Video games, historically, have not really excelled when it comes to presenting adult concerns and themes. From reducing Wounded Knee to a racist haunted house to shoot people in to reducing the Los Angeles riots to a playground to crash cars and shoot people in, the medium is still a long way from producing a Moonlight, never mind a Citizen Kane. Mafia III, which came out to indifferent reviews in October, didn’t do a great job of resolving the tension between wanting to address racism in an adult fashion while still being a video game built on the chaotic Grand Theft Auto template, but the team behind it is taking another crack at the issue. “Faster, Baby!” is the first downloadable content package, moving the action of the game out of the original’s New Orleans stand-in into a small parish ruled by a racist sheriff. While it’s possible that it will do an amazing job of portraying the horror of life in small-town Louisiana under Jim Crow, past efforts don’t inspire a lot of confidence. Neither does the trailer, which makes a noble effort to sell a sundown town as, well, a playground to crash cars and shoot people in.
Of course, despite the ridiculous dialogue about “building a civil rights case” against a racist sheriff, it’s clear that the target here isn’t Loving or Selma so much as it’s Foxy Brown. If a racial issue can’t be solved by hanging out of a muscle car with a machine gun, it’s probably not going to be solved in “Faster, Baby!” Still, considering that this is the industry that gave us “Robo-Hitler,” the game’s treatment of past tragedy looks like a small step forward, at least in the context of video games. And there’s at least one way Mafia III can outperform cinema when it comes to the Jim Crow–era South: the dead-eyed, inhuman stare of small-town law enforcement. This is a challenge when it comes to casting films set in that world, but, as the trailer’s uncanny-valley close-ups make clear, nobody does dead-eyed, inhuman stares like video game animators.
