Blips: Charged Imagery

Source: Being Black and Nerdy
Author: Sidney Fussell
Site: Medium

There's a lot of denial about the influence of racial politics in popular media, including games. Hopefully at this point we can at least agree that there's no such thing as an apolitical game, and that the pertinent question asks what a game's politics are, not whether it has any. Writer Sidney Fussell has published a very personal account of his relationship with the racial politics of video games, reflecting both on the images depicted in games and those projected by the medium as a whole. Check it out via the "Source" link above, but in summary, it's about growing up black in a racially divided Midwestern city where games are both an escape and a curse of sorts. It's a story about the perceived whiteness of games and how that racial label impacted Fussell's feelings of conflicted inclusivity among members of his own race as well as among his white magnet school classmates. And there's more to it than just that, so please give Fussell's article a look as it's an honest account of the power and influence games wield.

Though it is part of a critic's job to read and interpret media, it's the responsibility of creators of all media to thoroughly consider the politics of their creation before releasing it to the world. Case in point is the header image for this post, an actual promotional screenshot for Ubisoft's upcoming open-world cyber-crime game Watch Dogs. Another white male protagonist of vigilante justice (now also armed with a smartphone!) and another gang of angry black street thugs. Of course Ubisoft has the right to create and publicize these sorts of images (no one stopped them, after all), but it's also entirely within their power to produce imagery that rejects this status quo or at the very least frames their game in a less problematic context. Now, that would have potential to be a refreshing exercise in free speech. Everything in games is a design choice, and as Sidney Fussell's essay details, sometimes those choices have real world consequences.

Blips: Privileged Action

Source: The Trouble With We Men
Author: Sidney Fussell
Site: Medium Difficulty

I thought today, which sees reviews breaking for Dragon's Crown, was an appropriate time to share this recent piece by Sidney Fussell for Medium Difficulty on the institutional misogyny in the games industry. The article is very in-depth and is full of a ton of useful links for getting up to date on certain gender issues in the game world. Fussell is very upfront about the nature of writing a piece on gender politics from a male perspective. I recommend reading the whole thing and even the (SHOCK!) thoughtful comments section below, but one point that really stood out to me was the mental separation between the game community and the game industry, as if they're not two totally codependent groups. Industry and community are one symbiotic whole, and sexist actions on either side are reciprocated on the other. This goes for more than just misogyny, but that's the topic at hand here.

Dragon's Crown, lest we forget, received a great deal of criticism a while back for its exaggerated character art, particularly of two female characters which seemed born out of a 12 year old's notebook. Now the game reviews are coming in and if you ever wanted a game to act as a general barometer of which reviewers to follow and which to ignore, Dragon's Crown is it. From what I've seen and read about Dragon's Crown, it's a game that's conflicted about who it wants its audience to be. There are tons of callbacks to Dungeons & Dragons and old-school brawler arcade games from the 90s, but the depiction of female characters seems aimed at a demographic who would be too young to get those references. I greatly enjoyed Vanillaware's Odin Sphere in the past, and would normally be be very excited about Dragon's Crown, but knowing how it represents women has tempered that interest. Like so many games that have come before, Dragon's Crown seems to be a fascinating gameplay experience, that for some reason, needs to embarrass its players that aren't heterosexual teenage boys.

To pull from Fussell's article, it's important to acknowledge these kinds of behaviors when you see them, and especially so if you're a professional critic. It's not that we need to censor or eliminate perviness entirely from games, but if you're a critic who turns a blind eye to the issue, you're doing a disservice to your readers who probably just want to know if a game is for them. If you're critic who can't see why the issue needs to be acknowledged in the first place, you don't really have any business being a critic.