The Escapist Bulletin: Making a big deal of it

Here’s a question for you: what’s more fun than watching a movie about a ragtag group of survivors fighting their way through a horde of zombies? The answer is easy: being a group of ragtag survivors fighting their way through a horde of zombies. That’s probably what was going through the minds of the various designers and artists at Valve when they were working on Left 4 Dead and its sequel.

What Valve probably wasn’t expecting was for Left 4 Dead 2 to be called racist by a writer for the Houston Chronicle. Writing in the Chronicle’s gaming blog, Willie Jefferson said:

“One of the games that comes to mind is Left 4 Dead 2. Though the game isn't out yet, it's already causing an uproar. Set in New Orleans, players will have to fight their way through hordes of zombies - with several of them who appear to be African-Americans.

"When I saw the first trailer for the game, all I could think about was Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. Setting the game in a city that was scene of dead, bloated bodies floating by so soon afterward was a bad call, IMHO. The city has had enough to deal with -- Valve, you should have spared them, even if it's just a video game.”

Mr Jefferson makes two points about Left 4 Dead 2 in his post. Whether you agree with him or not, the discussion about how developers use real-world events in their games is a legitimate one.

As an African-American writer living in the American South, Mr Jefferson understandably has strong feelings about Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans and the African-American community in particular. Does this mean that New Orleans is now off-limits to developers and by extension all difficult periods in history? Well, that’s the conversation we need to have, but Jefferson muddies that point by drawing race into the discussion.

When the racism card gets played, whether justly or unjustly, it’s like a metaphorical tree on the train tracks. It brings a debate to a screeching halt as such an accusation tends to illicit an emotional response, as is evident in Valve writer Chet Faliszek’s rebuttal:

"Utter insanity... There are mixed races of zombies, there are all different races of zombies that you shoot, and since we placed it in New Orleans, that makes it racist? I honestly re-read the [Houston Chronicle] paragraph about five times ... but when two of the characters in your game are African-American, it's a weird thing to be accused of. We're like, 'how does this work'?”

The discussion over race in video games is one that we do need to have, but it isn’t the same discussion as the one about real-world events in games. While there is an overlap between the two issues, everyone needs to be clear about which discussion they are having.

Is Left 4 Dead 2 a racist game? Almost certainly not, but Jefferson's comments about Hurricane Katrina, as valid as they might be, appeared in a post entitled ‘Racism in video games: The new norm?’ and it’s this lack of focus that has confused the issue and made it into something that it wasn’t.

Gaming is unique amongst other entertainment media in that it has a following that is more interconnected than any other, and when we have these conversations all parties need to set aside their emotional reactions and express their feelings and thoughts in a calm and - more importantly - considered way. Otherwise, we’re not going to get anywhere.