I joined a match type called 'Survival'; a Gears of War-esque horde mode where you have to survive waves of enemies by shooting them.
However, in GTA Online's Survival mode, all these enemies were Black men storming in with guns. After each wave, the street was a layer of dead Black men.
The game does escape a "worse" framing; protecting a more gentrified neighborhood from Black men. This round of Survival I joined was played on 'Grove Street', canonized as the poorer, Black neighborhood in the GTA series. Yet, for all of us players portrayed as white avatars, we participated in the racist trope of staying away from the hood.
To further this atrocity, you can put a filter over the spectate mode which turns the viewing into breaking news report:
The explicit framing here is this is a 'Weazel News' broadcast, GTA's parody of Fox News. My issue is there's no explicit parody in using this filter: this survival mode doesn't display an understanding of Fox's history of racist reportage. Putting a Weazel News filter over the video game massacre of Black men doesn't have enough built-in commentary. If you were to argue there's subtext... it's too "sub." To understand Weazel is a parody requires hours of listening to the in-game radio station *outside* of this Survival mode. Given the long history of racism in national/local news coverage, this framing is inappropriate without more explicit commentary.
I understand the want of the horde mode and also understand this may be an "algorithm issue" (that replaying this mode may spawn different types, or skin colors, of enemies). But that doesn't excuse the easy fix to what I saw: eliminating any code which causes all Black men to be spawned.


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