Games, Learning, and Society 5.0 Talk: Analyzing Race in Games

Tanner — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:46:29 +0000

Last week I attended the Games, Learning, and Society conference. I also presented a talk there on a panel entitled “Representations of Self and Other in Games” which was a pleasure because it was one of the few explicitly political panels at the conference. Given the educational focus of the conference and the large attendance by designers and educators, much of the dialogue was about how to design educational games and the consequences of learning in gamespace. It was interesting to compare the investments of these approaches to my own more theoretical and politically radical concerns. But more on this later in subsequent blogs.

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.

Teaching Transcoded Race in Videogames

Tanner — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:35:58 +0000

In the past when I have taught race in videogames for my freshman composition classes I have had a hard time explaining how to push beyond representational critiques of racial signification. Naturally students are more adept at analyzing the visual presentation and iconography of race in games than breaking down the more subtle and technical ways race is coded into gameworlds. But it’s also important to demonstrate to the students Lev Manovich’s concept of transcoding where the cultural layer of games the visual material they can identify) is influenced by the software and hardware structures of games.

I have used MMORPG character creation tools as one example of how race is quantified and mapped into a set of options that presents the illusion of choice while adhering to a identifiable set of logics about racial difference. I have also had the students read David Leonard’s “Virtual Gangstas, Coming to a Suburban House Near You: Demonization, Commodification, and Policing Blackness” in order to understand how Grand Theft Auto can be interpreted as a metaphor for the necessity of policing race. I also tend to extend these discussions of Grand Theft Auto to analyze its satirical content and how it presents a critical view of racial antagnoism in American city by exposing the spatialization, hiearchicalization, and inequity of space.

However, it has been challenging to demonstrate, given the difficulty of bringing game consoles into the classroom, how racial representation is coded into the game world via easily identifiable population algorithms which fill the streets with what are considered the appropriate denizens of each sector of the gamespace. This recorded gameplay video of a member of 4 Player Podcast on Justin.tv solved my problems. In the video, the player enters an internet cafe in Grand Theft Auto 4 and encounters a glitch that causes the cafe to be filled with what he calls “heavy set black men.” The point of the video is not to expose some kind of hidden racism but to show students how the game’s technical architecture is a crucial component in understanding how race is manifested in the gameworld. The appearance of heavyset black men in a certain area of the game is not an entirely random effect but a programmed operation with both a technical and cultural logic at play that should be interrogated.

Gaming the System: Tanner Higgin » video

Games, Learning, and Society 5.0 Talk: Analyzing Race in Games

Teaching Transcoded Race in Videogames