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 similar to the U.S. Census, is exceptional in its own right, but also curious given how inconsequential these races are to Fallout 3′s fiction. Unlike Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim which attributes histories, skill attributes, cultures, and geographies to each race, Fallout 3′s races have no impact on the game beyond providing familiar stylistic variety.

Racial choices from the 1950 US Census via Racebox.org.

Yet I don’t want to stop here and simply reduce this design decision to a familiar critique of racially insensitive representation. Since meaning within procedural systems is both limited by and dependent on restrictions, I see Fallout 3 as open to a far more complex reading that can be redemptive of the limitations of its character creation system. 

One of Fallout 3′s most pronounced character restrictions has to do with the range of skin colors available for each race. For instance, Asian and Caucasian characters cannot have the darker skin tones available to African American characters. The legibility of these racial categories are thus dependent on color differences, similar to a 20th century color line divide. This ideology mimics the 1940s/50s American nostalgia of the game world, and effectively constricts the true range of physical difference present in people who self-identify as each of the four races in the “real world.” To put it succinctly, by forcing the player to identify with one of four rigid and institutionalized racial identities inside of a retro-futurist pre-Civil Rights world associated with segregation and nuclear annihilation, Fallout 3 affords a rare and bold consistency between setting and character (and let me note that whether this is conscious or not is of no interest to me). The player is uncomfortably hailed into mid 20th century American racial ideology.

Importantly this schema also effectively elides difference, folding the myriad ethnic identifications people might claim into monolithic and reductive notions of identity such as “Hispanic.” Many races are wholly negated, including several often featured in U.S. Census breakdowns such as Native American, or Pacific Islander. Creating a character in Fallout 3 initiates the player into  the violences of a system of raciological thinking similar to 1940s America, but the continued familiar violences of racial categorization seen today in the Census as well as job and school applications, advertisement, and so on.

Ghouls as Racial Proxies

These issues disappear in the gameworld, limiting them to character creation and squandering what could’ve been an interesting exploration, both procedurally and narratively, of racial politics and issues like nationalism and xenophobia which caused the destruction of DC. But that’s not to say that racial tensions completely disappear. Instead the game’s anxiety over race is displaced onto the “ghouls,” whose irradiated and disfigured bodies separate them from the rest of the human population, and who, as figures of zombie fantasy, allow for a safe and comfortable canvas  for the issues of race announced by the process of character creation. It’s a classic design cop out: instead of tackling race head-on, we use fantastical proxies.

Charon, a ghoul in Fallout 3.

Ghouls are a ghostly often underground presence that are easily distinguished from the rest of the population, and predominantly discriminated against. Their scarred bodies bear the violences of both nuclear warfare and the burden of racial conflict they carry within the de-politicized gameworld. (Sidenote: In Fallout 3′s sequel, Fallout: New Vegas, one of the more memorable missions finds the player collaborating with (or undermining) Zionist ghouls whose ultimate dream is launching a spaceship and colonizing another planet. It’s not difficult to see parallels here to Marcus Garvey or Afrofuturism.)

It’s no surprise that the racialized ghouls within Fallout 3 are ultimately the products of technological meddling. Humans are nothing if not technological; in turn, technology as a constitutive and mediating presence is also used as a differentiating mechanism, infinitely fracturing or reconfiguring what it means to be, or who gets counted as, human. Machinic and digital technologies in particular, and the real and imagined posthuman and cyborg beings they create, bear similarities to the racialized condition. For example, Thomas Foster has argued that the supposed malleability of race in digital interactions is prefigured by minstrel shows which didn’t require black bodies for a performance of blackness but a technology of blackness (e.g. burnt cork applied to the face).  Fallout 3′s ghouls are just one instance in a long line racialized bodies manufactured and marked through technology, effectively destabilizing the integrity of any notion of humanness.

Gene Projection

Fallout 3′s modeling of the technological configuration of identity functions at the level of metaphor as evidenced by the ghouls, it permeates the logics of character creation, but it’s perhaps best embodied in the fictional technology used in character creation, the Gene Projector. Rather than making character creation an unexplained event prior to the game’s narrative, Fallout 3 embeds the process diegetically. The player begins the game as a newborn baby. The doctor, the main character’s father, first asks, “Let’s see. Are you a boy or a girl?” prompting the opening of a dialogue box presenting the two choices to the character for selection. The socio-medical gendering and sexing of children is modeled in this moment, forcing the indeterminacy of the newborn and all of its possibility into the politicized rhetorical structure of boy or girl, which, quite fittingly, is conflated with a sexual distinction.

Opening birth cutscene in Fallout 3.

Immediately afterward, the doctor opens up the Gene Projector, a device that allows him to imagine what the baby will look like as an adult. The player finds herself within the character creation interface which is made to look like she is the doctor staring into the monitor of the Gene Projector. The player assumes the medicalized gaze of power, forcing the player character’s body into an established frame of meaning. She’s framed in the projector’s screen, locked within the boundaries of the code, and fixed within the ideological perspective of the game’s setting. The informatic and ideological layer upon each other infinitely, like a video camera pointed at a TV. We participate in the forced insertion of a body into a schema of cultural intelligibility divided up into clear racial categories and their expected phenotypes. We, the institutional force, assert our influence in projecting the player character’s future. In light of this diegetic frame, the use of racial categories to orient character creation makes more sense: we’re born into an ideological grid. Both the sex/gender and physiognomic differences are revealed in this process as supposed inner biological truths which, through the clever diegesis of the game, function more as deterministic choices shaped by the logics of the game and the player’s desire.

Fallout 3 character creation.

Postscript

Many years after my birth, I emerge from the vault, a sealed communal bomb shelter of sorts, or a crypt containing the anxieties and fears of the human remnants who found refuge there. It’s a matter of perspective. The sunlight adjusts just as it did when the harsh fluorescent light first entered my eyes in the vault’s hospital room. It’s a second emergence, and one that fills my chest with the euphoria of possibility. This time there’s nothing to choose but a direction. The open-air landscape sprawls before me destroyed and sublime, and I realize that my choices and freedoms are exercised upon a landscape scarred by violence and division. I’m confronted by this in the first town whose center is an undetonated bomb. Do I detonate it or disarm it? This is just the first of many dilemmas along my branching path as I scar the sand with my footsteps, experiencing the horror and redemption of this digital diaspora.

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 desiring a tool for identity play that lives up to the promise of these 90s promises.

Recognition of inequities in both technology use and in representation have shifted some attitudes about digital identity play from optimistic to skeptical. Lisa Nakamura’s work has been transformative in this regard.

In her study of telecommunications advertisements “‘Where Do You Want to Go Today?’: Cybernetic Tourism, the Internet and Transnationality,” Nakamura critiques myths of internet freedom. Rather than providing the equitable slippage of global identity ostensibly communicated in ads for internet access featuring the meeting of people across the globe, Nakamura describes how the ads actually show something very different that cuts across political lines. Here we’re faced with Nakamura’s key notion of identity tourism: greater freedom of movement, both geographic and cybernetic, for the privileged, and deeper othering and exoticization for the underprivileged. It’s not difficult to see the connection between the fantasy that telecomms sell in the advertisements Nakamura critiques, and the fantasy worlds of MMORPGs that are disproportionately played, in a North American and European context, by whites.

Using the restrictive choices available to users of MUDs and chatrooms, Nakamura characterized online identity as primarily reinforcing stereotypes. After the rise of videogame studies, and technical advances in computer graphics, animation and modeling, Nakamura revised her original claims. In her follow-up monograph Digitizing Race, Nakamura summarizes this change in position:

While in Cyberytypes I focused on the constraints inherent in primarily textual interfaces that reified racial categories, in this work I locate the Internet as a privileged and extremely rich site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counterhegemonic visual images of racialized bodies.

From my perspective, if we are to adequately describe and transform how race is communicated in videogames, we need to focus our attention on how representation is structured, and the politics of production behind this structure. Without an eye to the underlying causes of inequities in representation, our critiques of stereotype, or calls for multi-racial/ethnic/cultural equity will be severely limited in effect.

However, many fans and academics focus the bulk of their attention on what bodies look like and what options are available. The controversy on the popular feminist gamer blog The Border House over the limited options of character creation in a videogame is characteristic of battles being fought over the possibilities available to users in programmed environments. The debate started with a comment posted on the official discussion forum for the then yet to be released Dragon Age II:

Do we know if DA2 will have a better range of racial diversity? I was dissapointed [sic] that Dragon Age, a game that seem [sic] to use elves as an allegory for black slavery and the treatment of native Americans lacks any black or asian people.That and it’s a fictional fantasy world that’s not based on anywhere specific so it just seems thoughtless to the point of discriminaton (sic) to not include other ethnicities.  Not to mention that the character creator doesn’t really let you make a black or asian character with its messed up colour settings. Will this be changed for DA2?

Tami Baribeau, who posts on The Border House as Cuppycake, begins her post, which provides an overview of the ensuing debate on BioWare’s forums, with the passage above. Baribeau clearly aligns herself with the poster’s sentiments and Baribeau, the original poster, and the legacy of The Border House’s advocacy for diversity are correct—it is shameful that BioWare adheres to the disturbing privileging of whiteness characteristic of most high fantasy. Yet the discussion that Baribeau summarizes, and which generated a flood posts before being locked by BioWare admins, while commendable and just, is also representative of the pitfalls of representational critiques in media culture. In order to engage in critique of character creation, progressives appeal to the neoliberal structures of market choice determined by the logics of videogames which reduce differences of all kinds to pure style. The results of critique are beholden to market forces, and existing biases of game production, as opposed to ethics and politics. What we end up getting from this push and pull exchange are a few more skin colors, rather than a game which disrupts the integrity of fixed racial difference entirely.

BioWare representative Stanley Woo’s responses reveal the powerful capitalistic logic of market demand and profit which truly drive game makers. Woo argues that making games fair in representation is a “slippery slope” because there’s no end to groups who would want to be represented. Thus, in his estimation, when designers decided on what races are included in a game they should depend on the setting for guidance. (As if the setting is not itself selected, or as if geography, however fantastical, provides a clear instruction manual for racial difference.) He explains:

We’ve got European concepts pretty well covered, but perhaps you also want Asian to be represented? That might work, but is there an Asian equivalent in the Dragon Age setting?

Woo defends the limited options of identification via an appeal to a Eurocentric setting that remains peculiarly beyond criticism—as if it exists independent of design manipulation, intention, and the pitfalls of ideology. Equally problematic in Woo’s response is his appeal to the market as the ultimate arbiter of equity in representation. Continuing from his “slippery slope” line of thinking, Woo claims that the solution from a design perspective is to “appeal to a large group of people (maybe not ‘the largest’ or ‘as many as possible’) and hope for the best.”

The discussion in this thread, and Woo’s perspective as a representative of BioWare, provide a valuable lesson to progressives fighting for more equitable games. If we’re to simply argue for the increase in options of visualization for various underrepresented groups of people, while sometimes appeased, we’ll find our demands consistently disrupted by the protected privileging of whiteness present in the very ideological structures of game development. The “setting” of the Dragon Age universe, one which, like most high fantasy, fashions the world in the image of medieval Europe, facilitates an exclusion of difference which allows developers to protect logics of white privilege.

And when our demands are met, they are done from the perspective of market demand, i.e. who is the “large group of people” with the most consumptive power. As a result we’re left with empty gestures to diversity already familiar in more mature media forms such as TV and film. Robyn Wiegman expertly diagnoses the contemporary difficulty of fighting for racial equity within and through a regime of visuality that continues to privilege whiteness and cast racial difference as deviations. She explains how “in the frantic move toward representational integration, in both popular culture and the literary canon, the question of political power has been routinely displaced as a vapid fetishization of the visible has emerged to take its place.” As a result “political equity” has been understood as “coterminus with representational presence, thereby undermining political analyses that pivot on the exclusion, silence, or invisibility of various groups and their histories.” When we focus our on energies on, for example, a more diverse character creation system in Dragon Age II, we simultaenously disclose the possibility of analysis of how race is displaced and foreclosed through means beyond the explicitly representational.

Thus Wiegman’s perspective is still relevant, but, in light of the particularities of videogames, we must modify her perspective. Racial difference, and its potential disruption of white supremacy and dominant politics, continues to be pacified under a logic of representational equity. BioWare prides itself on detailed character creation, and user dissension is met with small conciliatory gestures, but never a fullscale revision of the inherent logics of the technologies. It’s the game systems themselves which need to be altered and which facilitate the exclusion and silencing of racial difference Wiegman critiques in 20th century visuality. In games we must be simultaneously mindful of traditional forms of representational management of difference as well as the less understood technological means.

Consequently, I think we need to design a critical tendency that does not just call for more representation because these representations will still fall into the system of fantasy, sporting culture, or whatever dominant ideological frame is already in place, not to mention the inherent hegemonic tendencies of Wiegman’s “integrationist aesthetic.” What we need is a critique of logic and ideology of videogame systems, and an attendant new regime of signification that does not comfortably fit in.

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. They are ideological imprints that actively shape the relations they purport to scientifically reflect.

In videogames the relationship between maps and politics is even more explicit. Mapping, often associated with level design, is the active manufacture of gamespace. When a designer makes a map they are creating space. The aspect of this process that interests me is how this process of arrangement of space in videogames is yet another site where racial difference is constructed. Space in games, and its active creation through architecture, geography, maps, and sociality, affects the negotiation of identity within gamespace in ways that mimic and exacerbate our current understandings of space and identity. If, for someone like Jeremy Black, maps are plans that simultaneously serve the ends of understanding, construction, and control, then mapping in games is the digital enaction of this relationship where space is not just represented but generated.

Any fan of a multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) has a favorite level. One of the most played levels in FPS history is Dust (or de_dust) from Counterstrike (CS). Designed by David Johnston and released in November 1999 as part of the Beta 4 release of CS, Dust was a quick hit and continues to be played twelve years later. Johnston humbly attributes the success of Dust to luck and simplicity, as well as some inspiration from pre-release screenshots of Team Fortress 2. His more detailed explanation, however, reveals the delicate tuning required to make a popular FPS level like Dust. For example, prior to releasing a level, Johnston would time his movement from each team’s starting point to the middle of the map. The intention behind this testing was to locate sites of conflict and to make sure the locations of clashes were challenging and fair.

Dust

While these spaces, such as Dust, are technically “levels” created by designers such as Johnston, they still are commonly (and perhaps even primarily) referred to as “maps.” Initially this might seem to be a misnomer, but the rhetorical conceit of such a term reveals an important function of the game level. Just as critical geography has exposed how maps of physical space are not just representations but constructions of the very spaces they represent, the discursive level/map conflation shows how videogames model and idealize the multiple functions of maps described by critical geographers. When Johnston designs a level he is simultaneously charting it and creating it, and he is designing a level in the interest of managing player movement and conflict. This, in light of the significance of mapping and space to human sociality and difference, opens up a new avenue for the study of how difference is communicated and, as a result, understood by players in videogame culture.

If we, in part, develop our senses of identity and belonging through spatial relationships, then the construction of space in games must be included in these processes. And since games, especially multiplayer games, are so often about competition and conflict, maps are designed to create territorial and geographic differences between players that must conquered through mastery of space.

We can see how games, while seemingly providing sites of free exploration, actually limit the movement of players in order to manage conflict which forms the basis of meaning for many games. We must build on Lev Manovich’s claim that “navigation through 3-D space is an essential, if not the key, component of gameplay.” Drawing from first-person games such as Doom and Myst, Manovich understands games as presenting the “user with a space to be traversed, to be mapped out by moving through it.” As user move through spaces they progress the game both temporally and narratively, unraveling the story and “uncovering its geometry and topology, learning its logic and its secrets.” There’s a clear connection to Manovich’s phrasing and the familiar “fog of war” mechanic of many strategy games whereby maps are covered in a fog that blocks visibility.

As a player moves through the space the fog recedes revealing previously concealed areas of the game map. While the fog of war is an overt example of this function of gameplay, it’s most certainly characteristic of most other games. But if gameplay is just as much about this excavation of space and logic as it is about story, what is being revealed by the player?

Civilization IV “fog”

Just as a player of Civilization moves through the map, rolling back the fog and uncovering geographies and territories to be conquered, players move through the spaces of other games mapping the contested boundaries of space, and the positioning of enemies and allies. Thus, difference, and incommensurate difference, is just as much about spatial relationships as it is about representation. To clarify, let’s turn to Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) as an illustration of spatial difference.

Racialized Space

So similar in style to its predecessor, L4D2 was met with skepticism by fans who considered it more of an expansion pack then a sequel. One thing that clearly sets it apart from the first game is its setting, post-Katrina Savannah, Georgia and New Orleans. The mechanics, however, are essentially the same. You find yourself in a team of four, fighting for survival against never ending masses of zombies. As far as content goes, we’re not offered much in terms of storyline. We know a bit about out characters from various lines of spoken dialogue, and we’re fed some information about the overall situation—it seems a disease has appeared that infects humans and turns them into zombies.

Left 4 Dead 2 poster featuring the Parish setting

Since L4D2 features black characters in geographic locations demographically and culturally dominated by the African diaspora, it’s not a surprise that it would peak my interest as a critic of race in games.

It’s a bit more surprising that it received a decent amount of media and fan attention scrutinizing the representation of blackness, given the relatively apolitical stance of many fans and popular videogame blogs. The conversation devoted to racial insensitivity in L4D2 was, however, brief and quickly dismissed.

The vehement and combative response by the “gamer” community to claims of racism in L4D2 was, in part, a compensatory overreaction to the much more heated and extended debate surrounding the initial preview trailer of Resident Evil 5 (RE5) gameplay released a year prior at the 2007 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3).

Conversations like this are appearing more often within popular videogame discourse, and they are, without question, of importance. But they do not satisfy the broader, and more pervasive, ways that race functions in games. We cannot always rely on this appeal to stereotype and, even in a game like RE5 that clearly has racial stereotyping, there remains other ways in which we can uncover a spatial paradigm of representation that both supplements and moves beyond the paradigm of stereotyping. It’s not simply that Chris Redfield, the hero of RE5, is killing black zombies, it’s how the character is positioned in a post-colonial space with those black zombies that creates the kind of horrified affective response many had to the trailer. The same goes for L4D2 which does not have racial stereotyping, but does map difference spatially.

Left 4 Dead, Zombies, and the Infected Space

This leads to my main interpretive claim: L4D2, fitting with the historical connections between zombies and slavery, leverages the survival horror genre to create a spatial metaphor for anxieties about colonial history and geographically imposed inequalities.

To put it another way: by understanding L4D2 as creating meaning spatially, we can see how it positions difference, which can be read as racialized difference in the context of New Orleans politics, as an infectious threat spilling out from spaces of exclusion and threatening the national body.

Certainly all monsters function as symbolic others and non-normative bodies on which to map concerns about human difference and displace anxieties about new historical configurations of human ontology. Even so, zombies hold a special significance. Consider Kyle Bishop’s theory that “unlike most movie monsters of the 1930s, the zombie was sired directly by the imperialist system” or, as he succinctly puts it, “the zombie…was a new monster for a New World.” The zombie is an overdetermined metaphor for the physical and mental destruction of the human form within the horror of slavery, conjured within the folkloric traditions of the former colony and current republic of Haiti whose people viewed the lack of autonomy of the zombie figure as a threat to their independence. The trope of rising from the dead, psychically shackled and soulless, was an amalgamation of imagery worked through in voodoo rituals as well as witnessed within slave plantations. And while the zombie resided within Haitian folklore, it made its way to the U.S., most likely, from anthropologist William B. Seabrook’s travelogue The Magic Island catching fire in the popular American imagination.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

One of the places where zombie folklore germinated earliest was New Orleans. Not only was New Orleans one of the largest markets for slaves in the U.S., but between 1809 and 1810 it was also the destination for thousands of refugees fleeing the slave revolts that would eventually transform the French colony of Saint-Domingue into modern day free Haiti. Today New Orleans, much like Haiti, is a product of the mixture of French and African cultures, as well as Haiti’s already unique blend of traditions. Zombies, as re-imagined within western popular culture, became less of an outlet for black terror in the face of slavery, and was resignified more as an anxious doomsday scenario for white culture—a slave revolt that flattens the power structure entirely.

Zombies were mysterious beings, emerging from the “dark continent” of Africa and confronting the western imaginary with cultural practices irreconcilable with “enlightened” rationality. They also served as reminders of slavery’s horrors, haunting whites with their own moral transgressions and the possibility that they too might some day relinquish control.

But why are zombies so popular now, particularly in videogames?

It’s easy to map a crisis of consumer identity as the cause for the explosion of zombie films in the 70s and 80s with the mall scene in Dawn of the Dead as the ultimate metaphor for these cultural influences. The 19th century white terror of slave revolt as punishment for capitalistic enterprise is replaced with a late 20th century dread over a loss of personal control in the face of neoliberalism and consumer capitalism.

More recently, films and games such as 28 Days Later and the Resident Evil series, while not innovating the premise of zombie invasions as infectious disease, have certainly refined it and made these issues, and their associated political critiques, central to the meaning of the zombies. These films and games often, as is best evidenced by Resident Evil, locate zombiefication as the product of covert government and corporate meddling into biological warfare. Here we see the latest permutation of fear over capital’s human costs and the possibilities of retribution from exploited people across the globe.

This narrative convention takes on special meaning when considered in light of the spatiality of L4D2. It is set in a geographical location haunted by slavery and depressed socio-economically. Furthermore, New Orleans is subject to severe environmental disaster. In the racist white imaginary, particularly during Katrina, poor and predominantly black areas of New Orleans, were understood as sites of self-perpetuating crisis rather than suffering from structural spatial inequality imposed by capitalist enterprise originating in slavery and continuing through modern globalized corporate networks of production and exploitation. As a result of this ethical disavowal of responsibility, the economically and socially well off have a tendency to see disasters or hardships plaguing poor areas populated mostly by minorities as disconnected from daily life and isolated—a product of an undisciplined and improperly self-actualized existence. Displaced New Orleanians are “refugees.” Genocide in Darfur is not worth helping. Why send aid to Haiti when the U.S. (i.e. white America) has its own problems?

So while zombie fictions have the potential to incite a critical reflection on shared exploitation within an increasingly unequal division of global wealth, they often serve more as a compensatory distortion of conflict and prey upon the anxieties of the privileged.

Zombie invasions in L4D2 stage a fear of infection escaping the social segregation between privileged and unprivileged, threatening an exposure of those in power to the precariousness of bare life. Thus, instead of acknowledging the truth that, as Giorgio Agamben argues, we are all bare life in a state of exception, zombie fiction maintains a fantasy of difference by staging an invasion, across maintained socio-political boundaries, of racialized contagions of economic, health, and social disaster.

Zombie survival horror can be read in light of this diagram I am drawing, as designing and mapping segregated territories which must be traversed and purified. The cultural meaning of L4D2, particularly the racialized colonial anxieties I am most interested in, emerge predominantly, if not entirely, through the affective experience of spatial relationships. The experience of L4D2 is about surviving movement through the dangerous corridors of stormy New Orleans as hordes of infected zombies spill through the margins, impeding progress and requiring (in the logic of the game) a violent purge of difference.

I hope this begins to demonstrate that if we’re truly to understand games, particularly how games engage with human difference, we must be more attentive to this layer of meaning beyond the representational.

We must understand the racialization of mapped space.

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 into the game I made a comment about how Sheva Alomar, the black female character, was perhaps designed to allay concerns over racism that erupted after the initial blitz of promotional footage. My friend responded, “Sheva is black?”

While I was surprised by my friend’s misrecognition of Sheva, the more I thought about Sheva the more I began to see the ambiguity. Her accent is a blend of American, British, and South African. Her features are what might be considered traditionally white especially in the facial logic of videogames. Most importantly her skin is that familiar shade of light brown used by many game developers, as well as in Hollywood film and animation, to signify a safe and “attractive” blackness/brownness which recalls the disturbing racist denigration of dark skin tones which are so pervasive they’re even present within racial groups.

Since that conversation I began to notice that Sheva’s ambiguity is not an isolated case but rather a strategy commonly used in videogames. For example, consider the following characters:

Alyx Vance (Half-Life 2)

Jade (Beyond Good and Evil)

Commander Shepard (Mass Effect)

There are exceptions, of course. For instance, Border House recently explained how Bioshock 2‘s Grace Holloway was a rare instance of mature black womanhood being done right. And in RPGs like Mass Effect characters are extraordinarily editable and allow players to approximate whatever physicality they desire. However, Commander Shepard still adheres to ambiguity in official promotional materials and is the suggested template when the player is prompted with creating a character. While players may or may not use the suggested option, any changes are understood as deviating from the standard Command Shepard, both literally and figuratively.

So what might be the motivation, from the standpoints of the developer and publisher, to create ambiguously raced characters? In some cases the character might fit the logics of the world they are trying to construct or the mixed heritage of the character. For instance, Half-Life 2‘s Alyx Vance is both Asian American and African American. I think Alyx is an example of a wonderful character whose ambiguity is productive and not gratuitous, especially given the fact that her father, Eli Vance, is one of the few excellent older black men in games. Alternatively, benevolent developers could be trying to create characters that represent a large variety of people. So before I proceed, let me be clear: in some cases I think ambiguous characters make sense and are productive.

Eli Vance (Half-Life 2)

But what does concern me about the trend toward the racial ambiguity in games is the possibility that ambiguity is adopted as a way to effectively occlude large swaths of difference from videogames in favor of forms of representation more palatable to a presumed white user base. To put it another way, I fear that race is being censored to the point of disappearance, whether done with positive intentions or not. The result is a gaming landscape dominated by whiteness.

Chris Kohler explored this issue in a slightly different way on Wired back in 2007 when he expressed confusion over what race Jade from Beyond Good and Evil was. He couldn’t tell if she was meant to be Asian, Black, White, Latina, Arab, or otherwise. He concluded that she seems to be none of the above and all of the above and that this indeterminacy is precisely what the developers were going for. She’s a racial everywoman able to appeal to any market. Instead of creating characters of varying races and ethnicities developers create a character like Jade who stands in for all non-white difference.

Colorblindness

What’s most interesting to me about the article is the comments section. Wired readers represent the standard responses to discussions of race in videogames that many readers of this post will be all too familiar with. Allow me to paraphrase these arguments.

1. It doesn’t matter what race Jade is because she’s an alien

2. Jade isn’t a race because she’s a videogame character.

3. Trying to attribute a race to Jade is racist because race is a myth.

The common thread between the above comments is an ultimately reductive post-racial colorblindness that seeks to solve the problem of race by getting rid of reference to race all together: “We’re all equal so stop talking about race already.” The problem with this, as Nick Lalone most recently pointed out in his gloss of Lisa Nakamura’s Digitizing Race (and other texts), is that “blindness to color doesn’t work because there are cultural differences between races/ethnicities in society.” It’s incredibly convenient for people already well off—or free of the burdens of racial discrimination and damaging socio-historical circumstances—to want to dismiss race because it saves them from having to acknowledge and deal with the divisions, discriminations, and racisms that continue to oppress. Colorblindness effectively closes the case on racial inequalities mid-session preserving hegemonic power structures that privilege whiteness. Business continues as usual, but underneath a rhetoric of equity.

Anti-racist activists who battle against this colorblind silencing of racial inequality find themselves caught in a bind: we want to destroy racism and end racialogical thinking but race continues to affect and define people’s lives; as a result, we must maintain race in order to describe and diagnose oppressions. And perhaps the most difficult concept for those less experienced with critical race theory to grasp is that race is a manufactured and segregating force but its also a useful cache of culture and history.

In an adept game of trickery, colorblind ideologues that choose to ignore existing inequalities, for whatever motivation, place the guilt on progressives for calling attention to the problems caused by race because to do so requires an attentiveness to race itself. From the perspective of the colorblind, racism now is found in the identification of race even if the attentiveness to race is pointing out an injustice.

Racial Alchemy and White Hegemony

Videogames predominantly function as colorblind media and the trend toward complex character creation systems or racial ambiguity in character design are effects of this colorblindness. So while videogame audiences are increasingly diverse (e.g. African Americans spend more money on games than whites) they adhere to a colorblind marketing strategy that appeases the desires of 18-35 white males. The result are gaming experiences that offer two equally less than desirable choices: on the one hand, characters fulfill stereotypical notions of racial others or, on the other hand, in what’s coded as a “progressive” move, difference is an amalgamation of otherness that divorces itself from the pressing racial politics of the every day in favor of an ideal post-raciality that doesn’t exist. Videogames and their ambiguously raced characters present the best case scenario for whiteness. Gamespace becomes a past/present/future free of troubling politics and division where the violences of difference are solved and the only racial others are beautiful white people with almond tans.

And don’t get me wrong: there’s a place for this kind of fantasy because, in some cases, it is motivated by a progressive desire to see to the end of race. But when ambiguity is the sole option, post-raciality is transported from the realm of dream to myth. Ambiguity, as a mythic construction, thus occludes substantive engagement with the very real differences that manifest themselves in daily life which, rather than being ignored, need to be described, understood, and worked through.

Evelynn Hammonds (2000) has written about this vision of a racial future, where race disappears in a mixing of genetics that levels current racial categories. In her study of a speculative fantasy of future-race conducted by Time in 1993, Hammonds diagnoses how our mythic post-racial futures often are strictly controlled and manipulated in the interests of dominant powers. In her example, Time used computer morphing technology to create “The New Face of America” by mixing together the photographed faces of individuals of different races. Hammonds points out that to even embark on this peculiar alchemy is to assume that “the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors in the Crayola crayon palette” (315). Compounding this clear adherence to racialized thinking, the “cyergeneticist” in charge of creating the composite face has not organically or naturally generated “The New Face of America” but manufactured it. Hammonds expresses this point eloquently: “With the Time cover we wind up not with a true composite, but a preferred or filtered composite of mixed figures with no discussion of the assumptions or implications underlying the choices” (312).

My interpretation of ambiguously raced characters in videogames is similar. What troubles me is how these racial amalgamations, similar to the “morphies” Hammonds studies, are created with a set of investments driven by market research and sales numbers, and in productive contexts that are significantly lacking in diversity. The premise of amalgamation is that all races mix into one, but built within that premise is an uncritical acceptance of a priori racial separation. It’s no surprise then that what we end up with in games are non-white characters that are expressed through the lens of whiteness, suppressing the beauties of real world differences to the point of indistinction. When ambiguous characters are understood as racial amalgams appealing to white desire, we see that ambiguity doesn’t solve race; in fact, it does the exact opposite. Racial ambiguity represents difference as deviations from a white norm.

The only way to stop this destructive raciology is to stop envisioning our past, present, and future, in and outside of games, as the flattening of all difference into one race and instead embrace an infinite continuum of difference.

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 a vain attempt to stop the onslaught of lightning bolts sent from some undefined elsewhere. The bolts accumulate and splatter across the ground in fuzzy blasts of sound and flashes of light. Some time later my next door neighbor peaks my curiosity when he playfully raps the line “I drop bombs like Hiroshima” in a cartoonish Japanese accent during a street hockey game. That night I learn about the violence of those flashes of light.

Writing the Body in Play

The reflection above is the first bit of writing in my dissertation and is similar to various bits of first person reflection at the beginning of every chapter and scattered throughout the rest of the project. My influence for this style is feminist work in the 70s and 80s, specifically Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other. This diverse critical tendency intervened into dominant patriarchal and masculine discourses within academic writing that privileged abstraction, reasoned distance, and logical analysis. As with many institutions, academia has been structured in such a way as to valorize a masculine disposition and its attendant rhetoric in order to systemically exclude dissent from women, people of color, and the economic underclass.

I believe similar oppressive tendencies exist in game scholarship and maintain exclusions that undermine the potential of the field. However, I think it is perhaps even more damaging within game studies because writing about games can benefit immensely from more embodied, personal, and affective critical engagement since games are played or interactive or actions or ergodic or whatever you want to call it. For feminist critics, struggling over what counts as scholarly work is primarily a way of exposing and giving voice to feminine perspectives. But when applying the same strategies of critical reflection to games, we both provide an outlet for diverse perspectives and are more traditionally rigorous in our understanding of the games themselves. We can do the impossible; we can satisfy the formalists and the experimentalists!

Writing the body was one of the most productive approaches developed by feminists. Scholarship that practiced this tradition worked to use the embodied and visible nature of feminine subjectivity (as opposed to the abstract/universal white male subject) to expand the possibilities of affect, sensation, and consciousness beyond the cerebral. Feminist writing focusing on the body also reclaimed the power of the body from scopophillic pleasures and the masculine gaze. For clarification, let me differ to the far more elegant summation of Trinh:

“Writing the body” is that abstract-concrete, personal-political realm of excess not fully contained by writing’s unifying structural forces. Its physicality (vocality, tactility, touch, resonance), or edging and margin, exceeds the rationalized “clarity” of communicative structures and cannot be fully explained by any analysis. It is a way of making theory in gender, or making of theory a politics of everyday life, thereby re-writing the ethnic female subject as site of differences. 44

I think there’s immense untapped analytical and political potential in mining the voices of critics and members of the game community. In a medium infamous for, at best, its reductive representation of non-white male subjectivity and characters or, at worst, the outright exclusion of diversity, consider the value brought to games when we actively encourage the exploration of difference through personal reflection on gameplay experiences. The writing of the personal is not limited to a specific subject either. As Trinh is careful to parse, personal writing is about a kind of embodied experience that is not attributable to a specific author (a designation that kills potential) but a voice that is specific, real and, paradoxically for those very reasons, generalizable. It allows for connections and affinities. “For writing, like a game that defies its own rules, is an ongoing practice that may be said to be concerned, not with inserting a “me” into language, but with creating an opening where the “me” disappears while “I” endlessly come and go, as the nature of language requires” (35).

Affect, Difference, and What a Game Does

Moreover, this style of writing will work to uncover and unpack how difference is not just a matter of visualization onscreen but a product of a player’s affective experience. There’s been robust debate over precisely what a game object is or isn’t and what we should be studying or not. I think one of the biggest omissions in this work is affect. Just as important as rules, mechanics, or narrative is the player’s visceral, phenomenological, and sensational reception of the experience within specific contexts. Writing about games not as objects outside us but as experiences we’ve had makes affect central to what the object is and how its meaning circulates. We need to stop writing instruction manuals and start writing play.

Consider how frustrating it is when writing about games to describe the game in the traditional mode of literary or film studies. What precisely are we describing? Working within the conventions of traditional academic writing we rely on a description of the plot, setting, and controls and some cursory depiction of visuals perhaps bolstered by screenshots. But this ends up being ultimately unsatisfying because this is only a partial explanation. We’re not getting at what a game does.

Now think about how you talk about games to your friends—you narrate experiences. And in these narratives you describe the visuals, the sound, the controls, the key mechanics, and, most importantly, what you did and how it made you feel. You get at the play of the political in its activity on the body and mind. And I phrase this as “the play of the political” because emotional engagement and personal reception tie directly to a kind of politics where your body and its reactions are in contest with the desires of the game.

A New New Games Journalism?

What I am proposing is not revolutionary. Many of us were excited at the possibility of New Games Journalism (NGJ) and its attempt to do something similar to what I am describing here. And it’s no surprise given the marginal focus of the form that one of the most famous pieces of NGJ was “Bow, Nigger” a first person narrative recounting the response and reflections of the author to a racial slur while playing Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast online. Within the confines of old style games journalism this piece’s affective power would have been neutralized (not to mention never accepted as a pitch or solicitation (although it was eventually published in PC Gamer UK)). Unfortunately the NGJ movement dissipated and its practitioners, like Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol, are now doing the equivalent of NGJ elsewhere. While NGJ is often described as having disappeared it continues to have tangible impact. Certainly games journalism is still incredibly infantile and market/value driven, but the discourse is maturing and there are new publications and voices representative of a more mature and critical engagement with games.

So what I am asking for is an intervention in the field of game studies similar to NGJ but with the political acumen of feminist critique. At its best, this new discursive mode will use the experiential perspective to combat marginalization, encourage difference, and exponentially expand the boundaries, capabilities, and meanings of game objects and the people that create meaning out of them. Furthermore, personal writing about games might be located historically and extend the act of play beyond the confines of the screen to the everyday contexts in which games are experienced, particularly in the play of affect and sensation. If we’re really lucky this writing might also surpass the confines of the digital game object to play’s myriad forms throughout life experience.

But most of all, it’s less boring.

Caption image via Lost in Translation