Two recent controversies have raised spirits in the video game world on both sides of the political spectrum. We’ve said it before: Far from being the conformist and sedentary caricature they’re sometimes portrayed, gamers are one of the most critical and active communities in the world.
Firstly, videos of reactions to the appearance of a character from Spiderman 2, “le doctore Young”, “une entomologue”, which in the original version is referred to with the pronouns they/them, are spreading on the Internet, that is a non-binary character. All over the Internet you can see criticism of this, reactions from live players and long speeches about why it is wrong (or right) to introduce such a character in a video game as large as Sony’s. On the other hand, actress Stefanie Joosten, who played Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V: Phantom Pain 10 years ago, criticized her character’s (skimpy) outfit. In the game, Quiet was required to wear little clothing because a mutation allowed her to perform a type of photosynthesis, although the game’s creator, Hideo Kojima, who had always liked to sexualize his female characters, could have looked for any other excuse to take off her clothes . to the character.
The debate is deeper than the one we are used to, because fundamentally and in a collective environment like this, the question is not so much about the author (we have already discussed him on cancellations) but about whether we, as consumers, are will be able to extract the gold nuggets from a product in which we see dark spots. Historically, the answer has been: Yes, let’s not kid ourselves: no film editor denies his work, no matter how much it was sublimated in the Ku Klux Klan hagiography “The Birth of a Nation,” and no documentary filmmaker stops, to use the recording techniques invented by Lenni Riefenstall in Hitler’s Triumph of the Will. Video games are now simply the battlefield on which these questions are resolved. Is it possible that those who see forced inclusivity in Spiderman 2 can enjoy the benefits of an endlessly entertaining game like this? Is it possible that those who point out Metal Gear Solid V’s machismo are seeing a mechanically well-rounded game with a very solid anti-war case as its backdrop? Ask questions.
Moment quoting Young’s character in Spiderman 2.
“I respect the decisions Kojima and his team made when designing the character. So I respect the calm look choices. But I also understand the perspective of people who are not so happy with the way they were portrayed,” Joosten told IGN in a sentence that was simply more conciliatory than the dust it stirred up. “This game came out in 2015 and I think the video game landscape has changed a lot since then,” Joosten said in the interview. Maybe that’s the key to everything. Video games are cultural artifacts, and saying this is tantamount to saying they are political artifacts. That is, as children of its own creative societies, the United States seeks to impose a more progressive vision of the world on the culture it exports, while Japan, the other great power in these negotiations, opts for opposing terms and continues to promote excessive sexualization of the Characters, feminine or the most trite stereotypes related to racial issues. Europe would, to use the tug-of-war metaphor, remain in the middle of the rope, caught between the two forces.
It is worth remembering that in the United States, between 0.5% and 1.6% of adults identify as transgender or non-binary. And it’s also worth remembering the video in which an elderly Japanese woman being interviewed remains undaunted when a man in a costume comes from behind to scare her, but she screams as the man be takes off his costume and reveals his skin color. Finally, it is worth remembering that video games are not something local, not even Western, but something global. And we have to face the evidence: there are countries that are more sexist than others. And there are countries that are more racist than others. It is good that we become aware of this, but we should know that someone who is forced to open his morality by force exaggerates his original postulates. We don’t have to go that far: this happened to Japan itself in the first half of the last century. These tensions between ways of seeing the world have always existed, and what we are experiencing now is nothing more than the translation of the same dialectical dance that we have already experienced in other arts into a new scenario. And that’s not a bad thing, because by introducing the political (and controversial) dimension to video games, we’re just underlining its importance. So welcome is the controversy: “You bark, then we ride.”
You can follow BABELIA on Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.