Promise, last one. We've had our fun. From R2-D2 (to his Skyrim-themed friend) to the Portal 2 multiplayer robots, we can only take so much of seeing cartoon or comic-relief characters going on a mass-murder rampage in Liberty City. For Sonic the Hedgehog—even if he looks like a little more like a blue Shadow the Hedgehog—we'll make an exception.
Because really, if someone asked if you wanted to see Sonic force-push a dozen Prius taxis three blocks, and then whip out a submachine gun and spray everyone with lead, you'd probably say yes. From Taltigolt, the guy who brought you all the rest.
This montage of Portal 2's ATLAS and P-body raising hell in Liberty City comes to you from the same guy who commissioned the insane death-dealing R2-D2 mod for Grand Theft Auto IV. It is outstanding. Just sit back and enjoy.
It's a proud part of American mythology that people from all over the world get to come here and pursue their dreams. Navid Khonsari has one of those stories. The Iranian-American used to work at Rockstar Games as cinematic director, where he helped steer the vision on games like The Warriors, Midnight Club II and Bully.
However, for all the best-selling, critically acclaimed games Khonsari worked on, it wasn't until he went back to the Middle East that he really saw the surprising cultural impact of video games.
During a visit to his homeland six months after Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, Khonsari found himself mobbed by teenagers in the small villager of Gombad after word spread that he'd worked on the PS2 hit.
There's not much retail infrastructure in Iran but that wasn't really an obstacle with regard to getting games. "Iran has no copyright laws," Khonsari explains. "It's all black market. So you can buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto for $1. You can buy anything for $1. And Iranians are hardcore gamers. It's a huge gaming community. What's amazing is that it's not gender-specific. I was talking to girls like 16 years olds who were throwing lines back at me from San Andreas."
It's a given that gamers in Gombad—a small community in Iran's northeast region near the Turkmenistan border—would seize on the opportunity to peer at American culture through the PC version of GTA: SA. But it was the things they enjoyed most that surprised Khonsari.
"What was amazing was they weren't necessarily drawn to what the media and the critics always attacked about GTA games. The sex, nudity or the violence… none of that stuff was a big deal to them," he relates. Instead, it was the more mundane parts of San Andreas that resonated.
"They said it was a great venue for them to just listen to music, which is harder for them to do. And they can't just hop into a car and go places, either," he continues. "So they were like, "I just drive around in my car and listen to music. And it's wonderful." They really got into the everyday kind of things you could do in the game, like being able to go and get your hair cut. We put these things in the game because we believe that these are part of our activities in our daily lives. We take for granted that these are part of our activities in our daily lives."
When I mentioned that such a level of personal freedom must seem like a fantasy to players like the ones he met in Gombad, Khonsari agreed. "For them, it's a hyper version of kids who live in the suburbs and what they think the city's like. In this particular situation these guys are going, 'I get to make choices.' And, on top of that, look at the power and strength I have as a woman playing as this character. It's not gender-specific. It's not limited by who I am. It's my journey because I get to control that journey. I might be the shell of this person that I'm playing, which is CJ. But my desire is what's shaping this experience."
"The fact that CJ was black had a huge implication over there, too," offers Khonsari. "Because it wasn't the white character that's being pushed forward. And they're like, "Wow, there's a sense of openness. They've taken their main character and they've made him black. That's amazing."
Khonsari says that his experience in Gombad drove home something he always knew in his gut, which is that games can make foreign countries and cultures feel alive in a way that other mediums can't achieve. I'll have more about how he hopes to do just that for Iran with 1979 tomorrow.
It's no secret that it's fun to get in trouble in Rockstar's open world Grand Theft Auto series.
Even this machinima director couldn't resist the urge to get his hands dirty in the midst of filming. Which is fortunate for us, because now we get to see massive explosions and cars flying through the air.
Because, well, that's what you do in Grand Theft Auto IV. You wreck cars.
YouTuber InsaneGaz has one heck of an enjoyable channel, featuring hundreds of videos in which he takes modded cars and crashes the living hell out of them. He even hits the Optimus Prime mod!
Some highlights are above, but you can go check out all of the videos at his channel.
I love Gav and Geoff from Rooster Teeth's Achievement Hunter. They always find the most pointless, yet hilarious things to do in games.
In today's edition of pointless, yet hilarious things to do in games, the duo launches their character into the air in Grand Theft Auto IV. GTA is known for some wacky glitches that launch people and even cars into the air, but this discovery might be the funniest one to come from the open-world franchise yet.
Plus, it involves jumping onto a helicopter. Provided you jump in the right direction, the blades of the helicopter will shoot you out, likely spinning you around in the process. Gav and Geoff suggest equipping a gun to shoot wildly in the air while doing so, because why not?
Back when Jenna Jameson was still doing porn, she appeared in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as blue movie actress Candy Suxxx. As recount in the new book Jacked, Jameson showed up to the recording session with her father.
For the session, Jameson was motion captured as she was on her back, feigning intercourse.
Vice City developers Dan Houser and Navid Khonsari were apparently uncomfortable with the notion of Jameson faking an orgasm in front of her dad. Khonsari is quoted as telling Dan that he didn't have a problem with her father, but he did not feel comfortable asking her to moan and groan as if she was having sex.
When it came time for Jameson to record her orgasm, Houser awkwardly asked Jameson to act like she was excited. Jameson wasn't sure what he meant, and Dan apparently told her to act like she was really happy or having a great time or eating a chocolate bar.
Jameson asked if she was supposed to act like she was eating a chocolate bar or like she was having sex. Houser told her to act like she was having sex, and they nailed the scene, in front of pops and all.
For more on Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, read Kotaku's previous coverage.
I've never played as a black video game character who's made me feel like he was cool. Worse yet, I've never played a black video game character who made me feel like I was cool. Instead, I've groaned and rolled my eyes at a parade of experiences that continue to tell me video games just don't get black people.
The faces that look like mine that I've encountered in video games have been, at best, too inconsequential to be memorable and offensively tone-deaf at worst. What about Barrett from Final Fantasy VII or Sazh from Final Fantasy XIII, you might ask? Or Cole Train from the Gears of War games? Wait, there's Sheva from Resident Evil 5, right? No, no and no. Too many elements of caricature in each, I'd say, and they're all sidekicks. Their stories aren't the focus of the adventure players go on.
But, hey, it's a given that video games tend to present exaggerated characters. Marcus Fenix isn't like any white guy I've ever met, after all. But he doesn't have to be. For every Marcus Fenix-type grunt hero, you can also get a witty Nathan Drake, a charming Ezio or a regretful John Marston. Enough white characters exist in video games for a variability of approach. That's simply not true of black characters.
In creating Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance, Valve gave players a woman who was feisty and fragile at the same time. Alyx ranks amongst the best black game characters of all time, but she's another sidekick. C.J. from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas comes closest to this pie-in-the-sky ideal I'm dreaming of. C.J. managed to hold a core contradiction inside of himself—an intense love of family balanced against the violence of thug life—that added depth to his characterization. And while he was the lead of the game he starred in, he was still a gang member. Rockstar found interesting things to do with him but C.J. still comes into being by virtue of another overused stereotype.
Does this stuff matter in video games? Yes. The thing to remember is that beneath all the comforting platitudes about a character's color not mattering lies a sticky web of stereotypes and cheap myths that can still insult and anger people playing a game. Even if I wanted to like Sam B from Dead Island, for example, I'm still running up against the fact that he's a hot-tempered thug rapper.
Stop leaning on this stereotype. Stop creating loud black soldiers who only know how to yell. Stop putting spear-carrying primitives in games.
What I want, basically, is Black Cool. It's a kind of cool that improvises around all the random stereotypes and facile understandings of black people that have accrued over centuries and subverts them. Black Cool says "I know what you might think about me, but I'm going to flip it." Dave Chappelle's comedy is Black Cool. Donald Glover is Black Cool. Aisha Tyler is Black Cool. Marvel Comics's Black Panther character is Black Cool. Their creativity is the energy I want video games to tap into.
There's a book about it. In the anthology Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, author Rebecca Walker assembles a crop of personal essays that talk about how Black Cool manifested in their lives. One of those writers is Mat Johnson, a professor in the University of Houston's creative writing program. Johnson's like me, a lifelong comics-reading, game-loving geek who continues to bump into jarring, awful portrayals of black people in video games.
"I played Dead Island when it came out last year and there's a point when you get the Natives Camp area. I was like, ‘Oh, OK, we're going to have an African-style primitive out here,'" he told me. "The bizarre thing is that the stereotypes you encounter in the games don't even match up timewise with our current culture. That's what's so odd about it. The mainstream culture at large has moved beyond the trope of the black primitive. You can't get away with that kind of thing in a movie."
Johnson's written prose along with graphic novels and when he compares video games' racial awareness to comic and he says "comics had a much more concerted effort to change images of minorities in the work. And part of that was a market-driven concern." There's a difference of scale, too, he continues. "If comics can access another 5,000 or 10,000 in their possible audience, it has a huge impact. Whereas video games have become a mass market phenomenon that have an even bigger scope than movies. So they're not as worried about minority concerns as comics are."
The importance of seeing a face that looks like yours when stepping into a fictional universe can't be overstated. I'm a big Superman fan, but it was DC Comics' Black Lightning that piqued my interest when I was growing up. Every black superhero face I saw growing up was another signpost that said "Hey, you're welcome here. You can be larger-than-life, too." The absence of such characters doesn't make fictional constructs hostile; it makes them indifferent, which can be far worse.
"Another difference with games is that, as a medium, they're about invoking our fears so that we can overcome them," Johnson speculates. "I think that's what happens in both Resident Evil 5 and also Dead Island. They're not just invoking fear of zombies, they are invoking fear of blackness, and offering the gamer an opportunity to challenge their racial fears as well as their other fears. What you're seeing here is a subconscious action. And the reason it becomes clear because it's not in one game, it's in several different games."
Stop creating loud black soldiers who only know how to yell.
"There have been exceptions in games like Left 4 Dead," Johnson observes, "where you have an actual black nerd character in the game." "I honestly think the move away from this going to be generational, when it's so easy to produce a 3D video game that it's the equivalent of shooting a movie today with a digital camera. But, until then, when I see a game that clearly walks right into a racial dead-end, I know I'm seeing a room of developers talking out a story with not one black person, not one Latino person of power in that room. So I think the single biggest thing that many of these companies could do to make sure that they are being representative of the larger culture's ethos, would be to hire in a diverse way."
"It's not a question of [developers and publishers] pushing culture forward," Johnson said. "It's a question of them catching up to mainstream culture. Part of it, I think again, is market success. They haven't had to worry about that at this point, because they're still going to sell a ton of games if the basic gameplay is good. But being better about black characters and characters of other races would make the overall quality better, too."
In other mediums and creative pursuits, there've been the black people who pivoted the conversations, expanded the possibilities and deepened the portrayals about what black people are. In jazz, it was Charlie Parker. In literature, it was Ralph Ellison. In comics, I'd argue that it was Christopher Priest, followed by Dwayne McDuffie. For me, the work of the deceased McDuffie managed to create characters that communicated an easily approachable vein of black cool.
Video games need this kind of paradigm-shifting figure. Not an exec, mind you—sorry, Reggie—but a creative face who steers the ethos of a game. For example, you know what kind of game a Warren Spector or a Jenova Chen is going to deliver. With Spector, it's a game that'll spawn consequences from player action. With Chen, you'll get experiences that try to expand the emotional palette of the video game medium. I want someone to carry that flag for blackness, to tap into it as a well of ideas.
Blackness can be a sort of performance, a lifetime role informed by the ideas of how people see you and how you want to be seen. One thing I've heard over the years is some variation of the colorblind testimonial: "I don't see a black guy when I look at you. I just see you." Well, if you're not seeing a black guy, then you're not seeing all of me. And if you're seeing just a black guy, you're not seeing all of me in that instance either.
I'm not naïve: no one's going to buy a video game because it's less wince-worthy on matters of race or diversity. But, maybe if Black Cool found its way into video games, I wouldn't have to hear the word "nigger" during online multiplayer sessions so much. Or maybe I wouldn't have to listen to characters that sound like 18th-Century minstrels in cyberpunk games.
While I'm sick of video games stumbling around the same ol' stereotypes and being afraid of black lead characters—"they won't sell!," cries the panicked logic— I'm not going to love Starhawk or Prototype 2 more because they have black lead characters. But if Emmett Graves and James Heller tap into some kind of deeper, more surprising portrayal than Standard Gruff Black Guy #29 and feel more human as a result, I'd feel better about the creative possibilities of video games.
Any mode of creativity that wants to be called mature needs to grapple with the sociopolitical issues of its time and place, especially if it wants to hold onto future generations. If it doesn't, then said medium just remains stuck in its own adolescence. When it comes to the examining the realities of how race can be lived in the world, movies, books and TV all do it. I'm not saying video games won't or can't, but damn if it's not a long time coming. Getting black characters who don't make me grit my teeth would be a great sign that video games are growing up.
"What was amazing was they weren't necessarily drawn to what the media and the critics always attacked about GTA games. The sex, nudity or the violence… none of that stuff was a big deal to them," he relates. Instead, it was the more mundane parts of San Andreas that resonated.
I've never played as a black video game character who's made me feel like he was cool. Worse yet, I've never played a black video game character who made me feel like I was cool. Instead, I've groaned and rolled my eyes at a parade of experiences that continue to tell me video games just don't get black people.
There's a book about it. In the anthology 
