Digital media and cultural studies research on race, gender, and power in videogames. More →
[NOTE: A version of this work was presented at the 2013 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference. Here is a PDF of the slide deck.] Measured Representation We’ve seen the fight for diversity in videogame culture gain ground in recent years. Women, people of color, and LGBTIQ identifying individuals and communities have productively re-framed and countered the [...]
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In Red Dead Redemption, the build-up to crossing over from the United States to Mexico is tangible. Up to this point you’ve been confined to New Austin, the mythical 1911 region of south Texas that is your training ground. Like Grand Theft Auto, RDR funnels movement cleverly. The player is faced with a region that is expansive but just [...]
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Fall In Non-fantasy roleplaying games don’t often allow the player to choose a race. However, Fallout 3, Bethesda’s open world roleplaying game set in post-apocalyptic Washington DC, allows players to select from four races: African American, Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanic, with Caucasian—unfortunately but not unsurprisingly—the default choice. An explicit breakdown of races in this way, along lines [...]
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We’re used to Nintendo’s E3 press conferences being awkward and odd. It’s part of their charm. But this year was particularly strange because many audience members, especially those watching at home, were utterly baffled: was Nintendo announcing a new console or just another Wii peripheral? It wasn’t long after the Nokia Theater emptied that journalists [...]
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When first entering World of Warcraft’s (WOW) world of Azeroth, you’re provided an intensely guided and relatively safe area, called a starting zone, from which to learn about the game and experience it in microcosm. Depending if you’re Alliance or Horde and what race you choose, you’re located in a particular geographic region, well guarded [...]
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I had the opportunity to visit the University of Southern California’s Game Innovation Lab (GIL) last August. Directed by Tracy Fullerton, GIL is a significant component of the now vibrant indie game development scene. GIL is largely responsible for proving that academic game development can gestate innovative and relevant design that escapes the ivory tower and [...]
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From Representation to Experience I am always looking out for games that handle race and ethnicity in progressive ways. Unfortunately, they are rare. Certainly we see examples of detailed character creation systems that offer myriad options for visualization, and fighting for broader representational options is important, but we almost never see games, especially in the [...]
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Header image from Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego. When we evaluate race in games, character creation seems to draw most of our focus. And there’s good reason for this: character creation appears to facilitate the kind of bodily manipulation promised by digital technologies during the mythic imaginings of the early internet. In some way we’ve been [...]
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