What is social realism?

Social Realism is an artistic movement that is expressed in visual or other realist arts. It shows social and racial injustice and economic hardship through unvarnished pictures of life's hardships and often depict the working class activities as heroic. In painting, the style depicts scenes that convey a message of social or political protest with a hint of satire.

Art Movement:

The movement became important in 1930s US during the Great Depression. As an artistic movement it is related to American scene painting and regionalism. Many Artists who subscribe to Social Realism were painters with socialist political views. The movement therefore has some commonalities with the Socialist Realism used in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, but the two are not identical. Social Realism is not considered an official art and allows space for subjectivity. Socialist Realism has been described as a specific branch of Social Realism in certain contexts.

Social Realism has been summarized as follows:

Social Realism developed as a reaction against idealism and the exaggerated ego encouraged by Romanticism. Consequences of the Industrial Revolution became apparent; urban centers grew, slums proliferated on a new scale contrasting with the display of wealth of the upper classes. With a new sense of social consciousness, the Social Realists pledged to “fight the beautiful art”, any style which appealed to the eye or emotions. They focused on the ugly realities of contemporary life and sympathized with working-class people, particularly the poor. They recorded what they saw (“as it existed”) in a dispassionate manner. The public was outraged by Social Realism, in part, because they didn't know how to look at it or what to do with it (George Shi, University of Fine Arts, Valencia) 

In film:

In cinema, Social Realism is a style that finds it's roots in the Italian neorealism movement known for naturalistic, substance-over-style works. Filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica are known for their films in this style. Although the roots of this type of film are Italian it is considered to be Britains main form of Cinematic style. For Britons their early cinema used common social interaction found in Dickens and Thomas Hardy. One of the first British films to emphasize realism's value as social protests was a film from U.K director James Wiliamson, A Reservist Before the War, and After The War which memorialized the Boer War serviceman coming back home to unemployment. Repressive censorship during 1945-1954 prevented British films from more radical social positions.

The United States was one of the last countries to adopt this style of cinema.  Kine Weekly marketed as an invaluable record of British film and television industries development, in 1947 wrote "Americans have shown  they want pictures reflecting the simple emotions. We are trying to crash into their market by offering them gloom-sadism-and-soft-focus. We must aim at the box office and not the art gallery. It is no good aiming over their heads. It will not help us earn dollars.” British Social Realism cinema has an objective distancing from what the characters think and feel, or a naturalism in its character spines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_realism

Social Relism in Gaming.

Realistic-ness versus Social Realism
In this essay I would like to describe how traditional theories of realism can be applied to electronic games, and then propose an expansion of the concept of realism to include new problems that games present.
Within the world of gaming it is possible to divide games into two piles: those that have as their central conceit the mimetic reconstruction of real life, and those resigned to fantasy worlds of various kinds. So, SOCOM is about the real Navy Seals, The Sims Hot Date (2003) is about real dating (one assumes) and Madden NFL is about the real National Football League, while games like Final Fantasy X (2001),Grand Theft Auto III (2001) and Unreal Tournament 2003 transpire in fictional worlds with fictional characters and fictional narratives. Thus games are generally either realistic or fantastical. Expressing the perspective of game designers, Bruce Shelley writes that realism is a sort of tool that can be leveraged for greater effect in gameplay, but is ultimately non-crucial: "Realism and historical information are resources or props we use to add interest, story and character to the problems we are posing for the player. That is not to say that realism and historic fact have no importance, they are just not the highest priority (Shelley,2001).
But realistic narrative and realistic representation are two different things. So these two piles start to blur. For instance, listening to music, ordering pizza and so on in The Sims is most probably closer to the narratives of normal life than is storming an enemy base in SOCOM,despite the fact that the actual visual imagery in SOCOM is more realistically rendered than the simplistic avatars, isometric perspective, and non-diegetic wall cutaways in The Sims. Likewise Unreal Tournament 2003 has a more photo realistic graphics engine than Grand Theft Auto III, but the former's narrative is sci-fi fluff at best, leaving it at a loss for realism. During the Cold War, games like Missile Command (1980b) presented a protorealist anxiety narrative about living under the threat of nuclear annihilation, yet the game's interface remained highly unrealistic and abstract. The infamous game NARC (1990) presented a realist window into urban blight by depicting police violence and drug dealers, couching its gory imagery in an anti-drug stance. Atari's BattleZone (1980a), one of the first games to feature a truly interactive three-dimensional environment, was deemed so realistic by the United States military that they hired Atari to build a special version that could be used to train tank pilots. Yet the game's vector graphics are too sparse and abstract to qualify as truly realist.
If these games are any indication, it would seem that gaming is a purely expressionistic medium with no grounding in realism no matter how high the polygon counts or dots-per-inch, or perhaps that gaming is one of those media, like the novel or the animated film, whereby an immense chasm stands between empirical reality and its representation in art.
But this is something of a straw man, for realistic-ness and realism are most certainly not the same thing. If they were the same, realism in gaming would just be a process of counting the polygons and tracing the correspondences. Realistic-ness is a yardstick held up to representation. And so at the level of representation SOCOM is no different from other games based in real life. That is to say, at the level of representation it is a realistic game, just as how Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (2002) is realistic when it lets the gamer actually skate, albeit virtually, at the real Kona skatepark in Jacksonville, Florida. Realistic-ness is important, to be sure, but the more realistic-ness takes hold in gaming the more removed from gaming it actually becomes, relegated instead to simulation or modelling. This is a contradiction articulated well by Fredric Jameson in his 1992 essay "The Existence of Italy":
"'Realism' is, however, a particularly unstable concept owing to its simultaneous, yet incompatible, aesthetic and epistemological claims, as the two terms of the slogan, 'representation of reality,' suggest. These two claims then seem contradictory: the emphasis on this or that type of truth content will clearly be undermined by any intensified awareness of the technical means or representational artifice of the work itself. Meanwhile, the attempt to reinforce and to shore up the epistemological vocation of the work generally involves the suppression of the formal properties of the realistic 'text' and promotes an increasingly naive and unmediated or reflective conception of aesthetic construction and reception. Thus, where the epistemological claim succeeds, it fails; and if realism validates its claim to being a correct or true representation of the world, it thereby ceases to be an aesthetic mode of representation and falls out of art altogether. If, on the other hand, the artistic devices and technological equipment whereby it captures that truth of the world are explored and stressed and foregrounded, 'realism' will stand unmasked as a mere reality- or realism-effect, the reality it purported to deconceal falling at once into the sheerest representation and illusion. Yet no viable conception of realism is possible unless both these demands or claims are honoured simultaneously, prolonging and preserving rather than 'resolving' this constitutive tension and incommensurability."
So, when one thinks solely in terms of realistic-ness Jameson's "naïve and unmediated or reflective conception of aesthetic construction" one detracts from a larger understanding of realism. Put another way: realistic-ness and realism are two very different things.
André Bazin defined realism in the cinema as a technique to approximate the basic phenomenological qualities of the real world. And he knew well that "phenomenological qualities" did not simply mean realistic visual representation. It also means real life in all its dirty details, hopeful desires and abysmal defeats. Because of this, realism often arrives in the guise of social critique. Realism in the cinema, dubbed "neorealism" at the time to distinguish it historically from its predecessors in literature and fine art, is defined by several formal techniques. These include the use of nonprofessional actors, the absence of histrionics, real life scenery, amateur cinematography, grainy filmstock, long takes and minimal editing. But further, Bazin also associated neorealism with a certain type of narrative,not simply a certain type of form. While Bazin acknowledges the formal tendencies of realism (long takes, amateur actors and so on), and even praises the mise-en-scene of filmmakers like Vittorio De Sica, he writes that "we would define as 'realist,' then, all narrative means tending to bring an added measure of reality to the screen" (1971). Thus, it is the story of the unemployed father that ultimately constitutes the realist core of De Sica's Bicycle Thief, not its degraded style. Jameson follows this by reinforcing what Bazin knew to be obvious, that neorealism was fundamentally a socialist political practice, and not merely a style of film focused on recreating the "real." Jameson writes that "realism is to be conceived as the moment in which a 'restricted' code manages to become elaborated or universal" (1971). The restricted code is, in this case, the code of the working class, what Raymond Williams would call their "structure of feeling." Elsewhere the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1986, 1989) also recognized that neorealism was crucial, situating it at the conceptual turning point from the relatively reified and dominant "movement image" to the emancipatory "time-image" in his work Cinema 1 & 2.
Here's how Bruno Reichlin recently described neorealism in Italian literature: A surgical examination of matters of society, an almost documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a more-or-less direct criticism of current society and morals (2001).
I suggest that game studies should follow these same arguments and turn not to a theory of realism in gaming as mere realistic representation, but define realist games as those games that reflect critically on the minutia of everyday life, replete as it is with struggle, personal drama and injustice.
This theoretical project is already beginning in Gonzalo Frasca's work. His essay "Videogames of the Oppressed" examines how games are able to raise social and political issues (2004) [3]. As a game designer Frasca is also interested in the genre he calls "news gaming," that is, games based on actual news events. His game September 12th, A Toy World (2003) deals with the war on terrorism, albeit using the somewhat unrealistic visual idiom of a cartoon-drawn, web-based bombing game. Other games such as 911 Survivor (2003) or Waco Resurrection (2003) directly reference current geopolitical events. The game company Kuma refers to this genre as "reality games" and offers their own Kuma\War (2004) game with episodes ripped directly from recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://gamestudies.org/0401/galloway/