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Racism as a mechanic in Mafia 3

Great to know.
There was also something similar, but of course, not as a big thing, just a small detail to make the city feel more alive in Mafia 2.
In the black neigbourhood if you started some kind of fight, if the police came, they only stopped the black guys. They got them in the floor as if they were a super threat, and the guys didnt have guns or anything. The police started talking with theselves about them being blacks, and sometimes one of them will try to run and scape, they were shoot as soon as they started running.
If you did this in the white neighbourhoods nothing happened, or the police only try to stop you and not the other people.

As i said, nothing to big, just some details to make it more realistic (sadly).
 
Lime said:
This is something that could have been made more explicit in Freedom Cry, where the spaces felt incredibly sanitized towards Adéwale (understandably so, given how hardcore the past was at the time).

I think it's good to highlight how different spaces and structures react to your identity (both procedurally and representationally), in order to simulate how identity matters and it isn't just possible to play someone differently without changes to how you get treated.

I also hope Hangar13 also relate the 60's racism to today in order to show that this isn't just a thing of the past, what with the prison industrial complex, white flight & structural segregation, police brutality and lethality, class differences in race, Black Lives Matter, and so forth, still factors into contemporary White Supremacy. The past isn't over and oppression is still being reproduced - this is extremely important to highlight when you do a historical game.
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It'll definitely be a difficult thing to get right. Hopefully the game won't relegate racism and discrimination to just passing comments and random NPC as if it only occurred in those subtle instances.

But, at the same time I have to give props to the devs for at least attempting to do something like this when, as you said, other games that could (and probably should) be dealing with those issues come off as more sanitized for the sake of not causing any controversy.
 
Seems interesting, but it's not something that would really influence my decision on whether or not to buy the game.
 
The Cretan said:
This sounds like an intersting mechanic that can be used in other games as well (gta, assassin's creed, etc.) and for other forms of racism, like sexism and homophobia.

Kinda off-topic question: Are the first two Mafia games important for the story of Mafia 3? Can I just start with Mafia 3 without any previous knowledge about the previous stories?
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AC already did it in Liberation and Freedom Cry and to an extent GTAV with police brutality
 
Hope it doesn't end up feeling too gamey. Not just zones with different danger levels like many games have done. All of this can very easily go wrong tone wise and gameplay wise.
 
Data West said:
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LMAAAAOOOOOOOO
 
Genuinely excited for this. It is something new and 60's seems like a great setting.

As for the whole 'black issue'. Videogames create worlds, they create experiences. From playing an Elf, to a WW2 soldier to a black mobster. None of these look in any way similar to my daily life. I can relate about just as well to a blue alien space lady as to a black man dealing with racism in the 60's. It matters little as who I play as, I am interested in getting engulfed in a story that moves me.
 
Here's hoping they commit to it and pull no punches, since they could do some really interesting stuff. I'd rather not have it just be "flavor" for the game, so to speak.

KingBroly said:
Didn't GTA5 do this?
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A little bit. I definitely recall getting a lot of shit from pedestrians (even killed, once) as Franklin depending on where I was.
 
I never had interest in this series but the news about how they're handling social issues in the game has me considering it.

Plus any game that lets me kill racists is a-ok with me. Freedom Cry <3
 
NZerker12 said:
Actually it is possible but unfortunately they only get knocked out when defeated and get back up in a few minutes.
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oh yeah totally, same things happens to geralt when they beat him, but the difficulty i was on made the red skull appear above guards so i just didnt mess with them, although i did lower the difficulty at one point, found a lone guard patrolling at night outside a castle and killed him lol
 
Lime said:
This is something that could have been made more explicit in Freedom Cry, where the spaces felt incredibly sanitized towards Adéwale (understandably so, given how hardcore the past was at the time).

I think it's good to highlight how different spaces and structures react to your identity (both procedurally and representationally), in order to simulate how identity matters and it isn't just possible to play someone differently without changes to how you get treated.

I also hope Hangar13 also relate the 60's racism to today in order to show that this isn't just a thing of the past, what with the prison industrial complex, white flight & structural segregation, police brutality and lethality, class differences in race, Black Lives Matter, and so forth, still factors into contemporary White Supremacy. The past isn't over and oppression is still being reproduced - this is extremely important to highlight when you do a historical game.
Click to expand...
I don't see how you have to make your historical themes clearly relating to present topics; at some point you have to let the work speak for itself and expect people to infer the parallels themselves. Did I get that "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was an allegory about 1960s racism? Yep. Didn't stop it from being cringey and stupid as hell because they were so on-the-nose about it.

It's a difficult topic to tackle, especially when virtually every game is never trying to be a hardcore historical sim and the fun of a lot of these games and periods (especially something like Assassin's Creed) is the escapism to a more intriguing past, and I don't think lots of players want to be hammered with "the past wasn't so great!" all the time, as well as the pitfalls of turning social issues into a game mechanic ("watch as your crack meter fills to full!")

The Mafia guys from the OP at least seem to be aware of these pitfalls, and dealing with the realities of race relations in the time period seems rather central to the story they're trying to tell, so I hope they can pull it off.
 
Sounds interesting.

Seems like it'd be a lot stranger if they ignored it as an issue and pretended that racism wasn't a major cultural issue at that point in time.
 
ElzarTheBam said:
Good.

I'm glad they are not shying away from the historical aspect of racism in that era
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Agree but we don't really see a lot of racist protagonists in historical settings either which often comes across to me as sanitising society's prevalent attitudes of those times for the sake of selling a hero. Happens a lot in movies too.

KingBroly said:
Didn't GTA5 do this?
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Depended on location. In the coastal well heeled rural parts Trevor got picked on more by police while in the poorer urban areas Franklin copped it.
Michael was sweet. Dat privilege.
 
Damn that's an interesting idea I hope it turns out to work well and be interesting. It can really add to the setting work to tell a story if they pull it off sensibly.
 
Spring Drive said:
Sounds like Witcher 3
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That's exactly what I was thinking. Geralt is called a mutant freak, told to crawl back under his rock, people spit on the ground when you pass them. While the Witcher takes place in a fantasy world the parallels are clear, you are treated as an outcast by many because of your physical appearance. With that said, I'm sure this will resonate with people more because it's a retelling of real events in the recent past.
 
Lime said:
This is something that could have been made more explicit in Freedom Cry, where the spaces felt incredibly sanitized towards Adéwale (understandably so, given how hardcore the past was at the time).

I think it's good to highlight how different spaces and structures react to your identity (both procedurally and representationally), in order to simulate how identity matters and it isn't just possible to play someone differently without changes to how you get treated.

I also hope Hangar13 also relate the 60's racism to today in order to show that this isn't just a thing of the past, what with the prison industrial complex, white flight & structural segregation, police brutality and lethality, class differences in race, Black Lives Matter, and so forth, still factors into contemporary White Supremacy. The past isn't over and oppression is still being reproduced - this is extremely important to highlight when you do a historical game.
Click to expand...

Not that what you're saying isn't true, but I disagree that it's necessary for a piece of historically situated media to make explicit commentary on present day events. It's fine for an artist to allow it to be read that way it as an implicit reading of the work. 12 Years a Slave didn't need footage of the Rodney King riots to be relevant.
 
It's not much of a Mafia game since they completely changed the game play and gone for more arcade/explosions. We gone from a game that stopped the player from driving against red lights in the first game to waging full out war with cars exploding in the streets.

They do seem to have captured the more serious tone of the early games though and I do hope they stick with the whole "Crime don't pay" that Mafia 1/2 had going for it. Both Tommy and Vito's lives were ruined because of the mafia and it would be annoying if the new protagonist gets off free and have a happy ending.
 
Not interested in the mafia games, but it's really cool they went there. Too many developers like to avoid this kind of thing altogether.

That being said I can already hear the gator rage over having to play as a black man.
 
It's a very interesting idea and I hope they can execute it well.

The possible issue that can come from making it part of the gameplay, is that if it's not balanced well, it can just become annoying to play. I get that it can be exactly the point, but even if the message they're sending is great, the game would still be annoying to play.

You could say, for example, that showing the other side of a war, and how they also have their families and people they fight for can be something interesting and worthwhile, instead of just making the protagonist the unquestionable hero that can do no wrong, but when they tried to do this in MGR, the effect it had in the actual game was a boring as hell forced slow walking segment. Not that MGR is an amazing example of mature storytelling, but just to show that it can actually diminish the message if the only thing the player is thinking about is how boring it is to play the game because of it.

Anyway, I love the series and I'm definitely interested in this game, and thought the black protagonist was a very interesting take on this kind of story. It's not from the same people though, right? So we'll see.
 
I like this type of thing. It also adds a level of immersion for me. Gotta say, the "says Blackman" part of the bolded text got a double take out of me.
 
Really cool idea even if not simple to execute but at least they're trying to give some context and a more interesting meaning to their choices in both the setting and the characters.

I was already interested because of the main protagonist choice and the bits of story we've already have but this makes me wanting to know even more.
 
Sounds like they're going all in on this, good.
--
I hope it's annoying and deeply frustrating when it happens, I want that feel.
 
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