The USS Quad Damage

As a racial type that will pretty much never show up in a video game, I’ve always seen video games as pure escapism. I truly do not relate to anyone or anything in video games. Reading this makes me wonder if this guy really knows what he’s asking for.

I’m saying this as an Australian too — I think Aussie movies aren’t very popular because just hearing an Aussie accent would be too close to home, and you couldn’t really suspend your disbelief. In an American movie, you can happily pretend these fictional characters are in this fictional world in a fictional location of New York. An Australian accent could locate them in Newtown or Fairfield.

Or “Leaukemba”.

I fully understand that video games (and indeed film and television, and I suspect books also) disproportionately contain all-white characters. But they also contain aliens and zombies and who knows what else. Sure, every other race fits some stereotype, but so do white guys — They’re the blank slate hero, the guy the player pretends to be.

So yeah, it kind of sucks that there isn’t more cultural (or indeed sexual) diversity in games. It would clearly make things a whole lot more interesting. I think that for people who don’t fit the stereotype, they get a more even experience. They’re not involved in that world, and as far as escapism goes, it’s best when you get to be the soulless white guy.

Which gets me to the question: How the hell do white guys play these games? I mean, there’s certainly a huge difference between heroes in games and real people — I can imagine even muscly white dudes look at Markus Fenix and say “yeah I do not empathise with that thing”, but I’m sure there’s a bunch of ordinary looking white guys in games that would give white male (American) players some pause.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Often an idea is broad enough that I can’t write about it directly, because it will be too long, and that’s if I can get an idea out of it at all. Luckily, sometimes others have the same idea as me, and will expand on some aspect of it. Here’s the core nugget of what I’ve been thinking of:

Single player games, in order to be interactive, necessarily need to be broken (or at least, potentially breakable).

Warren Spector talks about a variety of things in this light. In part, about consequence, and how games need to create consequences for players (not the cheap Good/Evil style that games create currently, but consequences which are inherent and consequential in the game system). This inherently means that someone could do something wrong and not realise it for the entire duration of the game, and then suffer far later — load and lose hours in the game world or accept the consequences.

This is the exact sort of thing that pisses games reviewers off, but the “safe” games we’ve been playing feel like a padded cell. In many ways, a single player game is a dialogue between the designer and the gamer, and we’ve come to an impasse where the designer is unwilling to be wrong, and the gamer is unhappy being corrected. Both of these need to change

Lewis Denby’s article I love you just the way you are is a column written from a Gamer’s perspective about games which are broken. Lewis does not say so explicitly, but it appears necessary that the things he’s talking about require the game to be broken. Not necessarily in terms of outright “bugs”, but in terms of how the player can use and abuse the system.

The more I think about it, the more it appears that the polish of games today has taken away more than just the bugs. The reviewing atmosphere, where games are split into their component parts, has engendered a game design space where the players are effectively asking for contradictions, a shadow of a game. A place with no real danger, and with no real answers.