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.

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

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

The Need For Literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toward a Critical Race Pedagogy of Videogames

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original Comment:

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

First Reply:

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

Second Reply:

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

Third Reply:

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

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

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

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