Albinism

Here’s an idea for a game: It’s an RTS called Race War. What really sets it apart is that the resources are different for every side. The Koreans have only two food sources: dogs and tree bark. The African-American forces have to steal all their vehicles and create new units at the Baby-Momma’s House, where they can thankfully churn out loads of superpredator babies—good thing, because they tend to die real young. I still haven’t quite worked out what the Jewish, Polish, and Italian factions will be doing, but you can bet it’ll be some kind of crazy funny thing. It’s just a game, right? It doesn’t mean anything, right?

OK, so, if you’re nodding right now, then you are two things: wrong and an idiot. Odds are, you’re also composing an e-mail in your head, in which you tell me you’re tired of me being so super-sensitive and tree-huggy about everything. That I should stop feeling the gong-banging Chinese armies in C&C: Generals are ignorant, reductive cultural stereotypes. That I and the rest of CGW need to relax and understand it’s all just a joke. Surprise—I understand it’s a joke, the same way I understand “What do you get when you cross a porch monkey and a Jap?” is a joke.

The fact is, there are good ideas, bad ideas, and wrong ideas. And while the majority of our readers are smart enough to write us letters intelligently wrestling with the good ideas in gaming, a surprising number defend the wrong ideas—most recently, the grade school–level racial caricatures shot through C&C: Generals. I am constantly stunned and infuriated by the number of people willing to zealously defend such crap. And I’m not talking about defending Generals as a game (one more C&C inflicted upon humanity is merely a bad idea). I’m talking about the supergenius that wrote “To be totally honest, I'm tired of all the panzy-assed [sic], whiney, liberal pussies that get offended every time someone mentions ANYTHING controversial or even hinting at ethnic or racial differences.” You sir, are a troglodyte. To suggest that Di Luo’s apparent Asian-ness makes him maybe a little too sensitive to Chinese stereotyping and therefore ill-suited to review a game that sports such great Chinkinese buffoonery, let me tell you this: Until racial background is listed on the side of the box along with RAM requirements, we’ll just keep assuming any games released in this country are meant for Americans in general and assign reviews accordingly.

I’m about two pink eyes short of albinism and I was offended by Generals. Offended that the idea of playing as obviously real-world–based terrorists was somehow supposed to be fun. Put off by the splash art that featured shadowy, menacing A-rabs and “We Breed ’Em By The Litter” Chinese. (Why didn’t they just get an intern to pull up the corner of his eyes with his fingers and stick his upper teeth out?) As for the American? Stalwart, square-jawed, and so right, good, and true that I wanted to puke. If it’s all such an elaborate joke, then why isn’t it taken all the way? Let’s take away the American vehicles and instead drop their fat asses on riding lawnmowers, slap a beer helmet onto their head, and—yee-haw!—let ’em go! Let the other sides stage tractor pulls to distract and trap the Americans—we’ll strike back by dropping McDonald’s restaurants into their cities so they get too fat and full of heart disease to fight.

To be fair, I don’t think C&C: Generals is the most racially insensitive game ever mad—for that, you need to pluck Shadow Warrior out of the bargain bin. And I don’t think the designers of either of those games, or of the original Soldier of Fortune or Daikatana (Superfly Johnson is about one “Feets, do yo’ duty!” away from burnt-cork minstrel capering) were motivated by malice in making the decisions they did when building their games. I honestly think they just didn’t understand, that they sincerely thought they were being funny or clever. But ignorance is an excuse that rings as hollow as, “I didn’t know not paying income tax was against the law.”

Stupidity is one thing, defending it another, and to suggest that we as journalists are somehow amiss by calling attention to objectionable material in games is ludicrous. Games shouldn’t get a free pass any more than movies, music, or television. Just because something is allegedly done in the name of fun doesn’t make it right—otherwise, we’d be seeing all those WWII-era Popeye and Bugs Bunny cartoons on Nickelodeon in between episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants. Want the government to stop treating games and gamers as a potential antichrist? Then grow the hell up and act like adults.

Copyright © 2003 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.