Cracked on gaming prejudices

Also, RE 5 doesnt have black people at all, some of them are even white or at least brownish, and then the blue ones, with machines guns

A lot of that article is true, really.

Personally, I'm getting really sick of playing a middle-aged balding white man in everything. I mean, I still got a few years before I'm a middle-aged balding white man. I don't want to speed that up! At all!

facepalming so hard at the assertion that morinth, the sociopathic serial killer out to manipulate you so she can kill you is on the same level as liara.

facepalming to a slightly lesser degree towards the samara assertion, if only because i dont remember her sexuality coming up at all in me2 and if you try to romance her she turns you down. on the otherhand i can see how that quote would make the writer think she belongs with liara. even though she doesnt. at all.

then again maybe im misremembering

I still fail to see wich section of the article is true its all preposterous and blatantly biased

The whole "stereotypes are easier to understand so don't be afraid to use them" is so insulting to consumers' intelligence it's ridiculous.

The article uses too much hyperbole which ends up killing many points it could've made otherwise. Some aren't even properly researched or taken out of context, and Khajit are the ES equivalent of gypsies.

Also I thought Asians played videogames more than anyone else? Though I know black guys play them a lot...

If I had gone and said, female gear sucks, there are hardly any black brown people and its stupid to give racial bonuses to actual human races would I have been torn apart too?

Although, I've never encountered that last one personally I've seen too many character customizations systems that... I haven't been playing recent Sims, Soul Caliburs or "MM Os" so maybe they got better while I wasn't looking but what really amuses me are the wrestling games where the models won't cooperate, to the point teeth poke through face and skin tone will always look like paint, even though there is usually at least one realistic model already on the roster. Let us template Booker T(or Kofi Kingston), he's right there!

I usually end with something passable but can't help but groan when trying to do something like the APA or The Worlds Greatest Tag Team and knowing which half of the team is going to take longer and look worse without fail. You're out of luck if Funkasaurus's dancers or Josie were what you had in mind. Jimmy Wang Yang? You'll be lucky if you can do Great Kabuki justice.

edited 20th Jul '12 7:20:16 AM by Cider

Some valid points, but badly presented (the OP article, I mean)

I'd hazard a guess that the studios do stuff like this because it sells. If it didn't sell, there would be no interest in doing it. So who's the real culprit, the designers who get paid to do it, or the gamers who shovel their money at the designers because they like it? What is the marketing being centered at? It's a known fact that sex sells.

Does all of that justify any of the gender prejudices? Nope.

The racial (or speciesism, to be more accurate) junk? Yeah, I got nothing on that, aside from easy identification of threats and stuff. But clothes/armor can do that without resorting to race use.

Sims 3 pregnancy moodlet: In real life, my wife got hit with that 'enjoying pregnancy' moodlet from time to time, so eh. She also got hit with the nausea moodlet a lot.

edited 19th Jul '12 1:54:30 PM by pvtnum11

Sex Sells for both genders not just one, there are also skimpy male outfits,

Honestly, I thought that the Liara and Samara examples were pretty horrible. I didn't play the first ME, so I can't speak for Liara there, but even without context that quote pretty much just implies that she finds him interesting on a scientific level.

And Samara turns you down if you try to romance her or have sex with her. That is never an option there.

Morinth...well, Morinth is pretty accurate.

I think most people are angry for the fact that the article pointed their fingers only at the negative aspects of the Redguards and completely disregard everything else.

And let's not even get into the official lore aspect of the whole deal, that was conveniently ignored in the article...

edited 19th Jul '12 2:56:25 PM by ThatOtherGriffin

I find it funny that he's going on about how Redguards are racist because they have a low intelligence stat and are good fighters. The Nords, the Aryan-esque looking vikings, have the same exact Intelligence stat (well, when TES games had stats beyond Health, Magic, and Stamina... Fucking Bethesda rantrantrant) and gain Frost resistance because they are so white.

The Redguards bit is handpicked but the implication isn't so much "this game says Black people are dumb" but rather "this game is insinuating that different races have inherent advantages and disadvantages over each other which has a somewhat racist implication".

I can somewhat understand that- on one level I kinda don't want to agree because the solution would be to remove those race bonuses which means yet more stats disappearing from a TES Game that is already losing far too many of them for my liking but I get his logic behind it.

edited 19th Jul '12 6:50:57 PM by ShadowScythe

I assumed the stat differences were cultural, not racial.

Its also, as much as it might piss some people off, *true*. Yes, Virginia, different ethnic groups have different statistical spreads in physical properties. Sure, most ( maybe all? ) of these differences are cultural, but the different races in Tamriel *have* different cultures.

( And the top it off, the actual difference the base attribute levels have on gameplay are relatively minor, compared to what class you play, ie, what skills you choose to develop. . . )

I think that is how it actually works. For example both Redguard and Nordic cultures are very anti-magic. Also "Intelligence" was originally a stat to determine how much magicka points you had, not actual intelligence per say. Put two and two together and there you go.

Plus, Nords live in their equilavent of Scandinavia, so resistance to cold is logical.

edited 20th Jul '12 4:00:45 AM by ThatOtherGriffin

Few people in the thread have suggested those problems don't exist. The issue is that he "proves" them with misinformation and hyperbole.

edited 20th Jul '12 6:32:26 AM by JotunofBoredom

Its never been explicit, but I've always suspected that the major races are to some degree "adaptive," to a quasi-magical extent. Living in a certain place via a certain culture for long enough eventually shapes the minor degree of magic intrinsic to everyone, resulting in the different capacities.

On the reguard thing being cultural: that's exactly what it is(as magic became more accepted notice they actually got a bonus in it), though truthfully the majority of people don't know the difference between race and culture.

Does that kind of makes this article racist in a roundabout way?

edited 20th Jul '12 2:11:45 PM by ThatOtherGriffin

No it's an easy misunderstanding to make. We call them racial bonuses not cultural bonuses after all. Heck I didn't realise it was a cultural thing and I've played 4 of the 5 TES games.

He overreacted to the idea and probably should've asked around the community before writing it not to mention the example itself was handpicked and didn't acknowledge similar advantages and disadvantages among other races/cultures but among all the issues in this article this was one of the comparatively less problematic ones.

edited 20th Jul '12 6:21:41 PM by ShadowScythe

It's not just cultural. You can also choose to be a lizardman from the same menu.

edited 20th Jul '12 6:29:20 PM by Clarste

The aside about Resident Evil 5 pisses me off. Is the very concept of the game problematic and controversial? Yes, as it features a white American and his Ambiguously Brown sidekick having to defend themselves against numbers of African townspeople who were being controlled by a parasite. People have every right to be offended by it. But it's not killing black people for the fuck of it! It's not racially motivated. It just seems like Cracked wanted to make it seem worse than it is.

All media suffers from a lack of diversity, so an article about attempts at diversification gone wrong is not a bad idea. But it can be badly executed. In this case, it was.

Hell, a conversation I had on deviantart about the potential tokenism of putting Sheva in as a sidekick was more interesting and insightful than this.

I thought that the Redguard stats was a little questionable, but if it's a cultural thing instead of a racial thing, then that's not so bad, I guess.

edited 20th Jul '12 6:39:32 PM by BearyScary

Cracked likes to make a lot of stuff sound worse than is.

Actually, it kind of *is* racial, too, but that requires actually reading the game's lore to realize. Basically, the Redguard are not actually related to the other humans in the game setting. They are human metaphysically, yes, but have no discernable common ancestry with the rest of the humans of Tamriel, who come from Atmora.

Now, you could argue this just means the origin of the species is far enough away and far enough back to be lost to history. The problem with that logic is, Elder Scrolls does not, largely, follow scientific law, especially the further back you go in time. Go to the prehistoric era of Tamriel, and you find things like "the world is not a sphere, and its not only one world, and it doesn't really follow laws of physics so much as the whims of the gods."

And all this is aside from the fact that, at no point in the series do the writers actually suggest OOC any moral inferiority on their ( or anyone else' ) part. Redguard are people, just like everyone else, no better and no worse.

Just like everyone else except stupider. I don't think moral inferiority is necessary for racism, condescension is quite common as well.

edited 21st Jul '12 1:54:25 AM by Clarste