While watching Inception, I could not help but think of all of the ways its subconscious playground compared to the experience of playing a videogame. I believe the film is just a valuable as an exploration of gaming and affect as it is dreaming.

Below is a list of similarities I generated:

(Please note that I realize none of these similarities only apply to videogames. However, I do think that when taken as a group they form a convincing argument for Inception’s game-like qualities.)

1. The film is heavily invested in a set of rules and logics which guide the action and events. The first act is focused on helping the viewer, whose surrogate is Ellen Page’s Ariadne, understand the system.

2. Similar to theories about game avatars, the people within the dreamworld are projections of the users’ subconscious.

3. There’s a heavy focus on the navigation of space. The architect/designer building the world is tasked with creating appropriately challenging labyrinths.

4. The worlds have their own physics engines.

5. The ideas being quested for are locked away like treasures.

6. Time is sped up. (This particularly reminds me of the quick clocks in sports games as well as first-person shooter characters running 15-20 mph.)

7. There are different levels of increasing difficulty.

8. Frequent and/or addicted users have a hard time distinguishing between dream and reality.

9. There are single player and co-op modes.

Can you think of any others?

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 by Kara Thompson, the idea was to intervene in the prevailing discourses of DH and provide a critique of DH’s productive relations from the perspective of Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and so on. We covered a wide range of topics: labor and racism in games, code studies, activism, violating copyrights as praxis, undergrads at USC designing K-12 curriculum, archiving MMOs, the tyranny of the new in choosing objects of study, and much more. Many of the issues we discussed could be considered standard touchstones of DH but what made the discussion unique was our shared investment in a progressive cultural politics dedicated to interrogating and reworking established structures of power. It also doesn’t hurt that I was the only white dude on the panel.

Significantly, we didn’t just focus on the corporate university but the far more subtle ways technologies reproduce oppressive social relations in everyday life within and without academia. Although left unsaid, our guiding principle seemed to be that, as Carolyn Marvin has argued, technologies do not determine social relationships but enter into already established relations. They can either reinforce or transform them and it’s up to us to do something about it. Without a robust critical apparatus, DH has and will continue to unwittingly remake the world in its old image. (You know, the one that has a whole bunch of white guys sitting around a highly polished oak table comparing business cards.)

I didn’t write about the panel at the time because only now do I understand the significance of that experience to my formation as a scholar. It wasn’t simply that I was able to share an intellectual space with some of my academic idols, but that it articulated my grievances with DH as well as demonstrated to me that I wasn’t alone.

For the past few years I have had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with DH. Since I am primarily trained in Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Media Studies, I cannot help but take issue with what I see is a potentially technofetishistic obsession in DH with technological transformation via the creation and use of various digital tools/platforms/networks, etc. as agents of social change. These efforts are often performed under the guiding ethos of collaboration which often becomes an uncritical stand-in for an empty politics of access and equity. There are exceptions, but it seems, and I realize I am generalizing here, that issues of cultural politics are downplayed or, more commonly, considered a given within DH. There’s a disposition that the battles of race, gender, class and ecology have already been won, their lessons have been learned, and by espousing a rhetoric of equity everything will fall into place.

DH does have its strong suits:  e.g. the ethics of copyright, privacy and open source, but as an intellectual community its positions on race, gender, class, and the environment are undertheorized and underimplemented even if many practitioners think otherwise. My concern is that when everyone in DH finally builds his/her One Collaborative Widget to Rule Them All, the dust will settle around Mordor and it’ll still be mostly a bunch of white academics at relatively wealthy universities talking about open access and probably around a rather nice table with a few unlocked iPads on it.

To prevent this outcome, DH needs to cultivate an equal interest in critique as in creation. Our play needs a politics. Alongside the creative and practical, we need to have an attendant critical effort that has the license to step in and provoke revision, or, better yet, assist with production. And we need an intellectual community that welcomes this interventionist presence and acknowledges its current lack.

These thoughts were circulating in my mind last weekend during the 2010 THATCamp. Designed as unconference that embodies a more active and dialogic alternative to the traditional conference format, THATCamp is a successful and beloved event in DH which has spawned a host of regional and international offshoots. Hopelessly poor, I enviously lurked this year’s conference, as well as last year’s, and read with interest as some of my favorite Twitter acquaintances offered updates about the happenings. But as it wrapped up and I looked at the final schedule and browsed the Hacking Academia collaborative book project, I considered how fundamentally different the ASA roundtable was from THATCamp. Much of what I am interested in was left unsaid or assumed. There just didn’t seem to be work engaging explicitly with my concerns.

I tweeted a question, “Where’s the race/gender/power/ecology?”, to the #thatcamp and #hackacad communities and Dan Cohen, one of the organizers of THATCamp, told me to check the submissions to the Hacking Academia project. Since I had been following the conference closely I had already read the submissions, noticed the dearth of discussion of these issues, and meant the question to rhetorically expose the investments and exclusions of THATCamp. Admittedly, it was a rather lame and unsuccessful attempt at intervening into the dialogue about the conference, but I was still disappointed in the lack of engagement with what I feel is a legitimate issue with THATCamp and DH. My purpose was and is not to troll or be negative; rather, I would like THATCamp and all of DH to expand and clarify what it is we do and to embrace a vigorous politics of inclusion and provocation because, behind my curmudgeonly tone in this post, I like THATCamp and I like DH.

Most importantly, I believe that critique can do things too and it can do things  even better with the innovations of DH.

So let’s expand the focus of DH beyond what we do and how we do it to whom we do it with and whom we do it for. Let’s do what matters and let’s make that our battle cry.

Time to start work on my THATCamp 2011 proposal.

It was an intentionally exaggerated but honest and innocent question and one I had been thinking about a lot lately. In the past few months, I had unscientifically noticed there was a a new topic trending each day supported by tweets from predominantly black users. (And let me note here that my trends are geolocated and cover the LA metro area so this may be different, or perhaps not even apply, depending on where you’re living. If so, please leave a comment.)

A few examples of the trends I took note of in the past week or so: #bottomlineis, #1thingaboutme, #whyyouattheclub, #laughatem, #oldassnames, #thingswesaytopolice, #blackmamaquotes

I imagine the reason why my friend sent the message to me privately is the reason why no one has written about  this: we’re worried that making this claim is somehow racially insensitive. However, it’s quite the opposite. Taking note of, and understanding how, black people are using Twitter  as a form of public discourse is important to combating inaccurate narratives about minority participation on the internet.

The Digital Divide and Black Technocultural Production

Allow me to explain. The rhetoric of the digital divide— that is, a gap in access between the haves and have-nots of cyberspace—continues to dominate discussion about minority use of computer and internet technology.  And while this divide does exist (according to Pew, in 2008 56% of whites have broadband access vs. 41% of blacks and 55% of English-speaking Latinos), many have complicated this simplistic narrative of access and exclusion. Thuy Linh N. Tu,  Alondra Nelson, and Alicia Hedlam Hines emphasized in the introduction to their foundational Technicolor collection that we need to think beyond simplistic solutions of access and consider the politics of access, i.e. what kind of access is granted and in whose interest is it being structured?

Also, as Anna Everett has argued, the rhetoric of the digital divide tends to devalue, defame, and discount a robust tradition of black technocultural production. Along with Everett’s critique, many writers (see Ben Williams’ chapter on Detroit techno in Technicolor and Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies) have worked to expose the proud, novel, and influential ways African diasporic cultures have expertly manipulated and innovated digital technologies, particularly music production, but are often forgotten amidst the focus on white dominated modes of production (such as computer programming).

Digital Dozens: Twitter Trends and Signifyin’

The overwhelming participation of black users in the creation and proliferation of Twitter trends is yet another example of the well documented history of black use of technology. But what is especially fascinating about the discourse of Twitter trends is its similarity in tone and content to African American rhetorical traditions, particularly signifyin’. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defines signifyin’ over the course of his book The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. According to Gates, signifyin’ replaces semantics with rhetorical style stretching and doubling (even tripling, quadrupling, etc.) the meaning of signifiers in an effort to parody, misdirect, and/or encode. Perhaps the most recognizable form it takes is in the irreverent vernacular verbal confrontations called the dozens (e.g. “Yo momma’s so ______, she(’s) ______!”  duel). The importance of the exchange of the dozens is not in the denotative meaning of the exchange but in the creative manipulation of style within the defined rhetorical tradition. A very similar exchange occurs within the bounds of the Twitter trend topic. The hash tag and phrase that compose the trend provide the framework within which participants can play with style.

Signifyin’ and the dozens are most often associated with street corners, school yards, and barbershops and are defined by a very distinct rhetorical tradition and set of codes and practices that are protected and safe from surveillance and policing by those outside of the discourse community, i.e. women, men, whites, etc. To account for the protected discursive exchanges within these public placesVorris Nunley has expanded the definition of the hush harbor, a secret place for African American slaves to engage in religious practice, to these other spaces defined by the rhetorical traditions of black culture. Within this context, signifyin’ is not simply a play of language but a rhetorical performance that provides access to a politically protected discourse community. Within this community, using this rhetorical tradition, black people have employed the dozens and other modes of signifyin’ as a means of entertainment, communication, and political negotiation. Consider the trend #shutyobrokeassup. While it’s clear this discussion is meant to engage in the humorous one-upmanship of the dozens, the subject is of class interest and the language is distinctly black vernacular. It might be easy to dismiss these tweets as silliness but within the context of class struggle they also serve as a coping mechanism and shared acknowledgment of political inequality, however slight or unconscious that intent may be.

The Not So Hush Harbor

But given those similarities, Twitter seems to be fundamentally transforming the traditional safe physical space of the hush harbor. For one thing, the trend discussion is explicitly public, so much so that it’s a point of pride to get a discussion so popular that it begins to appear on the left hand side of the Twitter main page. In this way, Twitter trends are less a traditional hush harbor and more in line with mass market reconfigurations of black culture wherein other discourse communities have access to the performance but not necessarily the code or lived experience that makes the performance politically or culturally significant. Here I see some alignment between commodified forms of black discourse (for example, blaxploitation film) and queer camp which provides a distinctly different experience to audiences depending on their subjectivities and social identifications.

Twitter facilitates a large scale, distributed, and exponentially more populated arena in which to signify but at the cost of greater surveillance and, it seems, less discussion between participants. But, just as in queer camp, the codes which provide a barrier of access work to maintain the appropriate discursive boundaries within which to communicate. Without the walls of the barbershop, rhetoric becomes even more important as a proof of authenticity.

Thus, Twitter, as new configuration of the barbershop, is a prime example of how black people are not invisible on the internet but are emblematic of the tightrope of privacy we all walk in taking our sociality to the net.

Kick-Ass is an important film for videogame scholars to see, especially with an audience. Many have made the claim that videogames have influenced film, but this influence has never been more apparent to me than in Kick-Ass. However, my concern is not with tracking the obvious visual/stylistic similarities (e.g. the first person shooter sequence featuring Hit Girl); rather, what  I am interested in is how the apparent but not functionally established connections between gamic logics and filmic logics can actually lead to serious ethical misunderstandings by the audience. Even though Kick-Ass and games are alike stylistically, there are still significant affective and logical differences that, if confused, can lead to ethically troubling audience responses. This ethical confusion, wherein audiences misread a film by applying gamic logics to film, demonstrate the desperate need for better videogame literacies that teach viewers how to interpret and understand games.

Disclaimers: 1. I have not read the graphic novel yet so these reactions are based solely on how I interpret the film (and I would love to hear from someone who has read the graphic novel). 2. I do not believe that games are making people violent. See my chapter in The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto for how violence in games can be productive. 3. Beware there is a mild spoiler ahead. 4. I understand my argument is based on one anecdotal experience. The point is to throw an idea out there and see what people think.

To Laugh or Not to Laugh

Let me illustrate what I mean by this ethical confusion. Early on in the film, the hero, Dave Lizewski, debuts his Kick Ass persona and is beaten up by thugs, violently stabbed and then hit by a car and left for dead. The purpose of this truly brutal and jarring scene is to disrupt the lighthearted tone of the film’s opening and confront the viewer with the dire consequences, as well as the incredible stupidity/bravery, of what Dave has chosen to do with his life. The entire film relies on this balance of extreme violence, humor, and very real consequences. Each “hero” is introduced with an emphasis on the fact that, while fighting and violence can be dazzling and fun, ultimately pain hurts (Hit Girl via the bulletproof vest sequence and Red Mist’s jump down into the alley) and that things can—and probably will—go very badly. Significantly, Hit Girl and Red Mist’s scenes do not have the presence of danger and the pain they endure is funny, while Kick Ass’s scene is incredibly dangerous and not funny. The decision to show Kick Ass in deep trouble is key to the plot of the film since Kick Ass is the everyman the viewer is meant to identify with. Kick Ass’s asskicking also exposes the fantasies of unrealistic violence in comic books.

Yet the majority of the audience in my theater laughed when Kick Ass was stabbed and laughed even harder when he was hit by the car. They also laughed at many other moments I felt were not supposed to be funny but horrific. From my perspective, and that of the person I saw it with, the audience’s response was disturbing. The inappropriate laughter  is the effect of the transposition, by some viewers, of videogame logics and ethics to other media—in this case, film.

Violence as a Mechanic in Videogames

Here’s what I think is happening: it can be assumed that a lot of the audience for Kick-Ass, especially the predominantly 17-25 year old male demographic of my screening, are videogamers. Death, destruction, and violence are a nearly pervasive element of all videogames and hold, for most games, very little consequence. Games are often allegorical and thus violence can take on a host of different meanings that’s more often than not is reduced to its function as a mechanic of the game. To be reductive, violence is a way to score points or to accomplish goals. As a result, violence in games can almost always be interpreted as funny and in most games pain is just a mathematical value with little affective response from the characters or player. Consider the player of Grand Theft Auto who runs around in a world that resembles real life but those resemblances conceal gamespace that essentially functions as a complex system of obstacles to impede free movement. In this situation, getting hit by a car is structurally equivalent to being hit by a hammer as you try and jump between platforms in a Mario game.

For those audience members at my screening, Kick Ass getting stabbed and hit by a car was funny because they are viewing the film as if it was a videogame. This is a fundamentally incorrect way of understanding what is happening in the film and a detriment to the experience. To look at the character of Kick Ass as a videogame avatar/crash test dummy corrodes the humanity and fragility of Kick Ass that provides the emotional center of the film. I acknowledge that viewers can and should interpret a film differently but to laugh at that scene represents a destruction of the narrative architecture of Kick-Ass. Moreover, the laughter exposes an ethical disposition that is troubling. (NOTE: I do think some videogames have characters that need to be understood as fragile and draw their power from that fragility but they are few and far between. Since games have extra lives and life bars, etc. it is difficult to have a player invest much in their well-being. Of course, permanent death of characters (e.g. Aeris in FFVII) do famously affect players but that is different than emotional concern over injury or brutality.)

The study of videogames is still in its infancy and public discourse around videogames is still painfully immature and reductive. If I am correct in my theories here then there has been no better example to me of how far we still have to go than the reaction to this film. It’s important that we talk about the ethics of games, especially when those ethics begin to creep into other media and everyday life. Games aren’t bad for you and like all other media some games are ethically sound and others are not, but they must be understood on their own terms and the differences between games and other media must be acknowledged.

Unveiling the video at the National Press Club on Monday morning, Assange said the helicopter crew approached its job as if it were a video game, not something involving human lives. Their desire was simply to kill,” he said. “Their desire was to get high scores on that computer game.”

In particular, this section of Voorhees’ argument struck me:

The games’ narratives and visual representations continue to deploy race, ethnicity, and nationality to construct characters and plots, but – like other computer-mediated neoliberal discourses (Boler, 2007) – only as obstacles to be overcome. They are starting points that players must traverse in order to configure powerful characters that can do anything and everything. These games are only able to propagate this message by expressing a procedural rhetoric that dubiously represents the social by collapsing difference into sameness.

Voorhess is calling attention to one of the reasons that race has not been given much attention in game studies and that’s because games participate in the construction of a transcendent liberal fantasy of post-raciality and universal sameness. Many games attempt to stage race as a non-issue or a simple stylistic choice solved through the robustness of character modification or appropriately diverse catalogs of bodies.  Voorhees ties this to an ideology of neoliberalism which is certainly a strong component of gaming rhetorics of freedom of choice. But moreover, I think we need to look at how this collapse of difference into sameness generally finds its point of reference in a logic of whiteness or in the assumed deviation from a foundational white subject.

Finally, I think what is implicit in Voorhees’ article, and what I would like to make explicit, is that sameness should not be the goal; rather, games should explore forms of productive difference and engage with race, especially given the rhetorical and persuasive power of the medium. Erasing race or believe that race is best foreclosed in gamespace is far too comfortable a solution for whiteness.

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.

But I say in some ways because I think it can also lead to narrow research that avoids difficult – many times political – questions which might otherwise mire the researcher’s beloved object of study. I find this, and certainly found this at GLS, to be the case in relation to World of Warcraft (WOW).

WOW was undoubtedly the game at the conference; that is, it was the touchstone of most presentations and the point of reference for many conversations. If nothing else, you could count on the person you were speaking with to, at the least, be familiar with it and, potentially, be a level 80 with a weekly raiding schedule and a costume ready to go for Blizzcon.

Certainly WOW’s popularity at the conference has a lot to do with its unparalleled success in the computer games market. It also was the first game many people had played. And then when you factor in the timesink that WOW becomes once you’re hooked, it is no surprise that so many people are thinking, discussing, and writing about it.

That being the case, WOW is also simply a great research environment for the questions scholars at GLS wanted to ask. Since the conference was focused on learning with, through, and in games and the impact of that learning on society at large, most of the presentations and poster sessions presented research that speculated about how people learn in games or what they are learning or how to design games for learning, and so on. WOW or similar MMORPGs tended to be focus given their sociality and cultural status.

But it seems to me that, in the wake of the violent video games lunacy and media vilification and skepticism about games as useful, game scholars tend to overcompensate by producing research that repeatedly demonstrates that games like WOW have educational potential and are productive learning environments. I am not trying to argue that this research is useless, but that I think it is operating with some fundamental blindspots to political issues, specifically relating to race and gender, caused by:

• The nature of the disciplines that are producing the work, i.e. the pitfalls so-called of scientific objectivity.
• The concern that critique undermines the hard-fought place of games as valid and worthwhile cultural objects.
• A certain wide-eyed fascination/fetishization with/of the game born from a lack of experience with games.

This is particularly troublesome to me because these blindspots are some of the most interesting aspects about the learning that is going on in games.

To illustrate, let me reference a panel discussing gender ethnography in WOW. The speakers offered some solid arguments that debunked the notion of the typical WOW gamer and demonstrated how and why women find the game compelling. And while I respect and consider myself a participant in the growing section of feminist scholarship in games that is deconstructing the monolithic hardcore gamer or problematizing the idea there is a “girl gamer” who likes “girl games” (both categories often being sexist and reductive), I think we should also look at how games like WOW stifle feminist playstyles or feminist politics.

It was my impression that critical views of the politics of a game like WOW were dismissed because they might disrupt the very notion that there are some rather productive feminine spaces opened up by WOW and how women are playing and using the game.

This is not the case at all.

What I recommend, however, is that if we are to try and locate a feminist politics within WOW we can only do so by being mindful of how the structure of the game might be resistant to those politics. I pointed out specifically how WOW and all other MMOs, while including the progressive mechanic of cooperation, is still primarily about accumulation of material items, competition, prestige, and the cultivation of personal capital. This is antithetical to a feminist politics due to the patriarchal basis of that competitive and capitalist framework.

Therefore, if we are to uncover or fashion a feminist politics within MMOs we need to  identify both the progressive and oppressive circumstances feminism finds itself in.

Those of us presenting on my panel were tasked with offering our thoughts in a micro-presentation format that translated into a provocative but often frustrating six minutes and forty seconds per speaker. Unfortunately, I had prepared a longer talk and had to trim my content down to three minutes since I was co-presenting.

Therefore, I went ahead and recorded the full length version of my talk.

Link to video.

You can also view the presentation itself here.

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 the Wii and the recent announcements by Microsoft and Sony, is intuitive control and accessibility. Given the Wii’s success it is certain that any other potential videogame console competitors will need to discover ways to integrate so-called “casual” gamers and make their products more inviting and easier to use. For Loyer, music is a natural tool to  facilitate this transition since music can affect people of any technical ability or previous gaming experience. Loyer isn’t interested in expanding market share, but in developing new kinds of interactions with games; however, the Wii’s success demonstrates these two aims are not incompatible.

While people are often spoken of as having no rhythm or being tone deaf, music, to be as mind numbingly cliché as possible, is a universal language. Although we might not all be able to sing or stay on beat, we can judge when something sounds good or not and this process is deceptively simple yet involves incredibly complex cognitive calculations and judgments. Compare this to a new player of Halo 3 multiplayer who has no possible baseline with which to judge how to play or let alone play well beyond the standard rewards system of killing a lot of people and not dying often. Inexperienced players lack the extensive conditioning to the interface and the genre’s ruleset and expectation in order to simply operate the game. Many games thus have a built in barrier of access tied to technical capability and game enculturation.

But what if the gameplay and operations of the videogame were based on the qualities and functions of music? With some simplistic interface instruction, any player would be able to understand the basic operations of the game and the prescriptions of good/bad gameplay or basic success/failure measurements. This is where Loyer left off and where his games and design philosophy seem to be heading – utilizing the universality of music as intuitive gameplay. 

My interest in this subject is more critical in focus. Loyer’s discussion of music as a form of design shorthand got me thinking about how game developers use race/ethnicity in a similar fashion when trying to create immersive worlds. Just as music can potentially be a progressive prepackaged set of mechanics, race functions often as a reductive cultural cache of signifiers and logics to efficiently explain the various interactions, backstories, relationships, and hierarchies of races/species/ethnicities in games. In MMORPGs, to take one of the more obvious examples, racial semiotic systems are used to explain antagonistic factioning, e.g. orcs vs. humans and the high fantasy split of monstrous/humanoid and primitive/civilized, etc. In this way, race becomes a toolset to signify incommensurate difference to a player familiar with these cultural codes.

This reminds me of Alexander Galloway’s brief but important analysis of race in World of Warcraft (WOW) in “Starcraft, or, Balance” in Grey Room. He suggests we not concern ourselves with determining whether using these strategies makes a game racist or not; rather, what is more important is how race is coded into the gameworld and often, as in WOW, identified as biological..

Extending this critique in light of Loyer’s perspective on music, I would argue that we need to recognize how race in videogames is motivated by the conditions of the design process itself just as it is a product of aesthetic/stylistic/representational choice. In this way, critical race studies in games should include an analysis of the politics and economies of representation rather than just judging the representations themselves as good or bad in order to avoid the pitfalls of reproducing or legitimizing racial formations through such judgmental discourse.