I’d like to call attention to Gerald Voorhees’ article “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Roleplaying Games” in the most recent issue of Game Studies because it discusses race and offers some worthwhile points of analysis.
In particular, this section of Voorhees’ argument struck me:
The games’ narratives and visual representations continue to deploy race, ethnicity, and nationality to construct characters and plots, but – like other computer-mediated neoliberal discourses (Boler, 2007) – only as obstacles to be overcome. They are starting points that players must traverse in order to configure powerful characters that can do anything and everything. These games are only able to propagate this message by expressing a procedural rhetoric that dubiously represents the social by collapsing difference into sameness.
Voorhess is calling attention to one of the reasons that race has not been given much attention in game studies and that’s because games participate in the construction of a transcendent liberal fantasy of post-raciality and universal sameness. Many games attempt to stage race as a non-issue or a simple stylistic choice solved through the robustness of character modification or appropriately diverse catalogs of bodies. Voorhees ties this to an ideology of neoliberalism which is certainly a strong component of gaming rhetorics of freedom of choice. But moreover, I think we need to look at how this collapse of difference into sameness generally finds its point of reference in a logic of whiteness or in the assumed deviation from a foundational white subject.
Finally, I think what is implicit in Voorhees’ article, and what I would like to make explicit, is that sameness should not be the goal; rather, games should explore forms of productive difference and engage with race, especially given the rhetorical and persuasive power of the medium. Erasing race or believe that race is best foreclosed in gamespace is far too comfortable a solution for whiteness.
What does sameness mean here? Characters who are basically not different, although they may be superficially?
I wonder how games produce colorblindness, and if they might encourage it? It is not just we, bad people talking about games wrong, who make games seem close-minded and raceless, but the games that are actually designed to be racist. It seems like an easy-to-justify decision for developers. Especially given how the industry runs at this time, where risk must be avoided, clones sell well, and the product must be finished with anything complex ultimately cut out for the Christmas deadline.
Anyway, I’m preparing an abstract for PCA/ACA, where Voorhees helps organize the gaming section. You should come! Blackless fantasy was wonderful, and makes me kind of want to explore the fantasy tradition a little further, to get more depth on the connection of orcs & africans, and more traction on ways fantasy worlds can include race in productive ways. (eg the variety of elves, the middle-eastern tribe-like characters with Olliphants and whatever else)
c
Yes, I think that would be a fair definition of what I mean by sameness here. I am concerned with how race and difference are either dealt with in games through overt stereotype or, as discussed here, by just sidestepping it often in favor of a pervasive whiteness that functions as the basis for this notion of “the same.”
And I would agree that part of the problem here has to do with games as commodities, and more specifically commodities that some still consider incapable of being “art.” As a result we see productions that are in large part designed to be less politically challenging and more comfortable for the typical consumer. Productive difference is a hard sell in the marketplace.