Brazilians are frequently depicted as stupid beggars with a pack mentality, and that despite their perceived stupidity, I have heard or read a lot of anecdotes about how they've cunningly cheated other players out of items or in-game money, etc..
Here's a comic that floats around the internet a lot with a lot of the depictions that show up frequently. ("BR?" standing for "Brazilian?" and "huehuehue" is considered to be a distinctively Brazilian way of writing laughing; ie: "hahaha" though I've never actually seen it used myself)
What do you think of in-game racism? Have you encountered it? What do you think the logic of it is? I think it's very interesting that real-world prejudices can carry over to situations that are in theory unrelated, as in "Bow, nigger," and I am also fascinated that new prejudices can be created based solely on in-game behavior, as with gold farmers and Brazilians.
3 comments:
Wow, never thought I would see that comic strip in an academic blog.
I never think too deeply about racism in the internet. Have I encountered it? on this vast, wild internet? Oh yes sir I have, all the time.
I'm of the opinion that racism always exist even in real worlds. I believe us vs them mentality, and stereotyping are part of the so-called human nature. Thus racism is always there. But racism doesn't mesh well at how we do things IRL, so IRL it is mostly supressed. Now take this average joe to the internet where there are anonymity and people can talk anything without consequence; or better yet, put them in an online game where competitiveness are high, the ugly side of things will show real quick.
A bit of the backstory, if anybody know where the comic strip originated, it's from an image board where anonymity is one of it's most important virtue (and feature). In this particular site, there are no id, post count, or account grade or any of that kind (and supposedly no ip cache either), so there is really no reason to hold back. In this site, racism is an everyday thing, and people are seemingly desensitized to the word.
This is why I'm not very sure about blizzard and ubisoft (and other game companies) wanting to link their game to facebook. Among other problems, you just know somebody is going to drive across the country to murder some dude over a game of SC2 (or over a diablo 3 character hack).
Another thing I want to point out, is that I think in online environtments, the reason of racism and stereotyping is language barrier above anything else. After all, people seem to hate (or fear) what they couldn't understand. That is why most of the countries being stereotyped are usually those who don't speak english. Singaporeans, Australians to the Indonesians, Filipinos, and the rest of east asian countries in east asian region; Americans and Canadian to mexicans, brazillian, etc. I'm not very well informed about how things are in Europe or middle asia, perhaps other fellow gamespacers could comment on this one.
I'm surprised someone recognized it. Haha. Yes, it's not terribly academic, but it's a populist voice, and there are hardly higher-authorities among gamers, so we've got little choice but to turn to the average players.
Certainly I wasn't trying to say that I haven't encountered racism on the internet. I have had very limited contact with it in online games, though.
I am reminded of the special hate that many players of Team Fortress 2 reserve for the only black character, the Demoman (actually a class title [short for demolitions man, presumably], as the characters do not have names [other characters being named such things as "Scout" "Heavy Weapons Guy" and "Medic"]). Popular sentiment in the past has been that the character is wildly overpowered in relation to the others, and some substitute names included "Demon-Man" and "Demon Nigger," an obviously racially charged epithet. (As a note, I don't mean to offend anyone with the use of the word nigger, but in order to get the point across that such racism does exist one way or another I would have to create the image of the word in your head, whether I say "n-word" or actually spell it out, the same word show up in your head, so it's a bit pointless and disingenuous to censor it)
To respond to your point about "us-vs-them" mentality, I'd agree that it's been a foundational piece of human evolution. So many of the major organizations in human history have been exclusively based (defined, essentially, by who is NOT in them). I grew up in what some people may call a bubble, a nice little town where racism was, at the very least, never shown in any way on the surface, so I was a bit disconcerted and maybe shocked when I ran into real racism in the outside world. Do you think that racism is still widespread? I certainly agree that racism exists, but to what extent? I suppose I still assume that most people aren't racists even with the protection of anonymity. Maybe I'm naive.
Haha yes, I agree. What the word "nigger" means to people, and how much it offends them is probably different individually and culturally.
I also would like to point out how racism in internet and in real world differs. Like I said I don't react much reading the word nigger on my chat log because after all, that is only an insult; whereas IRL, racism could have other consequences such as careers, opportunities, etc.
So yeah, racism is bad but in video game, I somehow could understand why people are being racist.
You see, I'm playing this game called League of Legend. It is one of the few games of the new genre, MOBA (never liked the name lol). I think methody mentioned another game of the genre, DotA, briefly in our first meeting. So basically in this game we play as a group of 5. Players would control one hero unit with various skills, and try to kill other team's HQ over the course of 20-60 minutes. The game is designed in such a way that teamwork is absolutely essential, and I can't express how infuriatingly and frustatingly hopeless it is to get a teammate who can't speak english. Also, somehow this genre's player are notoriously harsh on each other (due to teamwork emphasis), so you can really feel racism strongly.
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