Tag Archives: whiteness

The Trap of Representation

Posted 23 May 2011 | By | Categories: Theory | 8 Comments

Header image from Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego. 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 [...]

Colorblind Character Design in Videogames

Posted 18 October 2010 | By | Categories: Theory | 3 Comments

Ambiguity Non-white characters are a shameful rarity in videogames and when they are present (aliens and monsters don’t count) they’re often so ambiguously raced as to be completely indeterminate. I was reminded of this a year back while playing Resident Evil 5 cooperatively with a friend over Xbox Live. About a third of the way [...]