Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

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...