Ranting about stereotyping is a waste of time

Scholars have been researching stereotyping for quite a while. This topic does not only draw attention in video games but also in movies and other media. Especially in everyday life the term of stereotypes is often negatively connotated and I am wondering: WHY?

   To discuss this let's first shortly think about what a stereotype is. According to the Oxford dictionary a stereotype is "[a] widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing". The important word here is "oversimplified", which by itself means (again according to the oxford dictionary): "Simplify (something) so much that a distorted impression of it is given". So far so good. So by stereotyping we're doing injustice to people or things which are put into the same category of something but actually are different from all the other entities within that group and apparently this is something modern society sees as not right or even immoral.

   Now let us step aside from stereotyping and look at something different, for example language. What is language? It is a system of signs (words) that represent things in the real world (as well as abstract things, fictional worlds etc.; but this is not the point here). So if we say "Look at the wall!" Everyone knows what we mean, because we agreed on the fact that the wall is the thing that constitutes the border of the room (or any kind of space). A wall usually consists of stone and might or might not be painted. But why does noone think about the feeling of a wall out of wood? Or a wall out of paper? A wall which has holes or a wall that is only five centimeters high? Noone thinks about these walls, because that is not what language is made for. It is made to simplify communication. Without the simplification of what a wall is, the communication about it would get too detailed, complicated and counterproductive. The human brain is only able to handle a certain amount of tasks and that is why we simplify things.

   To get back to video games now, playing them is like reading a text, as for example Aarseth sees video games as "ergodic literature" (Aarseth, 1997). Therefore they can be seen as a form of communication between the designer of the game and the player. By putting walls in the game the designer tells the player "you can't go that way" and the player is able to read this information because he knows the concept of a wall from real life. Ofcourse you can play around with this concept and enable the player to walk through walls, but this only supports my point and I will get to this later. So let's stay at the normal concept of a wall. We can make this a bit more complicated now by thinking about a message which is not so easy to communicate, such as "this place is dangerous". How do we let a player know that the place where he is right now is a dangerous one? We can make it dark for example, because players know from real life that bad things are more likely to happen in the dark. But what if it is at day? In a modern american city? One way to communicate "this place is dangerous" is to use stereotypes. And by this I mean, we use the visuals of an american suburb, make it shitty looking and put afro-american people (NPCs) into it. This is wrong!... You might be thinking right now and I ask again: Why? The designer wants to communicate to the player that it is a dangerous place and the player knows the stereotype of shitty american suburbs being dangerous because of gang activities, unemployment rate etc. (we can communicate all these aspects with simple semiotics!). Does this mean the designer says every afro-american person is a criminal? No! The only thing it means is that the designer uses something which is commonly known, like a word, an image, an idea, to communicate something to the player.

   And now to the case of the player being able to walk through walls. What if the shitty neighborhood is the richest one in the game and you can receive the best rewards in there? Then the designer is playing with a stereotype, actively showing that this is only an image, a word, a form of communication and not the ultimate truth. So now we all should make games which question and play with stereotypes to make the world a better place, right? No again! Why? Because humans are not stupid. We are not becoming racists just because game designers use the language of stereotypes. Even though some researchers (Deskins, 2013) really want to believe in this, it is not true. Deskins drifts into a completely proceduralistic argument in his paper, which, if followed through, would mean that everyone who plays video games becomes either a racist or a serial killer. He even starts to argue with dopamine releases in the brain, which conditions animals and humans for future behaviour. Unfortunately he does not take into consideration that the dopamine argument was already pulled at video game addiction and we should be done with it by now. 
   For example one could argue that rewards in games, as they trigger dopamine just as any other reward, make players addicted. Unfortunately the problem is not that easy.  First of all the amount of the released dopamine is questionably low and then a lot of other factors such as social problems and psychological presuppositions play a role as well (I wrote a paper about this in my first semester).

   So in the end: Please stop ranting about stereotyping in video games. If we would follow through with the whole "we should not put people into drawers" thing, in the end the world would be so complicated and ineffective that we would probably not even have video games anymore. Stereotyping itself has to be seen as a mere form of communication. It is neither good, nor bad. And one thing is for sure: Just because video games use stereotypes it doesn't mean we are all going to become racists, misogynists, misandrist or whatever weird kind of opinion/behaviour there might be (a good further reading on this is the chapter "The players as a moral beings" in Sicart's (2011) book).

Sources:

Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature. JHU Press.

Deskins, T. G. (2013). Stereotypes in Video Games and How They Perpet-

uate Prejudice. McNair Scholars Research Journal, 6(1), 5.

Sicart, M. (2011). The ethics of computer games. MIT Press.