Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is a series of the action-adventure video game. It created by David Jones and Mike Dailly. The Series of GTA total sales is over two hundred and thirty-five million. GTA player can buy the game from the Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Although GTA is the best seller video game, it has the wrong representation of black women. In fact, GTA is not the only video game that has the wrong representation of black women; many action-adventure video games also have it. Most of the action-adventure video game use white people to be the leader. Also, white people usually have more power and rice than black. On the other hand, action-adventure video games always present black people are low income and low class, especially on African American women. The video games need many different characters, so they usually use race and gender to distinguish different role. For example, African American women usually have the job relate to sex and were very sexy. Moreover, they usually have a sad story and become the victim.
According to the “The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games” by Anna Everett, and S. Craig Watkins, they talk about the research about video game characters by Children Now’s. They studied 1716 video game characters and only 17% female. Moreover, African American only make up 10% of this 17% of female characters. In the report also mentions that most African American women characters “were far more likely than any other group to be victims of violence” (148) From this report, we can see that video player only get a very little choice of African American females characters. Back to my case studies, GTA has three main characters which are Michael, Trevor, and Franklin. The stories mode player only allows switching the characters from these three. Only the online players can create one character. Nevertheless, back to our class reading, Safiya Noble mention “Google Search results on the words “Black girls” discursively reflect the hegemonic social power and racist and sexist bias.” if you search “GTA black women,” the topic few suggestions are how to create a pretty or hot black women. As you can see, pretty black women should have some makeup, long hair and dress a crop top.
screenshot of Youtube “GTA Online: Pretty Black Female Character”
We can see what the presentation of the black woman is in the video game from those data. Most of the video game players are male, and they want to be a hero or powerful person in the game. People usually think men have more power and better fighting skills than women. Also, black women will be the be victims of violence. People always think African women have less power and need help from the society. I would like to talk about expectations of black women in the video game using two GTA black female characters. First, Tanisha Jackson who is Franklin’s ex-girlfriend. In the GTA story, she is a hypocritical person. She got married to a wealthy doctor and broke up with Frankin. Another example is Saeeda Kadam. She is from a poor immigrant family and only has $50. Also, her car was stolen, and she need help with the male character. Although GTA didn’t have many black female characters, most black female characters are lower class.
Pictures of GTA 5 Characters
GTA is not the only video game has wrong respective on the black woman. Stuart Hall mentioned two systems of the representation in his book “Representation.” The first system is the media or people will give a set of concepts to identify the people or thing. The most video game will give African women a lugubrious background. Theirs afford better education for them, and they can’t have a good job. Their job usually relates to sex. Moreover, another system is those concepts are not from the individual. Those concepts are from the society or group. As you can see, they have the bad taste of clothes. They will dress very sexy or nonfashion.
Works Cited:
Everett, Anna, and S. Craig Watkins. “The power of play: The portrayal and performance of race in video games.” The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games, and learning (2008): 141-64.
Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage in association with the Open University, 1997. Print.
Noble, Safiya Umoja . “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible.” Invisible culture: an electronic journal for visual culture. N.p., 29 Oct. 2013. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.
TreeFitty. “GTA 5 Characters.” IGTA 5. Accessed 15 Aug. 2017.
BISMCS 333 SUMMER 2017 