Most video games are made by Western Developers for Western audiences. They tend to treat non-Western cultures, religions, and people as curiosities at best and dangers to American ideals at worst.
While video games are notorious for playing fast and loose with other cultures, a new group of developers is refusing to exploit them as props or machine gun fodder. These developers not only make a conscious effort to understand and honor the people represented in games but challenge players to do the same.
This year’s Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), the nation’s largest video game convention for fans, demonstrated the best and worst video games have to offer in terms of understanding people groups outside our cultural context. Above the booth for Far Cry 4 hung a giant poster of a white man with blonde hair sitting atop a beheaded Hindu statue with an assault rifle and a rocket launcher.
In the Far Cry series, the player’s primary interaction with people of other cultures is not to understand them but to exploit and subdue them. But the cultural insensitivity in Far Cry 4 is tame compared to its predecessor. Far Cry 3 puts players in the shoes of Jason Brody, an American vacationing on an island in Southeast Asia when he and his friends are kidnapped. Brody escapes and finds himself embroiled in a war to overthrow the pirates that have turned the island into a hotbed of drugs and human trafficking. As the game progresses, the island’s indigenous people adopt Brody as their savior and he goes on to colonize the island.
The Far Cry series is not the only culturally exploitative game on the market. Video games tend to “exoiticize” or demonize people of other cultures, said Kevin Schut, who wrote Of Games and God. For instance, most Indian characters in games are mysterious religious gurus and Arabic characters are typically terrorists.
“These stereotypes reinforce misguided beliefs that we have about those who are different than us,” Schut said.
But another game shown at PAX tells a different story. Never Alone features the Inupiaq people, a Native Alaskan tribe. Andrew Stein of E-Line Media, the organization producing the game, told me his team hoped Never Alone would be a means to share and celebrate extended world culture and inspire youth to take an interest in other countries and traditions…Read More
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