ENG 225 Rhetoric and Gaming

Brock (2011). ‘‘When keeping it real goes wrong’’: Resident Evil 5, racial representation, and gamers The article claims that game developers often use people of color in ways that are insensitive. This article examines gamers’ reactions to a developer’s use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror video game, Resident Evil 5. The observations hope to give insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege. The researcher analyzed Resident Evil 5 while completing the game once on normal difficulty. Then he conducted a discourse analysis of the post, ‘‘Black Looks on RE5 Racism’’ (Fahey, 2007) and the discussions that were left in the comments about the post that illustrate the debate over RE5’s racial depictions. Their articulation of RE5’s racial approach rests upon their visualization of game mechanics, genre conventions, and cultural beliefs about gaming, technology, and race rather than their experiences of the actual game. Keywords: Black, race and ethnic...

Yang, S. (2014). Effects of avatar race in violent video games on racial attitudes and aggression The article claims that the media frequently portrays Black characters as violent in video games. These characters reinforce racial stereotypes and aggression perpetuating racist or prejudice tendencies amongst White gamers. There were 126 White college students, which is 60% male and 40% female; the gender of the participants was not relevant to the experiment though. The participants were told that they were only being tested on their gaming skills. After giving their consent, participants played Saints Row 2, a game that is Grand Theft Auto, for 20 min on a Playstation 3. The participants were randomly assigned to play the game as either a Black or White male avatar. Prior to the participants’ arrival at the experiment, the experimenter set up the game with the appropriate avatar and rotated the game view, so that the avatar was seen face on by the participant when he or she star...