Fair Play: Violence, Racism and sexist depictions of women!?! The gaming industry should be ashamed of themselves...

Or at least that's the popular opinion today. Interactive media entertainment has become the whipping boy for a new generation of the unspeakable. The images and characters depicted in games are found by some to be ultra violent, extreemly sexist and racially biased, and the study composed by the Children NOW organization is more than helpful in pointing out the inadequacies portrayed in the now mainstream culture of interactive entertainment. Even though I may agree with some of their subjects mentioned in the article, such as "E" isn't for everyone, It's hard not to get the feeling that the Children NOW organization is attacking the gaming industry about an issue that has existed long before it even was recognized as a problem.

Since the gaming industry is rather new to the sphere of acceptable entertainment, we must remember that it is still in it's infancy, and everyone knows that children don't just inherit bad habits, they learn them from their parents. Am I suppose to believe that racism wasn't running rampant before "Grand Theft Auto" was invented? People weren't viewing women as objects before "Tomb Raider's Lara Croft"? Violence didn't exist before "The Warriors" took to the virtual streets and beat the crap out of other gang members to protect their turf? "The Warriors"!?! The movie alone promoted and glorified the ultra violent, and that was back in 1979, before the videogamer even became a subculture.

Even though I'd love to talk about the sexist portrayal of women in every sphere of our existence creating a fictional image of what women are suppose to model themselves after (I'm looking at you, Barbie!), there is one part of the Fair Play atricle that really catches my attention, and that is the issue of race.

The article mentions that the prodominant character users are able to play as in video games is more likely than not a character that could be considered "white". The article clocks in with 52% of male playable characters are white and 78% of female playable charaters are white. The runner up to the white playable character is the black character with men taking 37% and women taking 10%. They continued to pick apart the "important" races till the remainder could be thrown into the "others" catagory (I guess my race isn't important enought to be considered anything but other) but I found something very curious, they had marked Native American men down as 0%, the other 0% went for Latina women. Now this must be some kind of mistake because I can think of three playable charaters of Native American decent right off the top of my head, Turok (Turok: Dinosaur Hunter), Night Wolf (Mortal Kombat 3) and T. Hawk (Super Street Fighter II). One other that might be conidered is Tak (Tak and the Power of Juju) though I'm not sure of his true origins (and that the game might have been published after the article was written). So I took a look at the list of games reviewed in the back of the article and to my surprise, there were only 70 games reviewed as source and the three I just metioned were not on the list (Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag Tournament has a half Native American half Chinese woman, Julia Chang, but that:

1. falls under the womans' playable character catagory and
2. might bring to light the atrocities commited against the Chinese and the Native Americans in the days of the early west.)

(Face!)*

With thousands of games to choose from, this review was comprised of a meer 70 games, with similar, if not repeating titles;

Tekken 3 (Playstation)
whose characters are also included in:
Tekken Tag Tournament (PS2)

Pokemon Gold, Silver and Yellow (GBC)
Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Stadium 2 (N64)

The Sims (PC)
The Sims: Livin' Large (PC)
The Sims: House Party (PC)

Tony Hawk Pro Skater (GBC)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater (Playstation)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater (Dreamcast)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 (GBA)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 (Playstation)
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 (Dreamcast)

With this in mind, I could not, in good faith, consider the Children NOW organization's report to be a fair evaluation of the entire gaming industry's alleged lack of morals and deconstuctive methods that may be influencing children by considering a large portion of their games rated under the "E" for everyone. It is becoming more and more apparent to me that the scare tactics used by some organizations to insite mob rule is based on faulty or half baked truths. Can one really count Tony Hawk as a reference six times?

*message from the author