Racism and Left 4 Dead 2

by guest contributor Alex H

Alex Horn is a Latino existentialist looking to explore the intersections of race, gender, and semantics in the video game world. He is an aspiring independent game designer based in Philadelphia.

This post was inspired in part by Lake Desire’s recent posts on racism in RE5. In them, Lake Desire (who is quickly becoming my muse), points out the problematic depictions of race in the game, and notes that the fact that being “made in Japan does not excuse its racism,” and “because the game was made by people of color does not mean it does not perpetuate white supremacy.”

To some, this may seem obvious; however, if one tries to take what lessons can be learned from the RE5 debacle and apply it to L4D2, you are hit with a feeling of déjà-vu. Responses to comments on racism in L4D2 include incredulity, the nonsense-racism defense, and the same “the plot justifies the portrayal” arguments you get with RE5. “Some people are going to complain about racism in any game that has black people,” etc., etc., etc. You get a veritable derailing for dummies checklist. This confuses the subject. We are not attacking personal motivations, we are examining social phenomenon.

It could be said that only ignorant “fanboys” make these types of arguments; unfortunately, this is not the case¹.

I refer to Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who addresses an article about racism in L4D2:

Utter insanity! Seriously, no offense to journalists anywhere. There’s 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 paragraph about five times, and then there’s another blog post by his writer friend who tried to defend it, but he didn’t defend it, he just talked about something else. Maybe it was a bad day, I don’t know what, 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?”

When we were choosing characters, not to say that we don’t look at color, but we were caring about who lives in this part of the world, who makes interesting characters. Essentially, Coach is playing the “Bill” role, the wise old guy, and he’s just a high school football coach from down in Savannah, and we were like, “wow, that’s a great character, we want to do that character,” and I’m not sure setting in New Orleans makes it racist. I’m at a loss on that one.

As far as Katrina goes, if you go down to New Orleans, Katrina’s still going on. I mean, it’s messed up, it is crazy that the city is still in the state it’s in, and we treat that with the utmost respect, our CEDA thing is not some subversive commentary on anything. This is a videogame, those are real people’s lives, we are not trying to make a statement with that. Again, I’ve lived down there, we’ve all gone down there, I’m gonna go down there again for a while this Fall, it’s a place we love, it’s dear to our hearts. We would not cheapen it. It’s not a brick for brick representation of New Orleans, it’s a fictional version, and I love that city.

Chet loves that city, and I’m sure his best friend is black too.

The full interview can be found here. The attitude can be found everywhere. I’m going to ignore the Ableism (“utter insanity”) as well as the gender issues in the game² and focus on Race.

When I first saw the E3 trailer for L4D2 I was at the same time horrified and hopeful. Hopeful because I thought “wow, maybe Valve is going to base a game around social commentary on Katrina;” horrified at the possibility of an exploitative, insensitive and oppressive work coming from one of my favorite game studios. After having played through the game numerous times, I’ve definitely been horrified, but more often than not it was by the insensitivity rather than the scary zombies.

In the Hard Rain level, you play through a flood. In the Parish level you run through the streets of a quasi-fictional, destroyed French quarter of New Orleans as fighter planes drop bombs on the city. Coming from a city where the local government actually dropped bombs on people, I found it disturbing. I can only imagine how someone who had to live through Katrina and George Bush doing a flyby would feel. For those of you who don’t see my point, ask yourself what if this game had come out the day after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Would there even be a need for this discussion? Does the length of time between an event and something exploiting that event dilute its offensiveness? The answer of course is no, it doesn’t matter when the game came out. However, just because part of the game is set in a ruined New Orleans doesn’t mean it’s racist. The racism comes with the ignorance.

Ignorance is what is really at stake in RE5. If by some miracle Capcom had carefully developed RE5 around the idea that Chris Redfield would be revealed as emblematic of white oppression, or that RE5 was really a self-criticizing work (like Bioshock), then the racist imagery in RE5 would not only be forgiven or forgotten, it would be needed. Instead of careless, uninformed stereotypes of Africa, we would have a critical commentary on European colonialism. As N’Gai Croal pointed out, however, this was not the case. When asked where in Africa the game was set, Capcom producers couldn’t answer, not because they wanted to have a neutral location, as did Ubisoft in Far Cry 2, but because they hadn’t done the research (Ubisoft, thankfully, did their research). This ignorance is the problem with RE5; it’s not satire.

Similarly, L4D2 is not satire. Instead of Neil Young, we get Lynyrd Skynyrd in the form of the Midnight Riders. In the quote above, Chet explains L4D2 is not trying to be “subversive commentary.” While this is an admirable attempt at avoiding exploiting the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina, the game is set in a post-catastrophe New Orleans-like city. At the same time that they are trying to create something sensitive to the survivors of Katrina, they are striving for realism in a disaster stricken New Orleans. It is disturbingly too easy to play the “Left 4 Dead 2 images or photos of Katrina?” game. No, this is not from a safe-room wall. I wish FEMA, I’m sorry, “CEDA” was subversive commentary. I wish there was a more meaningful answer to “why New Orleans?” than because the French Quarter is a cool setting for a first person shooter. To answer my question above, no, we would not be having this discussion if the game was scheduled to come out the day after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, because the game would never have been released onto store shelves.

Ultimately, Valve fails to create a work of liberation for the same reasons Capcom does. It seems Chet is all too eager to admit that they weren’t trying to say anything political about Katrina, or the southern United States or the American government, or the plight of dark skinned people in the US, or any of that. And therein lies the problem. By trying to create a realistic game you are saying something whether you want to or not. Just as RE5’s depictions of primitive Africans was informed by a history of racist imagery, so too is a setting for a game if you are not in control of the message. Yet one could argue, according to Chet, there was no message, right? Wrong. I’m sorry Chet and designers at Valve, but you don’t get to make that decision. To say there is no inherent meaning behind the setting of New Orleans is to ignore the history of slavery in the United States. Unless you are superhuman, you are not going to be aware of every single way your thoughts and ideas are informed by social dogma, and like it or not we live in a world filled with racism. Therefore, unless you are consciously incorporating this into, and analyzing, the creation of the game with this in mind, it’s going to include things that are not under your control because you don’t even realize they are there.

Parish did not have to be set in New Orleans. L4D2 did not have to be set in the Southern US, with a token female and a noticeable absence of Latino characters. It did not have to include a flood, or an incompetent government-run agency dealing with a disaster. These were choices, and the fact that nobody working on the game stood up and said “what about the similarities to Katrina” or if they did, were ignored, shows a lack of awareness.

The silver lining to all of this, is that Chet raises an interesting question, “how does this work?” In showing a genuine interest in understanding how a game can be considered racist, we can move the discussion forward.

And this brings me to my last point. Obviously, the designers are not solely to blame. The racism in L4D2 is a result of racism in our society, not in the hearts of programmers, artists and designers. Combating this is beyond the scope of this post, but I think a good start would be for our game developers to ask themselves why they are doing something, and for us to hold them accountable for those decisions. Stop using the default without thinking about it. If you are creating games based on audience feedback rather than original design, make sure your audience is not a (trigger warning – homophobia) homophobic nightmare. And finally, don’t let “fun” have the final word. For some people, watching Katrina on TV was fun, let’s not make video games for them, no matter how many Collector’s Editions they buy.

¹ – This paper is not an attack on Valve or its employees. I like Valve. I think the way they make games (soliciting feedback and incorporating it much earlier on in development) is the natural evolution of the video game industry. Instead of coming up with an idea for a game and forever tweaking it according to audience feedback they begin with audience feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed playing L4D, and I like L4D2 for similar reasons. However I am not going to let this get in the way of accepting fundamental flaws in its portrayal of society.

² – A few snippets: From the Midnight Riders blog – “The Powers That Be have decided a new album from the Midnight goddamn Riders won’t sell as much as some auto-tuned bimbo singing about her feelings. So guess who gets shown the door? Not the bimbo.”
Lyrics from Midnight Ride:
“Every lady’s crazy when her daddy’s not around”
“theres a cowboy wants to kill me in every single city cause his woman didn’t come home at all”
“if those zombies wanna fight then they know where to find me with a lady in a bathroom stall”

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