Video Games and Race

I just want to let everyone know that I think that video games are non-racist and they are created by what the world has become. In Gamasutra:by Tom Cross, he talks about the African town as being poor and dirty, which in real life, that is mainly what you see when Africa is portrayed on the big screen. You don't ever see Africa as a rich town or clean streets, it has always been poor. I haven't played Resident Evil 5 but I do remember when the first one came out and how it was bloody and weird, there was nothing that portrayed racism. In one of the comments in this article, they talked about how we really need to remember that it is just a game which is also just like the violence in Grand Theft Auto.

The article, Why Didn't I Buy GTA: Chinatown Wars, by Jaime Kuroiwa, she specificly said that she didn't buy the game because she didn't like it, there wasn't anything different than what she has already seen. She also made it very clear that her not buying the game, had nothing to do with her being Asian. I think that this article is a great example of why certain people don't buy certain games. As customers, we need new challenges and something different.

Game Developers Demographics Report by the International Game Developers Association, shows us that that the average age is 31 and 83.3% are white. They also said that it is hard to find diverse applicants, which I think has a lot to do with the education levels of their developers. Maybe if they didn't expect their employees to be as educated, they could get a younger perspective on what the gaming world wants to see.

In, Video Games Racist, Says Study, by Deborah Jones, and Pacific Citizen byLynda Lin, they both have a lot to do with the aspect of entertainment. Pacific Citizen talks about how these video games are entertaining us by the interactions we get when we are the character. In Deborahs article, she talks about how the video game world is more popular than movies and makes more money. If the video gaming industry is making so much money, than obviously people don't think there is a racism problem.

What I got from the Wikipedia article about PostColonialism is that a lot of what we do goes back to when cultures were being formed. In one culture, they might see video games as being harmful to your health and in another culture video games would be a learning process. I think this is also about the fact that we all sort of create our own book on what we believe and what is right and wrong. Especially today, there are so many beliefs that it isn't like the olden days when there was one way of believing.Most of the Wikipedia article, lost me in a sense.


I think that just like life everyone is going to have their likes and dislikes, and personally for me if you don't like the way the Resident Evil or Grand Theft Auto games portray their characters, don't' play it. We all have a right to our opinions and choices we make in life. And just like in the Gameology articles I think it is good that we are looking at the racial aspects in video games but we truly need to remember that they are just games and another form of entertainment.