Video Games & Racism, Sex, Violence, Etc.

While doing my reading for this week’s topic the article “Sex in Video Games” cites the results form a poll that was on the What They Play website. Poll was asking parents what it was that they worried that their children might being doing away from home. I found the results to be a little disturbing since “playing Grand Theft Auto” took second place, beating “drinking beer” and “watching pornography”. I do not know what it is that Grand Theft Auto has done that was so bad, that people can consider it worst than pornography and alcohol. Video games seem to draw negative publicity for everything they do. If the game is not racist, then it is selling sex, or it is too violent. There are much worst things in movies than what they depict in Grand Theft Auto or any other video game. In the few video games that do have sexual mini games within them the player never see anything. All the player is doing is pressing the buttons as they flash across the screen. People insist on blowing things out of proportion whenever video games are concerned.

Another topic that was covered in the assigned readings was racism in video games. The article “How My Opinion About Race in ‘Resident Evil 5’ Has Changed” looks at the debate that went on over Resident Evil 5, where people called the game racist because the story depicts a White character is killing Black characters. I thought it was interesting how people got so bent out of shape about this game. In the game’s description it says that it takes place in Africa and anyone who has followed the Resident Evil series know that it is the player’s job to kill the infected humans in order to save their own life. Another reason that confused me about people screaming that Resident Evil 5 was racist, I notice the author mentioned this as well, is that no one said anything about Resident Evil 4. In Resident Evil 4 the player controls another White character and is killing Spaniards who are, when one looks at the scenery in the game, living in a poor rural area just like the Africans. Then when the game came out and it turned out that the player was not killing only Africans people were ok with it. It seems that the masses are ok with killing Spaniards and Whites but not if you are only killing Africans. It appears to me that the non-gamer portion of society want to pick and choose what is racist and what is drowned in strong sexual themes. Sex is ok if it is in a movie, but a side view image of a half naked woman in a video game is going too far and it is ok to murder the poor as long as they are not Black. I feel those are some pretty twisted messages to have our children believing.