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The Bad News and Good News of Obsessive Video Games Part 1 |
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Thursday, 08 February 2007 |
 Richard O. Jones
I watched a DVD with a two 12-year-old boys. The movie was called "Inside Man" starring Denzel Washington. There is a small segment of the movie where a young Black boy is playing a hand-held video game. In the game there are Blacks shooting Blacks. The wall and street is spattered with blood. Both of the boys I watched the movie with found that segment exciting. I'm glad I witnessed their reaction. I plan to discus the subject with both. Psychologists agree that if your race is always the thief or killer, then after a while you start to think that's how you should be, or you think that's how your people are.
"If Blacks and Latinos are always portrayed as the villains, or as the victims who get killed often and easily, that is code for powerlessness," said Kansas State University psychologist John Murray, who's studied violence and stereotypes in the media for the past 30 years. "These image persist because too few minorities are in the industry. Roughly 80% of video game programmers are white, about four percent of designers are Latino, and less than three percent are Black according to preliminary results of an International Game Developers Association survey. Some in the industry believe race in games is a serious issue that has been ignored for too long. The video industry claims that educated, young white males create games for other educated, young white males and not minorities. Regardless, games are an expressive medium. They are an art form, just like movies, theater and literature. We're seeing, to a large extent, that the games that are being designed unconsciously include the biases, opinions and reflections of their creators. And obviously, whites see Blacks and
Latinos as criminals and gradually that's how our children see themselves and behave according.
A 2006 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation revealed that Black youths between 8 and 18 years old played video and computer games roughly 90 minutes a day - almost 30 minutes more than white youths. And Latinos play about 10 minutes more per day than whites. Therefore, since Blacks are the most obsessive players it stands to reason that Blacks are the most negatively effected. However experts say that if you've got kids who can sit in front of a video game for hours, then they have the cognitive thought process to learn how to build the game.
The video game industry is all about money. No one really cares about your skin color or gender if you are a well-trained video game designer or illustrator. The problem is that our youth and adult players see themselves as players and not designers or illustrators. Therefore unless they're motivated to get on the business end versus the player end of the video game phenomenon they will continue to be portrayed in a negative light and also miss out on a ten billion dollar a year industry
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