Comments on What Happens Before Game Design?: Race and Gender in Video Games

I really wish that show would come over here.

2009-05-13T06:31:00.000-07:00

I really wish that show would come over here.

http://antiprejudicead.net/landing.asp A great ex...

2009-05-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

http://antiprejudicead.net/landing.asp

A great example of the unwillingness to talk about the issue of race.

It isn't a comparison of the two time periods as m...

2009-05-11T13:46:00.000-07:00

It isn't a comparison of the two time periods as much as it is of science in general. We center ourselves around what scientists would call matters of concern (points scientists would disagree with and test) as matters of fact (slaves have a disease causing them to run away).

I am trying to make a point that we should be critical of sociology just as much as we should be of science. I was also trying to say that a social problem is a social problem because it happens in society and is expressed socially. We look to science to save us from ourselves but in the long run, science is inherently a social event and is prone to social pressures.

I am in no way espousing sociology as the end all, be all, but that we just need to be careful when making an absolutist argument.

Also, @Vistani
While I do agree that the two groups are distinct and have distinct characteristics that make up the lot of the reasons for prejdice, inequality, and racism, the point I was generally trying to make is that the fundamental nature of this issue comes from what goes on around us during growing up and unconscious reasons for action.

We view black people as lazy, horrible people who do nothing but steal from us and try to rip off welfare. You can see this repeated ad nauseum every night. We don't talk about this. I was making the comparrison to aboriginal groups simply because it is an example of a minority group having to try and struggle against the dominant one; it is not so much a matter of skin color as it is similar circumstance.

@ Nick: You can't compare Victorian or slave-era s...

2009-05-11T11:57:00.000-07:00

@ Nick: You can't compare Victorian or slave-era science (or even 1970s psychiatry) to assertions made from the POV of the 1990's on. I think you'll find that an analysis of brain chemistry is much different from "Look at this boy's bone structure: this is the bone structure of a psychotic" or "This woman's ovaries are traveling through her body looking for liquid, we need to perform a histerectomy." Of course biology is miserable if you don't understand it as a constant process of hypothesis and confirmation/disproving.

@ Vistani: Shit, good point dude. I think we make the connection between anti-immigration and racial discrimination because in the United States, Republicans hide their blatant and silent racial discrimination behind claims that immigration is bad for the economy. It didn't strike me that the case could be different in Australia. It's really so bizarre when you start talking across country borders! Thanks for the perspective!

'On Australia, Aboriginal attitudes are usually co...

2009-05-11T09:55:00.000-07:00

'On Australia, Aboriginal attitudes are usually compared to american attitudes toward african americans.'
Comparing these two issues is really a bit of a stretch, though I have to point out that you very quickly drew a link between two situations in which there's black/white conflict! :P

I'd say that it's closer to the situation of native Americans, we essentially have a conquered people living here. Now I'm going to take my turn making a tenuous connection.

"That said, Australia's got some big problems with discriminating against immigrants (there's a game about it called Escape from Woomera, made by a bunch of Australian digital media artists based on the journals of people who've gotten out - because journalists are banned from going there)."

The connection I see here is that I don't think that race is the primary factor in either of these situations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_detention_in_Australia can be looked up for issues related to Woomera, there was some pretty shameful stuff going on around the early 2000s, and the policy has since been changed. The issue here is immigration though, not racism. I'll hop on my moral high horse here (from a national standpoint), because these awful detention centres which were met with public outcry here, are pretty much standard practice in America except that the conditions are worse.

The Aboriginal issue is very complicated, to put it simply. What has brought contention recently revolves around the conditions in the various Aboriginal communites way out in the middle of nowhere. The living conditions in these places are basically crap, there's little to no work available and people there basically spend all day drinking away their welfare cheques. A friend who has spent some time in these places has told me that the basic attitude there is that they consider welfare as the white man paying them for having their land stolen and there's very little cultural motivation to improve their situation. These people basically have no education, very poor life expectancy and this is all coming off 15 years of moderate right government in which it was easier to just keep paying the welfare than to try to fix the situation. The current government has drawn a lot of flak for "The Intervention" from various 'well-meaning white people', you might say, who see it as racist. This is over things such as the policy to limit alcohol consumption and control spending of the residents of these communities. STEALING PEOPLE'S RIGHTS you might say, but when the situation is such as it is, with something like 1 in 2 children born with fetal alcohol syndrome to one degree or another, is it right to allow a culture in which children are born terribly disadvantaged both financially and physically, denied an education by their culture and expecting to die 20 years earlier than their fellow Australian citizens, to exist? Back to my original point discussing this issue, do you really think the main factor here is racism? I think that it's a combination of several things, but racism certainly doesn't spring to the front of the pack.

Why is the assumption that an issue between people of different skin colour has to be an issue of racism?

Thanks Simon. As for keeping psychology and sociol...

2009-05-11T06:26:00.000-07:00

Thanks Simon. As for keeping psychology and sociology separate, I'm not saying that they are always separate but that the problem of racism is identified as a social one and should be treated as such. Biological determinism is dangerous only because it is biological issues that have brought about a tremendous amount of behavior modifying drugs that not even scientists really understand exactly why or how they work.

Take for instance, the all important case of Drapetomania
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

This was a supposed mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that caused black slaves to flee captivity.

The problem with scientific explanations isn't that they are scientific or biological, but the social implications that because science figured something out, everyone else can just go home and not worry about it cause the authority is working on a fix to the problem.

That said, the problem with sociology is that we force our views of how society works through horrendous traps we call frames. All of the work i've done this semester, all of the horrid, horrible, disgusting work, has been criticism of sociology's reason for action and the damning effect it really has. I'll post the paper (it's not as good as I would have liked) here in a day or two.

The most I can say of sociology is taht our job is supposed to be most definitional. We take general trends created by groups and give them names and talk about motivations for action. With racism, we see that groups aren't talking about racism because the equal rights act created a reason for white folk to take a step back and wait for the minority groups to try and emulate the white folks better, to diffuse with the whole, to melt with the pot.

That is not a way to combat racism and we have tried to offer a forum through which this can be discussed. Equality and racism are the same problem, but equality for whom is the question of equality.

On Australia, Aboriginal attitudes are usually compared to american attitudes toward african americans.

Oh and Betsy di Salvo presented a paper at GDC abo...

2009-05-10T23:37:00.000-07:00

Oh and Betsy di Salvo presented a paper at GDC about what games teenaged African Americans play. You might wanna find that. Apparently it was the third most popular (by text message vote) academic piece presented there.

On Australia: From what I know of the country's ea...

2009-05-10T22:58:00.000-07:00

On Australia: From what I know of the country's early history as a colony, there was some pretty effed up shit going on with aborigines and Blacks. But since then, it seems that they've (you've) embraced interracial marriage and living to a much greater extent than America has (this is all from watching Australian films for classes - the historical ones are really depressing and then the current ones obviously embrace racial diversity).

That said, Australia's got some big problems with discriminating against immigrants (there's a game about it called Escape from Woomera, made by a bunch of Australian digital media artists based on the journals of people who've gotten out - because journalists are banned from going there).

As a Jew who likes to relate everything to Jewdom :P this reminds me of my favorite quote from Ulysses:

“Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the Jews… And do you know why? … Because she never let them in … She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter … That’s why.”

'the thing about racism is that we (And remember t...

2009-05-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

'the thing about racism is that we (And remember this is true in America and as an Australian you may not be prone to this) in America tend to be supersaturated with negative racial biases from a very early age and while we don't think or act on these biases'
I don't think I can make a fair judgement on this as I didn't have any racist influences around me growing up, nor did I really have to confront any issues of race. This is not to say that I've never met anybody without white skin, just that I've never had any negative experiences that I associated with colour.

If I'm getting this right what you're saying is that you view social equality and racism as two seperate issues? I don't think it is possible to seperate these, as one will inevitably lead to another. Neither can you simply enforce equality under a capitalist system. I don't think the answer is as simple as 'Don't be racist any more, white people'. All factors of the problem need to be taken into account in order to find a solution. This narrow thinking just seems indicative of the lack of research on the subject.

Ohhhh now I see why you're so against biological e...

2009-05-10T19:36:00.000-07:00

Ohhhh now I see why you're so against biological explanations: for you it's like a psychology versus sociology thing? I don't have a stake in either, but I'd say being a sociological determinist is just as dangerous as being a biological one. You can't just say, "Well we have sociology, so your brain chemistry has nothing to do with it."

I mean, as a sociologist it seems like what you're looking at are emergent structures that arise from hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, whatever, bodies and minds interacting with each other. Just because you can impose a top-down order through societal control or change, it doesn't mean bottom-up individual biological determinants aren't important.

I actually have very little interest in politics a...

2009-05-10T16:18:00.000-07:00

I actually have very little interest in politics and the political sphere. I am interested in the laws that come out of it and the general feelings of constituencies, but that's about it. Actual politicians I tend to shy away from.

Speaking from that perspective, we were ready for change. The phrase "darkest before the dawn". I think we, as a country, were holding on to old ways and realized just how bad we had become that we actually allowed a guy who was young, vibrant, and ready to shake the institutions that had been slowly consuming themselves.

The fact that he was black made it interesting but if he had identified himself as African American instead of the son of an immigrant from Africa, things might have been a bit different.

The problems that we're talking about are social problems. Sure there are psychological issues that may be present in other species like ourselves but the difference with humans, with homo sapiens, is that we're able to counteract our biology if need be. I've said it before but making a social issue one of biological determinism is just asking for trouble. It doesn't have to be one or the other, but pushing biology over social is a surefire way of doing this.

the thing about racism is that we (And remember this is true in America and as an Australian you may not be prone to this) in America tend to be supersaturated with negative racial biases from a very early age and while we don't think or act on these biases, we may not even recognize them, they are very real and very present and that is the intent of the websites presented in my post.

@Vistani: The stance of most anti-oppression effor...

2009-05-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

@Vistani: The stance of most anti-oppression efforts isn't that minorities aren't racist, but that the fact isn't important at all to the goals of recognizing and mitigating privilege. For instance, you may be Black and hate Jews, right? That doesn't mean that I (a Jew) shouldn't defer to your opinion on matters directly relevant to your lived experience as a POC. Like, just because you hate me doesn't mean I shouldn't recognize that I'm in a position of power or privilege.

The stuff about body chemistry makes sense, but again doesn't have anything with making the rational decision whether or not to respect someone else's lived opinion. What it does imply is that we'll never be able to ignore race, and I don't think we should. Basically it's our bodies preparing us to confront something that isn't exactly like us. Not a problem, you know? If anything, it should only show that your body subconsciously understands the difference and knows that you have no idea what it's like to be that alien body.

I have no comment on the Obama stuff. I don't think anybody knows quite went on there, and party politics just aren't my thing. But I bet Nick has an opinion!

"I would predict that most minority video game pla...

2009-05-10T08:01:00.000-07:00

"I would predict that most minority video game players make up that 14.1% of sports games sales."
Why?

I think you're correct that the problems around this issue arise because people are unwilling to talk about it. I also think that you and both the fixracism and silentracism are not looking at, or even considering all the factors involved in racism. I think this is largely because not enough objective, scientific interest has been taken on the subject. You can't just examine the social factors, but also need to look at the 'inherent' racism of humans. There was a study done by the American Psychological Assocation not too long ago that showed that 'U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes'.

"Specifically, this Black-ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not"

I can't find it right now, but I also read a study a few months ago that showed that almost all people will have different chemical levels in their brains when interacting with people of another race, whether or not they could be considered racist or have had any history of racial prejudice.

Are these issues important to the problem of racism? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly they're something that should considered.

Back on the topic of the sources silentracism and fixracism, both of these sites seem to be taken from the point of view that the problem lies with the majority, the white man, with his white power and majority rule and so forth. Racism goes both ways, and I don't think it's in equal proportions. I think it's pretty logical that if a minority (not necessarily just a matter of numbers, as will probably be seen as the latino american population grows beyond that of the white population) feels that racism exists, as most people do, they will be more likely to act with prejudice in their interaction with society (who they choose to associate with, work with, socialise with, etc.) than a member of the majority. I can't find a study on this topic, but I think it's a pretty simple idea that people who experience racism and/or feel disadvantaged by racism are more likely to be racist themselves, than those in the majority who are statistically far less likely to experience racism on a regular basis.

The last point I'll make before I stop my disjointed rant is that it's far more acceptable within society to talk about the minority overcoming the majority than vice versa. A great example would be the recent US elections. In the news I saw a whole lot of stories about black people who were so incredibly happy that a black man had won the presidential race. The numbers speak for themselves in this case, a record African American turnout not only voted in one of the most left wing presidents in American history, but also voted against gay marriage in California. This suggests to me that a whole lot of people turned out, voting with their conservative values, and voted for a liberal because of the colour of his skin. If there had been a record turnout of liberals voting against Barack Obama because of the colour of his skin, would there be 'anti-racism' groups screaming about the injustice of it right now? What's the difference between the two situations? Back to my earlier comment about black people celebrating this victory in the context of the president being black, would it have been socially acceptable to show white people celebrating the victory of John McCain, in the context of the president being white? I think that this sort of double standard just reinforces the idea of white superiority, disguised with good intentions.

I meant to get on to the topic of racism in video games, but I didn't quite get that far, oh well!
Perhaps just a question: What's the racial distribution of video game buyers and video game designers?

-Vistani

I was just being dramatic. I wouldn't worry too mu...

2009-05-10T07:47:00.000-07:00

I was just being dramatic. I wouldn't worry too much, we've all made some horrible mistakes. There's an entire website that hates me devoted to pen and paper gaming because I asked Gary Gygax if he thought the genre fantasy on the not-sci-fi side was tired and done.

Well, the problem with academia is a unique one in that it is relatively recent, born of capitalism, and perpetuated by well meaning undergrads who don't know any better.

The big underlying issue here is that academia is standing tall with authority and in arguments like the one on C-D, it is most often relied on.

Programs like yours stand confident against the furor of this inertia. It's refreshing to say the least.

I'm not really worried about academic suicide, as ...

2009-05-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

I'm not really worried about academic suicide, as it was one isolated argument where I lost my head and made myself a jackass. Then apologized.

Academics do a lot worse, like, say, belittling entire disciplines explicitly and then not apologizing for it (when they actually had no experience with the discipline except some departmental curriculum guidelines they found online). Kind of like what I did but on a mass scale, minus the apology and regret.

And I guess i'll just have to watch and make sure ...

2009-05-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

And I guess i'll just have to watch and make sure you don't commit academic suicide on C-D. If I had been posting when the event went down, I probably would have tried to talk sense intothe editors there but eventually succumbed to flames.

When I wrote my paper WoW hadn't really come out y...

2009-05-09T19:28:00.000-07:00

When I wrote my paper WoW hadn't really come out yet so, not really. But, i watched a huge amount of work come in on WoW and just sort of shook my head. I mean, it's nice that there's so many millions of people to just sit and stare at but come on, at least do some sort of strict study instead of participant observation.

It's these same people that would go to a strip club for a month straight and call it research.

As I work for a college, I have access to just about any journal you can imagine. So, for me it isn't a big deal. If we don't have access to the journal I can just request the article. I can imagine that it'd be hard to cite from blogs, but eventually (and by eventually I mean like 30 years from now) we'll be allowed to quote from there.

The problem with quoting from a blog is that it'll change or change DNAS / Web address and that isn't any fun.

@Nick: I didn't need you to back me up, I need...

2009-05-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

@Nick: I didn't need you to back me up, I needed you to kick my ass when I started getting rude. :P Like how the film and videogame industries self-regulate so the government doesn't have to crack down, you know?

The crappy thing about academic writing is you have to have access to journals to cite from. Does your department let you cite bloggers as primary research? I found an article in a sociology journal that you might be able to easily get access to:

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119700487/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

But like most academic writing on games, it's more about online communities than it is about representation. The crutch of being in the field of "World of Warcraft Studies" (a riff on the subject matter of most games studies articles, if you hadn't heard it before)!

Most of my friends around Austin are in the fight...

2009-05-09T18:48:00.000-07:00

Most of my friends around Austin are in the fighting game crowd. Hell, one of them opened up an arcade and was one of the only places in America with SF4 arcade machines. That crowd, even in its amazing amount of diversity class and ethnicity wise, managed an air of mutual respect. It would get ugly based on the competition involved, but it was nice to be around.

This reminded me of an article in the Escapist abo...

2009-05-09T18:30:00.000-07:00

This reminded me of an article in the Escapist about how most competitive fighting game players are people of color: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_184/5655-Diversity-One-Dragon-Punch-at-a-Time

Thanks! Once i'm all finished with this paper on M...

2009-05-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

Thanks! Once i'm all finished with this paper on Monday, I want to start diving in to a few projects. I think that those papers will help a lot!

Wow, my above comment has some serious carriage re...

2009-05-09T17:57:00.000-07:00

Wow, my above comment has some serious carriage return fail going on... Sorry for the illegibility, but the links are good, I promise!

In terms of discussion of race and video games, I ...

2009-05-09T17:56:00.000-07:00

In terms of discussion of race and video games, I would suggest checking out these links:
Race and Ethnicity in Games forum at Iris video games category at Racialicious Gamers of Color LiveJournal community
Token Minorities (in retirement, but the past posts are worth reading)

Man, i'd back you up any time. I saw it happening ...

2009-05-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

Man, i'd back you up any time. I saw it happening but I was so busy with writing my last paper that I didn't read any of it until the next day. I spent the better part of today looking for a dataset I could test some questions on but I ended up nil. There are some nice datasets out there for gendered gaming but without race, it just ends up being distorted and mostly wrong. I've been thinking of doing something with race and gaming for a long time.

A while ago I wrote up an entire presentation and paper on Final Fantasy 11 and the creation of a hostile Kuwaiti group that I pretty much became a participant observer in. It's too far past the incident to be objective about some of the things that happened so I scrapped the project completely. It was interesting as hell though.

Maybe i'll dust off that mantle and put it back on. Race in online games is covered quite extensively. Race in console gaming is mostly lacking.

I hope that at least a couple people from theirisnetwork make it over here to talk about the concept. I'd love to hear more about it from a perspective that isn't mine (white 30 year male).

Also Bogost (co-authored with Montfort maybe) has ...

2009-05-09T16:05:00.000-07:00

Also Bogost (co-authored with Montfort maybe) has an article on race/class in GTA San Andreas, which might not be directly helpful but probably cites a bunch of non-white, non-male writers who've also thought about the issue in journals.