A Race To Battle

As a fan of all (well ok, MOST) of what developer Rockstar puts out, I've been keeping a patient yet keen eye for information on the latest installment in their most iconic franchise, Grand Theft Auto V. I'll save my opinions and hopes for the next GTA for another time (ahem, vehicle customization), but amidst all the rumors, conjecture, official statements, and news articles, something caught my attention a few weeks back.


Supposedly, a disgruntled ex-Rockstar employee "spilled the beans" and leaked a handful of information about the upcoming title, which, as these things often do, spread across the interwebs like a brush fire. Among the arguably juicier and more attention-grabbing rumors was this seemingly benign little nugget:

"The protagonist will be one character, and one character alone. His name is Albert De Silva. He's a half hispanic man who was once part of a crime family in Vice City. He decided to settle down and have kids in Los Santos. He has one son called Kevin De Silva who is your stereotypical CoD player. He's lazy, useless and shouts racial abuse online and is really into FPS games. Kevin does admire his dad though." 

At first glance, this innocuous tidbit is nothing more than amusing, but it bumped me, and I'll tell you why by posing a question: has player-to-player racism over in-game chat really become so widespread and prevalent that we're actually at the point of satirizing it? To Rockstar's credit, it's very clever to incorporate gamer cliches into the in-game environment of a title set in the modern day, but despite our ability to laugh at hackneyed caricatures of ourselves, this shines a spotlight on an issue much larger than just within the gaming community.

The anonymity afforded by the internet has emboldened many to say and do things they normally wouldn't in real life. Don't worry, I'm not going to launch into a full fledged lecture on human behavior on the digital plane, but all you need to do is find a youtube video, just about any one will do, and you'll find that regardless of the subject matter or quality of content, people find an excuse to viciously argue in the comments section. Perhaps it's a result of people finally, for the first time in history, having a truly anonymous outlet to publicly indulge their inner frustrations, or maybe it's a corollary of the relatively recent "everyone's special, your opinion matters, just be yourself and speak your mind, keep it real" attitude that's been finding its footing over the last decade. Or maybe, just maybe, it's in our very nature as human beings to simply be fucking dickwads to eachother. Whatever the case, it's spilled over into the world of online gaming, and with the potent combination of fierce competition, online anonymity, the functionality of real-time voice chat and instant messaging, and a general immaturity among most younger and even some older players, it's no wonder hostilities bubble to the surface as often as they do. What does baffle me, however, is that flagrant racism seems to have become an acceptable code of conduct.

I won't speak to racial inequality in other parts of the world, but I admit I am probably naive when it comes to this topic in the United States, as I was raised in one of the most liberal areas of the country. Racism was never really "a thing" in my life; growing up I assumed, clearly erroneously, that people of different skin colors intermingled seamlessly all over the country just like they did here, since that had always been my experience. Of course by my early 20's I realized I was wrong, but that realization could not and did not prepare me to hear hundreds of disembodied voices of pre-teen caucasians dropping N-bombs on eachother during the heat of online battle.

A few months back, while free-roaming in Red Dead Redemption multiplayer on Xbox Live, I single handedly destroyed and humiliated a posse of two players who had teamed up against me. After twenty minutes or so of a thorough and embarrassing ass-stomping at my hands, they both started sending me messages across Xbox's messaging system. I had expected this, as it happens on a semi-predictable basis when you consistently decimate someone's self esteem along with their on-screen character. One of the kids sent me a few creative variations of the generic "FUK U BRO" message, which is always entertaining and enlightening. But the other guy, who I would later discover was a "good ole boy" from the deep south, went straight for the jugular by letting the N-word fly repeatedly and threatening to "string me up" if I didn't stop winning the in-game battle. 

Now, as a white guy, being called a n----- 37 some odd times by another white guy has little to no effect, but Bo Duke didn't stop there, he went on to detail his supposed connections within the Aryan Brotherhood, and proceeded to warn me that I ought to sleep with one eye open because he was "sending them after" me. I found the entire thing wildly entertaining and I'm not ashamed to admit, as a student of human nature and behavior, I definitely egged him on just to see how far he would go for my own amusement. However, after he called me Toby a few more times and the conversation came to a close, I was left with a profound feeling of disappointment, for a few reasons.

First, the obvious. Say I wasn't a secure white guy in my late twenties, but rather I was an impressionable 15 year old black kid who may or may not already be struggling with race issues; to have your very existence be not only marginalized but also threatened, all because you bested some insecure white kid at some video game...? I think all sane and rational people can agree that it's just cosmically wrong. Who is parenting these little foul-mouthed, intolerant demons, and why are you shoveling your racist belief systems down their gullets so early and so often that they're completely comfortable screaming "FUCK YOU COON!" at the top of their lungs at thirteen years old? You're failing as parents and as human beings.

Second, just soak this in: It's 2012. We're playing online video games with people all over the world using cutting edge technology. We have computers the size of small throw pillows that we plug into flat panel high definition televisions, and their primary purpose is purely for our entertainment. We can send messages instantly from our living rooms and have them be received literally three seconds later on the other side of the globe. Are we really SO far behind the curve as a society that we're socially 200 years behind the world of science? With so much innovation and creativity in the realm of technology and all these amazing gadgets and gizmos at our disposal, are we really using said technology to throw around offensive insults that are more than two centuries old? Let's universally and emotionally catch up with what's going on in the digital world and maybe earn the right to be deserving of all the amazing electronics being created.
 

Finally, and this is just a selfish, personal appeal: be more creative. We get it, you got stomped at Call of Duty and your natural instinct is to lash out. There's nothing wrong with that. But be creative, dammit. Ragging on skin color is played out. It's old. It's cheap, dull and monotonous. You know, "your mama" jokes had a pretty solid, two-decade-long run before they finally became passe. Be original, get clever. Create the next "your mama" craze. Find an innovative, provocative new way to insult and demean your fellow gamer and be hailed as a verbal visionary. There's gotta be something out there we can come up with instead of recycling ugly intolerance from the 17th century. We're better than that. And if we're not, I vote that we put the video games down and focus more on building a tolerant society, virtual or otherwise.

And to all the racists out there who insist on spewing their bile at their fellow gamers, the following message is for you:

"FUK U BRO"