Race and Sexuality in Games

Before analyzing the case studies suggested by the group in charge this week, I can’t resist commenting on the ‘Resident Evil 5 Trailer’ case. It resonates with the ideology text by Hall and his notion of encoding/decoding and it is also interesting to show the dangers of designing for masses. 

In one hand, I believe game designers, specially from big studios have a special responsibility towards their players and should, therefore, be specially sensitive not only to what would be interesting or fun for them, but also to what would be considered harmful. Following this line of thought, I would say that designers have the obligation to consider themes like racism and homophobia and the possibility of their work being interpreted as racist or homophobe. 

On the other hand, every design can be interpreted in many different  ways, and those are sometimes unpredictable. The messages designers believe to be encoded in their works/games aren’t necessarily the ones people/players will decode. However, both encoding and decoding have an ideological context that influences both processes.

I believe my own judgement and reading of the video in strongly influenced by the colonialist values transmitted to me via education and culture. Coming from Portugal, I’ve been educated to look at the colonialist era as “the golden age of Portugal”, and not owning a big empire is a national matter of shame. A lot of the books we read in school were either written back in the 1500’s or more recently, about those times, when Portugal was “a great country”. This built a big tolerance to images of white supremacy, or even ‘white normality’ and that’s probably why I can’t read racism in Resident Evil 5’s trailer. But I’m guessing, I know my judgement is made in the light of the ideology I was raised in, but, since ideologies are made natural, it’s hard to say which judgements are a result of my own critical thinking or of that ideology. 

And this is also an important dilemma to have in mind when looking at these issues of race and sexuality in video games. Sometimes those messages aren’t intentionally encoded in the text of the video game, but they end up being interpreted like that. On the other hand, it seems to be a ‘fact’ that video games tend to have the white heterosexual male and the preferred player, and so, they tend to adapt to what they believe are this preferred player’s natural choices. The Dragon Age 2 example shows how homosexual behaviors are introduced in video games as identical to heterosexual ones. The game was designed for one kind of behavior, and then the characters involved in the sex scenes just changed. Probably for technological reasons, man and woman have identical physical structures so both heterosexual and homosexual scenes can work on top of the same algorithm. I don’t know if we should see this example as homophobic or just as an example of resource economy. It seems that the designers thought about this feature late in the developing process, so everything had to be rushed. And this same reason would explain the lightning of the black character example, in Mass Effect. 

There’s something I find specifically interesting about the lightning example in Mass Effect. We discussed this example in class as a reflection of a certain degree of homophobia in games. To me, though, this could be read just as a normal bug and not a sign of disrespect towards the black community. This shows, again, the encoding/decoding problem I talked about earlier. The conflict between encoded and decoded messages problematizes the discussions about gender, race and sexuality in videogames, since they rely in individual interpretation.