Gaming the System

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 [...]

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 [...]

Maps, Levels, and the Orchestration of Conflict The notion that maps, and the cartographic processes behind those maps, are functions of power, most commonly imperial power, is a fundamental assumption of critical geography. As the diagrammatic products of territorial struggles between political forces, maps are both representations of the world and constructions of that world. [...]

Ambiguity Non-white characters are a shameful rarity in videogames and when they are present (aliens and monsters don’t count) they’re often so ambiguously raced as to be completely indeterminate. I was reminded of this a year back while playing Resident Evil 5 cooperatively with a friend over Xbox Live. About a third of the way [...]

1982 I begin on the shaggy tan carpet of my living room in front of a wood paneled television flickering the image of a game I later find out is called Missile Command. My hands grip the rubber of the joystick and click it violently left and right, smashing the big concave red buttons in [...]

Word cloud image via ghbrett. In November 2009, I had the privilege of participating in a roundtable at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference with Anna Everett, Deborah Kimmey, Tara McPherson, Lisa Nakamura, and Kara Thompson on the Digital Humanities (DH). The panel was titled “Neoliberalism, Multiculturalism, and the Means of Digital Humanities Production.” Convened [...]

I’d like to call attention to Gerald Voorhees’ article “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games” in the most recent issue of Game Studies because it discusses race and offers some worthwhile points of analysis. In particular, this section of Voorhees’ argument struck me: The games’ narratives and visual representations continue to deploy [...]

It was refreshing to be around so many different people from so many different backgrounds at the Games, Learning, and Society (GLS) conference in June, specifically because they were all incredibly excited about games. The conference had just a slight tinge of fangirl/boyism that was endearing and, in some ways, quite productive. After all, in [...]

Last week I attended the Games, Learning, and Society conference.  I also presented a talk there on a panel entitled “Representations of Self and Other in Games” which was a pleasure because it was one of the few explicitly political panels at the conference. Given the educational focus of the conference and the large attendance [...]

This is a follow-up to a previous post. Near the end of his talk Erik Loyer mentioned how music, although clearly a tool of emphasis in the post-plastic instrument peripheral games industry, still has a lot of untapped potential. One of the holy grails of game design, as most clearly demonstrated by the massive success of [...]