Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Check out Tom Sawyer for the NES-- the rom is available at somethingawful.com in their ROM pit section. It's only partly translated into English, but take a look at their depiction of Jim...

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas shows the player an insight into black gang culture, though I have no idea how accurate it is... At least this game portrays African American characters as actual characters with personalities instead of the stereotypical "tough black guy sidekick."

Thanks Mat, have any articles or books that you know of which tackle the topic theoretically?

I did a quick browsing on Amazon's various ludology books and couldn't see one devoted to race-- there are a couple devoted to feminist ludological theories, however...

You might want to check out The Escapist-- it's a great online gaming magazine with a strong academic bent.

Not sure if this would be a source, but I do give my insights on the racism portrayed in the "Tom Sawyer" NES game in an episode of my podcast, The Super Koopa Troopa Show (www.theworstblog.com). I would be more than willing to be used for an interview as a source if need be.

Good luck, dude!

There was an article by Henry Jenkins, but apparently it is not online anymore: (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/jenkins0402.asp). There is also a post by Wagner James: (http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_10_20_archive.php#20031024).

I recall an article called something like "I?m White and I?m Right", but I guess that was at Joystick101 before the restructure they went through last year...

You should also check out Blacklash, a game cited in Salen and ZImmerman?s Rules of Play, made by a group of activists.

Your mileage may vary, but there's this one:

Everett, Anna. "Serious Play: Playing with Race in Contemporary Gaming Culture." _Handbook of Computer Game Studies_ Eds. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.

Not Just Rappers and Athletes: Minorities in Video Games

By Ernest Adams

Gamasutra

August 27, 2003

URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030827/adams_01.shtml

This is the only one I can think of.

The best stuff I hae seen on this topic is by David Leonard. He has done several pieces. One is in a book called Digital Gameplay ed. by Nate Garrelts (see on amazon) he also has a strong piece about "high-tech" black face see info below:

Leonard, David. ?Live in your World, Play in Ours?: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Other.? Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education 3.4 (2003). http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/journal/ejournals/simile 11 Dec. 2005.

Also, this might be pretty important specifically to a discussion of Blackness in video games.

There's a documentary by the Media Education Foundation called Game Over that deals with race issues in video games. It provides a bibliography which might be of some use. http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderAndDiversity/GameOver/studyguide/html#_bibliography

Here are a few references I've found useful - mainly focussed on virtual worlds, but many of the principles are applicable to video game avatars in general. Not all of them deal exclusively with race, but they do touch on it in interesting ways (eg. Mia Consalvo's piece). I highly recommend both Lisa Nakamura's Cybertypes and the Kolko et al. collection, although the Dymek and Hayot/Wesp pieces might be more on topic for what you're after... With respect to the challenges of creating Black avatars in Second Life described by Au, I think I saw a related piece on Clickable Culture in the last couple days, fwiw.

Nakamura, Lisa. "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet." Works and Days 13(1-2), 1996. 181-193. Online: 9/3/99 http://acorn.grove.iup.edu/en/workdays/Nakamura.html.

Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet. (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Kolko, Beth. "Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter)Face." Beth Kolko et al., eds. Race in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2000) 213-232.

Kolko, Beth. ?Representing Bodies in Virtual Space: The Rhetoric of Avatar Design.? (1999) 15:3 The Information Society 177-186.

Book, Betsy. ?Moving Beyond the Game: Social Virtual Worlds.? Paper presented at State of Play Reloaded (New York Law School, 2004). 18/12/04 http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/papers/BBook_SoP2.pdf.

Dymek, Mikolaj and Thomas Lennerfors. "Among pasta-loving Mafiosos, drug-selling Columbians and noodle-eating Triads ? Race, humour and interactive ethics in Grand Theft Auto III." DIGRA 2005 - Changing Views: Worlds in Play. (Burnaby, BC: Simon Fraser University)."

Hayot, Eric and Edward Wesp. ""Style: Strategy and Mimesis in Ergodic Literature."" (2004) 41:3 Comparative Literature Studies. 02/07/05 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/comparative_literature_studies/v041/41.3hayot.pdf.

Meades, Alan. "Observing Player Behaviour in Virtual Worlds: Evidence of Ethnographically Motivated Player Difference." (Middlesex University, 2005). 03/07/05 http://www.videogamestudies.com/Research%20Review%20V1.0.pdf."

Consalvo, Mia. "It's A Queer World After All: Studying the Sims and Sexuality." (February, 2003) GLAAD Centre for the Study of Media and Society. 02/08/05 http://www.glaad.org/documents/csms/The_Sims.pdf.

Shanahan, Ian. "Bow, Nigger." (2004) PC Gamer. 10/12/2004 http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html.

Foster, Thomas. ??The Souls of Cyber-Folk?: Performativity, Virtual Embodiment, and Racial Histories.? Marie-Laure Ryan, ed. Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999) 137-163.

Gonzalez, Jennifer. "The Appended Subject: Race and Identity as Digital Assemblage." Beth Kolko et al., eds. Race in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2000) 27-50.

Au, Wagner James. "The Freeform Identity Bebop of Eboni Khan." (March 13, 2005) New World Notes. 28/12/2005 http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/03/eboni_khan.html.

Huber, William. "Cross-straits relations in Vana?diel." (April 16, 2005) Ludonauts. 20/12/2005 http://www.ludonauts.com/2005/04/16/cross-straits-relations-in-vanadiel/.

Aaron Delwiche also described an interesting student paper on race in WoW in a comment to TerraNova (November 14, 2005) http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/11/i_need_a_hero_a.html#comments

I think the Escapist piece referred to by Mat might be Jonathan Hayter's "MXO: Social Commentary through design" in issue 15, although that whole issue might be of interest.

T.L Taylor also touches on the issue of race in one or two of her pieces on avatar embodiment (eg. in her PhD dissertation), but I don't have the refs at hand...

Hope this helps... and I would love to read your work when it's done...

Apologies for the horrible formatting - couldn't find a preview button...

This is all INCREDIBLY useful, thanks.

I think Raiford Guins (UWE) has written more than one paper on the subject-- my 2 sec google couldn't pull one up, but if you contacted him directly I'm sure he could be a bit more useful :-)

I agree. Race and gaming is horribly overlooked. I've been saying that for a while. I even stood up and tried to say that at the Digra conference in vancouver last year but no one seemed to care!

David Leonard has also done work on race and video games and, on a related note, some of my students are working on Orientalism and games. Does anyone have any sources other than the ones above that would be applicable for studies of Orientalism and games?

David Leonard's articles:

http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol4_No4_gaming_leonard.htm

http://www.utpjournals.com/jour.ihtml?lp=simile/issue12/leonardfulltext.html

http://www.popmatters.com/multimedia/features/040226-whitesupremacists.shtml

Another article on race in E-games:

www.i-r-i-e.net/inhalt/004/chan.pdf

Laurie,

I just got a couple of books out of the library that might be useful for that student: *Race and Cyberspace* ed. Kolko, Nakamura, and Rodman has an article by Jeffrey Ow about Asian cyborgs in the Shadow Warrior game by 3D Realms from a few years back. Lisa Nakamura's *Cybertypes* is naturally also a great resource for digital media study of race.

I sometimes discuss race and video games on my feminist gamer blog, New Game Plus:

http://www.lake-desire.com/newgameplus/index.php/archives/category/race/

Hope this helps!

Hi,

some of my articles cover this issue, mainly the Orientalism.
Thanks for useful resources.

Representation and Self-Representation: Arabs and Muslims in Digital Games
In: Gaming Realities: A Challenge for Digital Culture, Ed. Santorineos, M., Dimitriadi, N. Fournos, Athens, 2006, p. 85 - 92.

Digital Intifada
Umelec/ International, 2006, vol. 10, No. 1, p. 77-81.

In Videogames You Shoot Arabs or Aliens – Interview with Radwan Kasmiya
Umelec/ International, 2006, vol. 10, No. 1, p. 77-81.

Best,
Vit Sisler

Not a source, but example: Cole in Gears of War. Both rapper and athlete!