User:Cbies/Race and video games work page

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The Pew Research Center found that 19% of Hispanic respondents and 11% of black respondents described themselves as "gamers," compared to 7% of Caucasians. Nielsen survey research found similar results. (Capitalized "Caucasian." Wikipedia MoS says not to capitalize black.)

The Game Developers Conference, a popular annual video game conference frequented by both industry and players, runs an "Advocacy Track" to "address new and existing issues within the realm of social advocacy. Topics covered range from diversity to censorship to quality of life." While initially started in 2013 to address issues around gender and gaming, the "Advocacy Track" features panels explicitly interested in improving diversity in gaming more broadly, including concerns around race. and. (Added wikilink to "Gender representation in video games.")

In 2015, Pew Research Center found that 35% of blacks, 36% of Hispanics, and 24% of whites surveyed believe that minorities are portrayed poorly in video games. The range of playable characters in certain gaming contexts has an overtly racial component. For example, David J. Leonard found that 80% of black male video game characters as of 2003 were sports competitors, and that high proportion of black male characters in sports video games has enabled (predominantly white male) gamers to practice what Adam Clayton Powell III refers to as "high-tech blackface", a digital form of minstrelsy that allows white players to effectively 'try on' blackness without being forced to acknowledge or confront the degrading racist histories surrounding minstrelsy. (Tried to confront confusing sentence structure.)

The potential for video games as a site for promulgating reductive, racist tropes has prompted many to point out the use of yellowface, or "the donning and using of the 'yellow' body by whites" to degrade and marginalize Asian characters in a variety of games as well. Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu argues that the Duke Nukem 3D series (including Duke Nukem 3D and its spiritual sequel Shadow Warrior) enable the gamer to identify strongly with the protagonist, due to the first-person perspective employed by the games. ("Invisiblize" is not a word.)

There was significant backlash against Fritz on online forums and blogs, with players talking about how colonization has always happened, and its appearance in the game is simply realism. (Clarified sentence.)

Media theorist Alexander Galloway, in his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, argues that these kinds of games are always an "ideological interpretation of history" or the "transcoding of history into specific mathematical models." (Corrected grammar and style.)

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While some video games have been more proactive about including characters of varied racial backgrounds—notably, The Last of Us had four significant black characters—there is further criticism of their roles as NPCs, where black characters are either offered as sacrifice for the protagonists' benefit or are themselves antagonists in a story defined by white protagonists.