Photo Credit: Topconzient
The video game that I chose for this blog is the one my brother used to play. It is called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). It is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game. The game puts two teams against each other: the terrorists and the counter-terrorists. Both sides’ task is to eliminate the other while also completing separate objectives. For example, in the game terrorists either plant a bomb or take hostages while the counter terrorists either try to prevent the bomb from being planted or rescue the hostages.
For the sake of this blog I asked my brother couple of questions regarding the game. I found out that there are no women in it, not even big pictures or the wall or something like that. This makes me think that CS:GO is very male dominated and it ties to the Frank Schaap’s reading Disaggregation, Technology, and Masculinity where he talks about masculinity. Not only women are totally unrepresented, but the male characters are extremely muscular and caricatures of men. Similar to Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell, the terrorist and Counter-terrorists are men that seem “strained, stereotypically male” (Schaap, 240)
As for the race I found that characters in the game are white. So non white races are also underrepresented. CS:GO reinforces the idea of a “monoculture” Lisa Nakamura mentions in her reading Cybertyping and the Work of Race in the Age of Digital Reproduction. “monocultures are posed here as the opposite of diversity.” (Nakamura, 17)
Since there are no people of color represented in the game_ this creates a monoculture, meaning it’s not diversified.
Also, white male stereotype shown in CS:GO is an example of one of the cybertypes the author talks about.
Representation: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Video Games and Video Gaming Culture
Questions:
1) What will be the future for gender and race representation in video games?
2) What would it take for women and non white people who work in technologies to start more representing themselves?