| In my ongoing quest to read
everything ever written about my new favorite game Giants - a product that, while it does
have a few bugs, hasn't caused any part of my computer to actually literally physically explode - I ran
across this review at Gamepen, a site for which I have no snide comment
because I don't know anything about it other than the fact that its name sounds a little
like "gaypen", a fact that could potentially be used against it if you
absolutely couldn't think of anything else, and, hey, what an epic journey this sentence
has been - welcome to the end of it. The review, by Jonah Falcon, contains the following
observation:
Another problem is more disturbing and insidious. All of
the heroes (the Meccryns, Smarties, and Delphi) are light colored, while all of the
villians have dark skin (Sappho, the Reapers). As if that subtle whiff of racism
isn't enough, why is the evil queen named Sappho to begin with? If it was a reference, I
don't see what the character had in common with an ancient Greek poetess. If the
developers equate sapphic with evil, that's a whole other can of worms to add to the bugs.
(Vocabulary time: sapphic is a synonym for lesbian). Even if this all was
coincidental, it still creates a nasty little subliminal message.
I could try to defend Giants by using sanity to prove that it isn't the Mein Kampf of
third person shooters, or simply thank Jonah for explicitly pointing out that Giants'
blatant racism is "more disturbing and insidious" than its lack of an in-mission
save, but what would be the point? Jonah Falcon is obviously either a lunatic, an
idiot, or some fanciful, Lewis Carroll-esque
combination of the two.
Plus, the review itself contains something even more disturbing and insidious than
simple, garden of eggplants variety racism. From reading the review, here's
what we know about Jonah other than the fact that he's koo koo:
- He is bravely, strongly against racism, including - presumably - racism based solely on
the color of your lesbianism.
- Giants is a clear example of dehumanizing racist propaganda.
But it still gets 3 out of 5 stars! And that's
after he's already complained bitterly about the repetitive gameplay, the crash bugs, and
the various annoying ways in which Giants is not more like Tribes 2. So taking those
non-trivial complaints into account, the fact that Giants espouses a dangerous ideology
that Jonah Falcon finds morally repugnant ultimately only costs it one half of one
star. In other words, if Borislav Herak's Bosnian Rape Camp
Superchamp is stable and lets you save anywhere, there's still a good chance
Jonah might give it a 4.5
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