Comments on: On discussing race

By: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:43:41 +0000

Yeah, I was pulling that from Croal’s interview:

There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. There [sic] sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of “othered.” They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed.

I happen to agree with you; not sure how postmodernism really enters into it.

By: Tdawwg

Tdawwg — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:37:48 +0000

It’s postcolonialism, not “postmodernism,” that he’s viewing the game through.

By: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:09:24 +0000

Well said, Mitch. There seems to be a general culture of fragmentation around games, actually — Nintendo vs. Sega, PC vs. console, RPG vs. FPS, casual vs. hardcore (and I know you’ve written about that distinction before), etc., etc. Most, if not all, of those debates tend to revolve around the same trollish ad hominem nonsense as the RE5 trailer discussion.

In a way, that gives me a bit of hope. Maybe it’s not the topic of race that set all this off; maybe it’s just another example of the “I’m right, and you’re gay” bullshit that’s seemingly endemic in the community.

On the other hand, if that’s true, we have a long way to go before we can all have an intelligent conversation.

By: Mitch Krpata

Mitch Krpata — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:20:50 +0000

I think you really get to the core of the problem with your second point. There’s this tendency in the community to close ranks whenever somebody with a platform criticizes our pastime. What’s different this time is that the person doing the criticizing doesn’t come from outside that circle, like Jack Thompson or Cooper Lawrence. Yet the response is exactly the same.

N’Gai knows this stuff cold. He’s on record advocating for the artistic potential of games, so he’s not criticizing this trailer from the perspective that games are corrupting our nation’s youth. But reading some of these comments, you get the idea that people think this is just one more authority figure trying to take something away from them. But notice the key difference between what N’Gai had to say and what some of the more unfortunate commenters say: he talked about the trailer, and they talk about him. Whatever it takes not to address the substance of the issue, I guess.

On a related note, if I read one more person point out that nobody had a problem with the Spanish zombies in Resident Evil 4, as though nobody had ever had this insight before, I’m quitting the Internet.

By: Dan Bruno

Dan Bruno — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:41:00 +0000

You may be right that Kotaku had a provocateur’s agenda with that post — I’m not familiar enough with the culture to know if that’s the sort of thing they do. (I rarely click through to the site from the RSS feed, to be honest.) At the same time, I’m not quite willing to fully lay the blame at the feet of the site, because some of the comments went far beyond the usual Internet inanity.

Still, we can’t be defeatist about it — the level of discourse isn’t gonna raise itself. :)

By: Ben Abraham

Ben Abraham — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:29:09 +0000

I think you’re expecting better than Kotaku delivers, Dan. Before reading Brian’s “A call to ban”, I had no *idea* Kotaku had ever been commenter free, or even commenter invite only. It’s always been to me, to quote the impeccable Alec Guinness, “The most wretched hive of scum and villany” on the Intertubes and more sensationalist than they could/should be.

Looking at the original “Clearly no one black worked on this game” post, It’s written by the other Brian (not Crecente), and I have no idea how Kotaku vet their posts, but I’d be willing to bet that it was, at least in part, headlined and projected so as to provoke just this kind of 1000 post reaction – *not* discussion.

Kotaku, we deserve better from what is perhaps the biggest single web publication about games. Shame on you. Take the initiative and change, for the better.

/rant