Can video games appropriately address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism...

Can video games appropriately address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism? Or should it be left out entirely?

Two games that come to mind in that regard are Bioshock: Infinite and the new Wolfenstein. Having played Infinite, I felt they did a decent job at depicting race relations in early America. However, a regular at my store brought Wolfenstein back to return it as he found it very distasteful that the game said nibba multiple times in the beginning.

We discussed how such things shouldn't be in games, as we don't play games to face the cruel realities of the world. In a game about super nazis spouting nibba at the player it makes sense, but is it appropriate?

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>address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism?
I wouldn't mind if hate crimes got exposed

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I want to say that "I want to go back to when politic wasn't in vidya"but what I really want is to go back when I didn't care or noticed it, can't even play older games without noticing how it has politics shoved into them

Interesting, care to say what games those were?

Got any examples of older vidya that has politics shoved in?

Shut up nigger

> Can video games appropriately address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism?
Yes
> Or should it be left out entirely?
Yes

>goldstein

Yes, but it requires two things (impartiality is not one of them, surprisingly)
First, a familiarity with the topic you're commenting on. It's why The New Order is superior in story and such to The New Colossus. The New Order is based around the Nazis and their effect on Europe; it's a game made by Europeans. The New Colossus is a game about the effect of the Nazis and racism on America, but it was still written by Europeans who don't know as much about the nuances of American race relations.

The second is a mastery of the video game medium, both mechanically and as a narrative vehicle. Without this, the developer will have story and mechanics like water and oil: co-existing in the same container but no real interaction between the two. A good corollary is Maus. It has an understanding of both the Holocaust and the Comic medium and uses both to convey the particular ideas of former in the latter in the most accurate way (accurate to the creator's vision that is)

Kojima may be a hack but he has a clear grasp on the ideas of nuclear deterrence and proliferation and the video game as an interactive narrative

Yes of course they can if done appropriately. Video games are no different from any other medium with regards to what it can effectively address.

That's not to say that anyone's ever actually done it in vidya very successfully, as most of it is crass commercial shit designed to milk players' wallets indefinitely, and the artsy indie games that come out are made by shitty artists whose banal inane myopic bullshit would be laughed out of any other medium. If That Dragon Cancer was a short film rather than a video game it would be lambasted for being well-intentioned but ultimately shallow. As it stands standards for vidya storytelling are so low that no major reviewer pointed out how fucking incongruous a go-karting mini-game that keeps score is in a game that's supposed to be about grief and pain and loss.

They can, but they shouldn't
Video games are for escapism.
Politics should take the very back seat, like niggers

why are nazis saying nibba? is that some german thing?

The mainstream media overplays the presence of actual, real racism in the United States. If you show a libertarian or a conservative a case where someone was unfairly discriminated against because of their skin color, then they will agree: That was a racist act and should be dealt with appropriately. But the cold hard truth is that the facts and numbers don't support this "racism is everywhere" meme that the Dems are trying so hard to push. You know why they're trying so desperately to convince you that racism is everywhere, right? Because the Democratic party can't survive without racism. It NEEDS racism to exist so that people will vote for them. It's a disgusting hypocritical lie that they tell. And when there's not enough actual racism to fit their narrative, they false flag or change the definition of racism to suit their needs.

Now the GOP has its own share of problems, don't get me wrong. And there are still a few real actual racists in the United States. But it's nowhere near as prevalent as the Dems would have you believe.

Remember that the UK likes to list Muslims as "asians" in their reports.

The fucks a nibba?

A black Twitter meme. It's actually kind of funny.

Yoko Taro touched this subject in both original Nier and Automata without bringing in retarded modern political analogies.
Both Nier and 9S are massive racists going on a genocide crusade on creatures they deem vile and lesser.

youtube.com/watch?v=Fi6-Ypvg17M

>racism

Only if we do away with outdated video game tropes that restrict access to them. Things like bosses, skill based challenge and win/loss conditions keep people from the message, especially women and minority players.

They can, but they have to do it in a way that is fundamentally different to a medium like books or film. In video games you're the active participant rather than the observer, the games have to fundamentally give you options and let you make decisions with regards to the racism, and have the consequences portrayed accordingly. The best examples of racism in vidya I've seen are the Paradox grand strategy games (or any 4X game really), because the games manage to show why people make racist decisions in the first place (self-interest) and they show how that racism can benefit the player.

Of course, when you give players the ability to be racist they often come to the conclusion that the racism is justified and makes sense, especially in situations where the player outright benefits from it, the way the perpetrators of racism did historically.

This pretty much hits the nail on the head.
While there were some good moments in Wolfenstein 2 the white-ass Nazi fascist pigs line was great it felt more comical because they had no idea what they were doing.

They can, but they shouldn't

>Wolfenstein 2
It's actually Wolfenstein 11

this

Racism is already prevalent throughout video games, it's just either stat-based between a player and his/her avatar(s) or a presumptuous dialogue between the story writer and him/herself, and involves fantasy races or 'classes' instead of real-life ones. If anything, that's the behavior that should be analyzed.

Impossible, every writer of this hack industry are preachy as fuck. Even fantasy racism in games is taken to 11 and try hard to draw a parallel with nowadays issues, it takes anyone out of the experience absurdly hard.

>family claim
>police are investigating
>Daily Mail knows the truth
the STATE of daily mail brainlets, stop gargling Paul Dacre's cum

sure. I don't play games, but it gives me something to shitpost about.

>no source

>in a game about super nazis spouting nibba at the player

It's MC's dad yelling at him because he was kissing a black girl in a flashback. The Nazis barely acknowledge black people since by 1961 they've been shuffled off into slavery or extermination ghettos.

Sup Forums troll article, hard to believe there are people on Sup Forums who still take it seriously.

A video game is a product of its creators, the same way a book, tv show, or movie are. They may choose to take on and tackle such messages as they see fit. Whether or not they do a good job in the eyes of the public is another thing, but as they are the ones creating the product and denying the ability to do so would be against freedom of speech, I feel they are entirely allowed to do so as they see fit.

>the game said nibba multiple times in the beginning.


just say nigger,fucking reddit

>Can video games appropriately address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism?

Hypothetically if video game producers were capable of doing that in the first place.

I just want to be friends with white people but they keep calling me a spic when they learn my name and tell me to go back even though I was born in the United States to legal immigrants.

Why are white people so mean?

Give a different name. Wow, so hard

Just tell them that you're Mexican by heritage but that you're civilized.

So you saying San Andreas is a fucking piece of shit game but Uncharted 4 wasn't because the latter handled the black people better?

>someone says something negative about nazis
>a bunch of people start posting black crime statistics with no sources
every time

>is it appropriate?
Of course it is. It's not like every game has to be for everyone.

That said, real life racism depicted in video games always comes off as heavy handed preaching. Whereas fantastical analogies to real racism usually completely miss the point.

If a game wants to explore racism then it should do so inside its own reality and not from real world sources because our reality is as morally gray and corrupt as it gets.

>Can video games appropriately address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism?
No, because the only way they can make it part of the story is to follow the typical ridiculous cartoon racism angle and try to pass it off as some sort of serious argument about the issue.

Racism arises not from distaste for the color of one's skin and facial features, but for the race's behavior, intelligence and cultural norms (which stem from the former). Skin color is merely an easy identifier for race that is visible from a distance.

If a videogame were to appropriately portray the problems of the human subspecies in a truthful manner, all it would do is make players even more racist as they can only come to logical conclusions about the observable bad behavior of certain races. If a story was to be written about some fictional notNazis locking up fictional notJews because the latter was funding / abetting massive moral injustices and a Marxist uprising in their fictional notGermany, which side would the player be more willing to side with? I think the answer is obvious.

Not really. Familiarity with a concept doesn't necessarily mean your personal background.
Rockstar North did a ton of research into real gangs and the social conditions of the time.
Similarly, Machine Games is a swedish developer but they also were able to pull perspectives from other individuals from across Europe, particularly Germans and the like.

It's why the Liesel bit in New Colossus is funnier to Germans than it is to Americans; Liesel is a parody of a particular genre of film that was very popular in Germany in the 50s-60s

>Infinishit depicting anything decent
Not once was nigger said in that entire game, nor was an unjust act of prejudiced violence towards one shown. And no, that pathetic ball throwing shit does not count.

>Having played Infinite, I felt they did a decent job at depicting race relations in early America


This has to be bait. How the fuck do you come to believe not only that you know what life was like 100 years ago, but that it was anything like BI? Infinite has the absolute most shallow depiction of every single issue it attempts to touch on.

>Can video games appropriately address/bring awareness to issues in today's society such as racism?
sure
>Two games that come to mind in that regard are Bioshock: Infinite and the new Wolfenstein
no