Ching Chong Beautiful Exposes Racism in Video Game Design

Are you really this insensitive?

Just to clarify, this is equivalent to naming your Southern themed Flash game “N***er Lovely”.

Making me even more angry, this story was the FIRST thing I read on Christmas morning. Thanks, Escapist, for filling my holiday with racism.

The response? “Cool down, man.”

SaintWaldo keeps fighting:

HK_01:

Cool down, man.

No. I won’t “cool down”, mainly because I’M not the uncool one.

It’s a racial slur, it offends me, and I’m going to say so. Calmly. I’m also offended that you seem to read any disagreement as “not cool”. I’m rational and presenting coherent arguments that this is a racist title and should not be on the front page of an international magazine on a major holiday. What isn’t cool is being told to not voice your objections to racism. So, concern taken for what it is, but, please, don’t tell me how I should be expressing my genuine disagreement with promoting this title. I don’t tell you anything of the sort.

Other readers chime in as well:

spiral helix:

Thank you Waldo. Big props to you for standing up and pointing out how racist the title of this game is. It is offensive and your reaction is definitely justified. I’m pretty disappointed that Escapist would be so desperate for material over holiday period that they would even stoop to promoting a game with such a title. I usually come to escapist just to watch zero punctuation but the completely inappropriate title of the article made click on it. Thank you escapist for reminding me why i never read the articles here.

BonsaiK:

As someone who is part-Chinese I do find this game as not a very prudent choice for The Escapist to highlight. I’d definitely stop short of saying “I’m offended” (racial epithets make up easily over half of my CD collection after all) but I wonder if it’s the best choice especially given how many young people visit this site. “Ching-Chong” is a reference to Chinese people, but the game is parodying a type of TV show that is Japanese and actually has nothing to do with China. I guess to the American who made this game, that’s not an important distinction for him, because in his eyes Asians are obviously all the same. I interpret this as being very racist, even if he didn’t have any actual racist intent in making the game. It’s a shame that he had to taint his game with a stupid and unfunny name like this because I actually don’t mind the gameplay concept and some of the other humour in the game is reasonably clever.

I realise that The Escapist and a lot of gamers in general are obsessed with Japanese culture (although I can’t work out why, it seems very random to me) so I guess something that both references Japenese culture and is a computer game was irresistible to them as it helps them to magnify this (artificial) link. The fact that the article writer was willing to gloss over a little bit of inconvenient racism, because the article subject matter was just that tempting, makes the Escapist look amateurish. I think that The Escapist can find better things to write articles about than what some racist kid did on Newgrounds.

At this point, the author of the post steps in – and completely sidesteps the racism, merely noting that the game is popular and that is why it was recommended. Fail.

And the usual excuses are trotted out. Other gamers say things like “it’s not that offensive” or ching chong isn’t a slur, it’s a “percieved [sic] view of the sound of the language,” and “As for the racism, I think we should give a pass to any words that have not been used seriously in over fourty years.”

One person helpfully adds: “Having said all that, it’s entirely your right to be offended if you’re oriental, however if not, I think it might be an overreaction.”

Sigh.

So aside from the usual amount of racism, CCB strikes me as a wonderful example of reinforcing stereotypes when you are trying to mock them. This actually happens fairly often in media. The last time I tackled it in the gaming sphere was when I talked about Chris Mottes, CEO of Deadline Games, and his defense of racism in his title Chili Con Carnage:

Employing Mexican-American voice actors? Great job! Promoting underground Mexican bands? Even better. I was so impressed by Mottes’ initiative, I was completely blindsided by his next statement.

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