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.
Voorhees 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 believing that race is best foreclosed in gamespace is far too comfortable a solution for whiteness.