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.

It wasn’t long after the Nokia Theater emptied that journalists stormed Nintendo representatives and confirmed that Wii U is, in fact, a new console. It’s now old news, and we’re left to debate the consoles merits and its chances at success. And that’s fine and all, except I can’t help but wonder about the cryptic and confusing way Wii U was introduced. There’s something significant behind what appeared, at the time, and just during that time, a significant omission of information.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

A lot of money and effort is put into polishing these presentations. Nothing is left to chance (consider the bourgeois Hollywood rent-a-families demoing Microsoft’s Kinect), and in the case of a console launch, the presentations are meticulously crafted to win over audiences with equal parts adrenaline and affection. Apple is a master of conjuring this cultish aura, and their church services, such as mecca-like Macworld, are highly anticipated press events. More than any other corporation, Nintendo has been Apple’s dutiful apprentice; look no further than the orchestral melody of beloved Zelda music that began the show, blanketing the audience in fuzzy nostalgia.

So why then, within this high stakes and intensely choreographed console debut, would Nintendo leave so many basic questions unanswered? It’s certainly not by accident, and it’s not a product of ignorance. While in retrospect Nintendo President Satoru Iwata did admit that he “should have shown a single picture of the new console,”  he reiterated that Nintendo had not “made any kind of blunder” because the focus needed to be on the controller. “The console itself will be almost invisible.”

Nintendo’s console-less console announcement is representative of a fundamental shift within some sections of videogame culture, a shift from the allure of the mysterious and beautiful computer to the orchestration of social space by the lively machine. It’s not processing power that enchants Nintendo’s targeted consumer, but bodily performance.

Allow me to explain.

In the past, consoles were marketed as highly technical machines. Specifications were pored over by fans, and displayed with pride at press conferences. In the 80s through the early 2000s, as computational power advanced with the stunning rapidity of Moore’s Law, the capabilities of each machine were so important that console development was akin to an arms race measured in bits. Hardware, like the Nintendo 64, branded themselves with their technological prowess. But even within this easily discernible taxonomy, hardware manufacturers still sought to define themselves against the competition. For instance, the battle between the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis found Sega touting their supposed “blast processor” technology in successful advertisements marketing the Genesis as faster and more bad ass. Nintendo responded with equally innocuous technological claims, such as the “FX chip,” stuffed somewhere inside the grey Starfox cartridge. A bit later, the PlayStation 2 received a lot of attention when Saddam Hussein stockpiled them in some supposed stunt to control missiles.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Game technologies, from consoles to cartridges, were sublime objects simultaneously mysterious, gorgeous, and perilous. Gamers loved them, Congress and family watchdog groups feared them, and the defense industry courted and funded developers. Nintendo, Sony, Sega, Microsoft, and many others profited off all of this fetishization; simple machines were transformed into boundless reality breaking experiences.

Given this climate, were used to press events orchestrated around the big reveal of both the machine’s design and its internal components. Apple is an obvious parallel here, and they continue to introduce new products this way in an almost entirely predictable fashion. While less standardized, we can expect Microsoft and Sony to follow suit, perhaps even as soon as next year’s E3 when their respective consoles are likely to be introduced.

Even as recently as 2004, with the debut of the Wii at E3, Nintendo adopted Apple’s minimalistic clean branding and sculpted a beautiful looking machine highlighted by the glowing blue disc drive. What it lacked in power, it made up for in sexiness. But the Wii U is entirely different. Certainly the branding remains, but the object itself, the console hardware, has been almost entirely invisible. During the press conference, many of my friends tweeted potential sightings of the Sasquatch-esque box buried in pre-recorded videos of gameplay. And while we can now see pictures of it, they are decidedly tame like a HD DVD drive.

Iwata holding up the Nintendo Wii (then named Revolution) at E3 2004.

Wii U Console

With the Wii, and its Kinect and Move progeny, we’ve seen the videogame market expand, and the possibilities for play expanded beyond contemplation or digitally networked cooperation and competition to the pleasures of physical performance. We’ve seen games become differently sociable, leveraging the living room space in new ways. Wii U follows this trajectory, and in the process continues to weave a new fetish full of its own imaginings, not of the black box, but of the lively machine and its orchestration of social space.

It’s where you belong. It’s what you know.

This changes around level fifteen when both Alliance and Horde players follow quest lines, treasure, and good hunting into the same areas. For an Undead player like me, the most most infamous flashpoint was Hillsbrad, a contested zone in the northern area of the Eastern Kingdoms, featuring both Alliance and Horde outposts. Particularly in the first two years of WOW (when I was playing most intensely), Hillsbrad was a hotbed of player vs. player conflict featuring impromptu clashes both spontaneous and calculated. The experience rewarded by the quests and monsters native to Hillsbrad were valued, and safe access to them was struggled over and defended. What made this ongoing battle for territorial so compelling was its dynamism. It felt less programmed than the rest of the world. But was it?

There’s no doubt that Blizzard, developer of WOW, calculated that this region was to be an initial site of frequent conflict. Whether Alliance or Horde, players received quests at around the same level beckoning them to Hillsbrad. However, considering there was, at the time, little incentive to do so beyond pride, and perhaps peace of mind, the vehement effort to maintain control through the sustained and enforced exclusion of the enemy had to be surprising even to the developers.

The aggressive and often hateful way players engage each other cross-faction in WOW is, in part, a product of geographical difference. The impact of entering Hillsbrad for the first time as an Orc and seeing a Night Elf crest a ridge and approach is profound precisely because the space that formerly separated you has closed. The radically different character models as well as your inability to communicate cross-faction only emphasizes the exotic effects of space. In light of this, the protracted player initiated conflicts in Hillsbrad can be understood as a symptom of the spatial relationships put in place by Blizzard. Players struggle to return to the purified environment in which they emerge.

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.

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 mass market, that broaden representation from visualization to the actual experiences of people of color. At most we get games that take interest in race through fantastical proxies, like the elves in Dragon Age, or through problematic attempts at social commentary, like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which reduces the experiences of African Americans to 90s ghetto gangsta culture.

When I first heard about Smuggle Truck, however, it  seemed like a departure. Created by indie developer Owlchemy Labs, Smuggle Truck is a side scrolling physics based game that has the player controlling a pickup truck full of immigrants. The goal is to speed through each level and cross the border fence at the end with as many passengers still in the truck as possible. This is made increasingly difficult as the levels progress introducing bumps, tunnels, ramps, and dynamite all of which jostle the car, sending the passengers sailing into the air. Rather than working against immigration, the player is tasked with successfully aiding it.

What interested me about the game was that it was ostensibly designed to have the player sympathize with the experience of immigration. This is something we don’t often get: a game experience that slips outside of the white norm, and the lives of whites to show us the lived experience of the disadvantaged. Unfortunately, Smuggle Truck, in trying to escape the often didactic and dry stylistics of most politically progressive edu-games, doesn’t succeed in making this experience intellectually effective. What we get is at best a lighthearted misfire of social critique, and at worst it’s flat out offensive.

Satirist or Troll?

While Smuggle Truck had been making headlines since earlier this year, I wasn’t made aware of it until Kill Screen ran an interview with one of the men behind game, Alex Schwartz. The interviewer, Danielle Riendeau, describes Smuggle Truck as a “biting satire of the American immigration system” and Schwartz explains how the idea for the game arose when a friend had difficulty emigrating to the U.S.. It’s clear that the purpose of the article is to counter the mounds of negative press the game had received leading to Apple refusing its release on iOS, and forcing Owlchemy to respond by re-skinning the game as the tongue-in-cheek stuffed animal filled Snuggle Truck.

Smuggle Truck repackaged as Snuggle Truck for its iOS release.

In typically astute and level-headed fashion, Colorlines’s Channing Kennedy sums up the controversy well explaining that the game’s “dearth of novel perspective” is representative of a systemic ignorance within indie games to the often dire realities of minority experiences. From Kennedy’s perspective this is due to a lack of developer diversity. As a result, Kennedy argues the game is “absolutely not” racist, just a “fun, irreverent game” with nothing profound or interesting to say, and with a damaging “impact” on people of color and actual immigrants that, while not intentional, is still real.

I agree, but I want to take this opportunity to more deeply explore why exactly Smuggle Truck fails as satire, without relying solely on the cultural backgrounds of its creators. I want to go beyond identity politics because, while I am a dedicated advocate for diversity in game development, I also believe that anyone, regardless of background, can make a game that deals with race in a positive, productive, and progressive way.

Kennedy mentions South Park’s style of satire in relation to Smuggle Truck, and I think he makes an apt comparison. Satire is at its best when using ironic sarcasm in the service of political critique, exaggerating and parodying that which it seeks to undermine and subvert. Stephen Colbert’s outrageous and hilarious caricature of conservative pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh is an obvious and particularly effective example.

South Park, however, is apolitical. The show lambastes equally all sides of any issue and is especially vicious when the target is itself deeply political. It’s effective, and certainly has struck a chord in an age of cable news, reality tv, the blogosphere, and internet anonymity which have seemingly eroded the possibility of truth and justice. In the logic of South Park, everyone, everything, and every cause is ridiculous and worth lampooning. The only crime is to take the world seriously.

But this isn’t satire; this is trolling.

Failed Satire

Smuggle Truck tries to be Colbert and ends up as South Park. The reason: it’s aim is off. Instead of effectively parodying the inefficient, extended, impossible, and downright racist U.S. immigration system, Smuggle Truck ends up making fun of the border crossing experience, which itself is equal parts harrowing and horrific. Other than a smart but brief clickable gag on the menu system which shows a character in a DMV-like room awaiting his “legal” immigration 20 years down the line, the game does not effectively attack immigration through procedural critique. Videogames are well suited to the critique of complex systems and process through simulation so one could imagine a game that takes the state endorsed and managed process of immigration, and its attendant bureacratic evils, as the subject of its mechanics. I would imagine this being similar to Persuasive Games’ satire of airport security. Alternatively, a game could show us the trials of the immigrant experience, and the dire choices involved in making the decision to cross illegally. Here we can turn to another Persuasive Games offering, Diasaffected, which has the player serving customers at  Kinkos and, perhaps, understanding the frustrations of customer service. Neither of these games is the typical dry and ineffective “serious game” that Owlchemy is clearly trying to get away from. These games are playful and fun, yet embedded within them is a clear and focused critique.

The most critically effective portion of Smuggle Truck is the jab at legal immigration buried in the welcome screen.

Smuggle Truck makes the fatal satirical mistake of comically exaggerating the very thing that must be taken seriously for fear of feeding into racism: immigrants. The speeding truck, floaty physics, cutesy “whees!”, joyful music, and cartoonish expressions on the characters work together to make the journey of the immigrants hilariously thrilling. At the level of process, the game is making a confused argument. Irony is certainly a key element of satire. You say what you don’t mean, and you say it in such a silly way that no one could take it as truth. (There are exceptions.) In this sense, Smuggle Truck is clearly designed without malicious intent. Its meant to make the border crossing silly in order to reflect back on how deadly serious it is. But it doesn’t work because even though Smuggle Truck deploys ironic satire, it targets an aspect of immigration, the experience of immigrants, which opponents to immigration themselves devalue and dismiss. In this way Smuggle Truck fits into the very framework it seeks to dismantle.  Those who argue against an open border would take issue with a game that simulates in a satirically exaggerated way the racism of border patrol agents, but they would have no issue with a silly caricature of immigrants.

This brings me to my central point: for Smuggle Truck’s satire to work, its cartoonish fantasy of the border crossing experience  needs to be grounded within the distorted and perverse psyche of xenophobes who might actually believe that border crossing is all fun and games. We need to understand that what we’re seeing is a window into the bizarre racist mind; we need the delivery mechanism of Colbert. Without this context, we’re left to erroneously displace that perspective on the designers themselves, and on the players who enjoy it. On this point, the release trailer for the game is a particularly troubling misstep. It cuts between footage of the game and players, who seems to be mostly be white professionals, reacting gleefully as they try to navigate the truck to the border. I am not saying these people are racist, but without a proper frame for the game content, it appears that they’re laughing at is the trials of immigration rather than the ridiculousness of racism.

Yet while Owlchemy’s satire is, in my view, ultimately misdirected and ineffective, I don’t want to completely dismiss it. Games that attempt political critique of racism and regressive racial politics are so rare that Owlchemy’s flawed effort is still worth something. However, that value lies more in our understanding of how and why this game’s satire ultimately alienates precisely those whom it aims to support.