| Back in the age of Atari, video gamers preferred their antagonists to be fictional, if not anonymous. We fought invaders from the cosmos, eluded persistent ghosts, and leapt over flaming barrels thrown at us by an angry gorilla. We plunked down shiny quarters in sour-smelling arcades and were transported to a bright, spectral world far unlike our own. And we were content.
But now, as graphics and sound approach near-cinema fidelity, a strange thing has happened: video game adversaries evolved into us. They look like us. They move and drive like us. They have conversations with each other and hold to beliefs as firmly as anyone living in the Bible Belt. They have names, too, like Olga Gurlukovich or Kenji Kasen. The boundary between life and fiction has blurred and certain groups consider it an affront.
Take, for instance, Sony's upcoming game, Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain. A covert espionage fantasy, the first mission originally involved players battling the Quebec Liberation Front – a group of terrorist separatists apparently based on the Front de Libération du Quebec (or FLQ) of the 1970s. Sony has now edited that sequence out after the Bloc Quebecois criticized it last October as coming "dangerously close to hate propaganda."
"If there was a game where people shoot at blacks or Jews, there'd be an uproar," commented Jean Dorion, head of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Montreal.
Regrettably, the game he's describing and others like it exist, courtesy of the Internet.
Most racist video games are banal hacks of famous arcade classics. A cursory search through Google turned up heaps of fascist Galaga, Tetris and Pac-Man variants. In a bizarre twist, there are supremacist add-ons for Wolfenstein 3D — a game where you originally shot at Nazis.
There are plenty of home-brewed games, too, like Border Patrol (with Mexican border runners as targets) and the unsavory Kaboom which lets you play a Palestinian suicide bomber on an Israeli road. Amateurish and shallow, it's hard to imagine any of these games recruiting someone into the neo-Nazi fold.
Apparently not so for the latest batch of KKK-branded games, at least according to Matt Hale, head of the white supremacist World Church of the Creator.
"The younger [the player] the better.... If we can influence games and entertainment, it will make people understand we are their friends and neighbours," he says about this new strain of propaganda games.
Resistance Records, the white power music division of the National Alliance, publishes two of the most vicious examples: the first-person shooters Ethnic Cleansing and White Law.
Both games are set in the aftermath of a racial war which has left the Aryan race decimated in America. According to the Resistance website: "your skin is your uniform in this battle for the survival of your kind."
It's the graphic whizbang of these games (at least when compared to previous attempts) that worries the Anti-Defamation League. For the first time, players are immersed in a full-on racist mindset, as an avenging knight of the Ku Klux Klan in Ethnic Cleansing or as a vigilante cop hunting down minorities in White Law.
The setting here is a neo-Nazi's wet dream: a lawless urban landscape brimming over with Hasidic rabbis and Afro-Americans ready to be gunned down. In Ethnic Cleansing, the final objective is to assassinate Israel's Ariel Sharon, who's hiding out in an abandoned subway tunnel.
Yet, despite the graphic advancements made in Resistance Record's offerings, everything about these titles pales in comparison to mainstream fare. More particularly, the underlying conceit of a game like White Law (where minorities are depicted as "sub-human") rails against the most sought after benchmark in video gaming: non-player characters with human-like artificial intelligence. It’s the one holy grail that could enable video games to transcend films in terms of emotional impact.
For example, the most visceral aspect of the brilliant Second World War action game, Call of Duty, is that every soldier – friend and foe – tries desperately to keep alive. Whether they blindly return fire or just hide in the shadows, watching them clamber to survive is eerily affecting, almost tragic and more immersive than any war movie. And though this survival instinct is a carefully choreographed illusion of intelligence, it steadfastly sustains that old mantra of expert storytelling – the suspension of disbelief.
Unlike Call of Duty, what Resistance Records has crafted are recreations of a slaughter. Their games play like morbid versions of Space Invaders; adversaries here come at you in suicidal waves, as bleary-eyed and unaware as cattle. It’s the Ku Klux Klan fantasy and an insipid one at that. In keeping to their racist biases, these games won’t recruit anyone who actually likes video games, but only other racists.
The conundrum is that, for Ethnic Cleansing and White Law to appeal to the mainstream, Resistance Records would have to make their in-game minorities as skilled and as passionate as the players themselves – a notion, I suspect, that would rankle most white supremacists.
In the end, it’s a futile attempt. Video gamers are generally an open-minded lot. They revere their Japanese heroes, fight alongside Russian comrades, and sell their souls to Italian mafiosos. In trying to make video games intent on recruiting, the National Alliance and the World Church of the Creator have landed themselves squarely and uninvited in enemy territory. |
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