial statement about Africans in Resident Evil 5, but there is no escaping history. African characters behaving like savages and white-on-black violence are loaded images, despite the most benign of intentions. Recently, IGN Xbox editor-in-chief Hilary Goldstein editorialized that Resident Evil 5 is not a racist videogame. He's right -- it's not.

But the loud pushback over questions about its imagery threatens to miss the point -- and an opportunity -- entirely. This is part of the growing process for videogames. If they want to be considered on the same level as film, television, literature, and other forms of artistic expression, then conversations like this must unfold. As widespread and accepted as videogame are now in modern culture, they can be a real force for good in striking down remnants of insensitivity and intolerance around the world. Let's not turn back now.