This is a follow-up to a previous post.
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.