Cultural Relevance Through Non-Innovation

In keeping with the previous posts, I am trying to continue a theme. I wish to refine and redefine the argument I want to make and then write it into a coherent pdf. Where it goes from there, I don’t know.

In any case, I am interested in what people playing video games and people making video games are discussing and maybe not really talking about.

There is a large amount of assumptions that are made when a designer or innovator in any sense of the word, creates a new product / idea / thing. This brings us to our first premise, one that I will illustrate with a quote from Aramis or The Love of Technology:

“By definition, a technological project is a fiction, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist ye because it is in the project phase” (23).

Further, I wanted to say something with this in mind, of the nature of the technological project. Same source:

“No technological project is technological first and foremost.

“What’s that engineer poking his nose into?” you may well ask. “Why is he criticizing society, pursing his own politics, his own urban planning? An engineer answers questions, he doesn’t ask them.” This is the image of engineers held by people who think technology is neutral, or …that technology is purely a means to an end, or…that the only goal of a technology is technology itself and its own further development. Bardet, as we have seen, defines his goals and questions for himself, even if he is defensive about playing “amusing mental games” or making “sterile critiques”. He’s a sociologist as well as a technician. Let’s say that he’s a sociotechnician, and that he relies on a particular form of ingenuity, heterogeneous engineering, which leads him to blend together major social questions concerning the spirit of the age or the century and “properly” technological questions in a single discourse. “ (32-33).

In this statement sits the general idea I have wanted to make but have been struggling to discuss. The issue with video games is that there is not a single engineer that is in charge of this technological product.

Each game requires, like the subject of Aramis, a series of innovations that are not altogether related. There is a trail of associations that begin when the first design discussion happens. How are we going to get A to do B using C physics engine on the D console. How are we going to get A to do B using the controller configuration of the D console? Here is where the limitations of telling a story in a video game start. Jordan Mechner of Prince of Persia, says:

By its nature, video game writing is inextricably bound up with game design, level design, and the other aspects of production. A film screenplay is a clean, written blueprint that serves as a starting point and reference for the director, actors, and the rest of the creative team. It's also a document that film scholars and critics can later read and discuss as a work distinct from the film itself. Video games have no such blueprint. The game design script created at the start of a production is often quickly rendered obsolete, its functions assumed by new tools created to fit the project's specific needs.

While most project specific needs may be met, not all of them will be due to either physical limitations, monetary, or time constraints. Going back to the examples from Aramis, video game makers, the project developers, the scripters (both voice and code), and the people ensuring the code works well with the D console, all need to work together to perform a task that can only be called a technological one. If a video game is a technological product, then the series of translations that occur based on what they feel the industry, their company, their fans, and their soon-to-be fans, need to be accurate. Here is where the social aspects of the game creation process come in.

Once a game is released, the innovators, translators, and associations are put on the table. It is up to consumers to decide if the game is worthy of their attention. Here we will use another quote from Aramis:

“Rather than focusing on the artificial difference between State and industry, the public sector and the private sector, let’s choose the more refined notion of spokesperson, and find out, next, whether the constituent groups turn out to be well represented by those whom have given their mandate. The spokespersons assert that automobiles mst be supplemented, complemented, by Aramis. They are the ones, too, who claim that all their constituents would say, would think, or would mean the same thing eventually, if only people would go to the trouble of questioning them directly. The representatives surround themselves with unanimity. To hear them, the conclusion seems obvious, irresistible…” (42).

Here, Latour is talking about a problem that most industries have, this includes the video game industry. Most creators of technological products need to create products that meet the needs of their users as well as grow their user base in order to meet the ever growing cost of using more and more expensive parts. However, this doesn’t necessarily happen in the video game industry as the things that have made money in the past keep being remade with the innovations created by the D console’s new processing power. Thus, innovation is somewhat removed from the game maker’s hands and placed into the D console’s manufacturer.

This process has been repeated quite a few times now. When a console has been around for a while and the number of innovations decrease slightly in favor of truly tremendous reinnovations of the D console’s apparatus (via a re-translation of the console’s intended use), a new console appears. The console makers have little to lose as reimagining older games in a new light has been as successful as games could be.

Do we owe it to the kids?

Recently I was struck by a conversation and a situation about the perception needed to understand and enjoy video games. It started with Metroid Prime 3's intro. I was watching someone play the game for the first time. They aren't the kind of person that would really play this type of game but found herself playing it. As she was wandering around the intro level, she kept having trouble finding the door handles, figuring out how to move correctly, and just, in general, not really enjoying themselves. The conversation went something like this.

"How the hell am I supposed to open this door?

"Well, every door has a handle."

"Why would a door be opened with just a handle in a video game?"

"Because no matter how hard games try they are always grounded in the realm of common sense."
"Yeah, but it's a video game, why would I think about common sense? It's supposed to be fantastical and some sort of alternate reality. I haven't played games long enough to know what common sense made it into these things."

The last phrase struck me. Here we were on the all too friendly Wii playing a game that was essentially a point and click adventure and having trouble getting at the controls of the intro level. It set me off thinking about what it takes to understand video games in the way that video games are meant to be understood and the gap that exists between those who have been playing games and enjoy them, and those that would enjoy them if they could just figure out the introduction to games.

Later that weekend, I was at my girlfriend's birthday party at her sister's house. Being that all of the siblings have recently started having children, the house was filled to the brim with children. As the party died down, the Wii was broken out and one of the oldest of the grandchildren began challenging everyone to Mario Kart. Eventually they all convinced me to play him.

Now, I mostly avoid playing games against him. Like all kids these days, they seem to think that they are just good at everything. Now, I can let him win or I can make him work for his win or I can just stomp him. Most times I just stomp him as everyone else hasn't play games long enough to really beat him. Still, this means i'll have to play him forever until he finally beats me. 

Anyway, it's not too hard to play the fool for a 5 year old. But, sitting there watching everyone play I noticed that he hadn't ever unlocked or won past the opening of the box and that got me to thinking. Do parents owe it to their kids to unlock this stuff for them?

Now, none of my girlfriend's siblings are really gamers. In days past, they played some games (Commodore 64, N64), but they never really were the gaming to completion type. Considering the Wii is meant for people like them, they've been picking up games for the Wii for quite some time. 

One of the complaints i've heard is that the games cost a ton and you get so very little. They just don't know that they can play the game through and unlock more; that games like Mario Kart actually have more than what comes with the box. I know some of you are thinking, "The ???'s are there, what the hell, but do they know that that means there are more circuits to complete?

This is where the perception of gaming came back. These guys hadn't played games since arcades were popular. Most arcade games, especially in the 80s and early 90s, didn't have unlockable content let alone hidden things. There is no reason for these guys, hearing that the wii is meant for everyone, to think that they would have to work to play a game. 

It got me to thinking about the Wii. This is a system meant for beginners but Nintendo is hiding enourmous amounts of things in their games for the Wii. Is this fair? If the game is meant to be for the family and the games for it are coming with half of the game unlocked, is the family getting out of the game what they should and does it matter if they don't know that they're not?

What Do Video Games Need to Be More Culturally Relevant?

The post semester blues are always a strange thing. Typically, I go off and just sit in quiet for a while reflecting on what I’ve learned and where it’s taking me but this time I am trying to be a bit more proactive and write about it so that I may learn more. So, it’s time for a theoretical exercise.

In keeping with the previous post, I am interested in what people playing video games and people making video games are discussing. I am further interested in what they do not agree with and the discrepancy that exists between the intent of a game maker and the way a game player interprets that intent. You could also say, the way the game maker intended the game to be played via their system and how game players play the game using that system.

As this is supposed to be a theoretical exercise, I wanted to base my thoughts on something that came up constantly through this semester. I keep looking through my paper trail on Bruno Latour and getting hung up on a chapter in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. In this chapter, a conversation between a Doctoral Candidate and Latour takes place. The candidate has come to Latour to ask about Actor-Network Theory and wants to see about using it in his thesis, as it is “hot stuff”.

I’m cutting out a lot of this for fear of infringement but this is the part that always makes me think. S is student, P is professor (pages 151-155).

S: But I have to make the actors learn something they didn’t know; if not, why would I study them?

P: You social scientists! You always baffle me. If you were studying ants, instead of ANT (actor-network theory), would you expect ants to learn something from your study? Of course not. They are the teachers, you learn from them. You explain what they do to you for your own benefit, or for that of other entomologists, not for them, who don’t care one bit. What makes you think that a study is always supposed to teach things to the people being studied?

S: But that’s the whole idea of the social sciences! That’s why I’m here at the school: to criticize the ideology of management, to debunk the many myths of information technology, to gain a critical edge over all the technical hype, the ideology of the market. If not, believe me, I would still be in Silicon Valley, and I would be making a lot more money – well, maybe not now, since the bubble burst…But anyway, I have to provide some reflexive understanding to the people…

P: …Who of course were not reflexive before you came to honor them with your study!

S: In a way, yes. I mean, no. They did things but did not know why…What’s wrong with that?

P: What’s wrong is that it’s so terribly cheap. Most of what social scientists call ‘reflexivity’ is just a way of asking totally irrelevant questions to people who ask other questions for which the analyst does not have the slightest answer! Reflexivity is not a birthright you transport with you just because you are at the LSE! You and your informants have different concerns – when they intersect it’s a miracle. And miracles, in case you don’t know, are rare.

S: But if I have nothing to add to what actors say, I won’t be able to be critical.

P: See, one moment you want to explain and play the scientist, while the next moment you want to debunk and criticize and play the militant…

S: I was going to say: one moment you are a naïve realist – back to the object – and the next you say that you just write a text that adds nothing but simply trails behind your proverbial ‘actors themselves’. This is totally apolitical. No critical edge that I can see.

P: Tell me, Master Debunker, how are you going to gain a ‘critical edge’ over your actors? I am eager to hear this.

S: Only if I have a framework. That’s what I was looking for in coming here, but obviously ANT is unable to give me one.

P: And I am glad it doesn’t. I assume this framework of yours is hidden to the eyes of your informants and revealed by your study?

S: Yes, of course. That should be the added value of my work, not the description since everyone already knows that. But the explanation, the context, that’s something they have no time to see, the typology. You see, they are too busy to think. That’s what I can deliver. By the way, I have not told you yet, at the company, they are ready to give me access to their files.

P: Excellent, at least they are interested in what you do. It’s a good beginning. But you are not claiming that in your six months of fieldwork, you can by yourself, just by writing a few hundred pages, product more knowledge than those 340 engineers and staff that you have been studying?

I have been thinking about this passage and the underlying messages of legitimacy, relevancy and imposed structure and how it relates to video games. Specifically, I have been thinking about the function of a system in a game.

My argument comes in the form of several different perspectives. First, the game designer has power over the gamer in that they can impose whatever system they choose. Second, the story within a video game is often ancillary and merely a function to serve the system a video game uses (e.g. Halo’s FPS system is there to provide a means through which Master Chief can accomplish amazing things by himself or with another Master Chief, RPG systems are often created in much the same way as their pen and paper counter parts in that they serve to emulate the growth of power needed to defeat the big bad).

That said, sociological perspectives are mostly synonymous with video game systems. In conflict theory, one group must always be in conflict with another, the group in charge must always maintain their power by convincing the other that it is a good idea, functionalism must always take a portion of society as necessary for the whole (albeit the dysfunction of a portion of society opens a few of these doors). Video Games often recreate basic iterations of these theories. We often have an oppressive regime that needs to be taken down or something that comes in to oppress / destroy us all.

It’s all about perspective here. Living within a specific framework in sociology shields us and blinds us from seeing arguments from other perspectives. Sure, we can go and do another study using a different framework, but this second study is another step in darkening our blinders. We could compare conflict theory and functionalism but all we would learn is that in one system, 1 group is subjugated by another whereas in functionalism one group is supposed to be lower as there are always people that need to be under others. As you can see, we merely compare the two perspectives and move on, not learning about the group we are interested in so much as how the two systems conflict and contrast. We don’t ask the people we are studying what they feel from their perspective. We simply impose social theory on a group already having a multitude of other things imposed on them.

In other words, the system through which we see the world shields our eyes from seeing a group of people in different ways.

This is a function of ANT. It attempts to close these gaps by taking us from the top looking down and puts us into the same level as the actors we are studying and let’s us view all action and trace associations. ANT acknowledges the social world by allowing it to act fully. Through ANT, no longer would sociology be preformed to plug groups into without asking or looking at that group’s action. Moving on to video games.

ANT as a perspective for game design is interesting. The discussion between S and P could just as easily be a discussion between a Game Designer and P. The messages of the discussion work as a metaphor for game play and game design.

Like social theory, a game designer has to choose what frame they want to stick a game into (FPS, SRPG, RPG, Platformer, etc). A game’s story, a game’s narrative, isn’t really what drives the story. The story is bound to the rules of the engine it uses; certain choices, certain design decisions are dependent on the limitations of that engine. However, where social science is free to approach ideas from a wide variety of frames, video game makers are not. Video game makers are stuck on the consoles that exist and may only use the engines that are made to work for those consoles or are limited by budget to develop their own in house engine.

Consoles add another level of complication. Comparing it to social science, this would mean that I could only base my theory on ideas created from a language that wasn’t my own, using ideas that aren’t my own. Further, the lifeblood of the video game industry is money and this means that games must be made according to what the markets demand. Experimentation is low because of this.

Now, I know the first thing that will be said here is that there are games where the story matters. The only thing I can say here is that there are always exceptions. The exceptions deserve discussion, but not here. The argument I want to make is complicated to me. It may not be complicated to you but I am new to this idea so I wanted to get this out of the way. Video Games are a combination of interactive storytelling, games, play, and fun. This combination of things has existed in multiple forms throughout history but this one has taken shape in the so-called ‘modern society’ so we have what exists in front of us.

So, there are two mediating variable that exists inside each and every video game, engine of the game and system the game is on. Whether it be an in-house engine customized for a game system or an engine purchased and customized to fit the needs of the maker, the engine of a game is the nuts and bolts of the player’s experience, the story is ancillary or is adjusted to meet how well the system works on the console or machine it is intended for. It has been this way since the first video game was created.

I tried to think of a better term than mediating variable, but it works.

In statistics, a mediation model is one that seeks to identify and explicate the mechanism that underlies an observed relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable via the inclusion of a third explanatory variable, known as a mediator variable. Rather than hypothesizing a direct causal relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable, a mediational model hypothesizes that the independent variable causes the mediator variable, which in turn causes the dependent variable. The mediator variable, then, serves to clarify the nature of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables.

The mediation variable has a tremendous affect on the player’s enjoyment of a game. It depends on a huge range of other independent variables. Person making the architecture that runs the game, the person making sure that architecture can exist inside the console that is running the game, and the people that make sure that those two are communicating enough to make a coherent product.

This issue has become more and more of a problem as consoles have become more complicated. The gap that has been growing in development time, money spent on development and failure is causing the same types of problems that sociology currently has. In essence, the stale nature or tired portion of constant innovation and ‘progress’ has created a growing want for a ‘revolution’. Or, you could say that I feel the Atari / Arcade machine created methodology of video gaming that was perpetuated by PC and home console makers is about to reach its critical mass.

In Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn writes (92):

Political revolutions are inaugurated buy a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of an aspect of nature to which that paradigm itself had previously led the way.

I believe that there are several things going on here. One, the state of innovation in video gaming has been two fold but necessarily limiting. More code can be processed faster thus allowing for a higher resolution for display and artificial intelligence in the way it has always been programmed. This innovation has been extremely limiting in that it has cut off more and more people who would play video games until all that is left is a single demographic, males between the age of 18-35. This limiting effect has begun to taper and lose hold as the resolution approaches life like possibilities.

As we reach the point whereupon the uncanny valley seems to be within reach, the need for innovation in other aspects of video gaming increases. Getting back to ANT, the need for game makers to actually listen to their players is increasing. You can see this beginning to take place in the type of games that are managing to reach sales figures that surprise most fans of games to the point of criticizing them. The rest of the world, separate from the narrow niche of people who have been purchasing games, are ready for a world of electronic games that, like they say, are easy to play and hard to master.

While user generated content is silently making its way across all platforms and various types of games in an attempt to do just that, it is still limited to the system that the game employs. For example, I can choose now if I want to be a woman or a man from a certain city and my stats change or I can build a level in Little Big Planet, but I am still restricted to the system that the game employs. I have little to no control in the actual content of the game, I can even make myself a fat, horrible person in Fable II. Here to, is a revolution waiting to happen.

The growing issue created between engine and console is made clearer here. If I have complete control of the content of a game, I am limited to my own imagination but restricted by the engine the game employs. I could just as easily be horrible at this as I am at basketball and no amount of predictive work the engine may employ will help that. User created content depends on the creative nature of the user and looking back through history, the amount of inspiring, creative, people is very small when compared to the rest of the world’s population. Video Game makers need to expand their influences past video games that have come out before they began making their own game.

In the words of Roger Egbert:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Egbert here is making an argument that video games teach us nothing culturally. There are arguments to the contrary but as they are mostly limited to the scholarly realm, they do not often make it to popular culture in a noticeable way. Perhaps someday the scholarly work will matter; however, the problem with video game is that most games come from a culture that isn’t our own and are devoted to a singular idea delivered through an engine they probably didn’t make.

Wrapping this up, Video games are stuck in a variety of ways. Games are: dependent on the current state of technology, dependent on other people creating engines that allow them to create a game they want in the way they want it, stuck making games the way that games have always been made, stuck spending more and more money to deliver games to an audience that grows smaller and smaller, further limited by design camps that are more and more inclusive and are thus limited in innovation due to their tiny audience. This fits in well with my wanderings in Sociology as it is experiencing similar issues.

Video Games are stuck between several different cultural ideas. They are seen as escapist and often immature things that are meant for a specific audience. They have a movie connotation to them now that the life like nature of their graphics is becoming more apparent. Fiction rules are applied to video games because games are meant to be a way to tell a tale that is fiction but the rules with which the games are made are almost in opposition of the rules of fiction and thus limit the type of people that would enter into making a video game at all. Movie tie-ins and movies made from video games are often horrible and serve to widen the gap that video games can be seen as a proper work of fiction.

So, until someone can come in and destroy these preconceived notions, shorthands for narrative (genre rules), the video game may well be excluded for not creating its own method of telling a story with its own artistic merit. Until game makers can get past their own self-imposed limitations and try to create messages that actually talk about something in society past the already established media, video games won’t matter as much as they should, or could.

On Bruno Latour, Generic Types, and How They Relate to the Video Game

This semester has been one of the most difficult ones I have had. I gained about fifteen pounds from due to spending countless hours reading and I don't know that I really gained exactly what I was looking for. But then, considering I don't know what I was looking for in the first place, I can't really say that much.

More than most semesters, I feel like my theoretical perspective has shifted dramatically. Where I was once exceedingly excited to learn more and more social theory, i've shifted to jst wanting to know more about 1 theory. I suppose that graduate school is all about specialization but it's somewhat disturbing.

The last thing that is just weird to me is that graduate school forces you to talk about your own feelings as opposed to hiding behind basic social theory. Even the assignments change.

The most important things I learned this semester I think I can list.

1. General social theory seems to revolve around creating things through which we try to box everything and everyone in. In other words, functionalism, conflict theory, symbolic interactionism, and every other theory that's out there.

2. As scientists, we box people and ignore the action that people create. We tell them what they're doing.

3. Sociology performs a very important function in scoiety but tries its best to not acknowledge that function by maintaining objective ideology.

Despite these criticisms, the rest of my program, the rest of my time in school, is going to be spent perpetuating the very thing I spent criticizing. In order to graduate, I must be able to prove that I can perform in the preformatted Sociological Tradition. I have some issues with this but being in school is really about doing this in the first place so I would say that this is nothing new.
In any case, I learned what it would take to really write about a group of people this semester and I find myself somewhat overwhelmed by it. To blog is one thing, to really write about something is another.

And this gets me to a summer project. Over the past few weeks, I've seen a tremendous amount of hufflepuff about gender, race, and inequality in gaming. Discussion like this seems to be very critical on one end while at the other end, the privileged end, it seems to be filled with apathy and frustration as they don't understand exactly what the argument is supposed to be. The later is where I think more discussion is needed. Namely, I want to look at what exactly is happening there.

There seems to be something wrong in gaming. I think that perhaps this is a safe statement. Something is off. We could point fingers to game makers, we could point fingers to gamers, advertisers, game resale shops, chains, commercialization or even the ever quickening rate of technological change. But, this would be taking a very narrow path and would only lead to blinders and dead ends. I am curious as to what's really going on here and i'd like to think about what i've been doing this semester as a means to explore that possibility.

I'll begin by offering as a means to remind myself later of what it is that i'm trying to do.

The unit of measurement here is Generic types. It's not really a term so much as it is a concept. We see these in almost everything we do or build that requires something of a general concept. Marketing uses this to target specific audiences, stores build themselves around the general needs that the research group in charge of them feel that would benefit them the most and schools are a supreme example of this. Schools are designed with a singular purpose, a place to speak and a place to listen...these days there is typically a television or projector, screen, dry erase board, and perhaps a sound system.

These generic types are created through a wide ranging amount of definitions and constant emulation of the first iteration of that idea. For example, schools and that have been around for thousands of years and you could, if you were so inclined, to trace them as far back as there was written record of them. Tied to this, you could also trace the association of learning and literacy to the christian religion. An illiterate populace could not worship through the bible if they could not read it.

So in this case. I want to trace associations that gamers have (in particular, video gamers) and see where it takes me. I want to look at video gamers as a generic type. The difference I want to make is that I want to look at it from how pop culture refers to gamers and not how gamers identify themselves. It's one thing to look at this from the video gamer's perspective, it's another to look at it from pop culture's perspective. What does pop culture think about gamers and how is that perception shaping and fueling video games in general. This is not to say that I don't want to look at it from the gamers perspective as well. I want to start on one side of the definition and walk to those being defined and look back. How do gamers, how do games, react to these things?

My general thought process is that the type of games that keep coming out are inexorably tied to social movements that begin and end with certain types of people coming in and out of pop culture's focus (also, technological innovations on the part of sound, graphics, and processing). Further, gaming is tied to technology and the recent console generation actually brought about a shift from more power is better to something else. I want to explore the technological implications behind gaming. Because paradigm shifts happen so regularly and furiously in pop culture (I am sort of looking at this from more than a trend perspective) about subject content, tracing associations should be relatively easy. These groups of people influence the creation of games by being the type of person that would be considered the "general type" that fits the mold of the gamers these days.

From here, things should prove to be interesting. I suspect that many people who read this will think that it's common sense and will be little more than stating the obvious. However, I really think that it is our common sense that is creating this nagging feeling in my mind that we are missing something and it is from there that my want to do some basic tracing begins. I will have to limit myself and stick to one path so choosing a path is important. The beginning will be simply testing the waters. Once the right path is found, we will dig in and see what that trail has to offer.

Race and Gender in Video Games

The Department of Sociology I am a student of is filled with people who talk a lot about race and gender. In fact, I would go so far as to call the department specialized in Race, Gender, and Stratification. This is a generalization, but for the most part it fits. A professor that teaches here, an amazing teacher, wrote a book called Silent Racism: How Well Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide. It is an excellent book and really serves to educate on an idea of growing importance in discussion of race, how racism is and why we are still racist despite any amount of "equal rights".

You'll see this argument in a lot of places. White Privilege, White Power, Majority Rule, all of these things serve as a synonymn for the ideas of silent racism. This term is also synonymous with feminism in that all feminist studies have to be done using white male's rules for study and white male's journals for publication. Majority rule, the completely invisible but all encompassing white male culture, and the super-saturation of these things all serve as a means through which discussion of race and gender are rendered impossible. But we just have to keep trying.

Over at the well-intended but ill thought out Critical Distance Blog, a statement ignited a flurry of anger that has been mostly misunderstood by the editors there for the same reasons that I listed above. It's difficult to talk about the things the frustrated commenters from theirisnetwork tried to discuss over there. Further, it's even more difficult when the anger and frustration of not being able to talk about these things explodes as a defensive flame driven comment on the viability of any poster's ability to discuss things as they see fit, privilege talks be damned. The unfortunate thing is that even after calming down the discussion is still confused and mangled in that those causing the issue through their privilege still do not seem to understand what is going on. This discussion takes a bit of education and a lot more reflexivity before deciding where discussion needs to be headed. I can only hope that it manages to head a little in that direction despite any amount of feet in mouth.

Tangent to this is the newest Brainy Gamer article that really brings the same subject to the floor. This was what prompted me to try and write a bit about these ideas. I didn't want to post these opinions there as I did not want the same arguments to begin. I use this blog to monitor my own interests, needs, and ability to create arguments so, if I were to create a horrid discussion here, it wouldn't really be a big deal. The discussion needs to happen but too often opinionated or frustrated conversation erupts into flames on the net and the discussion is quashed as irredeemable.

In fact, discussion of race online is typically met with "Let's just ignore it." You can even see arguments from scholarly articles as far back as the late ninties that have talked about killing race discussion as a topic (Race in Cyberspace - Lisa Nakamura, et al)

First things first, definitions. I'm just going to post the silent racism faq:

• Race awareness in well-meaning white people—including racial progressives—is both sorely lacking and a crucial piece of the racism puzzle.
• Well-meaning white people who are passive around others’ racism encourage it, whether or not they intend to.
• Slavery and segregation have been transformed into a less obvious structure: institutional racism.
• Race awareness entails understanding three facets of racism: the history of racism in the U.S., how institutional racism operates, and insight into one’s own silent racism and passivity.
• Both silent racism and passivity in well-meaning white people are instrumental in producing institutional racism.
• Throughout U.S. history a small group of white Americans has stood against the racist institutions of their day.

So, silent racism is the unintended creation of racist ideology that carries over into the institutions that govern the country. An example here is a simple one, poor people are poor because they are lazy. If a majority of black people are poor, therefore black people are lazy. It's also on the other end. Rich people are caniving money hungry horrible people, Most Jews are rich, therefore all jews are caniving money hungry people.

Now, it's called silent because we don't talk about it and that makes it worse. Think about how you feel right now. It's uncomfortable, it's accusational, it's difficult to accept. It is all of these things simply because we are comfortable in thinking we do not have these tendencies; however, we do have these tendencies. We just do not recognize them, or accept them because we are told that we do not have them. This is the most difficult portion of this argument for 95% of the time, it never gets past this point. The tendency is that people write this argument off because it is easy to just say "well this is just reverse racism, i don't want to hear it."

That argument is from a place of privilege and is exactly why this discussion is very very necessary. If the people on top refuse to acknowledge the disparity that exists between different colors of people within the same social classes, then we cannot talk about it and th resulting anger about this discussion will simply result in similar fashion of the Critical Distance blog. Fury is inevitable by minority groups who cannot talk about their shitty position simply because the majority group doesn't recognize it.

Now, this was created by the same stuff that we saw after Obama was elected. Because a Black man was elected president, therefore racism is over. The interesting thing here is that because a black man was elected president, we need to be discussing race more and fortunately, we haven't entirely closed up the discussion again. It is just unfortuante that there are so many issues with the economy right now. We'll see what happens once the economy is back on its feet or finishes its transformation.

Ok, back on topic. Damali Ayo over at fixracism.com really gets at this in an 'in your face' kind of way. I really suggest reading over her stuff, it is quite amazing. Now, let's move from race to discussion of race about video games, vis-a-vis, Brainy Gamer's topic on Sports Video Games.

Do a search for race and video games in google. The most reliable thing you'll find is a quote from gameology.org:

I am working on a paper dealing with the commodification of Blackness in video games and I am finding the subject horribly ignored.

Does anyone have some good sources for racial representation in video games and digital media? Please feel free to comment and form a mini-bibliography for myself and anyone else interested in the subject.

Here is where I try to tie in Brainy Gamer's article on sports games. I believe that we don't really talk about sports games in that it's not something a video gamer would do because we're all mostly white, privileged, nerdy boys and sports games are reserved for old men and minorities. Discussion of gender and sports is well known in academia about sports, but will not even be touched on past that female softball team you can play against in Bad News Baseball on the NES.

It just isn't really talked about. I tried looking for what I wanted to talk about but I can't really find a good dataset to look at. There is a further problem that most survey data is middle class older white people who still have land lines. Until we can find a better data gathering method that randomly samples the actual population instead of those people who have phones or can actually be bothered with returning a survey in the mail, we may actually never have accurate and reliable numbers that show just how many people from different races and ethnicities are playing video games.

Here is what I was able to find (and i'm sure I could find more if I looked harder, I just wanted to do a cursory glance right now):

This is from the Essential Facts on Video Games - Demographics:

Breakdown of sales: Family Entertainment Games: 22.3%, Action Games: 22.3%, Sports Games: 14.1%.

In the ESSENTIAL FACTS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES, race isn't even taken into account. However, I would predict that most minority video game players make up that 14.1% of sports games sales. Even in the nielson reports race is not really considered. Nothing i could find would even serve up whether or not any minority group is looked at in video gaming.

The only mention I could really find about race inside of video game (portrayal of race in video games), was this:

Among games for older kids racial representation was poor and stereotypes were only reinforced. Out of 1,716 characters, not a single Latina woman existed. Black women (for the most part) were not active participants. There were only three Native Americans and one of them had an active role while the other two were props. Meanwhile, Asian, Pacific Islander, and African American men were portrayed mainly in sports as vicious or superhuman competitors. In terms of victimization, Latinos were shown exhibiting the most pain even though they were portrayed almost exclusively in sports where injuries should not be as devastating as in more violent games. While 43% of white characters showed pain and physical harm when injured, only 15% of African Americans did. Black women were much more likely than anyone else to be the victims of violence. © Center on Media and Child Health

So, race isn't discussed in video games. I have one last point and then i'm done.

Discussion of race from a racism standpoint about video games is something that should happen. However, discussion about race need not be from a racist point of view and should never be. We need to recognize this. If I were to begin a discussion saying, "everyone like you is so lazy." Would you get immediately defensive or engage in scholarly conversation about the liklihood of a stereotype being thrusted about people like me?

The next thing I wanted to do about race was to take one of the most fantastic representations of race in video games and discuss its finer points: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That will come later.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity

So i'm in the midst of the most intense workload i've ever experienced and i'm somehow surviving. It's nice to see progress from the kid I was to the kid I am now. In any case, I had a conversation yesterday about the type of game that I like. I believe that bias should be given before exposition about a topic and i've been lax in this environment so I thought i'd serve up a bit of it now.

I like games with grandeur. Grandeur isn't exactly what it is but it's close enough that I can call it that. I like games that give the epic experience that is needed to simply let go of the life that one currently has and move into the unknown, or games that approach world changing events with such intensity that they are unexpected. I also like games that aren't bound by the normal rules we live in. I play games that remove some silly thing like gravity, or the idea of what would normally be called 'danger'.

This second one was born at the origin of the discussion. Monster Hunter. Monster Hunter is a game that doesn't take itself seriously but is so unbelievably epic and heroic that playing the game gives you the sensation of standing naked on a cliff with intense waves crashing just low enough to spray you with stinging salt water. Intensity, grandeur, unbelievable situations, and lack of normal world rules are typically what i'm looking for. I look for this simply because video game systems have not ever really tried to approach the human idea of agency. Agency in video games is choosing predetermined paths and calling it a choice.

So, I was reminded about the game:

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- A Reckless Disregard for Gravity

This game has a simple premise and is actually really fun. Jump off a building and break as few bones as possible when you land.





I was reminded of an idea I had for a paper last night on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and race in video gaming. I'm going to take some time out and actually research the topic so it should be a nice beginning to more strictly scholarly writing.