What was a profound moment that a video game caused you to experience, and why?
The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.
But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.
So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I'm naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they're part of my family and dynasty--so I'm giving them names that have a lot of personal "worth" to me.
Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn't white, and I couldn't figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt "right" for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none "fit".
And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was "high worth" to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn't get the name of this other character I really liked.
Now, if I was doing that in a frickin' video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are "high worth" to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.
And it wasn't like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this "gut feeling" that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow "weren't right" for her, even though that frickin' inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.
So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.
Wow, such a cool revelation. I think the devs of CK2 would be proud that you engaged with their game like this.
Great story!
This is a great write up, thanks for sharing!
Were any of the female characters you idolized black?
You make it sound like it's a direct racist association, but in reality your brain just doesn't have any good frame of reference for a probably stereotypical high-fantasy black person lol.
I'm sitting here thinking you were going to end it with saying you treated that person with the respect they deserved by not wantonly giving them some bogus high fantasy white name.
There's a reason why so many black people give their children uniquely non-Anglo names. There is nothing new about it, and you're right, it probably wouldn't fit. Because most white names are distinctly non-black lol. Even moreso most uniquely white names are distinct in the same way that uniquely black names are.
Understanding that all people hold intrinsic biases is essential, but acknowledging cultural differences isn't racism lol.
https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-black-names-from-perlie-to-latasha-130102
https://www.thedailybeast.com/are-blacks-names-weird-or-are-you-just-racist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_names
Very interesting and I appreciate the candor.