In Video Games the Bad Guys Come in All Shades of Stereotypes
A college student's study reveals a string of objectionable Asian characters.
Published August 18, 2006
Dishonorable samurai, kung fu masters and slanty-eyed Chinatown gang members rule the digital video game landscape whenever a storyline calls for ethnic representation. It’s a pervasive problem, according to one university student, and he’s calling the video game industry out on it.
Robert Parungao, 23, is a self-described avid gamer who spent most of adolescence perched in front of the television set playing popular games like “Shadow Warrior,” an action game where the players assume the identity of Lo Wang, a sinewy Japanese henchman who guzzles fortune cookies for power. At first, the fifth generation Canadian who is half Filipino and half Chinese, was happy just to see a character that looked like him, but as his cultural awareness heightened he began to notice a problem.
Mainly, Lo Wang stereotypes were rampant in a six billion dollar industry that capitalizes on riveting young minds. So he made race representation in video games the topic of his honors thesis at the University of British Columbia, and suddenly he was being interviewed by BBC News and maligned by other gamers who accused him of pulling the race card.
Obviously, Parungao hit a nerve.
The gaming industry is used to weathering criticism about violence and sexism, but racism?
“I’m raising issues that have never been looked at before,” he said.
Academic Reading Meets a Culturally Mixed Up Samurai
“I was coming at it with gamer sensibility,” Parungao said about his research, which involved eight months of academic reading and video game playing — two of his greatest passions. He is now pursuing a master’s degree in sociology.
For his thesis, Parungao chose four video games: “Kung Fu,” “Shadow Warrior,” “Warcraft 3” and “Grand Theft Auto 3” (GTA 3). He initially borrowed the research model of race representation from film and television and applied it to video games, but found that it really didn’t fit. Games speak to its audience interactively, he explained, not like in television and movies where stories are being told to you.
“It’s the aspect of play. You yourself are the protagonist. You’re the one in [Grand Theft Auto] that picks up the baseball bat, runs through Chinatown and kills a Triad [gang member],” he said.
In “Kung Fu,” the main character chops and kicks his way through a temple to save his lover, giant pandas fight an army of demons in “Warcraft 3” and Chinese gangs vie with the Yakuza for territory in GTA 3. But Parungao said the most blatantly offensive is the culturally mixed up Lo Wang character, who throws grenades and yells, “Just like Hiroshima!” and preys on bathing girls, sometimes with chopsticks.
Stereotypes like those in “Shadow Warrior” are so blatant that they can be held up to ridicule, but it’s the subtle racism that slowly seeps below the skin. The ever present danger in these representations lie in the continued reiteration of a lot of stereotypes of kung fu masters and “Me love you long time” exotic women, said Parungao.
“I’ve never seen an Asian character portrayed as a person as opposed to a Shaolin master or a samurai. In video games, their actions are dictated by their skin color,” he added.
Reading Too Much Into a Pastime
Reaction to the thesis has been mixed. Panicked parents have asked how to deal with the new study and gamers have lashed out in online forums.
“If this guy is going to base his ‘thesis’ off of a game like ‘Kung Fu,’ then he seriously needs to quit college right now. I wonder what he would say about ‘Zelda II: The Adventure of Link’? Remember when you enter certain palaces; you had these white magicians with pointy hats that disappeared? They looked like Klan members … I wonder what he would have said about that,” said one gamer on gamespot.com.
Others have, of course, accused Parungao of reading too much into a recreational pastime. But blame should be placed on both the industry and its consumers, he said.
Texas-based 3D Realms, which made “Shadow Warriors” in 1997, called their game “an attempt to parody all of those low budget kung fu movies we all loved as kids.”
“Anytime you create a non-Caucasian character, you’re going to have people who believe you’ve portrayed them in a bad light. It is to be expected,” said Scott Miller, vice president of Action Entertainment, a 3D Realms affiliate.
Nintendo, Blizzard Entertainment and Rock Star Games, which made “Kung Fu,” “Warcraft 3” and “GTA 3” respectively, did not respond to requests for comment.
Parungao reflects on all the attention with a sense of bemusement. What started out as an honor’s thesis he wrote to get good grades and get into graduate school became a lightning rod for discussion on race representation.
“I don’t think there is much racism in video games to begin with, and wherever it may exist I think overall, video games balance out whatever stereotypes they create for various ethnicities. Like in GTA 3, Chinatown is the center of the Triads, a Chinese gang, but there are also Italian mobsters and other gangsters around so it’s not like they’re saying, ‘Hey look, dirty evil Chinese gangbangers!’” said Artie Lee, 21.
Lee, a student from UC San Diego, said video games don’t introduce racism or stereotypes to children, but he doesn’t think positive Asian Pacific American video games characters exist.
“As an Asian American who grew up playing lots of video games, I have to say that none of it ever felt racist to me and I don’t think I’ve met anyone who thought less of me because of something he saw in a video game,” Lee added.
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