Blackness and video games
by guest contributor Pat Miller, originally published at Token Minorities
So one of the latest stories to trickle through the video game news grapevine is about a student-run magazine at the Art Institute of California at San Francisco. Word has it an African American student named Simone Mitchell published an essay named “Homicide” in the student magazine, “Mute/Off”, about constructions of blackness in video games. From the Los Angeles Times:
Simone Mitchell enrolled in the Art Institute of California at San Francisco hoping to catch attention with his visual art, but it was his writing, contained in an essay about racial stereotypes in video games, that catapulted a small in-class short story to the front lines of debate on the timeless “what is art?” question.
Mitchell wrote the 10-page spread for Mute/Off, a small magazine produced as part of a cultural studies class. The school pulled the magazine from circulation Dec. 6, hours after it was distributed, saying it hadn’t been approved by the administration.
Soon after the cultural studies teacher, Robert Ovetz, protested the administration’s actions, he was told not to come back for the next semester. Students and Ovetz say it was the latest in a pattern of recent censorship tactics, an allegation the school declines to discuss.
Mitchell’s essay, titled “Homicide,” centers on three African American males who address each other in vulgar street slang and go on a rape and killing spree. At the story’s end, it’s revealed that they are characters in a video game played by three white suburban boys.
I should probably note here that the rest of the article reveals it’s unclear exactly what caused the school administrators to pull the magazine; another piece were highly critical of Goldman-Sachs, the school’s owner. But in light of other racist college newspaper issues, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mute/Off was pulled because of Mitchell’s essay. Apparently, the administration has since announced that the magazine will be released (hopefully, with everything intact), so we can look forward to reading exactly what it was that got the Institute’s administration so worked up.
Frankly, I’m appalled that a student essay about white boys role-playing as streetwise black gangstas got Mute/Off pulled off the shelves. It’s as if it was somehow Breaking News that the image of the South Central L.A. brown gangster has been glamorized and repackaged by (mostly white men) to sell to the youth who can afford PS2s and iPods - that is, mostly white boys. They’re playing out the modern-day blackface Godfather fantasies.
Perhaps the part that interests me most about this conversation, however, is the role that the games industry - which is, again, mostly white males - have in creating and recreating images of blackness, not just in fiction (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas) but also in ’semi-fiction’ (50 Cent: Bulletproof). Fortunately, others out there have started to unpack these questions a little bit. So!
Recommended reading:
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Jay wrote:
Pat, you’re going in my bookmarks right away.
The less than 10% in Asian/black game developers may be even more bleak if you consider the people who lead the projects.
(Also, not sure if this is just in the U.S. or includes international development, but if it is international, a significant portion of the “Asian developers” would be then Japanese nationals (and a tiny portion Korean nationals), which have different racial views.)
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 11:01 am ¶
kim wrote:
Jay,
what racial views would those be?
Carmen,
somehow, this article is begging me to re-examine all the young college “cross-cultural-dressing” parties that have gone on recently,and the expressions of role playing therein.
If this is the widespread, published and purchased, atmosphere that animates most of the young peoples’ lives and exposure to ‘otherness,’ how are they to pull themselves back from their more demeaning and hurtful in-the-flesh indulgences and expressions? When are they to make sense of when to draw the line?
I must say, I know nothing of PS2s, video games, or anything nearing that form of entertainment/play, and so know of publicized outrage or boycotting of this medium either.
I frown at the act of censorship, and censure, and would like to know more of the story.
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 11:43 am ¶
Gandalf Mantooth wrote:
It should have been pulled. Not for content, but for using one of the corniest literary devices since the third season of the original Twilight Zone.
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 12:35 pm ¶
kim wrote:
Gandalf:
Man, are you talking about the talking pig-faced people? ‘Cause I LOVED that one.
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 12:45 pm ¶
kim wrote:
Oh!
You’re talking about the one where the little boy is playing with a train set/people set and the world therein, kind of like the kids today set up the Thomas the Train Engine on the nice, raised wooden table, aintcha?
Yeah, I was sickened by the weak story aspect of that one, even as a child.
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 12:48 pm ¶
Jay wrote:
Kim: mostly with other Asians with the examples I can think of - unfortunately, they get some of their ideas from American pop culture too.
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 3:02 pm ¶
kim wrote:
So, you’re saying the focus, whether fair or not, balanced or not, as comes from, say, a Japanese-based artist in this field is going to focus on the ‘otherness’ of Asians from a different culture, versus the overwhelming empasis on the Black/White.
Did I get that? Your response was so terse.
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 3:51 pm ¶
Tim wrote:
Kim:
There are two major video game industries (in terms of software); the U.S. game industry and the Japanese game industry. (I’m gonna lump European developers in with the U.S. industry because their target audience is usually the U.S.) When Jay noted about the bleakness of less than %10 of Blacks or Asians in the industry, he was talking about the U.S. industry. Jay brings up Japanese developers because a lot of video games in the U.S. came from the Japanese industry. It’s a good point to make, because when looking at racism in a video game, you have do check who the developers are to see where is this racism coming from.
I can’t recall any overt-racism in any Japanese games I’ve seen. There was a really bad case of racism in one old “Tom Sawyer” game made in Japan (that never made it out here to the U.S.). That game depicted the slave character Jim in a way that matched old Southern anti-black propaganda as you can see in the bottom of these articles:
http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=7221859&publicUserId=5379721
http://www.encyclopedia-obscura.com/gentrans.html
The U.S. game industry has been criticized for having racism and sexism for quite some time now. Here is a not-too-old article about another student paper criticizing the game industry about racist Asian stereotypes:
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6154591.html?part=rss&tag=gs_news&subj=6154591
Here is another news article on the original subject, it also contains video from the TV news segment with interviews with the student and the fired teacher:
http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=education&id=4900486
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 6:09 pm ¶
Robert Ovetz, PhD wrote:
Hi
Thank you so much for covering this story. I was the faculty member fired for protesting the publishing of the magazine with Simone’s great article in it. Oddly enough, this is the only story I have read that focused on the race issue in the censorship of Simone’s critique. Unfortunately, it has really been buried which is unfortunate.
One other thing to note is that since this happened we have uncovered a number of other cases of censorship including the censorship of a sculpture by an african-american student. The powerful sculpture was of an african-american man rising up and breaking out of his chains of slavery! Ironically, the Art Institute of CA-San Francisco recuits many students of color. These stories need to get out.
If you would like to read the magazine you can find a low resolution version of Mute/ Off at:
http://www.brandedmonkey.com/muteOffLowRes.pdf
in jubilee,
Robert
–
Robert Ovetz, PhD
PO Box 645
Sausalito, CA 94966
USA
Posted 13 Feb 2007 at 11:24 pm ¶
Gandalf Mantooth wrote:
Actually, I’m talking about, oh, a third of the episodes. There’s always the reveal to find . . . WE ARE NOT IN THE WORLD WE THINK WE ARE.
The topic of race and gaming comes up now and again. I think it’s most interesting and relevant to society in terms of the online role playing games, since “real” race is supposed to be irrelevant in games because you can be whatever you want. However, there’s often bleed through to real life, and it is interesting to see how people negotiate the mine fields that creates. I’ve never had the time to get involved in those games.
The role of African American characters in games (and manga and animation) from Japan has been discussed among Black folk with some interest in Japan and/or gaming. There was the controversy over Final Fantasy VII, which contained a major character with a Mr T mohawk. The translators gave his speech a kind of strange, “street” dialect. I’m guessing that the original had the character speaking in Osaka dialect, though I’m not sure. The result of that controversy seemed to be the game’s producer avoiding including easily identifiable African American characters from any future games.
Posted 14 Feb 2007 at 1:14 am ¶
Gandalf Mantooth wrote:
Oh, also, Rockstar made a game, Manhunter(?) that was sort of a test for GTA: San Andreas. AFAIK it is one of the few games to feature an mixed race character whose race is made explicit reference to in the game (I think the number of half Asian/half White main characters in games are substantial). Clearly, the physical model for the character was Vin Disel.
Posted 14 Feb 2007 at 1:19 am ¶
kim wrote:
Tim, Mantooth, Ovetz:
thanks!
There are many aspects to this article, the topic, and the genre of gaming that I think I will explore in more detail (though I am strictly a pen-and-paper gal, save my time here at Racialicious).
Tim: Thanks for the links. I am actually extremely interested in how subtitles are both “diagramed” and transliterated, and loved the humorous, catch-as-catch-can tone in the encyclopedia link above.
Gandalf: what do you know about science fiction (on the page, but in films is fine, if you feel like talking) and how race is dealt with therein?
Posted 14 Feb 2007 at 2:06 pm ¶
Jay wrote:
Tim,
Thanks for explaining in detail what I meant. However, there were quite a few blackface characters in Japanese media (especially old media) like Popo from Dragonball and Jynx from Pokemon.
Much of this is derived from their perceptions of American pop culture; this is not to absolve their own responsibilities (they do have their own race hangups, but it’s more nationalistic.) - but this is a testament to how powerful popular culture can be.
Matt Thorn also wrote about Japanese perceptions and the way Americans view these perceptions. This is a response to people who think anime/manga characters always looked “white” (or devoid of racial markers). That speaks more to the normativity of whiteness in America than it does anything about the Japanese.
It’s at http://web.archive.org/web/20060517194357sh_re_/www.matt-thorn.com/mangagaku/faceoftheother.html.
Posted 14 Feb 2007 at 3:21 pm ¶
Gandalf Mantooth wrote:
Kim,
That’s a really broad topic, something I’ve been thinking of covering within a larger piece on portrayals of the Black middle class in film. Sci-Fi, “soft” sci-fi, likes to deal with race in symbols. So you often see things like robots becoming the object of discrimination. Many hard sci-fi authors from the sixties included Black characters and made predictions about how race would become irrelevant (in the 90’s!!). Heinlen and Clarke are a couple of examples. Black authors like LeGuin regularly included characters of African descent.
Film is a slightly different animal because of it’s collaborative nature, casting directors, the director, the writer all have a hand in what ends up on the screen in terms of character. Like a lot of the older sci-fi in print, many films try to reflect a society where the kind of racial issues we view have been dealt with satisfactorally, however racism and discrimination are addressed through metaphor.
The dystopian films like BLADE RUNNER and Cameron’s STRANGE DAYS have tried to address race straight up.
Posted 15 Feb 2007 at 2:04 pm ¶