Race and Sexuality in Games

Before analyzing the case studies suggested by the group in charge this week, I can’t resist commenting on the ‘Resident Evil 5 Trailer’ case. It resonates with the ideology text by Hall and his notion of encoding/decoding and it is also interesting to show the dangers of designing for masses. 

In one hand, I believe game designers, specially from big studios have a special responsibility towards their players and should, therefore, be specially sensitive not only to what would be interesting or fun for them, but also to what would be considered harmful. Following this line of thought, I would say that designers have the obligation to consider themes like racism and homophobia and the possibility of their work being interpreted as racist or homophobe. 

On the other hand, every design can be interpreted in many different  ways, and those are sometimes unpredictable. The messages designers believe to be encoded in their works/games aren’t necessarily the ones people/players will decode. However, both encoding and decoding have an ideological context that influences both processes.

I believe my own judgement and reading of the video in strongly influenced by the colonialist values transmitted to me via education and culture. Coming from Portugal, I’ve been educated to look at the colonialist era as “the golden age of Portugal”, and not owning a big empire is a national matter of shame. A lot of the books we read in school were either written back in the 1500’s or more recently, about those times, when Portugal was “a great country”. This built a big tolerance to images of white supremacy, or even ‘white normality’ and that’s probably why I can’t read racism in Resident Evil 5’s trailer. But I’m guessing, I know my judgement is made in the light of the ideology I was raised in, but, since ideologies are made natural, it’s hard to say which judgements are a result of my own critical thinking or of that ideology. 

And this is also an important dilemma to have in mind when looking at these issues of race and sexuality in video games. Sometimes those messages aren’t intentionally encoded in the text of the video game, but they end up being interpreted like that. On the other hand, it seems to be a ‘fact’ that video games tend to have the white heterosexual male and the preferred player, and so, they tend to adapt to what they believe are this preferred player’s natural choices. The Dragon Age 2 example shows how homosexual behaviors are introduced in video games as identical to heterosexual ones. The game was designed for one kind of behavior, and then the characters involved in the sex scenes just changed. Probably for technological reasons, man and woman have identical physical structures so both heterosexual and homosexual scenes can work on top of the same algorithm. I don’t know if we should see this example as homophobic or just as an example of resource economy. It seems that the designers thought about this feature late in the developing process, so everything had to be rushed. And this same reason would explain the lightning of the black character example, in Mass Effect. 

There’s something I find specifically interesting about the lightning example in Mass Effect. We discussed this example in class as a reflection of a certain degree of homophobia in games. To me, though, this could be read just as a normal bug and not a sign of disrespect towards the black community. This shows, again, the encoding/decoding problem I talked about earlier. The conflict between encoded and decoded messages problematizes the discussions about gender, race and sexuality in videogames, since they rely in individual interpretation.

Gender and Gaming II

In her blog post about this week’s cases, Stine asks, at some point, if male players don’t meet any barriers when playing games and how do those intersect with age, sexuality, race, etc. 

As we talked about in the last few classes, it is easier for a girl to cross certain gender-borders than it is for boys, specially if they are young. And even, most of the times, sexuality is brought into the table when they do. On the other hand, cultural context, age, class (and, therefore, status) determine the consequences of certain behaviors. My friend who plays farmville because his mother invited him, for example, is constantly giving justifications, even though we (his circle of friends) never said anything or made fun of him. The key explanation here is context. Farmvile has a wide audience and it isn’t necessarily seen as a “pink game”, so he isn’t judged by other people in the same game. Besides, gender-border-crossing is usually policed by those who are closer to the subject - friends and family. In this case, all of us in his group of friends play “pink games”, even the more hardcore players in the group have no prejudice against facebook games, or more embodied games (Wii games, dance dance revolution, etc). We all play sing star and dance dance revolution together when we meet, so we don’t have “the morals” to judge him. In fact, we were more surprised by the fact that his mother, who’s in her 50’s, was playing - both because she’s a woman, and because she’s not exactly young. Considering this is all happening in Portugal, it is very surprising that someone in her generation is playing anything, since she’s part of a generation who had access to card and board games only. Playing in public spaces hasn’t been common in Portugal. Cyber cafés never became popular and arcades were really hard to find some years ago.

Actually, the reason why we all started playing Dance Dance Revolution is also interesting. In my group of closer friends there is a boy who owns a metal pad. He tried to make us all play with him. In the beginning, no one, except for girls, wanted to play. As time went by, because that metal pad would be present in every party, more and more boys joined the group and now that’s one of the group’s favorite games. The guy who introduced the group to DDR is gay, and that’s probably another reason for boys taking so long to give the game a try. But, once they overcame prejudice, no one was judging anymore and we were just having fun together. The fact that we were too old to make fun of each other might have helped the transition. As this example shows, the first and the biggest step is to overcome prejudice - easier said than done. The only real barrier to female or male gamers is the community’s prejudice.

When watching the video Stine and Pernille suggested, I was struck by the fact that I was being exceptionally disturbed by the fact that women were discriminating men and not the other way round. The video shows a series of common behaviors male players show towards female players, as described by Yee, but reverses roles, so women are either underestimating the male player or offering him gear. If the video showed the usual situation, I would think “oh yeah, this is so typical.”, but because it was reversed, I was really disturbed, just because it goes against everything I’m used to.

Another thing I find interesting is that, in MMORPGs, players don’t really have to reveal their gender, age, race, etc, and yet some players are interested in exploring these offline-characteristics in game, even if it doesn’t help the playing at all.

Performance & Audience

Our colleagues brought to class two case studies to illustrate the theme “performance and audience”: DotA and DotA 2, and Guitar Hero. These example show the two apparent “trends” of performance: the “embodied/dance-like” and the “strategic/sports-like”. The literature analyzed brings that dichotomy too, which is an interesting dichotomy and shows how ‘confused’ we are when we talk about performance in video games. 

Outside the realm of games we use the term ‘good performance’ to evaluate different criteria. In class, Isaac gave the example of the guitar player in a rock concert. In this case, it seems there needs to be an extra theatricality showed by the artist for the audience to consider it a good performance. It isn’t enough to be a good player to capture the audience. A guitar player is, most of the times, required to do “extra things”, he needs to show-off, to prove he can play the guitar in strange situations - with his teeth or feet, holding the guitar behind his head, etc... In this case, besides being good at doing what he’s supposed to do, he needs to add something the audience can see and understand even if they don’t play a guitar. This is the kind of performance we usually associate with “more physical” games like guitar hero. The videos our colleagues showed, however, problematized this notion. 

The two examples of “good performance” in guitar hero showed people who scored high in the game, their skill was recognized by the game itself (through the score) but they didn’t really add the ‘extra’ the real guitar player needs to add in order to perform well, according to the audience. To me, those videos illustrate a non-embodied performance more than an embodied one. What they were doing with their bodies wasn’t different from what the starcraft professional gamers do. There’s an important difference between objective and subjective evaluation of performance in games, and that distinction is tied to the embodied/strategic distinction. An objective evaluation of performance is one made by the machine - score, winning a battle, etc. In this case, the game itself quantifies performance. The evaluation of performance can only be subjective when players add something extra to the quantified performance that the machine can’t really “read”. This is the case of the DDR dancers who added a whole choreography on top of the moves required to have a perfect performance for the machine. In this case, the performance sort of has two layers, if I may say so, the machine performance and the bodily performance, added just to capture the audience. This doesn’t mean, though, that a quantified performance doesn’t please the audience. It means that a quantified performance demands knowledge of the game while the second one can be pleasing even for those who don’t know the game. 

Tied to what I call a performance of “objective evaluation” is the concept of deep play (borrowed from Clifford Geertz by Christian McCrea). Deep play depends on a culture surrounding the game, this culture helps creating a narrative around the game/situation that can be shared by the group - players and fans/audience. The audience engages in the playing situation not because the ‘performer’ is doing “something extra-game”, but because there’s a culture around the game that makes every game event meaningful and part of a shared narrative. This is what happened with DotA, it became part of the culture, reaching a lot of players all over the world and creating a competitive community around it. Performances, in tournaments, or in a battle, is evaluated by both the machine, other players or the audience, in tournaments. This audience, though, doesn’t evaluate something “extra-game” players do to show-off, they are interested in the game itself and the way it is played, the strategies used to attain what the machine tells is a “good performance”. In this case, players and audience share this culture around the game and understand its stakes.

Embodied & Material Play

(I'm going to cheat a little in this post - I'm going to use the present tense as if I was posting just in time.)

This week's discussion about embodiment was inspired by texts with different focuses. Dovey & Kennedy's "Bodies and Machines" reflects about the cyborg and the importance and role of the body when playing games. Simon's "Geek Chic" looks at case modding as a way for moders to express themselves, to bring games outside of the virtual sphere and to make technology present, visible and obvious. Kirkpatrick's "Controller, Hand Screen" proposes an artistic view of the interactive/gaming experience, looking specifically at the materiality of the controller.

Our colleagues driving the discussion suggested some case studies: the sixth sense, by MIT and the 3ds AR tattoo. These two different paradigms of interaction suggest two different views of technology-use. The sixth-sense says interaction is more intuitive if technology is somehow hidden. In this case, the user moves her fingers in the air to produce results, without having an 'intrusive' or 'obviously material' interface. In the second example, the 3DS AR Tattoo, the technology becomes part of the body, as if it was what we first think of as a 'normal tattoo'. The fact that your always carrying this piece of technology around would work as a form of showing off technology, a little like the case modders who change their machines to make technology evident. When looking at these two examples, we tend to try to predict which interaction paradign will outcompete the other one. But it is hard to foresee the future. The notion of 'intuitive' technology is very ambiguous and we need to consider the adaptability of the human. Some forms of interaction may seem 'not intuitive' but after some use they become 'natural'. If we look at today's controllers, they don't look 'natural' at all, while interaction with the kinect would easily be qualified as 'natural'. Yet, for gamers, because they are used to it, using a controller is considered 'natural' and other forms of interaction can cause some discomfort. This makes it hard to choose a paradigm over the other.
Personally, in one hand, I like having a sort of material "portal to engagement", an object that marks the gaming moment as a gaming moment and not a working moment or other. But, at the same time, I can have a lot of fun playing wii or kinect and laugh at the way me and others move while playing. In the latter case, I'm more strongly connected to the physical world and I am more aware of the fact that I am playing a game. That isn't so different, though, from the experience of playing a tabletop roleplaying game - there are no visible controllers and yet I don't feel that my engagement is compromised.