Brad Bushman's Call Of Duty: Black Op 3

The game I chose to play was Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. After playing this game for a short while, I realized that there is a lot of racial issues in it.
The first thing I noticed was that there were no minority choices when picking your player. I found this to be weird and surprising. The game is so popular, so you would think the creators would include different types of races. There was a choice for gender, but that was all. All the players, no matter what gender, were white.
The other in this game was clearly the people you were trying to kill. The game was pretty fast paced, so you really never get a good look at them. From what I saw, it reminded me a lot of the LeBron ad we discussed last week. The villains were very brute looking and
dark. They did not seem to have prominent faces either. This seemed like they were trying to portray that the bad guys were African American.
The player who has power is you, if you are winning.
You are the good guy. As I stated before, the good guy was white. It was good to see gender as an option, but race needs to be included as well. Brad Bushman stated, “Playing a violent video game as a black character reinforces harmful stereotypes that blacks are violent.” This is very true. Not all bad guys are African Americans. Not all good guys are white. We have to educate kids on this topic, so they don’t make assumptions based on race.
The stereo typing is not right out in the open. I probably would not have noticed if I was just playing this game for fun. I even mentioned it to my brothers, and they had not noticed. They even said that they hardly think about race while playing the game, so pointing it out surprised them. The main stereo typing that I saw was that the bad guys were darker figures.
I think this can be an example of new coding. When you say the villain is a darker figure, many people might think that it just has to do with the fact that he’s the bad guy. This does make sense, normally a bad guy wouldn’t walk around in all white. Nonetheless, it made me think about where the stereotype came from. It made me think about how we view race and crime as a
society.
The article mentioned a study. The results were, “Afterward, those who played with the violent goal and as a black avatar showed stronger explicit negative attitudes toward blacks than did those who played as a white avatar.” This made sense to me. If kids grow up playing games where the darker, or black players are bad, it becomes natural to fear that race.
I understand that statistics play a role, there is more crime in the city then suburbs. This does not mean that white people are always good. These video games almost help raise children to have a racist view towards African Americans. It also teaches them that white people are always safe, when in reality they can be dangerous as well. Parents need to make sure that their children understand that dangerous people come in all races.
When it comes to video games, I never really played them. On the rare occasion that I did, I was more concerned about my brothers beating me than race. Now that I am older, I can see it is a concern. I think it is up to the parents to really teach their children. The games also need to make the bad guys different races. Most importantly, give people an option so the hero can be any race.