Today:
- Preamble
- Sarkeesian
- Project Two
- Homework
Prepping for Project Two
Last class I showed one of my favorite video’s, Jay Smooth’s “How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist.” Key to Smooth’s rhetorical strategy is to maintain a distinction between judging/indicting the *person* and the thing they said. I want to keep that distinction in mind this week as we begin to discuss the difficult topics of racial, gender, and sexual representation(s) in games.
These can be difficult conversations. I want you to feel comfortable to ask questions–I am not attempting to police thought. I often think what makes people hesitant to join these conversations is the ire with which “Social Justice Warriors,” such as myself, can rain fire down upon people who might, out of innocent ignorance, say something that mortally offends their liberal sensibilities. So, up front, I am warning everyone to take a deep breath and extend charity and tolerance to everyone else’s perspective.
I also want you to take a look at this picture:
The picture might cause you to chuckle. That’s ok. Humor is an impulse reaction. But as educated citizens, thinking about this picture should give pause. There is a space between impulse and thought. Let me unpack this a bit.
Often comedy operates by transgressing imposed social norms, giving us a moment of respite from the hard work of being civilized human beings. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues that you can judge the depths of a friendship by how deeply you are willing to transgress social expectations. Archer is one of my favorite shows. But, in terms of rhetoric, you have to be acutely aware of context, situation, and (multiple) audience(s).
If upon reflection you don’t realize that you shouldn’t bring a sign mocking genocide to a public event, then we have problem. And if you think I’m making a big deal out of a little problem, then you need to keep that opinion to yourself. Seriously. I don’t want to hear it.
It might seem as if I am not willing to extend charity to your perspective, that I am policing you. In part, yes. Part of my job, especially as someone teaching in the Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology program, is to teach you the social boundaries that discourse should not cross. Transforming genocide into a joke is one of them. We can debate whether my job entails teaching you what to think or who to be in your private moments. However, it is beyond debate that my job entails highlighting how such discourse generates severe repercussions in public forums.
I’d wager that if a bunch of black students from a northern university made a sign that said “Let’s March ‘Em Like Sherman All the Way Back to the Sea,” some people might take offense. And I’d say that if a bunch of muslim students made a sign that said “Let’s Blow ‘Em Up Like the Twin Towers,” then Fox News would go absolutely batshit crazy. You don’t get to make a joke about another culture’s tragedies. Period. Being a sophisticated Professional Writer or Rhetorician requires a measure of cross-cultural awareness. As we highlighted in our discussion of art, empathy is the ability to stand in another’s shoes and approximate their reaction. It is also the ability to listen to someone else’s critique without becoming overly defensive. We’ll be practicing both in the upcoming project.
Jokes are fun. But you don’t get to purchase your identity, or just have some fun, at the expense of others–especially at the expense of groups that have been historically victimized, enslaved, suppressed, lynched, or disenfranchised. And, in the era of the Internet, those historically victimized groups have more of a voice and presence than they have had before. And that’s a pretty good transition into project two.
Project 2: Representations of Race and Gender in Games
I want to begin by exploring Anita Sarkeesian’s series on “Tropes vs Women in Games” (here “tropes” means metaphorical representation). In short, Sarkeesian’s project, funded via Kickstarter, identifies the different, shallow, and reductive ways women are represented in games. Her video on “Women as Rewards” provides a good example. We’ll watch the first 7 minutes (and then minutes 10-13):
And one more video, her take on the classic game Beyond Good and Evil:
Ok, with these as examples, let’s turn to the Project 2 description on the syllabus:
Level Two: Representations of Race and Gender in Video Games
In our fist unit we looked at video games as aesthetic objects; in our second unit we will examine them as socio-cultural artifacts. While scholars are increasingly noting the pedagogic potential of video games (particularly, James Gee’s oft-cited What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning), they also note, with growing concern, the rather myopic presentation of women, minorities, and other cultures in games. If games are going to advance, then they will need to be sensitive to these issues. They can do better, and they will if we keep telling them to. Think: Bechdel test (and why we can still do better).
Our second project will turn a critical eye to games to see how they measure up to 21st century standards for identity politics. We will be building off the work of Anita Sarkeesian and here Tropes Vs. Women in Games series. Sarkeesian’s work has drawn sharp criticism from what has become known and the Gamergate movement. I’ll deal with this later.
While Sarkeesian’s project focuses on gender, I will be interested in expanding the premise to also look at representations of race. My premise here is simple: if we are to elevate games into cultural objects worthy of a place in our schools and universities, then games will need to become increasingly sophisticated in their representations. We need to be critical of some games, and praise others.
Of course, here we should also be wary of over-generalizing: after all, we wouldn’t say that all books belong in high school classrooms, so I am not saying that all games do, either. But it does warrant looking at the most popular games in a variety of genres to see what kinds of identifications and procedures (thinking ahead to Bogost) these games ask us to internalize.
Over the next few weeks you will work in groups of 3-4 to produce a video that investigates representations of race and gender within a particular genre of games. Your video should contextualize itself in terms of Sarkeesian’s project and the articles we read in class. The videos can both point to games that reproduce the tropes she identifies (which we’ll cover more on Thursday), or offer other games, like Beyond Good and Evil, that transcend cliched, stereotyped, or misogynist representations.
Homework
- Read Rouner’s “Would You Believe There’s Only Been 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?”
- Read Moosa’s “Colorblind: On Witcher 3, Rust, and Gaming’s Race Problem”
- Read Williams, Martin, Consalvo, and Ivory’s 2009 “The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games”; note: this should be a free download if you access it on the USF WiFi or if you access if from home via the USF library. I recommend you download it now.
- Read Mou and Peng’s 2009 Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Popular Video Games
