BF3's story mode has a middle eastern looking guy as the "main character". His allegiance is pulled into question during his debriefing, even if from the POV of the player, it's pretty obvious that he's innocent. Well, as innocent as a war-worn soldier can be.
FFX, al bhed are treated as tech-taters/gypsies, ronso are treated as brute and unintelligent.
And I guess this is as good a time as any to repeat what I was saying in chat yesterday.
Racial discrimination is a subject that is pretty touchy. I'm going to take a crazy assumption here and say most video game writers are white or asian(living in asia) males. How many of these writers have actually experienced serious racial prejudice towards themselves? How would they know what it feels like or what sort of things go through your mind when subjected to it?
This is very likely a subject that is extremely hard for a white male to actually write realistically about. You've never experienced it, you might not have seen others experience it except in TV shows, and even if you had seen it with your own eyes, you might not have recognized it as racism because you've got that so called "white priviledge" all around you acting as a firewall. Such a person would put his career at a considerable risk by writing a story about something he has no clue about what is like. Do you want a story about a black guy experiencing racism, or do you want a story about how a white person thinks a black person experiences racism?
It's the same thing with how males and females interact with their own and the opposite sex in media. Male writers know how males talk to other males. Male writers know how males speak to females and females speak to males. Male writers are however very unlikely to know how and what females talk to each others when there are no males around, unless he is a peeping tom who sneaks into the girls' locker room on a regular basis.
I think it's unrealistic to expect a white person to write about how it feels to be discriminated against based on his skin color, just as I think it's unreasonable to expect a male writer to know what girls talk about when they go to the restroom in pairs. Of course, now and then you will have writers that think themselves capable of pulling such things off, but I think it is reasonable to assume that there are more writers who do not feel comfortable doing this than there are writers who do.
Is this an ideal situation? Probably not, but I can't think of a way to "fix" it that doesn't involve people of minorities and females to get into those companies and start writing stuff for them themselves.
With this in mind, to answer the original topic of the thread: No, I don't think it is fair to accuse games in general to be racist. If anything, writers avoiding the topic of racial discrimination is more out of respect, insecurity over their own abilities, or a combination of both. A white person writing about racial discrimination would be kind of like a white guy going over to a black person and say "hey dude, i know how it's like to be black". That's not something I would do, at least. Mostly because I would be lying.
And it's getting better, at least in western countries, where there actually is cultural diversity. Japan doesn't have all that much of that.
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