Jaded Alyx
Member
This guy on the left here.
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What's the most racist thing you've encountered in a video game itself (not real ppl)
- Thread starter Spring-Loaded
- Start date
This guy on the left here.
Funyarinpa
Member
Dude might be the first gay Turk in Western media that's really fucking coolWell his accent is all in at least
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfT71wnnq-s
(On the plus side, he does a very good job being an unremarkable gay character. So maybe the tea fixation was a ruse!)
Edit: "Dev" also means "giant" in Turkish, it isn't a generic nickname
Oh, Westone.
I encountered this when I was six years old on Master System.
This was the first thing that came to mind for me as well.
I do appreciate the context. Now I can wish he would shut up about tea due to his "Turkishness" instead
RE5 wasn't a very enjoyable game to start with, the setting was tactless and I wouldn't have played it if it weren't available for free as a PS+ Member back then on my PS3. But you could say RE4 was racist in a way too, not toward black people but Hispanic ones, it was just a good enough game to get away with it.
No, a non-black person playing a black person does not count as digital blackface. You're seriously undermining the severity blackface by using such a juvenile comparison. There are problems (as noted by other posters) with black characters being portrayed by non-white people, but holy fuck your point is just straight up untenable. I don't think people with specific ethnicities should have exclusive rights to characters with said ethnicity. I mean look at Overwatch and characters like Lucio (who isn't portrayed by a afro-Brazilian person) but the voice is the most perfect fit imaginable. Like it sucks that black people (and other minorities) aren't getting more roles in general, but it's not like the situation isn't dire enough to deserve being compared to blackface.
And yo, "frequently" was a terrible choice of words my part. I guess "it happens more often than you'd expect" is closer to what I was trying to get at.
Seraphina in Disgaea 5, while not discriminating against an IRL race or anything, is basically a slave master. She has loads and loads of Prinny (penguin things) 'servants' who she regularly abuses, constantly makes statements like 'all Prinnies look alike' and 'you're smart for a Prinny', and to top it all off, she pays them in food.
Oh, and she has a date rape superpower too (hypnotising men into loving her/ obeying her to take advantage of them).
Idk, it just makes me really uncomfortable because of the parallels to IRL racism etc. Though this is one of many problems I have with that game.
Oh, and she has a date rape superpower too (hypnotising men into loving her/ obeying her to take advantage of them).
Idk, it just makes me really uncomfortable because of the parallels to IRL racism etc. Though this is one of many problems I have with that game.
Finale Fireworker
Member
I specifically never mentioned racism in my post. I just want to be clear on that. I said it was ridiculous, not racist.
Racial misconceptions and actual racism do go hand in hand, but you're correct in that these misconceptions can be innocuous. This is sometimes the case with positive stereotypes ("Asians are really good at math!"), because people see the results of something another country might prioritize (STEM education) and misinterpret it as a genetic disposition. Other times people just don't realize what they're saying because it is easier to explain something at face value than to dissect the mechanisms that contribute to that appearance.
I didn't call the person I was quoting a racist. I am trying to get them to realize why what they said was problematic. The idea that black people are great at basketball is not an especially damaging belief to hold, but people can believe much more terrible things about other races and cite the same explanation as justification. This is why it is good to combat stereotypes even when they are "harmless." It's easier to have a conversation about race generalization when the belief being held doesn't call for incarceration or deportation or murder.
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
but Capcom ever said that their fictional Spain is 100% the same as the real world Spain? if they can put virus zombies in Spain, why can't they make villagers the way they did?
Bloodporne
Member
I do appreciate the context. Now I can wish he would shut up about tea due to his "Turkishness" instead
To be fair, the time I went to Ankara, Turkish rug salesmen wouldn't shut up about their tea. This is payback.
Jaded Alyx
Member
I fixed it
At that point, why not just make up a Faux-Euro country? We see it in plenty of other games.
It's more of an issue with diversity in voice acting and Hollywood in general etc. but that's another day
What I do find offensive are things like Tiny Teena in Borderlands. Talk about stereotypical voice acting regardless of the character is white
Unfortunately Japanese media in general has had an issue with using dark skin as visual shorthand for "corrupted by an evil power". You can see it in almost any fighting game with alternate "evil" versions of characters.
Chuck Norris
Banned
But Kratos is Mediterranean and looks Mediterranean. Not sure what we are to expect for an Ancient Greek character?
aGuyInaBearSuit
Member
Let's have a chat about Native American characters in like EVERY FIGHTING GAME
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
because they did not want to?
Well obviously
But by sticking to an actual country name, you have to take it on the chin when your portrayal is taken as an attempt to mirror the country, even if that might not be your intent.Temeculan3000
Member
Yeah, I hope my post didn't sound like it was attacking you, as I only meant to agree with you and add to the discussion.
People sometimes don't realize that spreading good stereotypes isn't fine just because they are "good", because the reasoning that allows you to accept those stereotypes is the same that allows people to believe the negative stereotypes.
I was going to say, you may need to draw a line between what's fitting for the game and what is pretty much just audio blackface (like dunkey)
Yeah that whole first island of Crash one is bad taste
Yo WTF
dano1
A Sheep
Jack The Nipper
Banned
The whole game
The new Killer Instinct consulted with a tribe in Washington.
That doesn't mean it is perfect, but that is admirable.
https://venturebeat.com/2015/09/03/...-design-thunder-character-in-killer-instinct/
Hmmm...
IDK.
The obvious case for me would be something about a Japanese game reducing black people to inhuman stereotypes, but my immediate memories of that sort tend towards things I've seen in K drama, like that black GI in Giant who is a seething racist (against Asians) and presented as bestial.
Barret's English dialogue is probably over the line. It comes across as reveling in the "strange talk of black folk." Given that there isn't some sort of minority community Barret, of which Barret is part--the game isn't using African American vernacular English as a real-world stand in for a similarly positioned dialect in their fiction--it can come across as reveling in what it perceives as a racial trait. This would be the sort of racism that assumes black people are other than 'normal' humans and takes enjoyment in rolling around in that presumed otherness: a sort of banal evil as it needn't be underwritten by (but can be or can coincide with) hatred, but does serve to put people in demeaning boxes through demeaning assumptions.
At the same time plenty of Barret's speech patterns are mirrored by other, white, characters, such as Cid: the cussing, the malapropisms brought on by typos, folksiness, etc. I do think, however, that it went further with Barret and they were doing the sort of thing discussed above to some degree, at least when they translated the game (no idea what the Japanese text is like).
And there's the further thing about issues like the ones with Barret: discussions around them can seem to condemn fictional usage of African American vernacular English. That should be avoided. There is nothing 'wrong' with the dialect(s). (Or any dialect--if there were, there'd be something wrong with all language as that is a major force in language evolution) There is nothing, in itself, wrong with having a black character use such language. There is something wrong in assuming black people must speak that way because they are black. There is also something wrong with assuming that people who don't speak 'right' speak as they do because of mental problems (in this case presumed racial mental traits).
The point of the Barret case is not "he's speaking like a stereotype of a black person! racist!" It is an issue with the underlying logic as to why he seems to be speaking that way.
(Although, iirc, it is also a ridiculous, off-point exaggeration, which tends to run against the point I'm making, but doesn't completely thwart it: there are perhaps two problems with Barret--the ridiculousness and the logic behind it all--and neither is just that he has a dialect he speaks in. The other thing is that some of it being ridiculous and off-point could be the translators being bad at what they were trying to accomplish, so I think that is a more complicated issue).
I do think that this isn't all there is to Barret, but I do think it is a problematic aspect of the character.
IDK.
The obvious case for me would be something about a Japanese game reducing black people to inhuman stereotypes, but my immediate memories of that sort tend towards things I've seen in K drama, like that black GI in Giant who is a seething racist (against Asians) and presented as bestial.
Barret's English dialogue is probably over the line. It comes across as reveling in the "strange talk of black folk." Given that there isn't some sort of minority community Barret, of which Barret is part--the game isn't using African American vernacular English as a real-world stand in for a similarly positioned dialect in their fiction--it can come across as reveling in what it perceives as a racial trait. This would be the sort of racism that assumes black people are other than 'normal' humans and takes enjoyment in rolling around in that presumed otherness: a sort of banal evil as it needn't be underwritten by (but can be or can coincide with) hatred, but does serve to put people in demeaning boxes through demeaning assumptions.
At the same time plenty of Barret's speech patterns are mirrored by other, white, characters, such as Cid: the cussing, the malapropisms brought on by typos, folksiness, etc. I do think, however, that it went further with Barret and they were doing the sort of thing discussed above to some degree, at least when they translated the game (no idea what the Japanese text is like).
And there's the further thing about issues like the ones with Barret: discussions around them can seem to condemn fictional usage of African American vernacular English. That should be avoided. There is nothing 'wrong' with the dialect(s). (Or any dialect--if there were, there'd be something wrong with all language as that is a major force in language evolution) There is nothing, in itself, wrong with having a black character use such language. There is something wrong in assuming black people must speak that way because they are black. There is also something wrong with assuming that people who don't speak 'right' speak as they do because of mental problems (in this case presumed racial mental traits).
The point of the Barret case is not "he's speaking like a stereotype of a black person! racist!" It is an issue with the underlying logic as to why he seems to be speaking that way.
(Although, iirc, it is also a ridiculous, off-point exaggeration, which tends to run against the point I'm making, but doesn't completely thwart it: there are perhaps two problems with Barret--the ridiculousness and the logic behind it all--and neither is just that he has a dialect he speaks in. The other thing is that some of it being ridiculous and off-point could be the translators being bad at what they were trying to accomplish, so I think that is a more complicated issue).
I do think that this isn't all there is to Barret, but I do think it is a problematic aspect of the character.
starchild excalibur
Member
Holy shit. I've played through Resi 5 a handful of times and I never realized that they tried to justify the zombies with spears and shields by saying that the virus made them regress to an ancestral form. I never read the extra journals or texts, so I guess I missed it. That's fucking idiotic.
When the depictions of Africans just so happens to be justified in a way that allows the most cartoonish, 1-dimensional portrayals of the people on said continent, then it's racist. It'd be like setting a game in China and showing everyone there eating dogs. You could say "What's the problem? There *are* some people in China that eat dogs," but you'd only be working to justify the creator's desire to show something salacious and stereotypical. You can justify anything through plot. It doesn't absolve the creator.
When the depictions of Africans just so happens to be justified in a way that allows the most cartoonish, 1-dimensional portrayals of the people on said continent, then it's racist. It'd be like setting a game in China and showing everyone there eating dogs. You could say "What's the problem? There *are* some people in China that eat dogs," but you'd only be working to justify the creator's desire to show something salacious and stereotypical. You can justify anything through plot. It doesn't absolve the creator.
PaulBizkit
Member
What's offensive in RE4? That you kill them? Having a character kill enemies from other countries is automatically racist? then every COD game is racist.
Honestly, RE4 is not racist to me. As a spanish-speaking person, I find it pretty funny that these guys shout random stuff in spanish.
TE VOY A ROMPER LA TERRAZA sounds like IMMA BREAK YOUR ROOF
How does one come away with this take
Weltall Zero
Member
Wow, you have all this figured out. You sure showed us!
I could literally not be more Spanish if I tried, and I found RE4 perfectly fine. Hell, it was awesome to see Spain represented in a game (and it was great having them actually speak in Spanish, hilarious "hora de asplastar" gaffes notwithstanding). As long as one remembers that the villagers' aggressive behaviour is caused by the parasites, I don't see an issue. There wasn't anything in RE4 like the tribal zombies in RE5, at least that I can remember.
Wham Bam Rock from Kirby Super Star
Its design is... dated to say the least
The boss got edited in the DS remake, but the SNES Mini game will probably have it like this
I always thought that whole thing was handled a bit weirdly because in Kirby Super Star Ultra Wham Bam Rock is basically the original design but just made out of stone, still with the stereotypical African elements, and the new harder version of that boss, Wham Bam Jewel, looks like this:
I mean, it does look way more like a monster but still the gaudy jewelry (its hands are made of diamonds) theme is a bit strange to say the least.
The Black Baron from Platinum Games Madworld. That's a white guy. I do believe they retconned him to be an actual black man in Anarchy Reigns though.
I don't think it's ever implied that he's white and the only time it's said that he isn't black is by the two commentators in the fight and it's pretty clear that whole bit was meant as a dumb joke rather than an actual reveal or something. Pretty sure Black Baron is actually black in both MadWorld and Anarchy Reigns.
Not KI actually. They got in touch with an actual native american tribe to design an appropriate outfit for Thunder and to design to main look for his brother Eagle.
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
Well obviously
they ever said they were portraying the real country? it's like saying they were portraying real Brazil with Blanka.
Yeah no, I recognize I most definitely fucked up
Got too high on myself after thrashing RE5 and didn't think about the other side of things, as dralla pointed out:
Played by
The first thing that popped to mind when seeing this:
Is played by:
ichtyander
Member
Chief Scalpem from Sunset Riders also comes to mind. "Me ready for pow-wow".
As far as ethnic stereotypes go, holy shit did Soldier of Fortune have sum dumb, dumb shit in it.
Finale Fireworker
Member
No, I understand what you mean. I just used your post as a springboard for what I already intended to clarify. We're on the same page - no worries.
chaobreaker
Member
Street Fighter has a history of poor representation of other groups but all the black characters throughout the series have got it worst.
Balrog being the first playable black Street Fighter character but is nothing but a series of negative black stereotypes. Someone mentions the poor big lipped Bengus illustrations in this thread but he does that for Birdie too. There are a bunch of other problematic illustrations of Balrog throughout the history of the franchise too.
Speaking of Birdie, he's also had the same problems like Balrog but this time he's British.
Elena is from Kenya but uses the Brazilian Capoeira. This costume too.
Seth is the black shoto that uses basketballs in his moveset.
Afro-Brazilian Laura and all her pervy costumes. I'm reaching here but I felt Capcom went out their way to make her the designated sexy female character in the initial Street Fighter V cast.
Amen. Disgusting.
Raven117
Member
She didn't THAT good of South African accent. Wasn't bad, its a tough accent to get right...but it wasnt on point.
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
so you are saying that in their fictional China they can't make everyone eat dogs? they are not making a documentary. they are making a fictional game with fictional plot...
Again, explain? The game was developed with native consultants and has been praised across the board for its portrayal. I've asked this of the other poster as well but no one responded yet.
This one stuck out like a sore thumb when I played the game, and I thought of this portrayal again when the developers falsely equivocated Black Lives Matter with the plight of Augs in their fictional universe.
I think it's a pretty clear weakness of the entire reboot. Deus Ex is at its best when you're searching through emails or reading environmental clues to learn more about the lives lived and the lore, and at its absolute worst when you're having face to face ideological tiffs that have all the subtlety of a bull goring your brains out.
For a game that wants so hard to be the intellectual's action stealth game, these types of mistakes and examples of ignorance really rip you out of the experience.