By Guest Contributor Mattie Brice, cross-posted from Kotaku

Tamagotchi. Remember those?

They became popular when I was in 4th grade. Sometimes my mother took me to a nearby Target to pick a toy- she told me it was for good grades, but I knew it was because I got bullied often at school. One of these times, I raced to find a Tamagotchi, as all of my friends were getting them. I liked the idea of something with me at all times, to take care of it and make me feel like something needed me.

And there it was, a whole wall of glittering purple eggs. I remember that exact, uncreative display panel to this day, and my mother stopping me. She told me to wait, that my aunt wanted to get that for my birthday when she visited. I protested, but the answer was the same: be patient, you’ll get it soon enough. We went a week later and all of them were gone, sold out from every toy store in our area. For some reason that memory is lodged in my brain. I brought it up to my mother recently, but she’s forgotten.

The stray times I visit Kotaku, it’s like I’m seeing an empty panel that the reward for my sitting, smiling, and internalizing should be. I was supposed to find somewhere to escape to, maybe even a place that needed me a little. You told me to wait, and I did. Where’s my Tamagotchi?

There is only a wrong way to go about this. So let’s just get to why I’m here:

Me too.

I’m part of the gaming community, but Kotaku doesn’t see me as a gamer. No, instead I’m a multi-racial transgender who-knows-sexual possibly-feminist woman gamer. A boogie monster. Someone who uses too many –isms and –ists in their daily tweets to actually enjoy anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask what it’s like to be me in this pocket of society.

You know that invisible ink in detective movies? If you could get an internet lighter, you’d find “This site is for heterosexual white American men gamers.” Kotaku will never include me until it’s figured out that “gamers” is skewed to one identity and asks me to deal with that. No. Me too.

Gamer culture isn’t Kotaku’s fault. That skewing Japan as a land of weirdoes is humorous. That gamers like to look at galleries made up of T&A shots of women in cosplay. So what if someone like me doesn’t fit in with typical gamers? The editors are just providing what gamers want, how is that a bad thing? Are you using that lighter?

When I wasn’t bullied as a child, I was creating games. My favorite thing to do was to give my friends superpowers based on their personalities. When we played, they were empowered to be themselves. It was always fun because each one of us mattered. I mattered. Ever since, I knew I wanted to be involved with games, maybe even make them. I contemplate what I would say to kid-me now that I figured out what a gamer is. What kind of treatment I would receive if I ever got into the industry. Would it be more humane to convince my past self I didn’t actually matter?

I’ve turned away from Kotaku because it doesn’t like my answers. There’s a reason I can’t find you bountiful resources of sexually liberated cosplayers not posing for straight guys. [I had asked Mattie to help me find some sources of cosplay images more in line with what she would like to see on the site. — Kotaku Editorial Director Joel Johnson] Why there’s a scant amount of criticism of manchild culture. How the LGBT community is still the elephant in the room. We haven’t thought of what a gamer community that assumes diversity instead of homophobic adolescent dudes looks like. There are plenty of stats of who the “average” gamer is, what the actual demographics are. However, the image in our mind hasn’t changed in decades.

There’s a taboo against saying that. Me too. It’s radical liberal talk, an attempt to kill everyone’s fun. The common denominator response is “Why won’t you just go somewhere else?” I usually do. This attitude polarizes the community between large, mean-spirited marches of “the old guard” and a few impenetrable bastions of rigid but progressive niche philosophies. I’ve run to places like The Border House because “me too” isn’t deliberated upon, it’s the law. I turn away because Kotaku doesn’t ask me “Why are you leaving?”

Me too.

I’ve stared at those two words and deleted them often enough that I forget what they mean. I can’t say those words here without preparing myself for the sling-fest, and some days I just can’t summon the strength. This is after I go through my life dealing with crap society presents me just because I exist. And you know what sucks? That many times, my words are shrugged off, or given the fatal “I’ll think about it.” That isn’t inclusivity. Being benign doesn’t help. Letting commenters spew toxic isn’t inviting. Looking to defend yourselves doesn’t solve anything when it’s so obvious there’s a problem. I’m not looking to shame you, I just want to set things right.

Must I be a martyr? Must you be a machine? Are our only choices to become symbols and lose our humanity? Do you understand what you’re asking of me when you tell me to be patient? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?

The games I play now won’t let me be myself. No game dares to feature a transgender character that isn’t on the wrong end of a joke. Sometimes I pretend that my party members know, but are too scared to ask. God, I don’t even know if most actual people know what it means to be transgender. Or multi-racial. Or anything other than what they are. I don’t know if they know it’s okay to ask. Then maybe we could figure out what a gamer really is. Halfway isn’t enough, but I will accompany you on the journey.

I wish Kotaku would tell me “We don’t want you to go away.” You’ll have to scroll down a bit to see if that comes true.

Me too.

This panel is all about titties and I feel like its my fault!  – Jonathan Jacques-Bellêtete

There are many things I expect to see in a panel called “East Meets West, Art Direction for a Worldwide Audience.” I expected to hear Isamu Kamikokuryo, the art director for Final Fantasy XIII-2 discuss how Japanese artists focus on creating new worlds, Norse mythology and its influence on the game, and drawing inspiration from Cuba for some of the beautifully rendered backgrounds. I expected to hear Jonathan Jacques-Bellêtete, the art director of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, talk about influences like Andrew Loomis and Metal Gear Solid. I had hoped for an interesting back and forth between the two designers on how technology influences artistic development as well as what happens to geographic differences in artistic influences in our increasingly connected worlds.

I did hear all of these things, but also something that pinged my feminist gamer radar.

In describing his influences, Jacques-Bellêtete mentioned he was heavily influenced by Metal Gear and Final Fantasy. Then he went into a two minute riff about “always trying to have very beautiful female characters,” noting that these were characters he would want to sleep with. After making a semi-disparaging remark about female characters drawn in a North American style, he concludes “I’d rather have female characters from Final Fantasy or Soul Caliber to sleep with.” This draws chuckles from the crowd.

And there it was, the truth about character design that so many players know but most designers wouldn’t usually articulate: most of the egregiously sexist character designs are based on fuckability, rather than playability.

Drawing attractive characters isn’t a crime. But it starts to become grating when characters are not only attractive, but hypersexualized and mostly defined by their appearance. Even when characters aren’t hypersexualized, they can still be boring and flat in execution if there is more attention paid to animating her curves than the character herself.

But the model for art in our fandom communities is often sex appeal first, to the detriment of characters. Over in the comics world, Laura Hudson broke down the problems with the faux empowerment form of “liberated sexuality” that is so common in contemporary storylines:

Let’s start with Catwoman. The writer and artist have decided that out of all possible introductions to the character of Selina Kyle, the moment we’re going to meet her is going to be the one where she happens to be half-dressed and sporting bright red lingerie. That is in fact all we see of her for two pages: shots of her breasts. Most problematically, we are shown her breasts and her body over and over for two pages, but NOT her face. No joke, we get a very clear and detailed shot of her butt in black latex before we ever see her face looks like. Can’t you show us the playful or confident look in her eye as she puts on her sexy costume? Because without that it’s impossible to connect with the character on any other level than a boner, and I’m afraid I don’t have one of those. [...]

[W]hat I keep coming back to is that superhero comics are nothing if not aspirational. They are full of heroes that inspire us to be better, to think more things are possible, to imagine a world where we can become something amazing. But this is what comics like this tell me about myself, as a lady: They tell me that I can be beautiful and powerful, but only if I wear as few clothes as possible. They tell me that I can have exciting adventures, as long as I have enormous breasts that I constantly contort to display to the people around me. They tell me I can be sexually adventurous and pursue my physical desires, as long as I do it in ways that feel inauthentic and contrived to appeal to men and kind of creep me out. When I look at these images, that is what I hear, and I don’t think I even realized how much until this week.

In many ways, the constant barrage of this type of imagery (and characterization) is not unlike the sh*tty neighborhood I used to live in where every time I walked down the street, random people I didn’t know shouted obscene comments about my body and told me they wanted to have sex with me. And you know, maybe a lot of those guys thought they were complimenting me. Maybe they thought I had tried to look pretty that day and they were telling me I had succeeded in that goal. Maybe they thought we were having a frank and sexually liberated exchange of ideas. I’m willing to be really, really generous and believe that’s where they were coming from. But in the end, it doesn’t matter that they didn’t know it was creepy; it doesn’t matter that they “didn’t get it,” because every single day I lived there they made me feel like less of a person.

That is how I feel when I read these comics.

As a gamer, full cosign. Two years ago, at my South by Southwest panel with N’Gai and Naomi, I talked about how in my 22 years of playing video games, I’ve been all kinds of characters: a Bandicoot, a Lombax, a pervert squirrel, James Bond, some dude addicted to painkillers, a few different folks hustling in the underworlds of Vice City, San Andreas, and Liberty City, Lego Batman, Joanna Dark, Laura Croft, Karin and crew, Tidus and crew, Sora and crew, and easily hundreds of other characters. But to play as a black woman, to inhabit and play as someone is similar to my real life identity? I’ve had five opportunities in twenty-two years. And that’s if I count characters that are biracial, characters that appear in reflections, and one tan colored viera.

And, to add insult to injury, these characters are also undermined from the get go. My first introduction to Resident Evil‘s Sheva Alomar was an ass shot.

So, at question and answer time, the feminist gamer Goddesses shined down on me and allowed me to ask Jacques-Bellêtete about his comments. I wanted to know how the approach to female characters influences their design. Do designers put more thought into female lead characters, or are they illustrated in the same way as characters who are intended to be eye candy? How does that presentation impact their playability?

Jacques-Bellêtete immediately blurts out “I feel like you’re trying to trick me,” laughing apologetically to avoid stepping into a controversy landmine. He takes pains to explain that Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a female lead narrative designer. Mary DeMarle shaped the story in a way that created strong primary female characters, which makes for different themes.  He acknowledge that I was “kinda right,” in that there is a difference in the approach to design between main characters versus characters he termed “cannon fodder.” He also noted that it is “such a cliche of our industry that women have big boobs” so most of his teams draw women with smaller chests – so much so the designers requested a big breasted character. But he ultimately agreed, “we broke the [usual character] mold a little bit because of the women in the lead.”

My question was the final question accepted, since N’Gai Croal (who was moderating the panel) had one more surprise – he had asked Kamikokuryo and Jacques-Bellêtete to each interpret each other’s work. So, Kamikokuryo drew Adam Jensen, and Jacques-Bellêtete drew Lightning. Jacques-Bellêtete’s work was unveiled first – and lo and behold, it’s a tit shot. For comparison’s sake, here’s what Lightening normally looks like versus Jacques-Bellêtete’s interpretation.

(Interestingly, Kamikokuryo said Jacques-Bellêtete’s work reminded him of Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, and so he adjusted his work to have Adam Jensen share the same fate as Spike.)

Seeing the Jacques-Bellêtete’s image after his explanation about how he interprets female characters was disappointing, to say the least. But it was not surprising, as this type of sexism is endemic to nerdy industries. In a medium where we are only limited by our imaginations, where we can dream up princes rebuilding the cosmos with Kamataris and shelve that fantasy next to dystopian futures, it’s painful to see that kind of creativity doesn’t extend to the majority of women in game worlds. No matter how creative we are, we still can’t get past this base level sexism.

After the panel, I approached Isamu Kamikokuryo and asked him the same question I posed to Jacques-Bellêtete. I’ve been a fan of Final Fantasy for years, and a small part of that is due to the range of female characters that inhabit the world. According to Kamikokuryo, this was the first time he took on character design for the franchise. The same three artists have been doing the character designs from Final Fantasy VI to XIII. ”So,” he said through his translator, “We thought deeply about what we wanted to express with each character when designing.”

Seriously, that’s all we feminist fans really want to hear.

Resources:

Social Justice and Video Games SXSW Panel Slides
The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their ‘Liberated Sexuality’ [Comics Alliance]
Augmenting the Deus Ex: Human Revolution story [GameSpot]
Deus Ex: Human Revolution offers old school racism with your gaming fun [Feminsiting]
GODDAMMIT VIDEO GAMES: THE FIRST FEW HOURS OF ARKHAM CITY IS LOTS OF FUN, BUT SUPER-DUPER SEXIST [Film Crit Hulk]

Take a look at Square Enix’s official comment on the matter: “Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a fictional story which reflects the diversity of the world’s future population by featuring characters of various cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. While these characters are meant to portray people living in the year 2027, it has never been our intention to represent any particular ethnic group in a negative light.”

See what’s missing there? The same words that Sony avoided for so long: “We’re sorry.” (Also missing is something along the lines of “We screwed up,” something else Sony didn’t want to acknowledge initially.)

Certainly, the issue of perceived racism and the compromise of sensitive personal information are two entirely different beasts. But they’re both issues that people take very seriously and personally. And by trying to defend their actions rather than immediately apologizing for them, both Square Enix and Sony risked alienating part of their audience.

Time’s Evan Narcisse wrote a spot-on look at the problems with the character of Letitia. Though he was careful to note that he was not calling Eidos Montreal or Square Enix racist, that’s what many people inferred from the column.

That’s easy to understand, given that Letitia’s speech patterns are reminiscent of something you’d hear in a minstrel show. And while voice acting is hardly the high point of this otherwise widely embraced game, Letitia’s patois is particularly hard to defend.

- From “Square Enix’s Handling of ‘Racism’ Case: A Page from Sony Playbook?,” on IndustryGamers.com

Above is the trailer circulating for a game based on slavery – but it appears that this is fake, despite all the attention it’s been attracting.

As Jessica Conditt explains in her post for Joystiq:

These are lined up at the bottom of the site, right next to the overwhelming sense of relief we felt when we realized neither 360 nor PS3 release AO titles. Further, the ESRB doesn’t list a rating for anything called Slavery the Game and the proposed developer, Javelin Reds Gaming, doesn’t exist. One YouTube version of the trailer credits The Creative Assembly with making Slavery the Game, but it isn’t mentioned anywhere on The Creative Assembly’s site. We’ve contacted The Creative Assembly for clarification.

A lot of people are rightfully horrified at a game predicated on the slave trade from the slave master’s perspective – specifically glorifying the dehumanizing nature of slavery for cheap amusement. However, even though the game is fake, I hesitate to fully condemn the premise, probably because of one of my other favorite games: Age of Empires: The Conquerers.

A game can do anything we program it to do – and AoE:TC allowed me to rewrite history, by allowing the people of Tenochtitlan to defeat the Conquistadors.

AoE:TC is a civilization based game, one that bases the action on real historical events and allows players to recreate key battles in play. Along the way, you also essentially create a civilization from scratch and learn to defend your base. Now, in the wrong hands, it’s very easy for these games to revert to a standard colonialist/racist/imperialist view of history, as the fake slavery game did. The presentation of history there was very one sided – the game proposed no premise to question what was happening historically. The competition was solely from slavemaster to slavemaster, and the playability was set to revolve around violence toward enslaved people. And, to me as a player, totally boring. It’s the expected narrative story line – slave master rules pliable and silent masses of enslaved people. We’ve heard that narrative before, ad nauseam.

All the fun is in the subversion.

In AOE: TC, each civilization has it’s strong points and weak points. Depending on region and practice, some places have calvary units and some do not. Some have gunpowder technology, some do not. Some have advanced naval capabilities, some do not. So quite a bit of the fun in the game is figuring out in what circumstances your civilization would be successful at resisting invasion or conquering other nations. It was also a valuable lesson into history. For me, the fun of playing both the Spanish campaign and the Tenochtitlan campaign was hearing about the history and the need from both sides. When you play the Spanish campaign, the Conquistadors explain their goals, why they are doing it, and who they need to kill to get this done. You help them grow their army – and in some ways, watch history play out in a series of betrayals, accidents, and strategic alliances. (Or, as Jared Diamond called it, Guns, Germs, and Steel.) Then, you can flip the narrative – you play as the Tenochtitlan, and realize the vital need to resist invasion, to outsmart the Spanish, to understand their new technology and defeat it. Now, it’s been years since I’ve played – I can’t recall how historically accurate the campaigns actually are, and I can’t remember if there were other problematic elements in the game play. But, playing multiple sides of the same historical conflict gives you a tremendous amount of perspective – and I daresay, much more perspective than the average historical textbook.

Now, I haven’t kept up with how history is taught to K-12 students since I graduated high school in 2001. But back then, I remember history being a long line of domination and defeat, with the occasional black history facts thrown in to spice things up. (Crispus Attucks was the first martyr in the Revolutionary War! Black Dude Dies First: Historical Edition!) The only attempt to showcase a different view was my Modern World History class, taken in 11th grade, which would occasionally include a quick paragraph on the Igbo resisting slavery. But for the most part, Europeans came, saw, and conquered, and that’s the way it was. I had received some info that things weren’t quite that simple early in life – but it took accessing a lot more materials as an adult to realize that history is often a complicated mash as opposed to the linear narrative that we are taught.

Great civilization games not only explore history as it happened, but also the way it could have been. If Slavery: The Game was realized as it exists in the clip, it would be an epic fail. But if someone felt like working with the nuances and complications of the practice, it could also turn into something amazing. Many African American history museums have a permanent installation on slavery as part of the story of blacks in America. Most recently, when I visited the Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, I checked out their “And Still We Rise” exhibit. We started in an exhibit dedicated to the African continent, then walked through a recreation of a slave ship designed to explain the rigors (and horrors) of The Middle Passage. I couldn’t help wondering how we could create a game from this experience, something that is interactive on a different scale. What stories would we follow? Where do we start? What are the motivations of European slave traders and African slave traders? What types of betrayals occurred? How do we program to show the difficulty of surviving the middle passage? How does a person other someone else so completely as to sell them? How does one stoke the fires of an uprising? Could we play as a policy maker debating the merits of abolition? Of entry and escape? Is the main character Harriet Tubman or John Brown or Fredrick Douglass Game or Nat Turner?

Octavia Butler did an amazing retelling in Wild Seed; video games have the power to do the same thing. So this silly video may not have any redeeming qualities – but in the right hands, this could easily turn into something amazing.

The first is a short video. Directed and narrated by Irish, Anishinaabe, Metis writer Beth Aileen Lameman and edited by Beaver Lake Cree filmmaker Myron Lameman, the video looks at really common stereotypes being deployed in game narratives. Lameman points to the common framings of “cowboys vs. indians,” guides, and “wise old Indians” and heavy doses of the white savior narrative and the “half-breed hero” trope.

The second is an essay over at Project COE that tackles the politics behind representation:

“How many kids will play this game and then carry what they’ve experienced into their interactions with real, live Apaches and other Native Americans?” the Association for American Indian Development asked video game publishing giant Activision in a public letter accusing the company’s 2006 PC and console title GUN of containing “some very disturbing racist and genocidal elements toward Native Americans”. The AAID went on to launch an online petition demanding that Activision “remove all derogatory, harmful, and inaccurate depictions of American Indians” from the game and reissue a more culturally sensitive version, threatening to campaign to have the game pulled from store shelves internationally. Although Activision thereafter issued an apology to anyone who may have been offended by the game, they justified the content of their product by pointing out that such depictions had already been “conveyed not only through video games but through films, television programming, books, and other media”. The AAID’s subsequent attempts to have the game recalled were barely acknowledged.

As evident in Activision’s defense of GUN, many negative stereotypes about Native American culture are so ingrained in mainstream media that the near-genocide of an entire culture is rarely treated with the same sensitivity with which we regard similarly tragic occurrences like the Holocaust, or African American slavery. The AAID argues that video games like GUN undermine the severity of the atrocities committed against First Nations tribes by the European settlers and marginalize this violence in a way that negatively affects the image of contemporary Native Americans. Millions of people play video games, and entertainment can leave long-lasting impressions on consumers, making it important to be able to criticize misconceptions and separate fantasy from reality. The impact of media on our mentality towards people and events certainly cannot be underestimated, so it is understandable that an organization such as the AAID should be concerned about what kind of images audiences are exposed to, but were their claims about GUN‘s potentially damaging effects warranted?

By Arturo R. García

According to some of my fellow geeky bloggers, the woman in the picture above is a victim.

That’s the new Miss USA, Alyssa Campanella, who some people are seemingly rushing to induct into the “scene” because of some comments she made in this interview:

Campanella expresses her love for shows like The Tudors and Camelot, and says she was a “science geek” in high school, which is commendable. I don’t question her fandom. But interpreting her statements as some sort of victory for fandom in general not only appropriates her words, but strikes me as vexing for a number of reasons.

First is the fact that this interview was only aired because of Campanella’s participation in an industry promoting an exclusionary body standard, an industry that tacitly encourages parents to exploit their children in hopes of “moving up the ranks” to reach her level. Campanella was on this platform to begin with because she’s trafficking in privilege. If she were a plus-sized woman, a transgender woman, or a woman of color, it would be much less likely for us to even hear the name “Alyssa Campanella” in this setting.

In Campanella’s case, her geekdom will more than likely be framed as a way to make her “exotic” to certain advertising demographics – and make no mistake, she is not there because she enjoyed studying biology, or chemistry. She is there because of her body, and people who do not have her kind of body, or the cis-male equivalent, are Othered by many of the people who both control events like Miss USA or watch it. That is privilege, and while recognizing that doesn’t excuse any rationalization for insulting her, neither is it evidence of “jealousy” or “self-loathing” when discussing that privilege.

At this point I’d like to make a couple of key distinctions: it is sexist when people only accuse female celebrities of “pandering” to geeky audiences. There’s little evidence that male actors and performers aren’t scripted to declare “relatability” any less than their female counterparts; male celebrities have their own set of stereotypes and corporate messages to live up to. But it’s also problematic to equate skepticism regarding declarations of “geeky cred” by celebrities of any gender with the street-level harassment many women have reported at conventions or at comic-book shops.

The factors behind that harassment go beyond the individual misogynous acts or attitudes practiced by their attackers. It’s the encouragement of that mindset by many of the companies supplying our geeky products. When DC Comics tells retailers it plans to continue to target the 18-to-34-year old male demographic, despite promises of a “new, diverse DC Universe,” that fuels the narrative depicting fandom as an all-male fiefdom. That attitude should be questioned by geek media at every turn, not only at the storefront, but at the corporate level.

When DC promotes hyper-sexualized character designs like the new one (shown at right) for Harley Quinn, or allows writers like Judd Winick to emphasize that titles like Catwoman will be “sexy,” while marginalizing female creators, that sends a message of exclusion to anyone who is not a white cis-hetero male, and it perpetuates the corporate-driven perception that women who look much like Campanella are only valued at all because they’re handy props to entice customers to buy their products.

The fact is, geeky women are not, and have never been “Unicorns.” Despite what advertisers want you to believe, women have always been involved in fandom, be it as creators, critics, cosplayers and consumers, of all body types and ethnicities. Want proof? Here’s a picture from Newsweek, taken at an early Star Trek convention, along with the caption, emphasis mine:

In the early conventions, a majority of attendees were women, [costume designer Angelique] Trouvere says. Because of that, more men started to attend, and today convention audiences are usually evenly split along gender lines.

Despite that fact, businesses haven’t just been ignoring female consumers, they have been telling their clienteles that “hot girls” can’t be geeky, and telling them that geeky women have to be “hot” for their opinions to matter, or to be taken seriously as characters across the media spectrum. Movies like She’s All That and television shows like The Big Bang Theory depict female geekdom as something that is Not Normal, something they must be “cured of” before they can be accepted into society at large.

And make no mistake, a lack of acceptance is part of the real-life experience for many geeks, both male and female: in some of the threads involving the debate over “hotness” and geekdom, people have mentioned being mocked, harassed or outright bullied by schoolyard peers. But seemingly at every turn, people who discuss being bullied are told to “grow up” or to “get over high school.” As if bullying doesn’t really do anyone any harm. Just tell that to the parents of this anonymous child in Lakeside, Calif.:

“My prevailing thought when I wake up in the morning is, ‘I don’t want to find my son hanging from the rafters,’ ” said the mother of a Lakeside middle schooler who has been bullied for three years. She asked that her name not be used for fear of further assaults on her son.

He has been punched, slapped, hit with rocks, called names. Asked about transferring to another campus, he declined. What if the same fate — or worse — awaited him there?

“And why should he have to leave?” his mother asked. (The students and parents interviewed for this story asked that their names not be used for fear of further assaults.)

Or tell that to the mother of 17-year-old Tyler Long in Murray County, Ga.:

“They would take his things from him, spit in his food, call him ‘gay, faggot’,” Long said. “One day to the next, it was continuous harassment from the other kids in the classroom.”

His parents said they complained to school authorities about the pattern of bullying early on, but no action was taken.

“‘Boys will be boys’,” was the response Long said he got from school officials. “‘How can I stop every kid from saying things that shouldn’t be said? What do you want me to do Mr. and Mrs. Long? I’ve done all I can.’”

Is death now the litmus test for bullying? At what age does the “Get Over It” caucus believe bullying becomes “official”? Would these people also tell women who like Star Wars but are not “hot” to “get over it” if they’re sexually harassed at conventions, or while playing games online?

I know friends who were pelted with pieces of meat by schoolmates, years before any PSA campaign was there to tell them “It Gets Better.” In my own experience, I was able to avoid physical harm because a) I was fortunate enough to develop a circle of friends with some of my fellow Honors students and b) I showed just enough athletic ability in phys-ed classes and pick-up games in the playground to not receive much more invective than to be accused of “acting white” because I was a good student.

That was a privilege that I worked for, sure, but it was privilege just the same. Other people were not as fortunate, and there are kids out there today who will continue to be subjected to the same stereotypes older geeks were regarding gender and body identity, only through many more media outlets. These problems will not automatically start to disappear because an actor or popular musician tells a breathless interviewer he or she is a gamer, regardless of intention.

All of which is not to say that celebrities or “hot” people can never be members of the community. In calling herself “a history geek,” Campanella herself seems to fit the definition of a geek ally: she has some geeky interests, and she believes in evolution (thank goodness), but it’s not like she chose to cosplay Wonder Woman for the swimsuit competition, either. There might be some common tastes between some celebrities and their fanbases. But, again, barring any evidence to the contrary, there’s experiences common – not unanimous, but common – to this subculture that they did not go through. A star watching The Tudors doesn’t make him or her a “bandwagon jumper,” but it also doesn’t mean he or she can automatically empathize with a non-famous woman who’s treated coldly or ignored by her local comics retailer, or a non-famous man whose geekdom, while acknowledged “without complaint,” is painted as “less of a man” because of it.

Acknowledging that disconnect doesn’t make either side a bad person. That’s often a good starting point for newcomers to learn, and for day-to-day members to share their stories. That’s one way communities strengthen their ties. But it takes effort on both sides.

As rosasparks pointed out (via our own AJ Plaid) on Tumblr:

Perez Hilton may be a gay man, Lady Gaga may be an out bisexual woman but their identities alone do not make them awesome members of any particular tribe.

I am a bisexual woman of color. I don’t get a cookie, a medal or even a high-five. Not because of identity alone, because I hope my actions and contributions to society speak louder than my identifying markers.

If I act like shit, say horribly hateful and ignorant things, I’m not doing anyone any favors, myself and whatever tribe I belong to, nor does it reflect well on my ‘tribe’.

Come on. It’s absurd to assume that one’s self-identified ‘group’ makes them somehow an ally or a responsible member. That’s bullshit. We’re all required to be more than our ‘titles’.

F-CK THAT.

And there is nothing wrong with being an ally; people like Tim Wise do valuable anti-racist work from that position. When celebrities participate in campaigns like “It Gets Better,” it’s a gesture of support and empathy that deserves credit. But that is different than just saying, “I like [x] television show” – it’s people doing work for the communities they’re supporting. Even then, I don’t think Wise would argue that his work as an ally disqualifies him from his white privilege.

Recognizing that distinction, and the fact that many of the industries of choice for celebrities have played to insecurities and biases defining millions of people – geeky or not – as falling below a set of money-driven “standards” is self-awareness, borne of individual experiences that cannot be trivialized just because corporate America tells us geekdom is “chic” right now. And Campanella is the latest example of someone who is in a position to become a valuable ally, if she chooses to. But that takes more than telling us she’s a fan. Without that acknowledgement, any claim of “empowerment” is really an argument for privilege. And no celebrity, male or female, needs our help with that.

DMG|BurnYourBra: At tournaments players talk [crap] to each other. That’s just the way tournaments are. People get hyped. Players get salty when they lose, which is fine. But there is a difference between trash talking and calling other players disrespectful names. For me, I’ve been called a dyke, a butch, a slut, a bitch… I was even called a black bitch to my face along with being called a lesbian, a gorilla, and a monkey. Now I know people are going to say that as a player in the community, you have to have a thick skin. I do, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t speak up about the names I’ve been called. Because these names refer to my sex, but most of them refer to my race; which to me is racist. I think some of these people are blurring the lines between trash talk and disrespectful trash talk. And again, this is just my experience on the matter. I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience. So I wrote a note on my Facebook, made it private, and got the opinions of several other black female gamers. They all have had somewhat the same type of experience as I, some have seen it and others have heard of it.

DMG|jason24cf: Another topic you had mentioned in your post was about “not having the look” could you go into that further?

DMG|BurnYourBra: I would love to *laughs*. Well, I don’t feel that it was like this 10 years ago but there is what I call an “Asian Aesthetic” (as in meaning beautiful) in the fighting game community. There is almost an invisible rule in the way male gamers see female gamers in terms of looks. I’ve read and I have come across a lot of individuals who think because a certain person or persons are of Asian descent that they’re automatically good. Now, I will admit, Japanese players are really good, that can’t be denied. But when it comes in terms of females, it feels to me like it’s almost a written rule that if you aren’t Asian, and if you don’t have the look that fits into this beauty hierarchy, then you’re just not good. So, for me, I feel like it’s a double standard that I really can’t fight. I’m not Asian and I don’t have the Asian Aesthetic look. I’m an African American female, so I am looked at as trash by some people. Also, it is a male dominated community, I know of a few girls who have told me they don’t have “the look” or “don’t fit that ideal.” This ideal shouldn’t be used as a rule for females who want to play. So for me, and this is my own personal experience again, I want to be judged by my play. You can say that I suck. And I’m fine with that. But when you base it on my looks then that’s when I have a problem. I’m not there to please the males at the tournament with looks. I’m there to play and to get better. Judge me on my play rather than on my looks.
- From an April 16 interview in Dominion Method Gaming
Image courtesy of Kotaku

By Guest Contributor Allegra, cross-posted from The Border House

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing myself for the release of Dragon Age 2, which is set for release on 11th March. I only managed to get my hands on the demo today, but already there are a few problematic elements bubbling away in the background.

The demo begins with a Chantry seeker named Cassandra calling on Varric, a dwarf who she knows spent time with Hawke – the game’s protagonist. In response to her questioning, Varric begins narrating a story in which Hawke and his/her sister Bethany are fleeing the darkspawn only to encounter a dragon. At this point, Cassandra calls shenanigans on Varric’s story, and he promises to relate ‘what really happened’.

The problem, however, is that BioWare have chosen (at least for the purposes of the demo) to give you the character creator only after this initial opening sequence. In fact, the beginning of the game gives you a simple choice between male/female and warrior/mage/rogue before throwing you into the action. This means that the first ten minutes of the game are always going to be played as BioWare’s default male or female Hawke, which in turn means that they are going to be Caucasian.

At the time of posting, the discussion on BioWare’s forum about this issue is already over twenty pages long (and really not recommended reading for the most part, with a lot of people making the point that this opening sequence presents Hawke as a legend, rather than who they really were. However, this raises the uncomfortable subtext that, while the real Hawke may be customized to suit the player’s tastes, the Hawke that people know from legends is always going to be white. Personally, I can’t help but be reminded of Jesse Houston’s assertion that BioWare’s female characters are less iconic than the male ones, and Stanley Woo’s utter failure to handle racial issues surrounding the Dragon Age games in the past couple of months.

BioWare’s reasoning behind this bizarre choice seems to be that they have concluded that they’re losing a lot of players who don’t want to be confronted with a character creator at the very start of a game. As Mike Laidlaw says in this interview:

We saw a lot of people disengaging at hour one, hour two [...] You get to an RPG and fire it up, and it hits you in the face with a thousand stats. Those stats are very cool, but you may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to deal with them as your first thing to do in the game.

He also goes on to add:

Part of the glorious advantage of the frame narrative is [that] Varric kind of lies about you. We establish how people perceive the Champion. This figure is of some import to the world.

And, apparently, the way people perceive the Hero of Kirkwall is as a white man or white woman, regardless of their actual ethnicity. Granted, this could make for a very interesting plot device should BioWare wish to use Dragon Age 2 to challenge this assumption in game, but unfortunately the demo makes no sign of doing anything of the sort.

Granted, there has been some progress since the days of Dragon Age: Origins, where your Warden of color was furnished with an entirely white family. According to the Dragon Age Wiki, the skin tones and facial structures of Hawke’s family members will now adapt themselves to compliment your customized character. However I can’t help but feel that this is at least a small step back from Mass Effect 2, where the pre-character creation sequence has been craftily put together to only show Shepard in full armour obscuring her/his skin tone and facial features until you’ve played through the opening scene.

I have to wonder: would that have been so difficult to do this Dragon Age 2, as well? Why choose to present a legendary version of the main character, and their entire family as potentially whitewashed versions of themselves, without challenging or questioning it? Will this depiction of the Caucasian Hawke of legend appear in the full version of the game? And, if so, is it plot device that BioWare have used in a ham-fisted attempt to ‘hit the ground running’, or will we be seeing more cutscenes featuring the default versions of Hawke throughout the game?

I’ve been buried in work for the Public Media Corps – the program ends December 17th, so there is a lot of work to accomplish between now and then.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to provide as many updates as I would have liked to on the program, so I am planning a series after I finish to talk about the things I learned over the last six months.

However, I did want to share one quick thing.

Back in September, I helped my co-fellows Brittany and Danielle with their social media club mixer at Anacostia High School.  The mixer was one of my favorite parts of the program since it allowed me to do what I like best – to engage with people.  The kids who came to the mixer were funny and high spirited, just as interested in tech as they were in pizza and trash talking.  I met Tony, a sweet kid who decided he was ready to be the next Jazze Pha and used my help to create his own beat using GarageBand, which he then attempted to convert into a ringtone for his cellphone.  One kid, named Robert, wanted to start a blog but did not have an email address.  So we worked through that process.  A girl named Tiny said she wanted to be a teacher, but later decided she wanted to start a blog to showcase her poetry.

And then, there was Mardez.

Quiet and serious, Mardez was one of those kids with a confidence that permeated the room.  Other kids seemed to genuinely like and respect him, and he had his priorities straight, soaking in knowledge like a sponge.  Mardez walked into the room and asked questions about being a graphic designer.  He showed me his portfolio, which was a printed binder full of graphic designs and effects, many featuring 50 Cent.  I told Mardez he should start scanning his work and putting it online – one, to create a holding space for all of it, and two to create a copy of all his work.  I saw Mardez again at the What’s Good DC taping on Tuesday and he chatted for a bit, mentioning he wanted to catch up.

Today, I found out from another fellow that Mardez was featured on a blog called The People’s District, an amazingly cool blog that tells the story of DC through all the types of people who live here.  When I read Mardez’s story, I felt my heart drop.

“I dropped out of high school after my freshman year. I had teachers who put me down and a school counselor who encouraged me to get D’s. I told him that I wanted to do better than that, but he said, ‘You ain’t gonna be any better than that.’ When my Mom had a baby, I knew that I needed to help my family get money and I left school because there was no future for me in the D.C. public schools. [...]

“A couple of months after I dropped out, we got put out of our house. The landlady put our stuff out in the snow along with my newborn baby brother. When we asked her for help, she just laughed in our face. When I saw my friends get off the bus, I thought they would laugh at me, but they didn’t. I just sat there and looked angry because there wasn’t nothing else that I could do. [...]

My cousin ended up helping me get back into school. He said, ‘You can’t drop out of high school and drop into a good job. It don’t work like that. You are not Bill Gates. You can do more help to your family by finishing school.’

“He helped me get to Anacostia High School. I changed my attitude and am doing the best I can. I want to go to college and even got a scholarship. So far, I have visited 13 colleges so far, and am trying to find a college that fits what I want to do in life, which is graphic design.”

I felt pain, not because of the sadness of his story, but because of how common that narrative is here in DC.  Our dropout rate is atrocious, with only 48.8% of students graduating from high school within four years of beginning 9th grade.  Mardez is one of the success stories – he was able to re-enter school and is on target to graduate this year, with a plan to go to college and a dream of becoming a graphic designer. But the problems still swirl around him.  Tony, the burgeoning producer, recently confessed at a social media club meeting that he was planning to drop out of school. Mardez told his story that day, to convince Tony to stay in school, and added one crucial detail: in 9th grade, one of his teachers embarrassed him by pointing out Mardez’s wrinkled clothes, ignoring all the issues Mardez was going through at home.  I really hope Mardez got through to Tony.

I wish I had been there for that meeting. I wish I had read Danielle’s post earlier, so that on Tuesday, I could have pulled Mardez aside and told him I was homeless too once, and I know what that feeling is like, and that life gets a little better once you can financially support yourself, and that he was on a good path.  I wish I had read that post earlier, so I could tell Tony that I knew exactly where he was, that I too had almost dropped out of school in my senior year, that my 3.5 average fell to a 1.5 and I missed 70 days of class.

But I didn’t know this, so I just let them play computer games on my Android tablet and talked to them about tech.

Then again, maybe that was better – I hated when people tried to talk to me about my life in senior year, when all I wanted to do was escape it.  Maybe leaving it alone was the best course of action. Let them play and explore possibilities.  Watching Mardez, Tony, and three other boys I didn’t know crowd around the tab and critique the gameplay aspects of Asphalt 5 reminded me of how much work I have left to do when talking about black boys, play practices, technology, and video games.

It’s stories like the ones Mardez and Tony told that remind me of why I got into this work in the first place, and why we focus a lot on structures on this blog.  Mardez has a good shot at making it, but he is surrounded by kids in the same boat, struggling against all kinds of social issues and political issues to try to craft lives for themselves.  Mardez’s story pains me because it reminds me of people that I knew, and people that I still know, kids who were exposed to the ways of the adult world a little too early, trying to make adult decisions (i.e. I need to drop out of school to help my family) without adult perspective and understanding how each of these actions could alter the course of their lives.

All of the fellows joined the Public Media Corps hoping we could impact our communities in some way.  But doing the work exposes how large the problems actually are.  We are all staring down at the end of the program, just fifteen days away.  I think everyone feels some sense of unfinished business.  But how do we keep moving forward?

How do we even begin to evaluate our work, when so many things are intangible?

And how do we reconcile all the things we’ve learned and grown to understand with the edicts laid out by those who fund programs like these?

(Image Credit: Danielle and Brittany, for the Public Media Corps)

By Arturo R. García

Yesterday a reader e-mailed us with a tip (emphasis mine):

Recently I’ve begun to notice in the PC Gaming scene this really irritating meme going around that basically consists of people calling themselves part of the PC Master Race and acting like that they’re nearly untouchable to anyone who even thinks to play on a console [XBox 360, Playstation 3, etc.]. Now, the attitude itself that PC Gaming is superior has actually been around for quite a long time and I’ve always considered it nothing more than part of the sophomoric fanboy loyalty that’s extremely rampant in computer gaming in general that I’ve long outgrown. For the record, I do think that PC Gaming is much better if you’re going independent or something since you’ll have much more creative control and won’t have to go through the trouble of worrying about what publishers want, but that’s only if you care enough about making games to begin with, but that’s kinda besides the point.

The term seems to have started as a one-off  joke from a game review by Zero Punctuation (video contains NSFW language), which contains the image posted above. The somewhat snarky tone of the review suggests it was meant to take the piss out of both sides of the PC/console gaming debate. Still, does anybody need a reminder of why “running with it” is problematic? Okay, just in case.

While its’ use since then may not be “widespread” – for what it’s worth, no gamers I know had heard of it when I asked – it’s still beyond tone-deaf, even if board postings like Look, you’re either part of the PC master race or a console unwashed pig or As a PC Master Race gamer, I feel insulted seeing that dirty console peasant crap are thrown around “in jest.”

To say nothing of the “PC Master Race” user group that popped up on one gaming site, with both a creepy tagline – “We Will Survive all. We are The Master Race. The PC Master Race. Forget consoles” – and the handy disclaimer (caps not mine), “IN NO WAY DO WE SUPPORT THE NAZI PARTY OR ANY OF THEIR IDEOLOGIES. OR ANY OTHER HATE GROUPS” while its’ avatar features a fraking Swastika colored like the Microsoft logo.

As Latoya would say, I just can’t. Luckily, the reader can:

I really can’t imagine anyone who’s not unaware of the issues gaming really needs to work using this phrase at all, jokingly or otherwise. I’m just thinking that if someone who was oppressed in some way and had very little knowledge of PC gaming were to come by a forum where this was used, they’d be turned off pretty quickly. While I’m not turned off completely because of it, I’m getting the feeling someone like me wouldn’t exactly be welcomed with my own ideas.

I’m just really frustrated–I personally think that PoC can use this medium as a way to express themselves in a totally new and exciting, and the technological advances made over the past decade has been drastic, but sadly the the same cannot be said of recognizing and fixing the social issues that happen in the games themselves and in the fandom. This is just another obstacle that’s getting in the way, even if it doesn’t seem like that at first glance. I’d like to get into gaming myself one day, not to try to make the best graphics, but to help create believable characters of color who are kinda lacking. I think that the PC platform can be very useful especially for PoCs to create the games that they want. At this time, that seems nothing more than a dream though.

By Guest Contributor Denis Farr, cross-posted from Border House

BioShock 2 started off at a slow, plodding pace that made me wonder if I would regret my decision to purchase the game. As many reviews note, it is a game that picks up steam and finishes strongly, in opposition to its predecessor. For myself that moment happened in Pauper’s Drop when I started to encounter Grace Holloway.

At first I was slightly concerned. You go to Pauper’s Drop and are instructed to obtain a key from one Grace Holloway, so as to progress along the Atlantic Express trains. It slowly dawned on me that my target was a jazz singer, with very obvious roots in African American history. Her first messages to you are antagonistic, and given the game’s still primary function of shoot and kill to progress, I thought I would be given little choice as to my actions. However, as you explore the level, you are given a view of Rapture that was not wholly afforded in the first game. While the common worker seemed a motif raised by Atlas in the first game, it never seemed fully fleshed out, instead seeming like a power struggle between two figureheads with citizens caught in between, with little word from those persons directly; in Pauper’s Drop you are given the story of a part of the city that was not built into the original design, but constructed by those who were unfortunate enough to not be able to afford the luxuries the rest of Rapture had to offer. This is where Grace Holloway finds herself.

Grace is a woman who fled to Rapture to escape the slums and economic Depression she’d seen elsewhere, being an African American with ties to the U.S. Midwest region. Instead, she found a class structure even more rigid, as she notes how Andrew Ryan holds nothing but a false dream. She champions for the downtrodden of Rapture, singing their woes and griefs in her songs, eventually becoming a political enemy of his. At one point she even speaks directly to you and states:

Andrew Ryan told me that in Rapture it didn’t matter where you came from. Bunk! Times got hard and all our old bigotries bubbled right back up. But Dr. Lamb showed us that down under the skin, down under the money, down under our very name we are family.

Grace had come to Rapture as a singer, and her character is admitted to be a loose interpretation of Bessie Smith. Loose is somewhat appropriate, as at no point does Grace display any hint of bisexuality as the famous blues singer did, instead being focused on having a family of her own. When she finds out she is barren, she is rather distraught, having yet another of her goals shattered. At this point many things come to surface, and among them the question of family, as Grace’s quotation indicates. Dr. Lamb is an entry unto herself, but her own magnanimity to the poorer citizens included free counseling sessions, which is where she met Grace, and how they became friends.

Friends who grew to trust each other enough that when Lamb was arrested, she asked Grace to take care of her daughter Eleanor, whom Grace took to treating as her own daughter. We are family. This will lead to how she sets herself against the character you play.

Beyond just her depiction is the choice one can make when encountering Grace. You are to retrieve the key, and you, as an original Big Daddy, have a past with her, that included you protecting Eleanor after she became one of the Little Sisters. Grace had somewhat lost faith in herself after Eleanor suddenly disappeared, unknowingly to her being put in the Little Sister Project. Despite her harrowed appearance when she next saw her, she tried to grab and hold her, acting as a true parent. You, as Subject Delta ended up pushing Grace away forcibly when she came near, an action that complies with how Big Daddies in the game tend to act. She views you as a monster, much as we viewed them in the first game. Killing her only confirms such a suspicion. You become an unthinking monster by her accusations, and fall down the ‘evil’ path.

In contrast, you can stay your weapons, at which point you can pick the key up anyway. Grace will then offer you assistance to get out of the hotel in which you find her, where enemies are coming to take you down, as well as later drop off some items for you to use. As you leave she also comments that she may have been wrong–no monster would have left her alive both after how she treated you and in reference to being just a goal-oriented killing machine, as Big Daddies have been depicted to this point. She comments on your game decisions, as much as the moral decision Subject Delta follows.

Of course, one could simply save her because it offers the better in-game rewards, in which case the designers have set up a scenario where they wish to encourage you to not kill this woman who has already survived heady amounts of racism both above ground and below in Rapture. Through audio diaries scattered about the game, she is fleshed out as a character who is realized as a human. After she sings songs critical of Ryan, her lover James is taken from her, and in fear of her own life she actually sings pro-Ryan propaganda to escape similar treatment. Her character is an homage to those jazz and blues singers of the past: ones who felt the lash of the State and struck a chord with a group of people who felt shut out of society.

As I read it, Grace becomes a symbol for the desire not to see African Americans succeed and create their own lives, families, and spread as do others. Despite her barrenness, despite her lover being taken from her forcibly, she is given hope, however. It is not hard to see why she would warm to Dr. Lamb, a white woman who believes in the greater good, regardless of race or class. Even though Lamb ends up the antagonist, she is still seen as human despite her hatred towards you. She is not a ‘great evil.’ She and Grace are humans, with concerns, lives, and stories of their own. They also become symbols of their plight, and ideology in the case of Lamb, through their lives.

When you do finally encounter Grace in the game, deciding to spare or take her life, she does not cow. Rather than lose her dignity, she throws the key on the table at which she sits, stands up with aid of her cane, and tells you she will not have you root about her corpse for the key, before she dares you to finish the job you started in knocking her about when she tried to embrace Eleanor. She stands for strength, but not through arms, not through physical violence. She stands for a strength of character.

In Grace Holloway, the design team crafted a character based on history. They did not deny her African American heritage. They did not ignore the political climate of the times through which she lived. The game’s setting places it in 1968, though she would have arrived before 1959. The political climate she was escaping was one that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In many ways, her placement here highlights that even a secluded, objectivist society like Rapture fell to the same squabbles, and a ‘blank slate’ does not erase years of racist and classist upbringing.

By Guest Contributor Alex Raymond, cross-posted from Border House

Trigger warning: Street harassment.

So, recently a Flash game was released that caused a bit of a stir on a number of gaming (and feminist) websites. The game is called Hey, Baby, and it is a game about street harassment. It is a first-person shooter where you play as a woman walking around a city fighting off waves of men who approach you while repeating “classic” street harassment lines, everything from the notorious “Smile, baby” to shouted rape threats. Killing the harassers results in a gravestone popping up with their line engraved on it. There are also both male and female bystanders who do nothing and can’t be killed. If possible, I do recommend playing the game a little before reading this post; it’s a Flash game and only takes a minute to play, although it is quite violent.

There have been a number of different reactions to the game around the internet. It has started a conversation in the gaming online community about street harassment (and in the feminist blogosphere about satirically violent video games), and for that alone, I think this is a win. But I’d like to take a closer look at the various reactions surrounding the game.

Some people (myself included) interpreted the game as a statement on the frustrating nature of street harassment. Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper, Shotgun gets all 101 on his readers, patiently explaining what male privilege is and how the game taps into the experience of being on the receiving end of harassment:

You approaching a woman in the street and being what you think is politely flirty is a different thing when, down the street, someone’s suggested that maybe you’d like to suck my dick and you’re a fucking bitch if you don’t.

From her perspective, it’s a culture of harassment she has to either politely deal with or ignore.

From your perspective, you’re just showing how you feel.

That your passing desire means you get to derail a woman’s life whenever you feel like it is the absolute definition of male privilege.

If you’re a man, and you’ve acted like this, the woman you do it to, beneath the polite smile she has to offer, has probably fantasised about you dying.

He goes on to point out that, if guys are disturbed by the game, good. They should be. That’s the point. “You should be disturbed that we live in a world where a woman feels the need to make the game – and for other women to smile at it, recognising it.”

Seth Schiesel at the New York Times had a similar take, writing about how the game gave him a powerful lesson about what it’s like to be a woman in public:

But as I played on, I came to realize that it is equally unrealistic and absurd to suppose that saying, “Thank you, have a great day” is going to defuse and mollify a man who screams in your face, “I want to rape you,” with an epithet added for good measure.

And that is the point of Hey Baby. The men cannot ever actually hurt you, but no matter what you do, they keep on coming, forever. The game never ends. I found myself throwing up my hands and thinking, “Well what am I supposed to do?” Which is, of course, what countless women think every day.

Amanda at Gaming Angels had a different take (additional trigger warning on this link for victim-blaming). She talks about how she gets catcalled on the street very often, but makes a snide comment about how thinking about that harassment is selfish: “You question if what you’re wearing is too provocative, even if it’s a sweater paired with slacks. You, you, you, you, you. It’s always about poor you.”

Well … yes. If you’re walking down the street and someone yells “Suck my d-ck” at you, then it is about you. And it’s the harasser that is making it about you. Otherwise you would just be walking down the street instead of blaming yourself for doing something to provoke a man to harass you.

And that’s what Amanda goes on to write: paragraphs of victim-blaming. It’s womens’ fault for not enjoying harassment! Don’t get angry just because “men are capable of being wolves.” It’s a “social normalcy.” They can’t help it. Smile and enjoy it!

She goes on to say that the man in this situation is actually the victim, but the key quote here is: “When a man ‘flirts’ with you, hes giving you the power to accept or reject him. You’re just complaining you have this power.”

Aha. Yes. This old gem. Women have all the power over men because men can’t control themselves around women they find attractive. (Forget, for the moment, that Amanda notes there is a difference between men who are trying to flirt and men who are going on a “power trip”–how can they go on a power trip by making themselves a victim? And what are women supposed to do about those men?) Never mind that real empowerment comes from within a person, it’s not given by anyone, much less street harassers. Because power given to you can just as easily be taken away.

Amanda ends with the super-helpful comment, “Get over yourself.” Don’t complain because you’re so pretty you take male attention for granted. But the fact is women have just as much right to be out in public as men do, harassment-free.

The game was covered in the feminist blogosphere as well, and some of the responses surprised me. Amanda Hess, who has done extensive coverage of street harassment on her blog, The Sexist, describes her experience playing the game and concludes, “Call me a pessimist, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that feminist issues can never be perfectly applied to a game based on simulated murder.” At the Hathor Legacy, Jennifer Kesler writes about how the game’s extreme reaction to street harassment undermines real women’s actual reactions and work against street harassment. On the other hand, Sarah at Feministe focuses on the aforementioned reactions of Kieron Gillen (a friend of hers) and Seth Schiesel.

What I think the detractors are missing is that this is a video game, and it’s helpful to look at it in the context of video games and video game culture. Both Hess and Kesler seem hung up on the violent aspect of the game, but, like it or not, video games are, by and large, violent. Many of the most successful and popular games are first-person shooters, like Hey, Baby. The game presents the problem of street harassment–and the frustration and lack of adequate options that individual women have in the face of harassment–in the language of video games. I also suspected that the game wasn’t necessarily made for women to let of steam about harassment (though it could certainly be used for that purpose), but for men to learn what it’s often like to exist as a woman in public. And that aspect of teaching men about women’s experiences reminded me of a game idea I wrote about a little over a year ago, a game that would show, rather than tell, men what it’s like to live in a rape culture (TW: discussion of sexual assault). I admire Hey, Baby because of the way it teaches is much more direct and less convoluted than my design.

But let’s hear what the creator of the game, Suyin Looui, has to say:

A few years ago I was on the subway, just on the platform and it was just a really cold winter day, totally bundled up in layers and someone said hot ching chong.

…

So that was the moment when I decided that I was going to make this game and it would be an ode the young man on the subway platform in New York. The next two years it just became this other thing this project about how to create conversations around the whole issue and just how its a very difficult topic, just how people engage in a really different way around it.

About the violent aspect of the game, she says:

I definitely had women saying, you know, why dont you try hugging them or how do you what is a way that you could actually flip it around so they become embarrassed? For me, in particular, I really wanted the violence to be so ridiculous and sort of over the top gory, that people would know that it was a joke.

But I do understand and it was one of the huge things when I was making it to make sure not to give points for everybody that shot someone. I didnt want to advocate that violence was an appropriate response in any way.

About Kieron Gillen’s posts about the game, she says, “I couldn’t have asked for anything better than that.”

What do you think of Hey, Baby? (And again, if at all possible, please take a moment to play the game.) Does the violence undercut its message?

by Guest Contributor Quadmoniker, originally published at PostBourgie

So, I think everyone knows that I’m a big fan of the Sims. Though the third iteration of the game has had its problems, I still spend more money than I should adding on to it. Against my own better judgment, I just bought the most recent expansion pack.  It created a whole new town, with new families already populating it.

The Sims has been pretty good about allowing for diversity. It’s easy to choose your own skin color and features, and because the characters speak their own made up language it’s not culturally specific.

They live in a suburban idyll, and weird classist things have troubled me in the past: there are “trailer parks” with characters uncomfortably close to white trash stereotypes. In the newest town, there is a black family with a single mom of two sons who has worked her way up by being a cook. She is overweight, and her bio talks about how hard it’s been to raise her boys on her own. Both the bios for the sons talk about how hard it’s been growing up without a father. I’d be willing to give it a pass if it didn’t involve every stereotype possible.

Here are the slides to our presentation, with a few quick notes added. Check back in about three hours, and we will have the video of the session and the Q & A available (just as soon as it finishes loading.)

Some things to remember: We found ourselves with about four hours of material that needed to be shrunk into forty minutes – so a lot of things we wanted to discuss (the Jade Raymond situation, recruitment and outreach from the gaming industry, how different races/ethnicity are represented in games) hit the cutting room floor. In one of the segments, I refer to a fifty page paper I’m holding on to – that paper covers those topics more in depth, and I will publish it here after I revise it some more.

(Special thanks to Naomi and N’Gai for agreeing to be on the panel, everyone who showed up, those who weren’t there but tweeted and retweeted the findings, and Allison Bland for volunteering to tape this!)

Social Justice and Video Games – Part 1 from Latoya Peterson on Vimeo.

I’ve been hooked on videogames since the days of the Atari 2600, though my family was too poor to have one.  When I was young, I am ashamed to say that any kid who had an Atari had a good chance of being my best friend, as long as I got to come over to play Atari during slumber parties or birthdays.  In grade school at Anderson, some of the ‘problem’ kids, if they were good, got to choose a friend to take 5 minutes and play Atari as a reward – I was always thrilled when I got that chance.

Through the years, if a system was able to play a video game, I’d play it.  I’d torture myself with text-based games on the Apple IIe, playing them over and over again even if I kept dying or failing in the same place.  I was obsessed with the Smurfs game on the Colecovision, got yelled at by my moms for playing too much Kid Icarus on the NES, and one of my proudest gaming moments was when a friend of mine brought over Zelda II: the Adventure of Link, telling me he just could not beat shadow link – and how he jumped into the air when I did it for him.  I lost my temper way too easily when I lost at Mortal Combat or Street Fighter 2 in the arcades. When Civilization came out, I mercilessly hung out at my friend’s apartment and played on his computer all night, like some shameless video game scrub.  When my dad needed quarters to take the bus to work, we’d go and use the change machines in Thompson’s Arcade, and my dad would give me exactly two quarters to play (it was also there where a white man once asked me my ethnicity, and when I told him I was Viet, he gave me a brochure translated into Vietnamese trying to convince me to convert to Christianity, and the irony is, I probably would have read more of that brochure if it was in English).  In college I saw a guy in my computer lab playing some 3-D game where he went around blasting demons, and he taught me how to type in the sentence on the computer that would allow me to play Doom.  After a strenuous test or big paper was due in college, I’d drive to Mall of America and blow $10 of quarters on this arcade game where you got to hold this big garish plastic machine gun and shoot things.  During my mid-20’s I was a terror to my roommates and their friends in Goldeneye.

You get the picture.  I’m still gaming today, just got my second red ring of death for my Xbox 360, and my partner has asked me to please stow my Master Chief helmet in a place where our guests can’t see it.  Not only do I game, but I’ve also written about racial representation, especially regarding Asians and Asian Americans, in video games, and also read a lot of online reviews and discussions regarding this hobby that I have grown up with.

Anyone who’s played games has heard of the Final Fantasy series of games.  I was a big fan of Final Fantasy on the SNES, particularly FF III, I think.  It gets a little confusing since Final Fantasy is a Japanese series, not all of which makes it overseas to American audiences, and thus get numbered differently.  So basically, Final Fantasy III in the U.S. might be Final Fantasy VI in Japan.

Recently, Final Fantasy XIII has come out, and following the previews, reviews, screenshots, and looking at the concept art, it reminds me of a question that is provocative but seems to be ignored – why do Japanese game companies create so many games where the protagonists all look European or white?  Sure, Final Fantasy XIII has one Black character, but then it makes it all the more compelling to ask, why aren’t there any Asian characters?

Final Fantasy fanboys, let me reiterate: THIS IS NOT A REVIEW. I’m sure that the in-game cinematics are fluid and gorgeous, the art design is innovative, and that the new battle system grows on you.  This is not a blog entry on game play.  If you want a review, there are dozens out there that don’t even bother to mention race – go take your pick.

In fact, that’s why I am using this space to ask this question, which I find slightly odd since there have been so many issues, from the mundane to the obscure, written about video games. I find it fascinating that Japanese companies, again and again, create games featuring predominantly white characters – or, to put it another way, games where there are no characters that look Asian.  This is particularly interesting considering the demographics of Japan, and also their reputation, earned or otherwise, for colonization and nationalism.  And as an American gamer who is Asian American, it’s also an issue since most American and European game makers also make games where the majority of the characters are white.

Sure, there are exceptions: the Yakuza series and Lost Planet, for example, or fighting games which tend to be more inclusive in their stereotypes of people the world over.  But those are, again, exceptions.  For the few that we can think of that have characters with Asian features, let’s create a list of games and characters that are white, and for the sake of argument, let’s limit it to ones created by the Japanese game industry: Link and the Zelda series, Mario, Snake from the Metal Gear series, almost all of the characters from the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, as well as the vast majority of characters from the multitudes of Final Fantasy games.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  These are not niche characters or games: these are well-known, well-loved franchises, commercially and critically acclaimed.

This is not an attempt to attack Japan or Japanese people, I’m simply asking a question about something very provocative that no one seems to be asking, which is surprising given that other socio-political discussions on gaming have at least popped up here and there.  I’m not saying that those discussions are complete – I’m saying given that there has been at least some discussion about race, gender, and homophobia in gaming, no one has pointed out that, you know, it’s kinda weird that these games made by Japanese people, rarely have any characters that look Asian?

I’ll admit that my placement as an Asian American informs my curiosity, as there is a history of internalized self-hatred for many Asian Americans and a push for us to desire to aspire to whiteness, in appearance and in terms of culture (I used to dream I was, literally, a White Knight) – combined with the history of this country claiming the erasure of Asian and Asian American bodies is motivated by economics and not by racism (see the production of 21, and Avatar: The Last Airbender).  There’s this idea that Asian culture is more important than Asian people, and that actual Asian people can be swapped out by people of other races and that it doesn’t matter.

I already hear the arguments.   Again, I welcome informed and reasonable debate.  But it has become obvious that some people have come to this blog not to read, think, and discuss, but to attack and try to bully me into silence from behind the safe anonymity that the internet gives them.  I’ll offer anticipated arguments and my counter-arguments so that, when haters attack me, I can just refer them to the numbered bullet points.  So, in no particular order:

• Game sites don’t report on things like this because they’re not political. I beg to differ.  Many game sites publish stories on workers and developers getting overworked, underpaid, and exploited by corporations.  That is absolutely political.  And I’m glad that they do – these stories need to be heard.  My point is, there are different political stories and discussions happening on game sites all the time – but people still shy away from race issues.

• It’s fantasy, it’s not real. Exactly – fantasy is only limited by our imagination.  If we are free to create entire worlds and characters, why do we only create ones that look white?

• Gamers don’t want to think about politics. I hear all the time that gamers bemoan the stereotypes placed on them – that we’re all a bunch of straight male losers living in our parent’s basement, living off of junk food and deathly scared of having a conversation with a woman.  I hear that gamers and game developers want to be taken seriously, and that games should be respected as a form of legitimate entertainment.  Well, one thing that adults do is consider seriously these issues of race, gender, and sexuality.  If gamers and game developers have indeed grown up as we keep demanding we have, then we can’t dismiss or deride any discussions on race, gender, and homophobia the way that they have been.

• You’re making something out of nothing. This is actually a part of racism: white people think that they’re the ones that get to tell us whether something is racist or not.  People think they can dismiss racism, sexism, and homophobia by blaming people of color, women, and GLBTTs for being ‘overly sensitive.’  That’s like me coming over to your crib after you haven’t eaten for a week, listening to you say “damn, I’m hungry,” and insisting, “no, you’re not hungry,” then preventing you from eating.  Which leads to the argument that usually follows:

• My best friend/girlfiend/wife/boyfriend/game designer is Asian and says it’s not racist, so you’re wrong. So by this logic, if I polled my white friends and got them to say it IS racist, I would win?  I don’t hide behind my white friends, why should you get to hide behind your Asian ones? Don’t hide behind your friends: argue the points.

• It’s not about race, it’s about money. This ignores the fact that some of these blockbuster Japanese franchises made tons of money in Japan, with Japanese audiences, before they were exported here.  And even if it were true, then can we have a discussion on how the exportation of culture, the massive wealth and power of U.S. western media makers, is gendered and racial as well as economic?

• It’s escapism – why do you want to play someone who looks like yourself? I don’t.  When I get the option to create someone, like in Mass Effect 2, I make someone who looks a hell of a lot better than I do.  In ME2, my character looks like what would happen if Daniel Dae Kim had a love child with Denizen Kane and was born with a lifetime gym membership.  Anyway, people who ask this question really show their privilege: white people don’t worry about this because they take for granted that the vast majority of games made out there gives them AT LEAST one option to play someone the same race, gender, and sexual orientation as them.  Put that into context: how many games out there, especially the ones with strong narratives and iconic characters, allow me to play an Asian male?  Or a Black, Native American, Latina, or Arab woman, if I so chose?

• Race is not important in video games . If this was true, then there would be a lot more diversity in terms of stories and characters.  Because if it doesn’t matter, then why not have more games where there’s an Asian protagonist?  Why wouldn’t games made by predominantly Asian men, feature at least one or two Asian men as characters? Look at the gaming climate today – maybe we should ask ourselves, why do game developers only seem to think that white characters make compelling characters?  Why are the vast majority of games being made ask us to relate to a white narrative and character?  And even if race or gender or sexual orientation doesn’t matter to you, can it matter to someone else?

• Games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age are based in European folklore and there were no people of color in Medieval Europe. Actually there were people of color in Medieval Europe.  You know what?  There were more actual people of color in Medieval Europe than there were REAL FIREBREATHING DRAGONS OR PEOPLE WHO COULD SUMMON MOTORCYCLES OUT OF THIN AIR WITH THEIR MAGIC POWERS.

• Japanese people shouldn’t be limited to making games that only have Japanese people in them. I agree completely!  As artists and creators, empathy and creativity, including stepping out of your own shoes and exploring the lives of others, is important.  I’m not saying that all Japanese games should be required to have Japanese characters – I’m asking why so few of them do.  And also, why is it that those of us who are people of color are continually asked to relate to someone who is not from our own race?  Why can’t people see that we have far fewer opportunities to see representation of people who are from our own race in pop culture and media?

• If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. The problem with this is, it’s not like a movie where you can rent it or look at a trailer.  You buy a game and you’ve invested $60 and a chunk of your time and energy to play it.  And you can’t rely on reviews because, well, game reviews generally don’t talk about issues like racial representation.  It’s not like if you read that Mass Effect 2 stripped away a bunch of its RPG elements and so you decide not to buy the game.  If you’re a person who cares about this stuff, you’re on your own.   I didn’t hear about Dr. Suchong before I bought and played Bioshock.   I didn’t know that Ada Wong was a Dragon Lady stereotype until after I had bought Resident Evil 2. It’s not like you can take a game you bought back to Gamestop or Best Buy because you found some representations in it to be problematic.  Can you?

• Some of these games feature American stories and characters, even if they’re made by the Japanese. This ignores the existence of people of color in America, including Asian Americans.  American does not equal white, though this mindset says a lot about the idea that Asians are perpetual foreigners.  Where are you from?  Asians get this a lot.  Plus, even if we went with this idea that America is majority white and that’s why the characters are, that hasn’t stopped white Western game developers from making a multitude of games set in Asia starring a white male protagonist.

• The characters could be racially mixed and biracial. Sure – but what, in the game or story, would have us believe that, or come to that conclusion?  Where does this desire come from – to see these characters, who have blond hair and blue eyes, which are markers of whiteness around the world, as mixed?  Does it add to the conversation and narrative, or is it an excuse to avoid these issues?

• Japanese people do make games with people who look Asian, like (fill in blank). Of course there are some exceptions.  But that’s just what they are: exceptions.  Try this: list all the iconic Japanese games and characters out there that feature characters that are white.  Now, create another list – with ones that are Asian.  See?

• They’re not supposed to be white or Japanese, the characters are in a fantasy world where they’re just human. If this is the case, then isn’t it a little odd that we equate human with light hair, pale skin, and blue eyes?

• Is race all you care about? If so, I would have stopped playing a long time ago.  I care about all the other things that gamers obsess and flame about on the boards: I think Gordon Freeman is a vanilla character but thrill at Half Life 2’s stellar level design and pacing (special shout-out to Portal).  I think Bethesda’s open worlds are breath-taking and mind-blowing, and yet I’m seriously irritated by their weight-based inventory system in their games.  I’m one of those crazy people who prefer Saints Row 2 to Grand Theft Auto IV, because even though SR2 is more juvenile, messier, and offensive, it’s also more fun to me.  And when I read about developers who get exploited by publishers, I get sad for them and their families and feel grateful for all the nerd sweat that went into making that snowmobile escape scene so exciting (and pretty) in Modern Warfare 2.  I love games, for all their frustrations and myriad flaws.  These issues of representation are just an added level of consideration for me.

You may have noticed that I don’t really provide any answers to my main query.  That’s because  I honestly don’t have all the answers.  I’m asking a question and I am curious as to what people think.  I also find it perplexing that people haven’t really asked this question before, especially as issues of race and gender and sexuality in gaming have been touched upon by various media.  The above rebuttals are to counter the knee-jerk reactions which I anticipate getting, as I am quite familiar with haters who don’t even bother to read my entire entries before putting up some abusive comment, or those who think snarky apathy is a cool substitute for honest debate and discussion.  I am also familiar with people who will complain that any of us even bring up these issues, which is perplexing since there are literally hundreds of other sources, professional or otherwise, that cover gaming which wouldn’t touch this issue – is it really that threatening that we talk about these things?

All of this adds up to people trying to bully those of us who would bring up questions of race into silence, or worse, make us blame ourselves for the flaming that goes on whenever we try to ask a difficult question.

And again, I don’t want it to appear that I’m unfairly picking on Final Fantasy XIII, as it’s far from the only Japanese cultural product that features predominantly white characters.  I also don’t want to pick on Japanese people. I’m not coming at this from some self-righteous place – anyone who read my nerd blog entry will remember that I have a lot of personal experience in imagining fictional worlds where everyone (including me) was white, and back then, if you told me there were racial aspects of my imagination and dreams, I would have gotten defensive and insisted that it was not racial and then I would have asked you to get out of my dreams.

I ask at this point in time because, for years, there have been a lot of blockbuster games from Japan featuring majority white characters, and yet very little has been spoken about it.  B  I’m not interested in policing how many people of color and Asians appear in a game, I’m honestly wondering where all of this comes from, and also why we can’t talk about it.

I am curious about these issues as both a consumer and a creator.  If we have the tools of creation, of story telling and world building and character at our disposal, what we create ultimately says something about us.

Thanks in advance for any constructive conversation and insight.

These are the notes for “Gaming Masculinity: Video games as a reflection on masculinity in Computer Science and African American Culture.” The notes are from a paper by Betsy James DiSalvo, presented at the Texas A & M University Race and Ethnic Studies Institute’s Symposium exploring Race, Ethnicity and (New) Media.

The abstract to the paper reads:

There are a number of efforts to broaden participation in computing to include underrepresented groups. However, few of these efforts have identified African American males as a population with cultural and gendered values that may inhibit them from entering Computer Science (CS). In this paper we will explore masculine identities within computer culture and African American culture by using video games as an object of inquiry. We hypotheses that the technological agency exhibited with video games is based upon cultural and gender practices; and by exploring video game play practices we can better understand how to increase the technological agency of African American males and broadening their participation in CS.

The paper/project was funded to help increase participation in the computer sciences, with a particular focus on underrepresented groups.

The research (hosted at the Georgia Institute for Technology) began by examining video game use by African American males, sparked by an exchange with a student. The student lamented:

Me and some of my black friends were talking about the other guys in CS. Some of them have been programming since they were eight. We can’t compete with that. Now, the only thing that I have been doing since I was eight is playing basketball. I would own them on the court. I mean it wouldn’t be fair, they would just stand there and I would dominate. It is sort of like that in CS.
– Undergraduate CS Major

This led to the researchers (Betsy James DiSalvo, Sybrina Y. Atwaters, Jill Dimond, and Dr. Amy Bruckman) to re-examine the assumptions around what makes for a successful computer science graduate. They decided to take a closer look at play practices. Play practices of being outside are the norm in many communities, but are not conducive to computers/gaming which require long amounts of indoors/solo time to become proficient.

The researches also examined the dominant environment in CS programs. Hacker culture is privileged in the CS learning environment, meaning that many students are drawn to the program because of their existing skills. This marginalizes many students who decide to enter at the college level, and do not have years of experience experimenting with programs on their own. CS programs also tend to trend toward the strongest programmers in the class, encouraging a DIY approach to learning, and leaving behind students who are new to the discipline.

DiSalvo and the other researches created a model for the “Idealized CS Masculinity.” The researchers were looking at cultural influences and how our presentations shape our interactions with our peers. For those in the CS community, the norms there rejects the body. There is not a premium placed physical performance, personal appearance, or even in some cases, hygienic personal care. Instead, the community values technological agency and proficiency above all. Competitiveness is encouraged. This type of person is also heavily attracted to technology, computer parts, and the latest gadgets and inventions.

In contrast, the researchers noted Idealized African American Masculinity was very different than computer science norms. For one, feedback from respondents noted that there was a body centric emphasis. A premium was placed on athleticism, physical power, appearance, and physical performance. There was little value placed on technological agency. So, from the beginning, the divergence in values could contribute to why there are less African American males in computer science programs.

However, there was a strange quirk in the research: Young black males may play video games more than most other groups. However, DiSalvo notes this data is not statistically significant – with gaming becoming a ubiquitous activity, there is only a slight increase over other groups with reported play rates.

Connections between video games and CS have been documented, but not qualitatively, meaning there isn’t a definitive connection between a heavy interest in games and an interest in working with computers. “Hardcore” gaming also does not have a consistent connection between hours played and the interest in CS Major. However, research has shown that gaming practices can be leveraged into CS Interest – and since video games are a cultural touchstone for the Millennial generation, it makes sense to pursue that link.

Looking at the data also revealed more trends: young black males often participated in community of practice, where video game competition was also a form of bonding. Sportmanship was emphasized. From a tech standpoint, African American males are more likely to playing on consoles instead of PCs, which limited opportunities for hacking, cheating, and modifying. However, they did play console games online with using digital cable. In contrast to the CS respondents, they did not consider online gaming to be a social activity, preferring in person play.
Family members were considered important in game play, and game time was often multi-generational. Their gaming experiences were also heavily gendered, playing mostly with male friends. Solo play is considered practice time for family events.

With these differences in mind, Georgia Tech created the Glitch Video Game Testers program to introduce more technical concepts into gaming and to encourage more African American youth to enter computer science programs by demystifying the field.

Latoya’s Note: Clearly, Betsy and I had a lot to discuss with reference to her research. I am fascinated by the paper she and her co-authors produced, and the interesting potential to increase the ranks of blacks in tech through gaming outreach. However, post presentation, one factor stood out to me in particular as needing further exploration. The paper examines the role of race, but not class in the development of skills – and, just speaking from personal experience, class heavily influenced my gaming experience. We discussed the divides around the ability to deconstruct technological items in the home, and how for some families, there would not have been the opportunity to experiment with the family computer by taking it apart. The console vs. PC divide is also, in some ways, a matter of class – to purchase a game console means that the owners will be able to play all the games issued for that console for the next 3 – 5 years, if not more. If a new version comes out of a system comes out, the system will not become obsolete. However, in the 1990s in particular, there was a constant need to upgrade your computer to keep pace with the changing technology. This dynamic was not present with a console – though the desire for new games would be there, older games could still be obtained and played. I am interested to see how discussions of social issues and technology continue to develop.

Related: Can Video Game Testing Spark Interest in Computing Among Black Youth?

On Christmas, reader Mel sent us a little present. He wrote in about a flash based indie video game covered by the Escapist. The title? Ching Chong Beautiful.

I click over the link, expecting to see a take down. After all, the Escapist does publish a lot of progressive gaming commentary, and our blog bud Pat over at Token Minorities has been known to bless them with a piece or two. So imagine my shock when I checked the endorsement:

That’s kind of the principle behind Newgrounds’ latest well-promoted title, the kind-of-offensive-but-actually-really-funny Ching Chong Beautiful, developed by The Swain. Your brother is kidnapped by Mr. Beautiful, whose obstacle course is A.) known to be deadly and unbeatable and B.) the most popular TV show in Japan. In order to save your brother, you must get a thoroughbred horse, and the only way to do that is – you guessed it – enter Ching Chong Beautiful.

I clicked over and prepared to play.

The game starts throwing stereotypes in the blender from the intro page:

A Game of Great Endurance Challenge!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/520768

The game features the new High Scores system and Newgrounds medals! So go grab some green tea, get drunk on sake, and maybe poach some whales if there’s time…the Bang Wong Fishhead Corporation challenges you to defeat Mr.Beautiful’s ancient obstacle course: Ching Chong Beautiful!

And it goes from there.

Now, before some gamers wander over here from other sites complaining about our general lack of humor and understanding, let me make something crystal clear: I get all the fucking jokes. I know what MXC is, I used to watch it on Spike. I know what Takeshi’s Castle is, I’ve watched it online. I know what this is:

The green can next to the television labeled “Sweat” is a play on the sports drink Pocari Sweat, which normally comes in a blue and white can or bottle. (And yes, I’ve tried that too.)

I’m aware that CCB is, in part, mocking the nature of these kinds of game shows that specialize in sadistic environments and public humiliation. But it’s still racist.

Much of the “humor” is visual. The game is set in Japan and includes lots of stereotypical images like these:

And for extra “oh, we’re so cool and un-PC” points, they named their levels things like “Crater Stadium” and “Spicy Tuna Bowl.”


The caption under Crater Stadium says: “A radioactive crater formed from big nuclear bomb! I couldn’t think of a more fitting location for my second course. You will die!”

The only thing missing was the orientalist riff.

So I play through the game. Sadly, the game play was actually fun. The initial concept (being trapped in a Japanese game show) was interesting and the game itself was just the right combination of frustrating and addictive. However, that was brought to a quick stop after a wall jump ended badly, and my little character Ching nearly cracked his head open on a block. Normally, when this happens, he yells out things like “this is bullshit!” or “aww, man!” (The announcer occasionally yells out “Too bad Chinatown!” after you fall.) But after that particular time, Ching screams: “You’re out of your zipperheads!”

What the fuck?

Predictably, the comments to the game are a cesspool – but I was interested to take a peek at the conversation over on the Escapist. And lo and behold, a couple lone voices of reason tried to call attention to how fucked up this all is:

SaintWaldo writes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_chong

Are you really this insensitive?

Just to clarify, this is equivalent to naming your Southern themed Flash game “N***er Lovely”.

Making me even more angry, this story was the FIRST thing I read on Christmas morning. Thanks, Escapist, for filling my holiday with racism.

The response? “Cool down, man.”

SaintWaldo keeps fighting:

HK_01:

Cool down, man.

No. I won’t “cool down”, mainly because I’M not the uncool one.

It’s a racial slur, it offends me, and I’m going to say so. Calmly. I’m also offended that you seem to read any disagreement as “not cool”. I’m rational and presenting coherent arguments that this is a racist title and should not be on the front page of an international magazine on a major holiday. What isn’t cool is being told to not voice your objections to racism. So, concern taken for what it is, but, please, don’t tell me how I should be expressing my genuine disagreement with promoting this title. I don’t tell you anything of the sort.

Other readers chime in as well:

spiral helix:

Thank you Waldo. Big props to you for standing up and pointing out how racist the title of this game is. It is offensive and your reaction is definitely justified. I’m pretty disappointed that Escapist would be so desperate for material over holiday period that they would even stoop to promoting a game with such a title. I usually come to escapist just to watch zero punctuation but the completely inappropriate title of the article made click on it. Thank you escapist for reminding me why i never read the articles here.

BonsaiK:

As someone who is part-Chinese I do find this game as not a very prudent choice for The Escapist to highlight. I’d definitely stop short of saying “I’m offended” (racial epithets make up easily over half of my CD collection after all) but I wonder if it’s the best choice especially given how many young people visit this site. “Ching-Chong” is a reference to Chinese people, but the game is parodying a type of TV show that is Japanese and actually has nothing to do with China. I guess to the American who made this game, that’s not an important distinction for him, because in his eyes Asians are obviously all the same. I interpret this as being very racist, even if he didn’t have any actual racist intent in making the game. It’s a shame that he had to taint his game with a stupid and unfunny name like this because I actually don’t mind the gameplay concept and some of the other humour in the game is reasonably clever.

I realise that The Escapist and a lot of gamers in general are obsessed with Japanese culture (although I can’t work out why, it seems very random to me) so I guess something that both references Japenese culture and is a computer game was irresistible to them as it helps them to magnify this (artificial) link. The fact that the article writer was willing to gloss over a little bit of inconvenient racism, because the article subject matter was just that tempting, makes the Escapist look amateurish. I think that The Escapist can find better things to write articles about than what some racist kid did on Newgrounds.

At this point, the author of the post steps in – and completely sidesteps the racism, merely noting that the game is popular and that is why it was recommended. Fail.

And the usual excuses are trotted out. Other gamers say things like “it’s not that offensive” or ching chong isn’t a slur, it’s a “percieved [sic] view of the sound of the language,” and “As for the racism, I think we should give a pass to any words that have not been used seriously in over fourty years.”

One person helpfully adds: “Having said all that, it’s entirely your right to be offended if you’re oriental, however if not, I think it might be an overreaction.”

Sigh.

So aside from the usual amount of racism, CCB strikes me as a wonderful example of reinforcing stereotypes when you are trying to mock them. This actually happens fairly often in media. The last time I tackled it in the gaming sphere was when I talked about Chris Mottes, CEO of Deadline Games, and his defense of racism in his title Chili Con Carnage:

Employing Mexican-American voice actors? Great job! Promoting underground Mexican bands? Even better. I was so impressed by Mottes’ initiative, I was completely blindsided by his next statement.

However, in reviews, forums, and blogs following the releases of both games, some people slammed Deadline for being bigoted towards Mexicans. While we did employ stereotypes we considered lighthearted and humorous, our intent was most certainly not to cast Mexican individuals in a derogatory light…But despite our best efforts, critics still slammed us for being racists.

…

Why, Chris, why? Why would you throw away all your hard work for a couple cheap, race based humor shots?

The reality is that no stereotype can be considered light-hearted and humorous. A stereotype is defined as “an often oversimplified or biased mental picture held to characterize the typical individual of a group.” Stereotypes are negative. Even “positive” stereotypes are ultimately detrimental to the groups that struggle to find a sense of self within the narrow parameters of society’s vision.

I’ll touch on this more in next month’s Cerise, but I have to say I was blown away. The tone of Mottes’ piece is unmistakably clear – this is how game designers think. This is how they justify their characters. It is as if the thought never crossed their minds that maybe, just maybe, the industry is sending a very powerful message out to minorities by saying that we do not exist outside of our stereotypical roles. If there were five or ten games with a multi-faceted, modern latino protagonist, maybe slipping in a few “light-hearted” stereotypes in one third person shooter would not be such a huge deal. It is still ill-advised, but you would have enough positive images on the market to balance out the negative images broadcast into the homes of every person who purchased this one game.

However, there is no balance. Stereotype after stereotype abound in the virtually crafted console world, with very few characters of color to provide an alternate perspective. Mottes argues that “most games with racist characters do not reflect the mindset of their developers.” I would argue that they do. It reflects the developer’s mindset in dealing with the world and in dealing with minorities. If the developer was not holding on to this mindset that minorities can be categorized with one or two main characteristics, we would have multi-faceted characters of color to play.

You lose the element of humor when you begin to reinforce the same dynamics you claim to poke fun at. A game lampooning television shows like Takeshi’s Castle? Fair enough. A game that relies on heavily stereotyped images, throws in random associations to bits and pieces of Japanese culture, and openly uses racial slurs? Not funny, not innovative, just racist.

What’s worse is that the game (and subsequent reaction) reinforces stereotypes on two levels. The first, what we described above, is the continuing animus toward Asians and Asian Americans, which result in people dismissing the voices and experiences of those impacted by this type of racism. The second is the reinforcement of the wacky Japan narrative, without which MXC would not have been possible. Interestingly, this othering, which masquerades as “understanding” other cultures, actually allows many people to lay their prejudices, xenophobia, and racism out on the table. As Lisa Katayama writes at Boing Boing:

The simple fact that I’m Japanese quickly became one of my greatest advantages as an aspiring writer. I started paying attention to my motherland as a repository of story ideas. I looked at things differently when I went back home, honed my story-finding skills, and launched my own blog, TokyoMango. I got major Japan-related assignments from magazines, consulting gigs from print and radio outlets, and a book deal. It was really strange for me, because all I thought I was doing was telling people about the place I came from. One thing was clear: Weird Japan sells. It’s an almost guaranteed success for book publishers and major traffic bait for blogs.

But writing about my own country’s quirks has its downside. I strive to tell each story objectively without condescension or sensationalism, but every time I write an article about, say, the engineer who has a body pillow girlfriend or the grad student who married a Nintendo DS character, I get hundreds of racially-charged comments from readers, long ranting responses from defenders of Japanese culture, and dozens of emails from people at big media outlets who want to find out more about these “strange” phenomena.

Why do so many love to gawk at this mysterious, foreign “other” that is Japanese culture? There are plenty of strange things going on in the US too, but when it happens in Japan, it’s suddenly incomprehensible, despicable, awesome, and crazy. This fascination doesn’t just end with angry commenters, either. Over the last couple of decades, it has spawned a huge industry of magazines, blogs, and products themed around Japanese culture marketed to Westerners by Westerners who are also obsessed with Japanese culture.

Lisa Katayama writes wonderful, interesting things – but she also began to feel the sting of racism continued to share small things from Japan. What started out as fun became bastardized into something ugly and awful. And games like CCB help to perpetuate the worst of both worlds: anti-Asian racism and wacky Japan stereotypes.

I spent a lot of last week traveling and grinding on deadlines, so I missed most of the E3 coverage coming out of the gaming sphere. While I plan to catch up with BawdyJane on what she spotted there later, one project in particular caught my eye.

Dan Hsu over at BitMob has the goods:

During E3 2009, journalists, developers, and even Hollywood celebrities got wind of the secret demonstrations Microsoft was giving to select individuals and were pulling every string they could find to get in. Even Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto went to the secret area of Microsoft’s booth and got a private VIP demo.

Demian and I got to give Natal a go, and we came away extremely impressed…and neither of us are of the easily impressed variety….

“No matter how many buttons you put in a controller, you can’t get this kind of fidelity,” says Natal Creative Director Kudo Tsunoda. We’ll see later if gamers (especially the hardcore) even want that sort of fidelity, but what we’ve seen so far supports Tsunoda’s statement.

The device measures 48 different joints on your body, so it’s able to distinguish your hands from your forearm, your forearm from your upper arm, your upper arm from your torso, and so on. It can detect forward and backward 3D positioning as well, unlike old Vision Cam games that see your silhouette as a 2D physical object. It even knows how fast you’re moving your body parts toward or away from the television (keep the snickers down to a minimum, please).

Awww, yeah! Reminds me of what they were going for back in the day with those clunky virtual reality helmets everyone swore would be the new hotness. You can even use your feet to kick at things instead of keeping all your movement from the torso up, as indicated in the shot below:

Whoo! So I was properly geeked…until I caught this little note:

When game consultant and former Newsweek writer N’Gai Croal gave Paradise a test drive, however, the game had trouble reading his steering actions. The footwork (gas and brakes) worked fine, but Croal couldn’t steer his car at all. It wasn’t clear whether this was a problem of calibration differences between Tsunoda and Croal’s very different body types, or if Croal’s crazy dreadlocks threw Natal off. But it was working just fine when Tsunoda was at the “wheel.”

It’s not about the dreadlocks, Shoe. N’Gai is brown-skinned. Sensors did not compute. Damn it, gaming people. Race issues are harshin my squeez again.

Luckily, this was a technology issue and not a character or plot issue, so instead of denials, we actually got a swift statement back from Microsoft. Gamezine.co.uk reports:

Research into the issue resulted in a study concluding that near-infra-red cameras did indeed struggle to read movements from those with darker skin.

However, Microsoft has responded to these worries, telling Gamezine that all ethnicities will be able to use the technology.

“Last week at E3, we gave a taste of what to anticipate when Project Natal launches. As we mentioned to everyone who had the chance to play, we were working with tech demos and, as we all know, these can be temperamental,” Microsoft told Gamezine.

“The goal of Project Natal is to break down the barriers for everyone to play, and it will obviously work with people of all shapes and ethnicities at launch.”

So hooray for Microsoft. They are handling the situation and should have it fixed before Project Natal hits a store near you. And, as another thing in favor of Microsoft, it appears that N’Gai’s copy could have had a glitch. Other folks with dark skin (like Sugar Ray Leonard) tested the game and appeared to be able to participate just fine:

However, the whole situation got me thinking about the assumptions inherent in gaming, particularly within character design and applications.

One of the reasons I really enjoyed Ryuta Komaki’s presentation on mixi at RESI was that his research proves that we can program our own biases into the technology we create.

In this case, it does not appear that Microsoft failed to do due diligence and test with a range of skin tones. This error seems indicative of the technology used, and a long standing issue to boot.

But what about when people are programming characters? Or testing technology like this when there may not be any brown skinned people in the room? How do assumptions of who is representative of a gamer and who is playing impact the final results?

In the paper I presented at RESI, I used an example from 2007 when Acclaim moderators assumed whiteness as a default. In their game Dance, the default avatar was white. When a black character asked why he had to pay for a darker skin to personalize his avatar, the moderator replied that black was an extra feature, and therefore, had to be paid for.

THE REASON, there is no available choice at the moment is because, being white doesn’t necessarily have to represent you color in game. To change your skin color in the game, IS a special feature. It makes you STAND OUT. Therefore, your going to have to pay for an extra feature. Maybe in full release, there will be a bit more leeway, but for now you have to stick with what you got and test the game, and don’t worry so much about your character they’re going to be wiped regardless… We didn’t mean for this to be a racial bash. But the default skin tone we have in DANCE! is white. If you want something extra your going to have to pay. Nothing in life is free.

Tekanji from the Official Shrub Blog breaks down the core assumptions at play:

This situation is, perhaps, one of the most clear-cut examples of how the privileged groups are normalized and the non-privileged groups are Othered. First of all, this game seems to be still in the development stage; they’re testing out game mechanics and the like. Just as with Fable, as I discussed in my gender-inclusive video game thread, treating a female option as an “extra” rather than an intrinsic part of a game that supposedly lets you be anything, Acclaim’s Dance treats white as the default and non-white as an extra feature. As one of the moderators on the board explains, “Black is an EXTRA feature. It makes your person look unique, so that is an EXTRA feature. Therefore, you having to PAY for it.” [...]

Acclaim wasn’t aiming to be racist. I would say that no successful company — at least none that want to stay in business — tries to be racist. But the whole point about privilege is that you don’t have to try to be bigoted, but you have to actively try not to be bigoted because of the way the bigoted point of view is normalized in society.

See, privilege is about not having to see yourself as the Other. The moderator quoted above — and the company he represents — don’t see the hypocrisy in saying that they didn’t “mean for this to be a racial bash” and then in the very next sentence say that “the default skin tone we have in DANCE! is white”. They don’t think of it as racist because in our society being white is “normal”, it’s the “default” and it’s certainly nothing for anyone to get worked up over.

White people, who do already have it so that the avatars “represent [their] color in game” (and in most games, movies, tv shows, comic books, books, etc), have the luxury of seeing race as an extra, as something to do to make yourself unique and stand out. People of colour, who aren’t automatically represented in this game or most other parts of society, don’t have that luxury. If they want to have their avatars represent someone like themselves — something a white person doesn’t have to think about if they don’t want to — they have to pay. They get to see themselves be Othered and then told that they should be grateful because they are seen as “unique” and something to be desired. What is a fun accessory for a white player is a necessary component for a player of colour who wants to have the same ability as the white person to allow their avatar to represent their real life self. Privilege is not having to think about how the “extras” afforded to you come at the cost of allowing non-privileged groups the same basic representation that you take for granted.

Video games – and development – are new and exciting fields and when we are experimenting with new technology, glitches are going to happen. But one thing the field needs to remember is always to question the underlying assumptions surrounding how we test, how we develop, and who we are developing for. Microsoft handled this situation well, but they are an exception to the rule. Most houses prefer to pretend these issues don’t exist, or try to justify bad decisions (like charging for a skin tone issued freely in real life.)

Other gaming spots, take a lesson from Microsoft. If it’s an issue that lies within your control, just fix it.

(All images pulled from the Bitmob blog)

Guillermo del Toro entered the geek radar with Blade II in 2002. Seven years later, the Guadalajara native has seen his stock rise even while he’s stuck to the realm of the fantastic, thanks to the success of the Hellboy series and Pan’s Labyrinth. This month, in an interview in Wired magazine, Del Toro hit back at those who would dismiss him as a filmmaker catering to a geekier crowd:

People think because you love genre you don’t know anything else. It’s condescending. If the emotion is provoked and the goals are achieved, what does it matter? Is Thomas Pynchon a more worthy read than Stephen King? It depends on the afternoon. And I love Kurt Vonnegut. He threads the profane and irreverent with the profound and soul-searing.

Even while praising him, though, Wired’s Scott Brown seems to ignore del Toro’s statement; Brown refers to him as a “schlock-meister” twice in the article, and uses the term “pasty indoor kid” to contrast del Toro with friends and fellow directors Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Thankfully, though he’s determined to hang an asterisk onto del Toro’s success, even Brown concludes, “Suddenly, we’re looking down the barrel of the Del Toro Decade,” citing a list of projects that includes:

* A vampire-oriented novel, The Strain, written with Chuck Hogan and which presumably doesn’t include shiny skin
* The film adaptation for The Hobbit, a two-film project he was selected for by Lord Of The Rings mastermind Peter Jackson
* A new movie version of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

During the interview, del Toro also says the day is coming for a new, pan-media form of story telling, encompassing film, television, print, video and even video games:

We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way—act one, act two, act three. We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.

Video games seem to figure heavily in del Toro’s vision of this “single platform” future: he says “the Citizen Kane of games” will come about during the next ten years.

“We’re using [non-linear storytelling technology] just to shoot people and run over old ladies,” del Toro says. “We could be doing so much more.”