Week 10: Race & Identity in Games
It is Week 10 of Black Digital Studies, colloquially titled “Jukin’ and Jivin’: Race and Identity in Video-Games”. Week 10 also means that we have made it to the final quarter of the term - cue “It’s the final countdown” music -. For this week, I got very caught up in the fun of teaching about games, through a consideration of video game content and communities through the lens of Black feminist media studies. The week began with a lecture on a US based history of games and a walk through of the major debates in video-game studies when it comes to race, gender, and identity. This lecture unpacked the important role that representation and stereotypes play in not only game narratives but our understanding of the normative game player.
Throughout this course I have used video-games as an example of a space that unites fandom, technological design, community practice, and cultural beliefs. By analyzing how the construction of virtual gaming spaces and the video game industry are coded as white, masculine, and heteronormative, I asked the students to consider the role that intersectionality plays in our understanding of video-game content and communities. Through examples spanning from arcades, YouTube, Twitch, XBox Live and other console games, as well as gaming guilds, we worked through how games not only generate culture but foster specific types of social interaction. Not just focusing on video-games, I also included deep analyses of the role of social games and board games, like Black Card Revoked or Spades, to think through the many ways that we can examine the relationship between Black culture, community, and gaming.
The lecture then ended with a focus on Kishonna Gray’s “Intersecting Oppressions” article as Week 10 builds on Week 6’s theme of Black Cyberfeminism by examining how people perform an embodied self in games. In the piece, Gray notes that anonymity allows a certain amount of disinhibition within gaming communities that encourages deviant gameplay i.e. flaming, trolling, griefing, etc (Gray 414-417). With few gamers in the class, the students wanted to learn more about how and why gaming communities could be hostile to women and POC. There was shock when I informed them about gaming controversies around harassment, such as #Gamergate and the motivations behind such controversies. Returning to the Gray piece, we also analyzed the role of the voice in performing the self in gaming communities through a discussion of Gray’s example on “virtual whiteness” (420). By exploring the concept of code-switching the students were able to unpack their own experiences in gaming communities and the role that language use and Black vernacular played in where they felt welcome or unwelcome during game play online. As Gray argues, there are multiple intersecting oppressions within gaming spaces, and we ended class with a reiteration of the importance of creating safe virtual spaces for women and POC in gaming communities online and offline.
The second half of the week focused on another research methods workshop, which walked through the article "Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought". In this article, TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Samantha Blackmon constructed a mixtape which replayed the traditional form of the article as a “discursive cultural remediation” (94). This mixtape combines musical tracks with a collection of lived experiences to reimagine videogame history through a collection of ethnographies from multiple spheres of video game creation, consumption, and critique. The mixtape model was incredibly interesting to me as not only a method but as a pedagogical tool, which centered listening to Black women as an important learning experience.
Therefore, for the workshop, I composed my own mixtape track as an autoethnography of video games in order to invite the students to consider their personal relationship to gaming culture by listening to my experience. Referencing Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair” I recorded the stories of one of my favorite games as a child and as an adult “Dance Dance Revolution” or DDR. This game, and Mary J. Blige’s song always brings back memories to me of dancing with my friends and family, either at arcade spaces like Dave and Busters, in living rooms and basement family rooms, or some other “dancerie”. With our portable dance pads, DDR almost harkens back to an old school hip-hop era where street dancers battled on unfurled pieces of cardboard. Through specific songs and group dances, Dance Dance Revolution is also imbued with Black Culture as dance is truly a “family affair”, with special dances for every celebration and family event. I ended my mixtape with a consideration of how games like “Just Dance” and DDR become relegated to the world of girls gaming, and are not usually viewed as “serious” games. I used my mixtape to disrupt our understanding of the normative gamer and gaming practice to make more space for the fun that can be found in playing these family games.
Throughout the week I also referenced my latest gaming obsession “Among Us”, a remediation of another game of my youth “Mafia”. Just in time for spooky season, “Among Us” is a murder mystery for the whole family and I highly recommend you play for yourself, or for your “research” and “pedagogy”. Moving forward, next week begins the final segment of the class which focuses on Black Digital Praxis. Now that we have all of the history, theory, and methods it is time to work on applying our knowledge out in the field. More workshops and discussion to come!
Readings
