Discussing or portraying race relations in the various media of popular culture tends to be an instantaneous way to spark controversy. Videogames are no different. Perhaps the hottest firestorm to date in the industry flared up when Newsweek's N'Gai Croal talked about his reactions to the Resident Evil 5 trailer during an interview that ran on the MTV Multiplayer blog. Responses, name-calling and outright invective blazed for days across videogame-related message boards and blogs all over the Web.

The radioactivity has cooled down a bit since then, but I think one of the reasons that the RE5 controversy burned so bright and hot was the issue of representation. It's not a matter of percentage, as in X amount of black characters in all videogames equals an accurate portrait. Rather, it's the kinds of roles that black characters wind up in that often raise hackles. Much has made of the way that the rowdy, crude soldier Cole Train rubs up against negative black male stereotypes in the first Gears of War game. Even Kudo Tsunoda, the project lead on Gears of War 2, has criticized the first game's approach. No matter whether or not you agree with Croal's initial reaction to the first RE5 trailer and his comments about it, it's impossible to deny that they enabled some of the most revealing and frank commentary on race that the still-young medium of videogames has yet experienced.

Still, all that drama begs the question: Can you make a game that draws from the divisive, messy history of race relations in this country and still have it be a compelling experience? Barring one other really good example that I know of, this question's not something that the swirl of debate surrounding RE5 ever really touched on.

Well, gentle reader, I'm here to offer a humble proposition of a videogame that would do just that. Allow me to relay a conversation that happened two years ago:

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The real-world roots of Runaway.

"Dude, it's me. I got your IM earlier. What's up?"

"Yo, I got an idea for a game." This was my buddy Dave talking. We've known each other for over 15 years, and while he's not quite as nerdy as me, we pretty much dig the same stuff, and we've always enjoyed spit-balling ideas.

"It'll be a GTA-style game, open-world, free-roaming?" I groaned inwardly. While he isn't a games journalist like me, Dave surely knew that there's been a glut of sandbox-style imitators ever since GTA 3's unprecedented success. So why go there?

"Uh-huh. And what else?" I asked.

"One word: Runaway."

"Wow." Maybe it's that pseudo-telepathy that happens when you've been friends with someone for a long time, but I immediately got what Dave was pitching. As we talked, the high concept came into focus: You play as a slave escaping from a plantation in the United States during the 1800s. Our hero or heroine makes a fateful decision to flee from servitude in Virginia when he/she finds out his/her family is being sold to another slave owner. With that story springboard, let's assume the basic elements of a open-world title -- a mission-rich sandbox environment with multiple paths running through it -- is in place.

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So what would the game's other features be? In the case of a game like Runaway, historical anecdotes can actually fuel gameplay ideas. Here are a few examples of how that might look:

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Runaway's protagonist could have arrived in a shipment just like the one detailed in this advertisement from 1769.

Character classes

According to color, temperament and illicit family ties (where members of the plantation household produced offspring with the slaves they owned), workers would have different skill sets and responsibilities that could be taken advantage of.

• High-yellow house slave: can read and write, trusted on the plantation, can sometimes pass as white, not as much stamina, not much of a fighter




• Field slave: can't read or write -- though you can learn at great risk -- great stamina, pretty good fighter, pretty good stealth




• Skilled laborer: can read a little, trusted a little, okay stamina, access to weapons

Context-based trust mechanic

The player would have to talk to non-player characters to progress, but would also be rolling the dice on his or her continued safety any time he/she did so. It's not just the random Caucasian encounter you'd need to be wary of, either. As history shows, white Americans were crucial in helping fugitive servants find their way to freedom, so such characters would be in the game, too. Conversely, other slaves, Native Americans on reservations through which you pass, or even freedmen could rat our lead character out, too, depending on how he acts in their presence.

Upgradeable skills with a level of risk/reward built in

• Reading
  
  risks: higher profile, increased suspicion and aggression towards hero; rewards: awareness of surroundings, navigation during daytime




• Mechanical skills
  
  risks: physical injury while repairing items, higher profile, increased suspicion and aggression; reward: ability to earn money, barter for travel, increased ability to navigate

Travel/Locomotion/Combat

You'd only be able to travel at night by following the North Star, until your reading ability reaches a certain level or until you built or acquired a compass. Even with those measures, daytime travel is still the game's riskiest proposition. You'd have to implement stealth during the daytime, staying indoors or within the boundaries of a safe haven. Our protagonist would only be able to fight at night, making use of a capoiera fighting style. You'd have to mask your scent, crossing water where possible or using strong-smelling roots or herbs to stymie dogs used for tracking. A penalty for poor play could be that you are sold deeper south the more times you're captured. Maybe you start in Virginia, but get caught running away a few times and you're sold to South Carolina; get caught a few more times, and you're sold to Mississippi, etc.

Primary goal:

• Rescue your family: Our protagonist would have to liberate one by one family members who are scattered across the game world, and make it to Canada. The timing and manner of your initial escape could be important, too. Do you wait on the plantation to improve your reading skills, and possibly get caught planning an escape? Do you increase your odds by recruiting other slaves to run with you, and risk having them betray you? Do you hide in the swamp, where it's harder for the pursuers to find you, but more likely that you would be attacked by an alligator? Do you give yourself a bigger head start by killing the master and the overseer, though the punishment will be much harsher if you're caught? Do you flee straight north, or do you go searching for family members who've been sold away? Do you try to buy your family members back, either by amassing money or befriending a benefactor? Runaway could incorporate educational landmarks like stops along the Underground Railroad, or the St. Augustine Church in New Orleans: An important American symbol, this church was the first place where slaves, free blacks and whites worshipped side by side.

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Side-missions:

• Examples: Our hero could join a slave rebellion, work as a blacksmith, relay messages between other slaves' family members on different plantations, or help other runaways reach their destinations (which may be off-route for him/her).

Multiplayer:

• Co-operative options: Control a pair of siblings as they try to accomplish the game's primary goal.




• Competitive options:

Play as the runaway in a variety of modes: as a Harriet Tubman-type and free as many slaves as you can before getting caught, or as a Nat Turner-type and destroy as many plantations as you can before getting caught. Or, in the tradition of games that let you control avatars on both sides of the conflict, play as the pursuing federal marshals or the slave-catcher.

Endgame:

Your play style determines your character's legacy. Do you become a famous freedman and abolitionist advocate, like Frederick Douglass? Do you become a fighter who incites slave rebellions, like Nat Turner? Do you disappear quietly into Canada, trying to leave the memories of forced labor and inhumane treatment behind?

These features may not exactly sound groundbreaking, but innovation in the feature set is not the point. The overarching idea of Runaway is to map these mechanics to the way that day-to-day concerns of our lead character would unfold. And, in Runaway, fighting and killing would truly be last-resort measures, since our lead character couldn't afford to have a trail of blood leading back to him.


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Sure, Runaway's just a thought experiment at this point, and color me cynical, but most game publishers would probably balk at the suggestion of making it into an actual playable title. Still, the goal of the Runaway idea isn't to start controversy, but rather to try and find an interactive storytelling experience through a subject that lots of people don't want to broach in real life. Slavery (and parts of its continuing legacy) may be a painful period in American history that many may want to forget. But there are moments of triumph and tragedy in that period that can still offer powerful lessons for the 21st century. As Dave put it when we revisited the Runaway idea, "It's one thing to watch 'Roots' and see how hard it was for Kunta Kinte. It's another thing to be Kunta Kinte and have to figure out how to deal with a world arrayed against you."

Exploring murky areas that we as a society would rather ignore is something that games could potentially do better than any other media. Such a shift could also point the way forward to games being taken more seriously as a storytelling medium, and as a teaching medium, too. Where else but a virtual world can we revisit past or even present-day crises and experience them safely from multiple angles? No one game can fully encapsulate narratives of human rights abuses, economic hardship or natural disasters, but neither can any one textbook or movie. Dave says again, "I walk away from a game like Call of Duty 4, and I don't think I'm an expert on combat, or even knowledgeable on combat, but I know more about combat than I did at the start of the game, you know what I mean? Things like cover and flanking, which I understand on an intellectual level -- all that starts to make immediate sense to me on a practical level."

So much of modern-day videogames' appeal hinges on the promise of fresh, visceral experiences. If the industry and audience dare to be brave enough, those experiences can be found in the very world we live in.