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’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.

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.

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.