Posts Tagged Video Games

It's not chilled.

Somebody call Al Sharpton up in this bitch.

As you may or may not have heard, 5th Cell’s hotly-anticipated (but mediocre-reviewed) game Scribblenauts apparently is purely and unabashedly racist. For you see, if you type in the word “sambo,” a watermelon pops up on the screen. I assume it’s not seedless and warm, and probably lacks vodka.

Of course, 5th Cell, who’s name I assume designates where they believe all black people should belong, denies that such a feature was intentional. Sambo, in Ecuadorian, refers to some fruit that only resembles a watermelon.

Oh, LIKELY story, 5th Cell. I assume they all saw this (absolutely hilarious) cartoon by Tex Avery:

… while masked and/or shaving their heads and thought this would be okay.

Well, I assure you, this is NOT.

The ‘sambo-leads-to-watermelon-and-perhaps-KoolAid’ picture, however, isn’t really the problem that black people have with it. As a black man, one who speaks for ALL OF THEM, I assure you that most of my brethren (kats? dogs? my ni**as? They keep changing out collective name) care little, if at all about this controversy, almost as much as they care about the controversy surrounding the African zombies in Resident Evil 5. (Wait– zombie-causing virus hits an African tribe, and the zombies they produce happen to be black?! Did they port Birth of a Nation to the Wii!? Can my grandmother play this?!)

Of course they don’t care. Black people only care about two video games:

1) Madden

2) The next Madden

No, we’re up in arms (you know, the ones that Obama took away, but didn’t take away, which inevitably led to a severe shortage of bullets) because sambo seems to be the only potentially racial gimmick in the game!

Now, sure, it you look at the 200-plus comments in that Destructoid link, a load of people didn’t seem to realize that sambo could be perceived as racist. Imagine! Kids today, running around as they stuff Big Macs and candy and Big-Macs-stuffed-with-candy into their mouths, playing a DS in one hand and a PSP in the other, blindly asking that sambo janitor to clean up their mess. Because, gosh darnit, they just didn’t know! We perverted their innocence, and thanks to 5th Cell, President Sambo is now a JOKE THEY WILL USE (presumably shouting this out at a town hall meeting, or Congressional session, or some other ill-advised political locale, along with socialist, communist, birth certificate, and other “way too big” words for them to be using).

“But,” they will say as they smear their greased-soaked digits on their keyboards when they finally realize how shitty Crysis really was, “if sambo is a word I can use now, safely and without harm, then what about the deliciously antagonizing vocabulary slang such as kike, wop, nip, spic, and so on? If I type in cracker, and a literal cracker pops up on screen, should I get angry and riot and/or flood my own city?

I say to you: YES. We blacks and whites have be represented (wut wut!) but my fellow minorities have been shafted their chance at video game recognition. So stand up, Scribblenauts in hand, and throw it away (after, of course, getting frustrated at its insane difficulty level) and instead, insert the race card! You know, that multi-player game of choice we all play when we get (or don’t get) what we want! It’s all or nothing, 5th Cell! You best think about that when you make the inevitable sequel, or we’ll try twice as hard to sit idly not caring as dollar bills rain down when you type “Kosher” or your character self-destructs when you type “Arab” or “Indian,” because, well, they just look so much alike!

Now, if you excuse me, I’m eagerly awaiting Madden 2011.

So, I’m going to try and add more content beyond my main feature, and add some more media-related stuff. For today, I’ll discuss the game Bioshock. Massive, massive spoilers contained within, so if you haven’t played it, do so, now.

Instead of hanging around, you SHOULD be getting a job.

Bioshock has received many positive reviews, as it should have. It’s a beautiful game with an interesting story and contains wondrous graphics, luscious sound, and tight controls. Furthermore, its willingness to engage in a political-social ideal is rather bold, especially in this day and age when that very same ideal is being somewhat discussed throughout the media.

That ideal would be Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

I’m not an objectivist, mind you. Hell, I’m not even sure what the details are within the overall concept of objectivism. Wikepedia helps, but like most “–isms,” it’s hard to put into words; it’s something that’s more embraced in the broadest sense via like-minded individuals. From what I gathered, BASICALLY, objectivism believes that a person’s worth is SOLELY based on their contribution to society (specifically, the “free market workplace” since our society is capitalistic), and that any interference from government, religious, or other social structures is automatically “bad”.

Cribbing from that possibly-woefully diminished definition, one can certainly see how Bioshock is playing into that definition; however, I would argue that it really isn’t giving it due credit. Or, more accurately, isn’t giving the idea a playing field in which one can experience it fully without understanding it in mere black and white terms.

For example, let’s consider Communism for a moment. Once viewed as an abject evil in the 1950s, and despite the misguided attempts for certain people to combine Democratic beliefs with the malevolence of the connotation of Communist ideas (not the ideas themselves), nowadays, its seen as a viable possibility, even though its inherent problems are clearly and evidently obvious—see, China. We sure as hell wouldn’t be borrowing money from them 60 years ago.

My issue with Bioshock in this regard is that we’re presented with an after-the-fact, automatic failure of objectivism in action, and I feel as if this may not be a truly fair assessment of the concept. In America, our liberties are derived from the fact that anyone can believe in anything, even in the things that may be antithetical to that very liberty, so to see this game present objectivism as an out-of-control, free-for-all of market forces; well, I’m skeptical.

The story, if you think about it, really has nothing to do with objectivism at all. Mind control? Making tough choices over the fate of children? Corruption? You can take all those ideas and plug them into a democratic, capitalist (and most-likely sci-fi) story, and no one would know the difference. Heck, if the story of the game is a critique of the failures of objectivism, then every movie/game ever made about corrupt businessmen and lawyers are critiques of the capitalist/democratic system. And more likely then not, they have “good endings”, with the heroes exposing the evils of these socio-political monsters, and ensuring the system is fixable, if flawed. Bioshock? Not so much.

It fell apart, miserably, and you’re wandering the once beautiful deco-era landscape with gun in hand, trying to keep away the oppressed crazies. Really, it’s a means to an end, a deep but still easy excuse to make an FPS. I kind of wish the game took place during the midst of Fontaine’s rebellion, where you can see the process actually fall apart, where his and Ryan’s tenuous partnership collapsed, and the beginnings of Ryan’s paranoid genocides. I’m a sucker for a good political thriller, made-up or real, and I can easily see a game where you play a morally ambiguous character playing both sides as Rapture starts to crack. After all, in some form or another, objectivism WAS working—I mean, it can’t be easy to build an entire, self-functioning underwater utopia AND give normal citizens superpowers, even in 2K land. I’d even be THRILLED if in such a hypothetical game, you had the choice to save Rapture somehow… but of course, that may be too much (and, uh, anti-American? Better start tea-bagging!)

In the end, I didn’t get the idea that objectivism in itself is ultimately flawed; rather, I got the idea that really crafty con-men can exploit any system (even in our society, whether for the poor, like welfare and food stamps, or for the rich, like Enron and Bernie Madoff). I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to see more political systems in action and more of the effects of those systems in games than the aftereffects.

Now, would you kindly post your thoughts and comments down below?