Wolf's Sociology 204

Not until the last few years have video games tried to tackle tough stories or messages. Typically games are designed around a game-play mechanic or level design leaving the story to be arbitrarily attached to give the player a sense of progression and motivation to get to the end of the game. In the original "Super Mario Brothers", Mario was tasked to simply "save the Princess", telling the entire story of the game to you as a synopsis or a plot point on the back of the box. That was all that game needed though to be entertaining to a young child, the core demographic at that time. In the current market we see those kids all grown up, the audience maturing into adulthood, and so the game industry is also trying to mature in its game design as well. Part of the current problem, in my opinion, with storytelling and character representation in games is with the prolonged nature of game development. To bring a concept all the way through the development process to a playable and enjoyable state can take up to two years or more. Skyrocketing development prices and ever changing hardware platforms put the burden of product on corporations with the vested interest to create a highly sellable product. One of the side effects to this development process is that games tend to get homogenized and story elements get striped away to get to a product deemed "safe" for the average target consumer. What that leaves us with is a lot of the same types of games relying on the same well-known stereotypes with the impression from the developers of "if it isn't broken, why fix it?" These games, such as shooters (relying on killing enemies to further plot progression), role-playing and adventure games, as well as the typical lot of traditional and alternative sports games tend to be the best selling and most visible games, but also suffer from the same stereotypical crutches. Hopefully in exposing these games reliance on or unconscious choice of stereotypes then we can as game designers and players better understand what kind of choices we can make to help perpetuate a more inviting medium and further mature the storytelling.

One of the most critically acclaimed and best selling games of 2007 was a modern military first-person shooter titled "Call of Duty 4". The game gives a fictional account of a war between an allied force of U.S., British, and Russian Loyalists against a group of Russian Ultranationalists allied, weirdly enough, with a group of middle eastern rebels ("Call of Duty 4"). Playing as characters from either the British S.A.S. (Special Air Service), or from the U.S. Marine Corp. Force Recon, you travel to various locations battling enemies, but the game does an interesting thing. With the British S.A.S. sections of the game, you are given specific locations, and know who the enemies are, the Russian Ultranationalists. But when the game switches you to the U.S. Marine portion of the game, you fight in a completely unknown region in the Middle East without any specific knowledge as to the Nationality of the Middle Eastern characters, just that they are "rebels" or "insurgents". In an interview with Robert Bowling, the Community Manager for Infinity Ward, which developed "Call of Duty 4", he explains the creative decision to give the game's Middle Eastern antagonists their ambiguity, "We were very adamant about not connecting the conflict that's in our game with any current conflict going on in the world. That's why it's an unnamed Middle Eastern country. We wanted to make it clear that you're not fighting these guys for any political reason. You're fighting these guys because they're bad guys. They're bad guys doing bad things which we make clear from the beginning (Meacham)." Those bad things were presented in the opening of the game as the Rebels overthrowing the current leader of that unnamed country and start an uprising. They are given further vilification by being shown as a militaristic group, which aims at controlling the country and allying with known terrorists, transferring nuclear weapons to the other villains in the game, the Russian Ultranationalists. This choice of not giving the Middle Eastern rebels a Nationality could be construed as a way to avoid possibly political motivations, given that if the settings were in Iraq or Iran, then the game might seem as biased towards war or political upheaval in that part of the world. But unfortunately for the Middle Eastern people it represents, the ambiguity gives them a nameless faceless representation as "evil" or anti-American. Portraying the faceless foreign enemy is not a new concept. One of the many problems with character design is a game is giving individual "looks" to multiple N.P.C.s (non-player characters, the people you interact with in a game but do not control directly). In this game in particular, the enemy character models all have a very specific skin tone (lighter skinned for the Russians, darker for the Middle Eastern models) and generalized appearances, thus presenting them as all having the same ethnicity and race. While there might be variations of the militaristic garb they are wearing, ultimately we see them as a homogenized ethnic character, In contrast to the western forces in game, particularly the U.S. forces you fight along side, which are all White, African-American, and presumably Latino Characters with given names and voices.

What this ambiguity could in fact promote is the authoritarian personality type. With this generalized picture of an ethnic group, we as the game consumer might be reinforced that this is a reality faced by our current military in its conflict in Iraq. With the main allied characters, even the inconsequential ones, we are given names and visual cues distinguishing them as individuals as well as audio commentary by our N.P.C. comrades in the battlefield. These are great ways to engage us as players into the roles we play in the game. Adversely, we see the nameless, faceless enemy as a generic character, which can lead to dehumanizing them, making them easier to kill. With the young males who generally play these games, there could be a tendency to categorize these images and stereotype those enemies as a reality we actually face in life on the battlefield, possibly leading to a superstition of all ethnic minorities of Middle Eastern descent or physical appearance there of. Probably not very surprising is how Islamic countries are responding to this current trend in western game design. In an article entitled, "Islamogaming", Ed Halter gives us a seldom seen look into the game industry coming out of the Middle East. In Iran, in an attempt to counter the current trend of casting Islamic or Muslim people as terrorists in western games, a developer, with the backing of the Iranian government, designed a game concept in which a Commander is charged with the task of saving a captured Iranian nuclear engineer who was taken by U.S special forces while traveling through Iraq (Halter). According to the Iranian game developer, the game is presented to show people an alternative view as to the nature of their nuclear program, which they label as peaceful, and counter the image of Middle Easterners as terrorists.

While it is not my intention to lay blame directly at the feet of game developers, a possible shift in understanding the way in which people perceive game content could encourage a more balanced, positive story in games. One possible side effect to gaming is the nature of the gamer to become immersed in the game it self. The player can become so entranced that time loss is experienced (Woods), possibly allowing for a state of susceptibility, cataloging the character interactions in the subconscious. If we are constantly bombarded with generalized stereotypes, we might become numb to them as passively integrate those generalities into our perceptions of the world. In a psychology study performed in 2002, a simple concept was set forward to gage whether police officers have a racial bias in their perceptions in suspected criminal's hostility. The study's concept was to task officers to make split second decisions to shoot or not to shoot a suspect using only their visual assessments of the targets. The test suggests the dilemma of police officers to quickly respond to possible threats to their personal safety by viewing images of varying White and African-American subjects against complex backdrops with guns or non-hostile objects in their hands. Having only a few seconds to decide, the test subjects are told to "shoot", i.e. press an appropriate button; depending on whether they could identify the subject on screen was a threat (holding a gun). What may or not be surprising is the study found that White participants made the correct decision to shoot armed targets more quickly if the targets were African-American rather than if they were White (Correll).

How those officers became socialized to have an apparent bias towards one race to another I cannot say. But cultural portrayal of different ethnic and racial groups in the media can and do skew at times towards placing those groups into stereotypical roles. I hope that in understanding this nature of our culture that the ever-increasing popular medium of video games can assume a positive more reflective role in our society, helping to shape and influence a more balanced view of our world. The vary nature of video games are to challenge the player in skill and dexterity. So it seems like the perfect place to challenge them in there understanding of society.

Biblography

"Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 12 March 2008, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 12 Mar 2008 .

Correll, Joshua; Park, Bernadette; Judd, Charles M.; Wittenbrink, Bernd. "The Police Officer's Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. December 2002. Vol. 83, Issue 6, p1314-1329.

"Game Developer Demographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity." Igda.com. October 2005. International Game Developers Association. 16 March 2008. .

Halter, Ed. "Islamogaming." Computer Gaming World. September 2006. Issue 266, p38-41.

Meacham, Travis. "Infinity Ward Talks Call of Duty 4." Tomgames.com. 28 February 2008. Best of Media Group. 12 March 2008. .