I have a sneaking suspicion that RPG games are inherently racist.
Hear me out.
I’ve thought about this for a while, and I don’t think it’s intentional
at all. Or maybe I just read too deeply into things like this. If you’ve ever
read Umberto Eco’s Inventing the Enemy
you’ll know that we seem to naturally, throughout history, create enemies to
propel our societies forward. We rely on differences (physical, political,
religions, social, and economic) to separate the undesirables out. All this hinges
on a lack of empathy toward this “other,” because once we feel empathy for the
other, these differences can no longer be superficial.
From birth we are trained to recognize and pick out classes, like being
a young kid and seeing a homeless person, and then—in the same day
sometimes—going to a neighbor’s house of moderate wealth. Then, while still
being kids, we encounter as we get a little older videogames of varying
complexity that implement progression and class based forms of entertainment.
Not only are they competitive, but each class’s specialization locks you into a
certain path of gameplay. Fantasy roleplaying games take this concept further
and suggest perks and disadvantages for playing a certain race. Elves may have
bonuses to stealth and intelligence, or charisma even, evoking the image of an
elite member of society, connected to social and political strongholds.
Conversely, orcs may have penalties to intelligence and charisma, but they have
proficiencies that boost strength and traits that are integral to physical
combat. To add insult to injury, at least in the Dungeons and Dragons game
system, orcs are also typically evil in alignment. (I once played a game as an
orc paladin, and the whole time I was reminded by the dugeon master that orcs
could not be paladins because they were evil and having a good, or even neutral
alignment, was tantamount to breaking the rules!)
Race is an artificial term already, as there is no genetic difference
between a human from Africa and a human from North Africa. While there are
physical differences between someone from Africa, who has extra skin pigment
after exposure to blistering, equatorial sunlight, and a North American person,
there is no degree of separation that would deny procreation between the two.
Race, if anything is an artificial moniker that human beings have employed to
categorically separate individuals from each other whom hail from a variety of
geographical regions on the planet. Yet there are stereotypes, not unlike the
class based systems in role playing games and other video games that implement
class and skill progression trees, which entertain the idea of “racial traits”
(I.e. Asians are intelligent, Blacks are lazy (yet exceedingly strong),
Caucasians are politically cunning). These racial stereotypes supplant the
familiarity we all share as human beings with a veil of obscuring unfamiliarity
and suspicion. This is how “others” are created.
So imagine the reality that as children, while we are still building a
conceptual framework of the work through our observations and experiences, we
are encountering the ideas, suggestions, that certain people are better at some
things and others are not. Not only that, we are doing battle with, struggling
for resources with, engendering a “race” based competitive ecosystem with
complete strangers. The entire premise is literally Darwinian in nature.
Obviously, this is all introspective speculation and the strength of
this argument depends on how willing you are to look into it. But I could
easily write a book on my experiences, incorporating trolling, anonymity, death
threats against female developers, and Varg Vikernes’ roleplaying game MYFAROG.
The latter is funny, because on my way to Norway a few years ago I sat right
next to a personal friend of Varg who told me that certain, less desirable
races, were meant to specifically emulate the stereotypes of people of color
(specifically blacks).
Anyways, food for thought.
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