I’m sick of implicit racism

So, I was watching the video about Crackdown over at on10, and a thought occurred to me.

I don’t want to criticise the developers, the game looks interesting and could be a lot of fun. But when they were detailing the plot something jarred. Here’s a rundown of the plot, the city’s gone to hell – the police are running scared and you’re thrown in to sort everything out. The city is dominated by three gangs, a Hispanic gang, a Russian mafia clone, and a Triad / Yakuza clone. You play the American / Western European super cop sent in to sort the bad guys out.

What is wrong with this picture?

Thankfully there isn’t a predominantly black gang, but that’s about the only concession to modern day enlightenment. I don’t want to criticise Realtime Worlds, the game looks fun, and this sort of implicit racism is definitely to be found almost everywhere else in games. There’s also a case to answer that in the real world Hispanic, eastern European and Oriental gangs exist, and do make up a large chunk of organised crime. That’s not really what’s bugging me, what’s bugging me is that in most games bad guys are depicted using what really amounts to very lazy stereotyping. What sort of game is it? Combat game: you get Evil Arabs, or Nazis. Espionage: You get fat white industrialists. Urban: gangs of ethnic minorities and fat white cops. I suppose this goes hand-in-hand with the kind of wafer-thin plots we’ve come to expect; but I think a mature intelligent group of people deserves better storytelling, and more interesting characters. If gaming is going to continue to pander to lowest-common denominator social stereotypes then it’s going to have to get used to being treated as a second-class art form.

Even something as simple as having a lead character who wasn’t a square-jawed American / Generic Western guy with huge biceps would be nice. How about an Indian? You don’t see a lot of heroes from Mumbai, that would be cool; a Bangladeshi woman would be awesome. Perhaps she could stand against evil corrupt influences coming in from Australia.

Hell, making the bad guys not instantly identifiable by their badly acted accents and ridiculous street fashions could even be a feature. Keep the player on their toes you know?

Enough of me ranting, I’ll let y’all go now. (PS – check out the Crackdown demo if you’ve got a 360, it looks cool.)

Darkstar One

Well, I’ve finished Darkstar One, the space shooty tradey game from Ascaron.

I’ve always had a soft-spot for this genre (and I refuse to call it a Space Sim as some do, I’ll continue to refer to it as a shooty tradey thing until a really good label is created) ever since playing Elite on my old CPC 6128. I remember the astonishment at realising that not only was the galaxy in Elite huge, but that there was more than one of them (5 if memory serves). As such I really wanted to like this game, Freelancer was a brilliant game, albeit a bit too limited.

Ever since Elite this genre has struggled, the problem seems to have been compromising the huge galactic sandbox with the needs to deliver a strong narrative. (i.e. the plot always seems to spoil it.) Without a story the missions quickly become repetitive and with a story you lose the beautiful freedom that flying about in space should have. Freelancer did an admirable job of making an entertaining sandbox space to play around in, with sufficient politics to make it interesting – but clearly the game couldn’t have sustained interest for long without a plot. Darkstar one is a very clear illustration of this, the missions rapidly become repetitive, however where Freelancer’s plot allowed for imaginative scripted missions, Darkstar one fails to break out of the "Kill this man", "find this item" monotony.

The idea of upgrading the ship – clearly coming from the world of RPG – looked like it was going to provide some interest, but sadly fell a little flat. Especially as the upgrades stopped the moment the game was completed. There also wasn’t enough depth in the idea to warrant replaying, picking different features of the ship to upgrade simply didn’t lead to dramatic enough differences to warrant trying again with a different style.

All in all Darkstar one was nothing special, a workaday addition to a genre in need of a lot more imagination.

Woo hoo

I got my refund for Winning Eleven 9 – which is nice, as now I’ve bought Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (which is the same game, but in English not Japanese)

 

I suck royally at it, but never mind – one day I’ll figure out how to shoot on target.

 

Aside from that – I’ve still got 3 invites to the Beta of the new version of messenger. And I’m really excited because Microsoft have released a preview of their new Expression design tool. Stupid name, good product.