Race in Games - Racial Tensions in LA Noire as Character Development - Extra Credits

So, it's been a long time since we said we were going to talk about the various brands of diversity in games. Too long. But, we do have a good reason. You see, every time one of you wrote in asking about it, we would always give the same reply. We're waiting for a modern game to deal with the subject intelligently so we can use it as an example. Well, I'm happy to announce that this long-awaited example has finally arrived and not at all in the manner I expected. But, before we start, let me contextualize the discussion. We were originally going to approach this topic much like we did the first two diversity episodes, finding a good example character from some game, talking about why that character works, what makes them meaningful, why this medium would benefit from more like them, and so on. And we could still do that. But, then we realized the rather obvious fact that we already did that. Twice. Our argument's still the same. You could take our sexual diversity topic, swap sexuality for race, and the overall point would remain the same. There's no sense in turning this series into a Mad Lib. So, I think it might be more worth our time

to broaden the discussion from racial diversity to race in games in general. Today, we'll be talking about L.A. Noire. Now, I'll readily admit that L.A. Noire isn't perfect. The running and shooting controls are clunky. Most of the game's mechanics seem to be lifted from the mystery games targeted at 40-year-old women that you can only find in the bargain bin at Walmart. And that revolutionary facial capture system works great for everything except helping you tell whether or not someone was lying. But, say what you will about L.A. Noire's flaws, the game addressed race and did it well. A few days ago, I was talking about this to some of my friends over dinner, and they said to me, "How can you say that when there are no playable characters that are a minority?" Well, racial issues aren't just minority issues. They're universal. They affect all of us. In the U.S., racial issues have started wars and made and unmade presidents. Even if you're the whitest, least racist, Anglo-Saxon Protestantist guy in the world, racial issues still have an impact on you. Looking the other way doesn't lessen their impact on our lives. And here's where L.A. Noire shines. It doesn't use race to define a character. After all, no one in the real world is defined by their race. We're all a polyglot mix of the entirety of our experiences, race

and all that comes with it being only a part. Rather, L.A. Noire uses racial issues to inform the player about the world they're stepping into and to give us perspective on the characters we're going to play. Here, racial tensions are used as a narrative device. We all carry around so much conscious and subconscious baggage regarding race. Baggage that can't be divorced from us even when immersed in a game world. Designers can play on this understanding of racial issues to pack a lot more narrative into a limited space than they could do otherwise. As soon as they touch on racial issues, all of our extrinsic comes into play and we start assigning a great deal of meaning to small actions or bits of dialogue. This meaning gives us context, context we can use to understand characters and to weigh their actions. For example, by the way, we aren't going to be dropping any big spoilers, but we are going to talk about some very early stuff in the game. So, if you want to avoid all spoilers at all costs, you may want to get out while you can. Anyway, early in L.A. Noire, you're given a case in which a Jewish person kills an anti-Semite shortly after the end of the Second World War. Detective Cole Phelps, the main character, shows no sympathy, no empathy, but no anger or disgust either. This is the moment where they hammer home that for Cole, there's a

very clear right and wrong. The law is the law and the letter of the law shall be obeyed without consideration for circumstances. In D&D terms, he's your straight-up lawful type, very by the book and honestly kind of preachy. And this is reinforced throughout the game, which, without giving any spoilers away, is a big part of what makes Cole interesting later on, even though many of the characters that populate the world of L.A. Noire seem more vibrant and more nuanced in comparison. But if we hadn't had this moment and gotten to see the way Cole reacted to the racially charged case before him and assigned to it our understanding of racial issues and anti-Semitism from the outside world, Cole's later attempts at moralizing would come off as weak and irritating. For example, there's a point at which he chides a cop for drinking on the job. Without the context and the meaning we assigned in the earlier racial encounter, his dialogue would just sound like weak prudish moralizing. But now it helps us confirm our understanding of his character, which leads us to the next moment where we're really informed about Cole's character and given material with which to contextualize all of his actions. Now, we're trying really hard to limit the spoilers in this episode, and we're not going to address anything that happens after Cole's second major promotion. But, we really need to dive in here. So,

again, spoiler alert. There's a cutscene a few hours into the game where Cole goes into a nightclub with another character. That character then acts disgusted because, quote, a negro put his hands on him, and then immediately after slaps a woman for talking back to him. Now, like with race, we all carry around a lot of baggage with regards to violence towards women. And this scene is clearly set up to use our extrinsic feelings about both subjects to help us understand not only the character who performs these offensive actions, but also the subtleties of Cole's character as well. Because this happens in a cutscene, the player can do nothing. So, Cole, that righteous lawful character we've been playing, simply stands there without intervening or even speaking up as all this goes on. Suddenly, all that moralizing, all of the holier-than-thou talk from Cole begins to make sense. He goes from being one-dimensional to being a deeply flawed and much more interesting character. The key here is that the character he goes to the nightclub with is a cop. Now, we see who Cole really is. He's willing to talk a good game and he's brave in the face of physical danger, but he can't stand up to people socially, especially his peers. At this point, all the moralizing comes into sharp relief. Every time he's

chided some cop about their wrongdoing, he's never followed through. He never takes any action to prevent his fellow law enforcers from behaving in a way that he says he believes is wrong. He wants them to view him as a righteous individual, but he's never willing to risk the true social danger because he needs those around him to validate his carefully constructed image of himself. All his climbing the ranks and need for citations suddenly makes a lot of sense after this scene. How this plays out in the end and what later events mean in this light, we won't talk about here. But, without the use of those external triggers, Rockstar could never have conveyed so much subtle information about a character so quickly and efficiently. You can even apply this sort of tactic to fantasy. Race can be used to give context in a science fiction universe with nearly the same efficacy that it can be used in modern urban drama. Whether you're tackling racial issues in a pre-civil rights historical game like L.A. Noire or exploring their effect in a fantasy world like The Witcher, race can be used to give context because it all comes from the same source, us. Now, I know it might seem like I've gotten a bit off topic by now. After all, the original question we aim to tackle here was, how can we construct a meaningful minority character in a video game? But in writing this, I'm coming to realize that's the wrong way to tackle the

issue. If we try and make a template or even give guidelines on how to make a meaningful minority character, we're only going to end up assisting in the creation of stereotypes or worse, caricatures. The truth is, we learn about a character through how they deal with racial issues, not by what race they are. This is as true for minority characters as it is for those who occupy the majority role in their societies. To flesh out a minority character, you simply have to understand what their reaction to racial situations says about them as a character. And every character is going to react to those situations differently. It's about discovering who your character is, and there's a lot more to that than skin color. And the same goes for gender, sexuality, religion, and all those other facets of diversity, too. Just remember what you're drawing on if you choose to use race in a game, and understand what you're tapping into when you decide to harness these feelings to give context to your characters in your world because these are very powerful emotions, and you can't afford to treat them lightly. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.

Woo.