next »

[starsrift]

Lichtspeer is a simple physics game by Lichthund, scheduled for a Sept 27 release. In it, you play a heroic white superman with a light spear in an "ancient Germanic future", commanded by the lightgods to murder hordes of coloured savages. The tones of white supremacy are just dripping from this product.

I don't really want to talk about how awful racism is in gaming, or how good/bad Lichthund may be. Pollyanna that I am, I'd like to believe they came to this final product via a series of quite innocent artistic decisions, and ended up with something perhaps not quite what they were intending.
If, on the other hand, they're racist jerks unashamedly producing a title to glorify racism, well, that's their artistic right, fuck them very much. But I'd rather give them the benefit of the doubt. Either way, I don't think that's a productive conversation to have.

I'd rather talk about the common trope of the heroic player against the Other, and how there's a very thin line between that and racism. Undoubtedly, games like Doom, and Prey, and so on, are racist in a very technical sense - but aliens and a race of demons isn't offensive, because there's no real world relation and slim evidence of metaphor. We're also often handed shreds of evidence to suggest that the entire group of the Others are evil, which is a strange resort to stereotyping in itself.
But how about more subtle cases, like the common 90's trope of a Russian villain. Is that racist, or is that just a typecast set against the cultural backdrop of the Cold War? Where and how do you draw the line, and how do you avoid falling down this rabbit-hole?

[talum]

Yikes!

[Cobralad]

too late, hotline kavkaz is on steam, hatred devs probably buying vintage german weapons.

[Rarykos]

Yeah, they just never thought you could read it that way. The theme looks like it was picked at random and as much as I know them, they're not super racists. Hatred devs are a bigger problem tho.


Well, it's a running gag that one of the most profitable franchises of all time - Call of Duty, is always about white guys killing Russians and brown people. People want that.

The best way to approach the topic, and the most interesting, is with nazis in games. You can kill, torture and massacre nazis by the dozen, because they're evil. But if one of them abandons his cause then you suddenly think he's a real person again.

[JWK5]

I think with video games it is more laziness than intended racism (even if the end result might be unintended racism). The problem with creating opposition that isn't cartoonish with its motives is that destroying that opposition no longer seems cartoonish, now you've exposed a moral dilemma. Rather than sorting this moral dilemma out or even leveraging it to tell a better story most creators (in video games or otherwise) seem to settle on just "innocent us versus evil them" and in such a scenario the less the "evil them" looks like the "innocent us" the easier it is to distance ourselves from the possibility that they might not actually deserve what is happening to them.

Video games have been evolving up and out of the cartoonish representations they started with and one of the most difficult challenges of this is that often we have things that are mechanically fun (say platformers or first person shooters) that thematically might result in some pretty horrific implications. In some cases you can get past those implications by changing the context (for example, how Splatoon gets rid of the gore altogether or how Quake 3 Arena or Unreal Tournament treats the violence as a future sport where the "us vs them" is literally two teams in contest).

The worst part about war-based games especially is that for all their attempts at creating something dramatic (at least in the single player modes) they really strip out the human element of war and reduce it all to a bunch of killing machines carrying out genocide. Mechanically, they are as stuck in Rambo mode as the classic Doom games where you are the one man army (no matter how many allies you have) gunning down hundreds of targets. This is fine in Doom, Contra, etc. where it makes sense given its theme and context and considering just how cartoonish and general it all is, but in a game attempting to be serious about WW2 or whatever it winds up creating those horrible implications (and often coming out tinged with prejudice).

Looking at this Lichtspeer game I don't know for sure but I am guessing it comes off the way it does incidentally. Most of the enemies are wrapped around norse mythology (dwarves, ice giants, etc.) with designs that are apparent jabs at hipsters and whatnot. Where things get especially dicey is that we have strictly white protagonists mowing down non-white human-like enemies (ice giants are blue, dwarves are green, etc.) and some of them have face designs that do bear resemblance to some racist cartoon stereotypes. It doesn't look like they were going for something racist, it just looks like they really didn't think through how their visual design choices add up.

[s0]

The best way to approach the topic, and the most interesting, is with nazis in games. You can kill, torture and massacre nazis by the dozen, because they're evil. But if one of them abandons his cause then you suddenly think he's a real person again.

firstly, i think it's pretty safe to call anyone who supports nazism as an ideology evil.

secondly, nazis in games are usually portrayed in a very milquetoast way. most WW2 games take a pseudo-neutral approach and treat "axis" and "allies" as just 2 equal opposing sides in a war. they also tend to focus exclusively on a very sanitized portayal of military conflict while leaving anything else out. there are almost no WW2 themed games that even hint at things like concentration camps existing. at most, nazis are depicted as generic cartoon villains, at worst they're depicted as vaguely "cool". the wolfenstein series is actually one of the better game series that features nazis, because even if it does go into the cartoon villain thing somewhat, at least the nazis in it are a bunch of fucked up motherfuckers and not just "enemy soldiers" or whatever.

i think the topic of nazis in games is interesting because it's symptomatic of the game industry's aversion to taking a stand on anything ever, even something fairly unambiguous.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

dark skinned ennemies, ottoman mustache (supposedely be hipster mustache lol) .
it's easy to notice the racism especially since the game is german and main character pose.
naively said ,you have the white german kicking out turkish people.

edit: oups, should have checked deeper, game isn't german >.<

[s0]

are the devs of this game actually german? because if so, they really ought to know better. it does have a lot of shitty implications, not least because fantasizing about "noble germanic warriors" is really popular with white supremacists.

edit: oh they're polish lol.

[starsrift]

i think the topic of nazis in games is interesting because it's symptomatic of the game industry's aversion to taking a stand on anything ever, even something fairly unambiguous.

Do you think games have been too sensitive to the subjects - whether it's nazis or racism or sexism or whatever else - or just too dudebro? I mean, dudebro games exist and they're pretty thickheaded and innocent for all their gore, avoiding any issues of substance - but there a lot of other games and ones that have attempted to be more artistic with their statements.

[Dacke]

firstly, i think it's pretty safe to call anyone who supports nazism as an ideology evil.

sure, but massacring and torturing evil people is also evil 

[jamesprimate]

thats been my huge problem with the zombies trope as well, which like its subject matter never seems to die and shambles on and on beyond all reason. it was successful because it was basically just insta-othering your neighbors: "Now They Bad." an excuse to kill humans of all sizes and ages and genders without discretion/remorse/the barest sense of plot/motive/etc.

mostly they try to create grotesque shock jock bullshit "oh, im conflicted because there is a girl child zombie with a teddy bear, oh my morals! but alas it is a zombie so i must dismember it with this hatchet, and That Is Okay. perhaps my character will make a pithy comment."

Obviously some managed to eek out some story from this, but yeah, ugh

[JWK5]

I've always found the zombie genre to relate more to severe social anxiety and agoraphobia (even if it isn't intentionally presented to suggest such). At the worst points of my anxieties in my early 20s I used to have zombie dreams a lot.

The paranoia that everyone around you is focused on you, they're thinking something bad about you or waiting for you to fail so that they can tear you apart. No matter where you go there they are. You're not safe at the store, on the street, in your house, in your room. Constantly wanting to push them all away or just escape and retreat. Always feeling trapped.

I keep waiting for the zombie movie that really taps into that but instead they just keep it cliche.

[s0]

dawn of the dead was a satire on consumerism.

i think zombies in games are popular for pretty much the same reasons they are popular in movies: they are cheap. in a zombie film you can dress up lots of extras as zombies with minimal makeup (or use CGI i guess), in a game you can have tons of generic enemies with minimal AI.

[s0]

firstly, i think it's pretty safe to call anyone who supports nazism as an ideology evil.

sure, but massacring and torturing evil people is also evil  

which is exactly what nazi ideology stands for

it's of course immoral to kill evil people in real life. but look at this in the context of this thread, which is about action video games. if there's any sort of "ethical" component to "killing" pixels, nazis are a "safer" choice than orcs or aliens.

[JWK5]

Not to play the devil's advocate here, but I think a factor often left out of the "it's okay because Nazis are evil" rationale is that many were conscripted by force (especially those in occupied territories) and even those that weren't you have to wonder was it because they actually supported the ideology or was it because they were afraid not to. The ideology was (and is) monstrous but that is not necessarily true of everyone caught in its wake.

Nazi's are only a "safer" choice because it is easier for some people to rationalize wanting them dead. If in a fantasy world an orc or alien is described as being (across all members of the species) murderous and evil then there is no more or less difference in rationalizing genocide against them than there would be going on a Nazi-killing spree. I mean even if we are talking robots the minute you slap a human-like AI on them things start to shift towards the gray areas (I, Robot and whatnot). Anything makes a good candidate for extermination if you apply the right rationale (particularly a rationale that makes them appear to be incapable of compassion and humanity).

The truth of the matter is trying to find something we can feel good about exterminating says something pretty uncomfortable about us as a species. It gets even more uncomfortable when you look at how a rather large amount of action oriented games that actually have you playing as a Nazi-like entity (sometimes in everything but name) exterminating your way through whatever humanoid species that game has deemed unfit to live.

On one hand, it is just pixels, but on the other it is pixels representing living things. It's a pretty fucked up gray area made only worse by the fact that often the mechanics behind the game make it fun.



EDIT: Now that I think about it, that may be the bigger problem games are coming into. The more realistic games get the more it requires you to disengage your empathy in order to play them the way they expect you to mechanically. I think in that conflict (mechanics versus implication) and as time marches on we are going to start having to deal with the possibility of games leading to severe desensitization, especially in individuals who might already have empathy/antisocial issues.

Once we're past the uncanny valley how do we cope with acting out murder on imagery that is believably human? What would separate a game from a snuff tape at that point (aside from the fact an actual life is taken in a snuff tape)? I think video games have bigger hurdles and responsibilities in store than anyone in the industry really wants to look into at the moment.




It is discussions like these that almost make me feel bad that while playing GTA5 I ran down that hooker with an ambulance and parked it on her dead body and then rolled a grenade under it and the laughed because the airborne ambulance husk landed on a nearby pedestrian.

Almost.

[s0]

Not to play the devil's advocate here, but I think a factor often left out of the "it's okay because Nazis are evil" rationale is that many were conscripted by force (especially those in occupied territories) and even those that weren't you have to wonder was it because they actually supported the ideology or was it because they were afraid not to. The ideology was (and is) monstrous but that is not necessarily true of everyone caught in its wake.

for the record: my own grandfather was one of those conscripted soldiers and lost a leg in stalingrad. so i understand that viewpoint.

however, i still think it's a weak excuse. because in the end, it was the german (and later austrian) people who, while most of them probably weren't fanatical nazis, were at least comfortable enough with nazism to get hitler in power. and that's where the real danger is. the point where a totalitarian ideology becomes dangerous is not when there's a tight knit group of fanatical supporters but when most people are "basically OK" with it. without that critical mass of complacent people, the actual ideologues are nothing.

Nazi's are only a "safer" choice because it is easier for some people to rationalize wanting them dead. If in a fantasy world an orc or alien is described as being (across all members of the species) murderous and evil then there is no more or less difference in rationalizing genocide against them than there would be going on a Nazi-killing spree.

they are a safer choice because orcs and aliens are coded differently. even if orcs are evil, they're usually depicted as a murderous horde of unintelligent savages, which has clear racist/colonial implications. similar thing with alien invasion themes which tap into xenophobia ("aliens are trying to replace our culture with theirs!"). also you're saying it yourself, you're basically genociding aliens and orcs in most games that have them. in WW2 games you're not genociding people of german descent, you're killing followers of a genocidal ideology. huge difference in the kind of cultural codes evoked by those scenarios.

[s0]

lol i think im getting too worked up about this. nazism as a topic is very "close" to me due to my family history and i find that it's often talked about in ways that miss the point and are unhelpful. one of the main problems being that nazism is often depicted as equivalent to US capitalism and soviet communism when it's infinitely worse than both.

[Dacke]

The more realistic games get the more it requires you to disengage your empathy in order to play them the way they expect you to mechanically. I think in that conflict (mechanics versus implication) and as time marches on we are going to start having to deal with the possibility of games leading to severe desensitization, especially in individuals who might already have empathy/antisocial issues.

that's very much a hypothetical, given that we don't see that effect from realistic films. Humans are pretty good at separating fantasy from reality.

My deeper worry has to do with norms established by all media (including violence as the answer to all conflicts), but that's separate from levels of gore.

(aside from the fact an actual life is taken in a snuff tape)?

Well, um, it's only the fact that it's real that's the problem with snuff tapes. So what's the aside?

[JWK5]

The more realistic games get the more it requires you to disengage your empathy in order to play them the way they expect you to mechanically. I think in that conflict (mechanics versus implication) and as time marches on we are going to start having to deal with the possibility of games leading to severe desensitization, especially in individuals who might already have empathy/antisocial issues.

that's very much a hypothetical, given that we don't see that effect from realistic films. Humans are pretty good at separating fantasy from reality.

In films, we don't pilot the actors. We don't direct their movements and assume their role. We are good at separating reality from the fantasy we've currently been able to experience but my point is what if the experience gets much closer to reality? As we push further into things like VR (even in its current state seeing people physically react to it is amusing) and various physical feedback forms how long before we get good enough at fooling the senses (which is what we are trying to achieve with this all) enough that the line between reality and fantasy blur (i.e. in terms of what we mentally can sort out).

Well, um, it's only the fact that it's real that's the problem with snuff tapes. So what's the aside?

Sorry, a lack of sleep makes for poor wording.

[Dacke]

It might happen, but as I said, I think it's pretty hypothetical.

But it's not like games go for actual realism. Like Silb mentioned, we get a very sanitized version of war in media in general. Games and films that actually show people begging for mercy while being brutally murdered are already considered "extreme". I don't think mainstream games are going to go further into that just because we get more graphical fidelity. So I imagine we'll still have a pretty clear divide between fiction and reality.