Cloth Map: Gaming Cultures Around the World

[Teone]

Remember the white blinking guy?

Well, this is him now.

Cloth Map was a project from Drew Scanlon, mostly known from Giant Bomb (or the meme), where he would travel around the world to get immersed into different cultures and their relationships with video games. Unfortunately, the last update on this project was some years ago.


I highly recommend you guys to watch it, because it can really broaden your perspective on video games as popular culture. I'm a bit tired of the eternal "japan - europe - usa" axis too, so I hope it helps more people to break free from their common zone.

One thing that I really like that he does is to explore the real places we often see being utilized as settings for some games. We are for many times heavily exposed to representations of some real group of people or countries and stuff, and we tend to absorve that without being able to critically discern what is accurate or rude. Knowing the brazilian favelas from the inside, and also through the speech of its own residents, it gives a whole different tone when we play something like Max Payne 3, for example.

To avoid flooding this thread with videos, I'm sharing only the ones of him in Brazil, but there are videos in Ukraine, Mongolia, Saravejo, Cuba etc.

Brazil's complicated history with electronics has created
an alternate universe of video games.

Brazil's largest favela, Rocinha, has a vivid history.
We went to find its true colors.

​

I hope you enjoy it! :D

 

[Yousef Yousef]

@Teone i have a br friend whom I’ve shared my reactions with when I played MP3 for the first time. I’m a big fan of payne but this game was basically a whole new world to me. It was not only weird to see it a max payne in a “cinematic” style (which is ironically counterintuitive because MP 1-2 were already cinematic as is, this was just adding water to a lake) but also a game that was surprisingly diverse in its location, which frankly went against the noir style of the series which is supposed to be small scale and also urbanized, so it was weird constantly seeing max in these rural towns and villages, which looked so similar to towns here I almost freaked at the thought max Payne might jump out of my tv screen and say hi.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen, instead I got more questionable writing. I can’t complain about a game being multicultural, but I can complain about it being pretty bad at it. My friend told me all the Brazilians had really terrible and unconvincing accents and that they were obviously low budget cheap American actors that R* thought no one would notice. Well, activison made a similar mistake with call of duty where they thought Arabs wouldn’t notice bad Arabic text. They were wrong.

The funniest part about this whole exchange is that my friend asked me to voice some of the PTBR lines, my knowledge of PTBR was obviously lacking but I could read out loud most of the lines and he said I had a way better accent and that was a really loooooool moment for me. Goes to show how troubled MP3 was as a game. I can’t comment further than this since I’m not a BR resident obviously so all my observations are somewhat surface level but otherwise yeah.

 

[thumbsdown]

The other day I was reminded about this write-up because of something I've seen waffles submitting for the WG long time ago, it was more centered in the argentinian POV of the early web than gaming culture, but still... Felt like sharing now. That's really cool shit btw, I've seen an attempt of Red Bull in making a docuseries about the history of games and gaming culture in Brazil addressing some of those questions, but I wasn't aware of those videos you shared.