I do fall into that group of people who think video-games have every right to be considered art. They can be a beautiful sight for the eyes to take in, and be full of soothing or heart-racing music and sounds. Some games blend these together so well that they provide a fully immersible experience that can draw a gamer in for hours at a time. Games also succeed in bringing out feelings and reactions in those who play, something all great works of art should do. Games have made me feel joy, whether it be from saving Princess Peach in the Mario games, or freeing Hyrule in many of the Zelda games. I have also felt sorrow and loss, one of the most notable instances for most gamers coming from Final Fantasy VII and the sudden taking of a character you had grown to like. Many times the Silent Hill series has instilled in me a feeling of nervousness and paranoia so strong that I double-check to make sure I am properly equipped before entering a room. Games have made me feel a lot of things, but amazingly never outright offended and made to feel bad due to blatant racism. Even through all these years of GTA and the sad and terrible games I’ve reviewed for this site. I never once felt like I had been personally offended.

That is until I noticed Black College Football Xperience (yes, Xperience). A football game based around the HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), and the teams that play in it.

Okay…time to be completely honest. I was originally going to just find snippets of articles people wrote about Resident Evil 5 and how it was racist during the period that doing such was in style and could move you up from being a lowly writer to a game specialist. I’ve spent the last couple of hours re-reading the standouts from the bigger news sites and digging deeper into personal blogs and posts. That’s the good thing about the Internet, when you say something that makes you look like a dumbass…it’s there for good. You can delete your post, or just let it vanish when whatever site it was on goes under…but somebody out there has the knowledge and means to bring it back. It’s the reason I never did serious articles and things that relied on a ton of facts back when I first started writing for the site, because I didn’t want to look like an idiot a year or more down the road. Of course now I’m old and don’t give a shit, so here we go.

Anyway, I was in the midst of reading all of these nonsense articles and rants about how RE5 was pretty much a KKK training sim, when it hit me; I don’t want to para-phrase these articles. I don’t want to post links to them, I don’t want to mention them more than I have to (which is two more sentences). To take such hate and ignorance fueled writings and try to turn them into something witty could be done pretty easily by a talented writer like myself, but I would feel deep down it would probably help “prove the point” since I am a white writer. That and the fact that I am too lazy, and I just couldn’t re-phrase something talking about shooting zombies (which they are NOT) in Africa into a football game with a drum-line mini-game.

It Can’t Be THAT Bad

I first saw this online while browsing what titles were coming out this week. For a brief period of time this game was coming out on the 21st of July. Then August 24th. Now Amazon is swearing it’s September. Mind you this all changed twice within a couple of hours, so who knows if this will ever even be released. Either way, the first time I saw it, I didn’t even notice the word “Black”, and was curious as to why a company would try to crank out a college football title when the market for such is pretty much locked down by EA’s own college football game. Then I saw that little word at the beginning of the title. The first thing that came to mind wasn’t that it was great that these black athletes are being recognized, or that folks can learn about the rich history of these schools. Instead I immediately felt disgusted that a company would try to make such a shitty cash-in on the black market, and in the process offend other races in the market at the same time,which is what is happening right here. I am genuinely offended for a group of people who probably won’t even think to be offended over this simply because it’s a football game. Not only that, but just recently there was a big controversy on how companies can make money off of college athletes in video-games, while students themselves get no cut at all, which I do think is sort of shitty. Well, this is double-shitty. Because it’s not only making money off of college athletes who get nothing, but it’s exploiting an entire race at the same time. All while making the rest of throw out a big “wtf” at the black community for not even caring.

So what’s so bad? For one, I’ve looked at all the videos and screenshots this game has to offer, and I have yet to see a single player of any other race. That is my biggest complaint of all with this game. If they would have removed the world “Black” from the title, I think we would have been on to something; An independent football game celebrating historically black colleges, and the kids who never had it as easy as the kids in the bigger colleges. As it stands, we are only getting one race to represent those colleges. You may be facepalming at the fact that I’m arguing that it is not showing other races for colleges that label themselves as black colleges. That doesn’t hold up, though. Just look at the first word of HBCU: Historical. Over the course of history these schools started with all black students simply because of segregation. But things change over time. We put a man on the moon, segregation is long gone, and  other races now attend HBCUs. Not only do they attend, but they play as well. Why are they not being recognized at all? When you put a word in front of a title that narrows it down to only one race…you cast aside a lot of other people, and even toss away some of the history of the schools. So far, the only other races I see are folks in the crowd (the worst crowd graphics since N64 wrestling games, btw). That’s no way to represent.

I was going to go on a whole thing about how the public would react if a “Segregated White Football College Experience: The Whitey Whitenberg Edition” was ever released. I didn’t, because when someone says something like that, a lot of people go apeshit about how that person is obviously just a white/black/brown supremacist. I’m smart enough to understand that saying such doesn’t make you racist, it just means the person you are saying it to has no logical response. So they just hurl an insult at you without any merit. Kind of like how most 4 year-olds end a fight by calling the other a stupid-head and then stumbling off. But for a minute imagine that it did come out. How would people react to that? How long would that company stay in business afterward? It would be the biggest shitstorm since Jeremy decided that that bench in front of the Young Girls Dance Academy was a great place to sit down and relax. The mind reels at how many game journalists would suddenly get mighty erections over how many editorials they could write denouncing such an atrocity that has set race relations back to the stone age. Somehow though, this game, which is all but doing the same thing, seems to go under the radar. And that ultimately is what is setting race relations back. Just because it’s football doesn’t make things totally cool. If you’re gonna call bullshit, then you better at least be consistent.

I suppose I should also mention the halftime show too. While it’s not as big of an offender, it’s still pretty shitty. When halftime rolls around, the player is treated to a drum-line band mini-game. At first I thought this was a tad bit strange, but then I remember some of the clips I saw from North Carolina A&T. Just wow. The half-time show is looked forward to almost as much as the game, so I can see why it’s featured. It’s just unfortunate that it has turned out to be a Guitar Hero-like mindless pounding of buttons.

Okay, enough of this rant. I do sorta see what they are going for here with Black College Football Xperience. I just feel bad when I think about how a more than likely not-predominantly black developer probably saw this as a way to cash in. Not only that, but after a bit of investigating, the game barely seems to exist at all at this point.

Floppern dorkin bin…?

As of right now, the day after the supposed launch of this game…there is not a single mention of it on Aspyr Media’s site. The publishers of a game not even making mention of it on their site? Why is that? I can click around that site and find out all I want about “Emma in the Mountain” or “Supreme Commander”, but BCFX isn’t even listed in the Products section. I think I would have had a tad bit more confidence in this product being published with the right intentions if the company making it had enough pride in it to put at least a sentence about it on their site. Worse yet, Jeremy was actually able to dig up the website for the devs behind the game. Nerjyzed Game Studios has what appears to be something of a website…sorta like three press releases, something about the game, and then a paragraph under a “Historically Black” banner (A post that I was hoping to get some explanation of the game’s intentions) that reads off as complete gibberish. No, I’m not exaggerating, it’s straight up gibberish. I’m not sure if I should be amused or embarrassed. I’m going with amused for the moment.

It was sort of refreshing to see that the company is based in Louisiana, the home of the Bayou Classic (a BIG deal amongst HBCUs), but the site for the company and the official game site were just strange for some reason. It’s sort of like it never gave much of a shit at all, which is odd for a game that was literally supposed to be released today. For instance, the last press release on the game’s site was from late 2008. It’s like this game somehow dodged the vaporware bullet by just barely existing, and the company sort of seems like it’s riding on this game, if it hasn’t already closed down. I mean, you could almost overlook it if it was one of those weird PC releases from a developer that made the game in their garage. But this game has a 360 release coming soon, and they don’t even have their website finished. Let alone not even removing the standard crazy talk that is used for fillers…I don’t even know really. It comes off as half-assed. And that’s no good for a game that wants you to think they are representing an entire race, and not simply trying to make some quick cash off of it.

Black Out

So in the end we have what we have; A game that the publisher won’t advertise on their site for something that is going to serve to line the pockets of people who for the majority never attended a HBCU, while making other races wonder if this is some sort of double standard we have going now. I don’t say take Black out of the title and add other races to be disrespectful or whiny. Quite the opposite. I am saying it because doing so would be respectful to the non-blacks at these schools, to non-black buyers AND black buyers as well. We’ve come way too far to throw a title on a game that calls out one specific race. We’ve also come too far for a race to be so offended at the fact that they feel they are being exploited in a zombie game, but not in a football game that literally has black in the title.

You might agree with some of the things I said, and maybe you don’t. As for me, I won’t be buying Black Football Xperience. I’ll be staying far away from it. Not because of a single word I stated above, but just because I hate football and I think football games suck except for that one Blitz game on the Dreamcast. To sum things up, I just got off Facebook with a black friend of mine, and he had the following to say:

“I don’t even know. I don’t like football and I can’t afford college yet. Maybe next year.”

I agree, 100%.