The Cat and the Coup

An excellent representative of this philosophy is Walden, a project currently in development. Rather than simulate all-to-common videogamey feelings of exhilaration or horror, Walden expands the emotional spectrum of  play to moments of calm reflection. You, playing as a Thoreau-like hermit, are invited to be patient and contemplative, moades of play brought on by the self-sustaining tasks of wilderness life you perform. Building on the methodical and introspective environmental meditation of the art-game Night Journey (produced via a collaboration between video artists Bill Viola and GIL), Walden changes the pace and focus of gaming.There’s nothing to shoot. No points to get. Time slows. The player looks inward. She reflects.

Walden is an ambitious project. Technically, Walden has a first-person perspective and a 3D engine rendering the lush forested environment and pond. According to designer Todd Furmanski, there are extra layers of complexity yet to come. He hinted at a host of practical tasks like fishing or chopping wood available to the player as well as an optional system of monetary accumulation and consumption (cleverly meant to confront the player with encroaching capitalistic requirements and desires). Procedurally, Walden is particularly challenging because it eschews the tired and ineffective literature based edu-game template which teaches players by having them read blocks of text. Instead, Walden leverages what makes games great, their ability to model and simulate environments and experiences. Rather than reading about Thoreau, or listening to him, we participate in his style of life, a process of living defined and coded, which, if all works as planned, will end with the player intuiting the virtues and pleasures of Thoreau’s life at Walden pond.

Given the obvious educational value of the project, one would expect Walden to be one of the more attractive GIL projects to funding agencies. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Fullerton admitted that Walden exists solely as a passion project for the team members; every funding source they pitched wouldn’t back it. It exists now only because team members love the project and are willing it into existence.

It’s frustrating for sure, but a simple issue to diagnose: the “educational value” of Walden, which is so obvious to game designers and critics, is unfortunately not obvious to funders. Edu-games that get funded, and which I won’t name here, have been a disappointing strain of game culture. Funds get dumped into the wrong projects, and what gets spat out the other end? Uninspired and ineffective husks of games which might look the part, but demonstrate no understanding of how mechanics underlie play. Just as exploitationware (think Farmville) reduces the expressive beauty of games to tedious repetition and accumulation, edu-games (and many well-funded) often squander the demonstrable abilities of games to educate. Instead of Walden’s compelling simulation of the intellectual and affective journey of Thoreau, we go to an island in Second Life and read excerpts from Thoreau’s writings because that’s literary. It’s familiar; it’s comfortable, especially to people who don’t play or understand games.

The games GIL has developed prove that academic and indie game development are an indispensable and increasingly important avant-garde running counter to an industry struggling with sequelitis and gamification. Games like Walden aren’t only potentially great educational tools, they force videogames to progress, and they provide a space for risks not motivated by quarterly earnings. We need to protect these projects, and protection comes from funding.

So what can we, the pennyless masses, do?

We need to take procedural literacy beyond the classroom and into the boardroom.

Researching and designing educational videogames continues to be one of the most popular forms of research within the critical tendency of game studies. Without question, the push to leverage the strong and unique persuasive and educational aspects of games via the design of new games is a worthwhile endeavor. However, focusing on the design and creation of educational games, newsgames, and serious games also monopolizes the attention of those of us interested in the potential for games to educate. We need to not only create new games that educate, but reflect back on games of all kinds that have already been created. There’s a lot to be learned about our culture from Call of Duty.

The problem is that this learning often takes place without basic literacies of the videogame medium. If we build these literacies we can use them to cultivate the critical faculties of game players and expose to them the important cultural meanings embedded within all games, not just those devoted explicitly to education or persuasion. This meaning cuts across race, gender, sexuality, power, and capital. For my purposes, these cultural meanings are most often tied to critical race theory. I use games to expose students to how race is constructed, but remains a fundamental component of social and political life.

The Need For Literacy

Literacy is becoming increasingly important as videogames continue to gain prominence in the media landscape yet critical engagement within the “gamer” community is undervalued. As a videogame fan and critic I spend a lot of time, as may some of you, traveling between the discourses of academia and the public moving from critical examination of games to debates about the aesthetics merits of games. The gap between these two discourses, while narrowing, is, in comparison to a more “mature” medium like film, massive.

And here I am not referring to the proliferation of racist, sexist, and homophobic language that predominates on message boards and online gaming. Although I do think this is partially related to literacy, it’s also simply a product of the anonymity and politics peculiar to internet culture. Instead, what I am concerned with are the dismissive reactions of fans to serious discussion of the meanings of play, particularly when that discussion engages with issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

To illustrate, let’s look at just two of the 428 comments (the majority of which are negative) to an article called “Blackface Goes HD? The Case of Resident Evil 5” posted on the Microscopiq blog. This article calls attention to the insensitive imagery of hordes of African zombies being shot to death by a classic white male hero in the first pre-release gameplay trailer of Resident Evil 5 at 2007′s E3 conference. The author of the article makes the argument that the trailer is offensive given its connection to historically oppressive images of black people as savage and violent.

Joel
Apr 20th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Honestly I think the person writing this article is looking at this waaaay too deep. I should remind you it’s just a video game. Resident Evil has never had a reputation for being racist and as you mentioned before although RE 4 did not give you this same feeling of racism. While I see why you might jump to conclusions, let take into consideration that RE is a game series where no matter what the people are out to kill you due to their infectious disease. I believe this game is no different. If anything the choice of location is nothing more than a move for a different scenery (too keep the game looking fresh) You can look at it as racism just because of history and the on going conflicts happening in Africa, but I think you’re really overlooking the obvious truth that this nothing more than a video game with the purpose to thrill/scare players, regardless of location/culture/skin color.

andrew
Aug 1st, 2007 at 9:03 pm
It is a video game. People will not change their perception of Africa. It seems that’s your main issue here. If you want to change how people view Africa, then educate them. Playing RE4 did not change how I view Spain. I’m sorry but people play video games for fun/entertainment, not for educational purposes. So please dont bring race into this. Most people (including me) didnt even look at this (as a white man killing black people) until people like you brought it up. If you want people to stop looking at peoples race, then stop pointing it out. Just let us play our games without thinking about race. I just hate it when people play the race card for no legitament reason. I cant wait until my generation are the leaders of this country. We are so sick of thinking about race when people like you bring it up.

On the one hand, we can assume some of these commenters are overly defensive of videogames because they feel as a media form it is often subject to undue attack from politicians and watchdog groups. And it is. On the other hand, and more of interest to me, is how people want to preserve videogames as sites of white masculine hetereosexual fantasy, free of the political contestation of the “real world.” Consequently, games are defended as “just fun” and any claims to the contrary, in keeping with a post-racial reversal, call out anyone wanting to talk about race as racist. In this way whiteness, and the racial hierarchy it sits atop, are protected and anti-racist discourse is nullified and the only viable position of progressive politics is a colorblind view which dismisses the significance of the lived experiences of people of color. Not to mention, as evidenced by the second comment, games are seen as lacking any educational or cultural importance and not worth discussing.

So how do we build videogame literacies which attempt to educate videogame players so they can appropriately critique what they consume and recognize the importance of race, and appropriate representation of race, in videogames?

Toward a Critical Race Pedagogy of Videogames

Since the importance of race to games is often not acknowledged, we need to start with mass market games (i.e. games they actually play) and show how cultural meaning exists within the games they consume. I’ve found that critical reflection is most effectively achieved if a historical lineage of representation is charted that travels from eras students will identify as overtly racist to current games.

To return to Resident Evil 5, N’Gai Croal, a game journalist and current design consultant, performed this very pedagogical role in an interview with MTV’s Tracey John about the game.

They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It’s not even like one cute African — or Haitian or Caribbean — child could be saved. They’re all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed. And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history, you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images? It’s not as simple as saying, “Oh, they shot Spanish zombies in ‘Resident Evil 4,’ and now ‘black zombies and that’s why people are getting upset.” The imagery is not the same. It doesn’t carry the same history, it doesn’t carry the same weight. I don’t know how to explain it more clearly than that.

Croal makes several important points that instruct readers on simple critical gamic racial literacy. First, he offers a visual and affective analysis of the imagery showing the representational techniques of darkness and deviance used in the trailer as well as the positioning of all the Africans as violent and expendable. Second, he connects the imagery to colonial history. Third, and following from the history of empire and slavery, Croal explains that dismissing the imagery as harmless or ethically equivalent to killing white or Spanish zombies, is ignorant of the differing significances attached to black bodies.

In addition to teaching this critical literacy of the visual, we also need to build new kinds of critical analysis that are attentive to the unique representational means of videogames. Since games are simulations, players need to understand that race does not solely function through overt representation but through logics and processes embedded within games. Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” is a useful term to describe this logic.

Perhaps the most basic examples can be found in roleplaying games which imbue races with differing statistics much like racist conceptualizations of racial difference as biologically determined. Moreover, character creation systems quantify and measure a range of human difference which is programmed into the interface as a range of determined options.

I have tried to explain one of the more complicated ways that procedural rhetoric communicates race in games. The population algorithm that generates racialized bodies depending on the spaces the player traverses in Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row locates race as a product of spatial arrangement. In addition, Mark Sample’s blog post on Sim City’s crime rate algorithms, while not engaging with race, provides another very explicit illustration of how procedurality generates meaning.

Each of these examples can be tied within a classroom to critical race theories about white supremacy and the deterministic and reductive ways non-white identity is socially managed through digital media technologies. In this way, students can learn through games how race is constructed and struggled over in the world and through game technologies.

In closing, we know people learn from videogames, and we can, and should, create games that provide worthwhile knowledge. Yet this should not be our only focus. All games teach and often what players learn is insensitive or politically regressive. In response, we need to develop and teach procedural literacies that encourage people to be more ethical and critical consumers of games so that they can better see the continued and fundamental importance of race, gender, and sexuality to social formation.

This post is adapted from a talk given at the 2011 Digital Media and Learning Conference on March 4, 2011.

Game studies has done a good job of figuring out what exactly constitutes a game and creating methodologies to interpret games but I don’t think we’ve done a good job of focusing on pedagogy. And let me be clear, by pedagogy I do not mean the educational potentialities of game technologies – those of course have been well documented by James Paul Gee, Constance Steinkuehler, Yasmin B. Kafai and many others. What I mean is how do we as game studies scholars teach students how to read and interpret the games themselves, along with the surrounding discourses and paratextual industries that accompany games? Ed Chang has written an excellent article offering one answer to this question theorizing textual analysis of gameplay or, to use the term he creates,  how to “close play” in a similar vein as close reading. I would like to offer another possibility using an example of how I teach game analysis, more specifically the analysis of gamic race, using the famous Leeroy Jenkins World of Warcraft (WOW) machinima.

In my classes, I do not have the curricular freedom or the technical capability to have students play a game like World of Warcraft (my classes are standardized introductory composition). However, most students are aware of the game and a short in-class demonstration of gameplay and further explanation usually affords them a basic understanding of how it works. With that background I then explain how a lot can be gained interpretively from looking at how game texts are appropriated, discussed, and remixed by the players. This builds on another lesson I often teach that I have blogged about previously that makes the point games must be analyzed not just in terms of what they represent visually, but also acknowledging the game technologies that are implicated in that representation (this is connected to Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s platform studies series at MIT). Therefore, by looking at the Leeroy Jenkins video and the surrounding player and media discourses students then get a more complete picture of all the different levels of meaning at work and available for analysis in a game.

Drawing on much of my argument put forth in “Blackless Fantasy” published in Games and Culture earlier this year, I then give them an overview of character creation systems in MMORPGs and the seemingly progressive push towards more options for visualization in order to facilitate more diversity. Students usually respond favorably to these changes and view them as the right thing to do given their familiarity with the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Once that is established I point out that even with these options available MMORPGs are predominantly whitewashed environments where blackness is viewed as abnormal and when black or brown avatars are present in MMORPG space they are often lampooned as incongruent with fantasy or sci-fi convention. (But that does not mean blackness is not of central importance to the game itself since high fantasy is obsessed with racial others.) My goal in discussing character creation is to expose the inherent problems of liberal multiculturalism since it understands social equity to be achieved through visibility and not deeper structural changes.

This is a fitting transition into the Leeroy Jenkins video which is representative of how blackness is understood within the context of the world by the players. I show the video with only a short explanation of its narrative purpose in order to illicit a more natural reaction to the humor of the video thus making the exposure of its racial logics more impactful.

After the viewing, we discuss the semiotics at work in the video and how Leeroy, a rare black avatar in WOW, is coded as black. Students often take note of the voice used by the player of Leeroy (a stereotypical 70s blaxploitation voice), the signification of the name as, once again, fitting with blaxploitation, but they often do not take note of the role played by Leeroy within the dynamic of the group.

The bumbling fool that is trying to fit into the predominantly white MMO space but ultimately screws it up for everyone is an example of the Zip Coon minstrel archetype. Demonstrating this to the students shows how these representations have a historical lineage and have undergone many permutations.

In order to counter common reactions to this reading by viewers—reactions that may be circling the classroom—I then have the class look at a Wikipedia discussion that questions the potentially racist content of the video. Please note, this discussion has since been deleted from Wikipedia.

Original Comment:

Am I mistaken, or is this whole character a giant racial stereotype? HELLO?! –yuletide

First Reply:

I’m confused. He’s a character in a game. He doesn’t have a race. I’m white and I love chicken. I would lord my possession of good chicken over anyone I met. I would especially use it to deflect or downplay blame. Maybe the person who is racist is you. Megan 02:24, 20 March 2006

Second Reply:

Maybe it is, why would that be so remarkable? The video is nothing but a bit of comedy after all. 132.162.213.109 05:00, 13 March 2006

Third Reply:

I think you’re mistaken. Why’s it a stereotype? Because of the chicken comment? Even if it is, so what? Surely in some countries people are still free to say what they want, whether or not some folks will be offended by it. Sukiari 22:03, 14 March 2006

The discussion is representative of the common responses to claims of racial insensitivity within and without videogame culture and therefore it educates students as to the contours of the surrounding discourses. It is also productive in that it shows the importance of these issues and usefulness of the critical methodology.

While the students never analyze the game itself, by analyzing a machinima that mediates the game, students are shown how the politics of representation in videogames extend far beyond the character selections available to players and whether they adhere to or subvert dominant stereotypes.

I also like to conclude by pointing out how Blizzard, the game company behind WOW, has  dealt with the potentially offensive content of the video by nullifying race while embracing the marketing potential of Leeroy Jenkins.

I have used MMORPG character creation tools as one example of how race is quantified and mapped into a set of options that presents the illusion of choice while adhering to a identifiable set of logics about racial difference. I have also had the students read David Leonard’s “Virtual Gangstas, Coming to a Suburban House Near You: Demonization, Commodification, and Policing Blackness” in order to understand how Grand Theft Auto can be interpreted as a metaphor for the necessity of policing race. I also tend to extend these discussions of Grand Theft Auto to analyze its satirical content and how it presents a critical view of racial antagnoism in American city by exposing the spatialization, hiearchicalization, and inequity of space.

However, it has been challenging to demonstrate, given the difficulty of bringing game consoles into the classroom, how racial representation is coded into the game world via easily identifiable population algorithms which fill the streets with what are considered the appropriate denizens of each sector of the gamespace. This recorded gameplay video of a member of 4 Player Podcast on Justin.tv solved my problems. In the video, the player enters an internet cafe in Grand Theft Auto 4 and encounters a glitch that causes the cafe to be filled with what he calls “heavy set black men.” The point of the video is not to expose some kind of hidden racism but to show students how the game’s technical architecture is a crucial component in understanding how race is manifested in the gameworld. The appearance of heavyset black men in a certain area of the game is not an entirely random effect but a programmed operation with both a technical and cultural logic at play that should be interrogated.

Twitter is the current hot social network and, for once, I think it is justified. As others have pointed out, what makes Twitter useful is its adherence to simplicity in design and features and the ability to be followed but not follow, or, its asymmetry.

Academics have been especially intrigued by its functionality in the classroom and many have been employing it in novel ways. Dave Parry does a good job of summarizing these various uses and a colleague of Dave’s, Monica Malkin, is featured in a video that demonstrates her use of Twitter as a backchannel.

A backchannel is a networked discussion that occurs behind, but in conjunction with, some kind of primary presentation of material. Twitter is an excellent tool to facilitate such a discussion as evidenced by the video above.

This quarter I am a teaching a standardized and regimented composition course at the University of California, Riverside which I have modified as much as possible to focus on technology and have titled “Culture Machines.” For the first time I have decided to run a course Twitter account and have required all students to sign up and complete a very simple assignment. The idea is to just introduce them to the service and allow them to use it as they see fit. I, however, have been using it extensively as a way to extend the classroom and post interesting links, provocative questions, and announcements.

Students, as expected, had no experience with the service (I believe only one, when surveyed, had tried it) and they were very slow to use it. Twitter tends to have this puzzling effect on new users who find it to be inferior to Facebook or too abstract. Having went through this phase myself, I recognized that what really got me hooked on the service was finding some likeminded friends and entering into conversations (using @ replies) around a central topic – for me it was the 2008 election.

Therefore, to recreate this situation I decided to initiate a backchannel discussion during our week long screening of Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

I had every student follow everyone else in the class in order to receive all of the backchannel content. To do this I recommended they look on the course Twitter account before class and follow everyone I (the course twitter adminastrator) was following.

I recommended anyone with a laptop bring that to class and use it. For those with iPhones or G1 phones, I recommended they download an application. For others, I instructed them, if they had a good texting plan, to set up their phones for text use with Twitter. This is very easy and the Twitter website provides guides for this sort of thing. It’s important that they have a good texting plan otherwise it could be expensive.

I designated a hash tag for the class to use (#cmact2) so we could all group our tweets together and find them later via a search.

Most students had access to one of the two and set themselves up without any issues. I was suprised by how smoothly that went.

BENEFITS

• Students seemed to take to this concept instantly and enthusiastically. As you can see if you check our feed, many students were participating, responding with each other, and making insightful observations as well as answering each other’s questions. Regular class discussion tended to be dominated by five students but via the backchannel students who had never participated before were very active.
• The backchannel, in a 10 week/50 min./3 days a week class, allowed me to contextualize and provide a commentary for the film during valuable classtime that otherwise would be without any critical discussion or instructor guidance. I loved the ability to, as the film was being screened, point out key moments or potential readings.  I am certain this enhanced the students’ understanding of the film, their investment in it as a critical object, and allowed me to shape their thinking of it, in real-time, in order to match the focus of the assignment (which was a gender analysis of the film)
• The backchannel not only allowed quieter students a more comfortable environment in which to interact and contribute, but also leveled out the divide between myself and my students.

PROBLEMS

• Clicking and typing noises were a little bit distracting in our relatively small classroom (set up for 30-40). Although I did tell everyone to silence their phones, there is really nothing that can be done about the clicking. A good sound system that can overpower this background noise is key.
• Some students, although I had not heard any complaints, might feel a bit alienated by not participating in the feed. To alleviate this I would encourage those students to check the feed after class and contribute. There’s no reason the backchannel cannot be extended to after class.
• The final screening’s backchannel was disrupted almost completely by Twitter’s scheduled maintenance. Unfortunately, Twitter is subject to frequent outages.

POSSIBILITIES

• Some of our classrooms have two projectors and two screens. This would be the optimal set up for a backchannel. The instructor could screen the film on one screen and have the course Twitter feed on the other. This would also help those students who cannot contribute to the feed still feel like part of the activity.

FINALLY

Add me on Twitter! ]]> http://www.tannerhiggin.com/2009/05/twitter-in-the-classroom-backchanneling-a-film-screening/feed/ 0