STUDENT INSTRUCTIONS for Week 4 Greetings, Flm&Mda 85C students! Here are your instructions for week 4: Step 1. Watch the “Week 4 Introduction” video from Prof. Ruberg. Step 2. Read Mary Flanagan’s article “Critical Play and Responsible Design” (2018). While you read, pay attention to: - Why does Flanagan say it is important to study video games from a cultural perspective? How does Flanagan understand the role of the game designer? What does she think that games that are designed “critically” should accomplish? Step 3. Read selections from the book How to Play Video Games (2019). Pick two of these four chapters to read (they’re all short - feel free to read them all if you have time!): Shira Chess, “Feminism”; Adrienne Shaw, “LGBTQ Representation”; TreaAndrea Russworm, “Race”; Souvik Mukherjee, “Postcolonialism” While you read, pay attention to: - How is the author applying a critical framework (like feminism, LGBTQ issues, race, or postcolonialism) to a specific game? How might you take the ideas from the essay and apply them to other pieces of digital media? Step 4. Watch “Video Games Have Always Been Queer” (2019). Technically, this is our week 4 “guest lecture,” but it is a book talk by Professor Ruberg. While you watch, pay attention to: - How does this talk model humanistic research on video games? What does analysis entail? How does this talk shift your thinking about what it means to explore LGBTQ issues in media? Step 5. Go to the website Twitch.tv and watch people playing video games. (This is in place of playing video games together in class.) Explore the options on Twitch’s “Browse” page. Pick at least 2 games to watch; watch for at least 1 hour total. It is ok to watch different streamers playing the same game. While you watch, pay attention to: - What is the video game like? How do you play? What are the goals? How does it look? Etc. What cultural elements do you notice about the game? Does it differ from what you expect in a video game? What topics are brought up by the streamer or in the chat? Step 6. Watch the “Week 4 Lecture” video from Prof. Ruberg. Step 7. Write and submit your weekly reflection (due Saturday, April 25 by 11:59 pm). This should be an original piece of writing, 500 to 700 words in length. Please write in full sentences. Note: Whereas there have been multiple prompts to choose from in past weeks, for week 4 there is only one prompt. - Prompt: Pick one of the video games that you watched on Twitch.tv. Perform an analysis of the game (it’s ok if you aren’t familiar with the full game - you can talk about just what you saw) drawing from this week’s readings. In the first part of your response, you should reference an idea from Flanagan’s article “Critical Play and Responsible Design.” What is one idea from the text that you think is relevant to the game? Explain your thinking step by step, pointing to specific details as “evidence.” In the second part of your response, you should reference an idea from one of the chapters from How to Play Video Games. In what ways is the idea from the chapter relevant to the game? Again, explain your thinking step by step and show evidence. Remember to focus in on specifics, using quotes from the texts and individual elements of the game. There is no “right” answer; one of your goals is to demonstrate your own unique interpretation. Step 9. Read and respond to one of your peers’ reflections (due Monday, April 27 by 2:00 pm). Each response should be 100 - 200 words in length. Consider commenting on the following: - What points did your peer make that you hadn’t thought of? What makes them interesting? Is there something in your peer’s response you disagree with. Be respectful and constructive? Does your peer’s response make you think of any new topics that connect to the course material? Intro videos. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pIDnU5Hv0haUWHqu8WoCQPmuqEnr0uv0/view?usp=sharing Lecture videos, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pyn2jUVxqhLEbf87WI4gTJz3J46DYtav/view?usp=sharing Peer’s reflections: Jingwen Zhou Video games are essential aspects of utilizing leisure time since they offer a sense of enjoyment and refreshment. Twitch TV is the most common media platform with a variety of games in which members can select the kind of video play they want to participate in playing. Twitch offers a variety of games from horror play, soccer games, candy crushing, cartoon plays, and many other games. Just as Flanagan’s states in the article that, modern media should allow individuals to interact with the media by either input of commands. Through this interaction, the media creates a better environment for individuals taking part in games to enjoy media games. According to Flanagan's, the media should be designed in a way that individuals control what the media is playing. The video game that captured my attention in Twitch TV is the Dead by Daylight game; this game is designed for lovers of war. The game is a horror game that involves killing others by hunting them and slashing them using a machete of other weapons of war. The game may be terrifying at first for people who scarcely imagine it. For me, I found this game interesting because I love horror movies and this gave me a chance to utilize the skills I see in movies. In a game, there are five key characters, the savage killer and four other players. One player takes the role of the savage killer, where he hunts over players to eliminate the players. The other four player's main idea is to escape the tricks of the savage killer to avoid being trapped and killed. Unlike other video games in Dead by Daylight, the four players have an advantage of better situational awareness. This helps the players to understand better what is happening around them and get away from the savage killer. The game environment changes every time the game is on the play and helps players to run away from the killer because of the situational advantage. The video game has certain key features that guide the players to survive in the game. Survive together or not, for the players to survive the play, they have to cooperate with others or get selfish. Working together will help you outfit the killer and will help the killer in escaping the killing grounds. Where I was another feature in the game that helped players in knowing the levels. These levels are to remind the player of the situation they are playing, and they should not feel safe in any case. A feast of the killer was another feature that happened to familiarize the killer with the killing grounds. The killer must master the art of killing and hunting to be able to catch and sacrifice as many victims as possible. Deeper and deeper was used to state the strategies of both the killer and the survivor; this is because every player has his strategy, which he may choose to utilize during the game to outwit the other player. Real people, real fear, and human reactions to horror movies make the game sessions interesting since one may not predict what is going to happen next in the play. The background music played while the game is on play and the environment around the play make the game to have a terrifying experience. References Gandolfi, E. (2016). To watch or to play, it is in the game: The game culture on Twitch. Tv among performers, plays, and audiences. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 8(1), 63-82. Qingyue Li I think that the League of Legends is one of the most phenomenal video games today. The game has overly intriguing scenes that create optimal joy and pleasure to anyone playing it. Ideally, it is a common phenomenon that playing games usually encompass an impregnable need for entertainment, which is synonymous with the video. The game offers a multi-layered online battle scene, which is inspired by classical frontline wars and battles. Some diverse themes and lessons are underpinned in this video game. Flanagan, in her "Critical Play and Responsible Design," talks about the idea of societal change and development, which is applicable in this film. At the start of the game, the goal is to show how defensive teams can repel each other during battle confrontations. The game seeks to expose how opposing teams can defend their territories against intrusion from enemies. In the matches defining the game, it is evident that each team or party normally starts on an Achilles heel. The teams manifest immense discreteness as they try to map out how to successfully engage their opponents on the other side without showcasing weaknesses. As the game progresses, the teams are shown as acquiring strength and power in pursuit of conquering rivals. However, each team is determined to capitalize on another’s deficiencies and wage an onslaught. The champion team adopts different roles in their quest to troll their opponents. The thematic architecture of the game is awash with fantasy tropes that are intended to spike tremendous interest among viewers. Sorcery, for example, is responsible for confusing the opposing sides, especially during instances of war. Additionally, champions have no singular roles that they play, but instead, their roles are multifaceted depending on the contextual environment they find themselves.However, despite the dominant theme of transformation for champions, there lacks a lucid narrative that is overarching in the game. The fictional game narrates how heroes and villains are transformational in their acts and intent, which end up inspiring other ordinary people to take action. For example, political struggle is identified as one of the appropriate actions that are inspired by the works of legends. Moreover, since societies have always been characterized by existential threats and challenges such as poverty, legends are depicted as having pivotal roles in shaping their future through individual and collective actions. Furthermore, fundamental academic steps inspire the video game on its creation, which are aimed at helping at easing interfacing with players. In the lens of the book, ‘How to Play Video Games,’ players are advised to be critical of the impact wielded by antagonists in any game. The factor is wholly reflected in the video game. For example, players are expected to ensure that they first master the art of strategic placement so that they can emerge as champions. Winners, as depicted in the game, are not merely people who use conventional means to win against their opponents. Contrary, heroes are supposed to show strategic mastery of their defensive mechanisms so that they can keep on warding off attacks from opponents. The first step, in this case, is to know the extent of fragility in regard to a foe before launching an attack. Notably, after the requisite evaluation has been done, then it becomes possible instigating defensive combats before extermination by an enemy. 17 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN Mary Flanagan In the landscape of media studies and digital humanities, games have become a popular subject of study for both their creative forms and the social practices they instigate. Because they create cognitive and epistemological environments that position the player-participant with a given collection of game elements, representations, and rules (Flanagan 2009: 10), and because they offer choices and a sense of agency that is empowering—and potentially psychologically manipulative—digital games are influential, exciting media forms worthy of critical attention. Described in this chapter, Critical Play is both a discursive method and a practical, instrumental approach toward the development of games that enrich communication, encourage in-depth reflection, and generate new conversations among game players and game designers. Key to this discussion is an understanding of the role of media, design, and criticality in social change and overall societal improvement, as well as the notion of social responsibility. Alongside their positive elements, games have faced harsh critique; key challenges in the conversation about games arise about who makes games to begin with and for whom they are created. In pop culture, videogames are still largely described as a domain for men, even though adult women constitute half of all digital game players (ESA 2014). Hispanic players currently outnumber non-Hispanic players in the U.S. as well (Mintel 2014). Yet, while player demographics appear more inclusive than ever across the player base, equity in terms of gender in the creation of games is still slow to come. While the percentage of women working in the U.S. game industry has doubled, it remains at around 22 percent, and people of color are marginalized in the current American game industry climate (IGDA 2014). A lack of diversity in game creation spheres helps create a vicious cycle of reinforcing biased, stereotypical depictions of characters, cultures, and world rules in games and larger gaming cultures. Limited, simplistic conceptions of games proliferate from mainstream media. Unfortunately, they miss the complexity of games’ messages and, moreover, their potential for personal and social benefit. Games are a part of (and some would say they are at the heart of) a massive set of societal debates about media consumption, social ills, and equity. But things are changing. Unlike film and linear media, games sway more toward being a systemic art form, and such an understanding sets the stage for us to engage with the complexity games offer. For example, while studies link violent and subversive behavior to videogames 183 MARY FLANAGAN (Hull et al. 2014), they simultaneously are seen to have potential for massive, prosocial impact on culture (McGonigal 2011). These contradictory claims reveal how very little we know about the complex ways that games engage our beliefs, feelings of agency, and desires for rewards. As researchers learn more every day, games increase their influence as an artform. There is great interest in how games promote prosocial values, due to the impact other media forms have had toward a more progressive society. For example, much has been discussed about television’s role in improving gay equity in the United States; in terms of increased representation over the last 20 years, the depiction of gay couples and “out” television celebrities is associated with more positive societal attitudes (Ayoub & Garretson 2015; Craig et al. 2015). Anecdotally, the former Vice President of the U.S., Joe Biden, noted in 2012, “I think ‘Will and Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far” (Little 2012). This is not to say that the representations avoid stereotypes, or that they are always positive and multidimensional. However, media ecology provides at least some opportunity for escapism, strength, proactive action, and finding community (Craig et al. 2015). For those interested in the social impact of media, the challenge remains to push for ways toward responsible media culture that intentionally shapes culture for good. Similarly, the norms depicted in digital games significantly influence culture. To give a sense of the scope of this influence, consider the fact that an estimated 33,000 people per day were downloading and playing the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game a year after its release, and that it made nearly 100K USD per day (Think Gaming 2015). In 2014, there were more people playing Candy Crush Saga at any given moment than there were people living in Australia, Germany, or France (93 million daily active users), and the year following, it still attracted over three million active users per day (King 2014). With record sales, record numbers of players, and some games’ ambitious development costs (e.g., the development of Grand Theft Auto V reportedly cost 266 million USD; McLaughlin 2013), games are a significant financial player in the media landscape, bringing in revenues to rival or surpass film and music industries on a global scale. Games are a key cultural force and twenty-first-century art form— their high sales figures, dominance in pop culture discourse, and sheer popularity point to their impact. In light of the financial and cultural sway of games, designing and playing critically is an indispensable approach in the domain of applied media studies research and for engaging the social and cultural dimensions of digital games. Key here is the notion that media makers and game designers can do something about how they might alternate depictions, rewards, and so on from mere thought experiment to design studio. In an age of theory meeting practice, and a push toward experiential learning and “making,” design itself operates as a mode of inquiry that can intentionally encompass a philosophical and social focus. Designing critically embodies such an intentional practice; it means being mindful of the potentially positive and negative effects of games as well as the positive and negative influences of one’s own design and play processes or experiences. Critical Play takes a historical look at how games and play can be analytical and experiential systems reflective of, but also entangled among, social and cultural norms. It incorporates past radical moves by arts and activist communities to understand games as components or counterpoints in critical theory. This is why Critical Play is an important and fundamentally unique approach: the experiential aspect of play—for all games must be playtested by actual players—moves the critique beyond a speculative conversation and creates an enactment of the imagined world. In exploring the historical foundations of games as their own form of creative expression distinct from story, image, or performance, I have argued that “critical 184 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN play means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life” (2009: 6). In past writing, I outlined approaches such as “unplaying,” where players enact forbidden or secret scenes or play out unexpected scenarios (2009: 33). A Critical Play approach is one in which games are not mere thought experiments but rather actual embodied experiences that not only have the potential for social impact; they are also likely to change us—our perspectives, our knowledge, our biases. Contextualizing Critical Play Across theory and practice, what might people consider as they develop games, study them, play them, and discuss them in relationship to notions of social engagement and responsible design? Further, why is this important work for the humanities? Significant trends emerged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to advance the social responsibility of designers. In the 1990s, my longtime collaborator, Helen Nissenbaum, began publishing with Batya Friedman about values in the design of software systems (Friedman & Nissenbaum 1996). The idea here is that any software system reflects the people and culture from which it is made. As Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt famously reminded us in 1972, “New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers” (47). Critical production therefore must rely on new methods to ensure critical making is happening. For example, it is quite easy to replicate the biases inherent in popular media forms. With other collaborators, Nissenbaum and I picked up the torch to bring values and critical introspection to digital games in 2005, while I was Figure 17.1 Chart of possible sources of values in games, a list intended to inspire possibilities rather than be constricting in nature. Source: From Values at Play in Digital Games (Flanagan and Nissenbaum 2014), used with permission. 185 MARY FLANAGAN developing the book Critical Play (2009). In Values at Play in Digital Games (2014; see Figure 17.1), we urge critics to consider how games produce values as often as they reflect values, and we demonstrate that values emerge across many game elements. Intentional interventions in games can focus on these elements, and the impact of using them can be measured empirically, if one so desires. In effect, our approach takes a values-centric methodology to instrumentalizing the tenets of Critical Play. Verifying the impact of this approach will likely lead designers and humanists alike to social science methods for empirical validation of the lofty ideals to which they aspire. Dunne and Raby meanwhile brought the idea of responsible design to the fore from the practical discipline of architecture (2001). Sengers et al. (2005), Agre (1997), Bardzell and Bardzell (2013), Bardzell et al. (2012), and others continue the discourse on criticality and reflection in human-computer interaction to move beyond the functionality of software to its social roles and responsibilities. The idea behind these critical-technical perspectives is that, by getting beyond the perceived “apolitical” and obvious needs of design (such as usability, reliability, and so on), we might create challenging, reflective systems instead. Designers could, for example, “force a decision onto the user, revealing how limited choices are usually hard-wired into products for us” (Dunne & Raby 2001: 45–6). Design-centric critical projects might take the form of hypothetical, high-tech innovations or even interactive fictional science laboratories that ultimately raise questions about data collection, for example. Or they might craft imaginary objects that provoke critique. These types of projects, by artists such as Natalie Jeremijenko or Critical Art Ensemble, are called “DesignArt” (Leither et al. 2013; see also Associated Press 2008). While these hybrid design-art objects are valuable, they only go so far, and as provocations often stay within the confines of the gallery. For instance, most do not make their way to the mass-produced world for which industrial design, product design, and engineering fields pave the way, and thus they may stay bound within communities where the conversations provoked already exist. They do, however, elevate the conversation about the role of design and perhaps spark systemic change at the level of industrial design. This holds less true thus far for experiments in games, especially digital games, which reach more people but have been less likely to deeply trouble the industry against which they operate, even if they raise theoretical and critical implications for the medium. Ultimately, notions of scale relate to notions of impact, and criticality and empiricism are both essential and underutilized aspects of the creation process, with empirical verification as an ideal to which it is important to aspire. By their nature, games are ripe for criticality, but it remains up to one’s strategies as a designer and player to actualize their critical potential. Recent Examples of Critical Play While there are many useful examples of critical games, I would like to focus here on three that showcase diverse aspects of Critical Play. Such play can utilize the mechanics in a game to convey its message or critique. The questions can be abstract, such as rethinking cooperation, winning, or losing; or they can be more concrete, involved with particular content issues (Flanagan 2009: 10). They could also focus on reshaping societal biases through game mechanics. I chose the three games for this chapter to span a range of media, which may confound traditional media studies as a discipline. The first, a card game, uses a dynamic social mechanic to counteract biases. The second game is a large collaborative event and online public art space using community participation and voice to form a relational aesthetic and prompt change through expression, representation, voice, and authorship. The final game is 186 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN Figure 17.2 Unexpected combinations appear while playing Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game. These combinations disrupt the thinking that perpetuates stereotypes. Source: Courtesy of Resonym.com. a computer game: a single-player experience that investigates border crossing, immigration, and the various systems that govern behavior and the body. Each has its own strategy in approaching issues critically. Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game (2012; see Figure 17.2) is a fun, party card game where players work quickly against other players to be the first to name someone who matches the cards on the table. Sometimes the game offers wildly diverse combinations of adjective and noun, such as “tattooed grandmother” or “kind bully.” The first player to name an accurate match keeps the cards as points and moves on to the next fast-paced round. Developed at the game research laboratory I lead, Tiltfactor, Buffalo serves as a great icebreaker or party game for groups small and large. It uses a randomizing mechanic to create unusual combinations of criteria, which, from a psychological perspective, expand a player’s social categories and undermine stereotypes on conscious and unconscious levels (Kaufman & Flanagan 2015). The game positions players to overcome their own biases and prejudices as they encounter and “break up” easy mental pathways created by stereotypes. This approach corresponds with empirical work done at Harvard via Implicit Association Tests, which measure unconscious biases we might hold about race, proper jobs, language, and so on. As it turns out, countering unconscious biases is quite challenging; teaching people about the injustice of discrimination or asking them to be empathetic toward others is often ineffective. Mahzarin Banaji notes that what works, at least temporarily, is providing “counterstereotypical” images or messages (Banaji & Greenwald 2013: 151). Games are systems of rules leading to experiences that help shape the way we think and rhetorically and psychologically persuade us; games like Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game are in effect micro-solutions that address the psychological factors of social inequity and the microaggressions that permeate culture. Whose criticality is the focus here? The player’s? The designer’s? The observer’s? The scholar’s? The answer is all of the above, but the designer plays a key role in framing a game and setting the stage for both conscious reflection (e.g., engaging in reflection and discussion during play) and a less conscious mindset common during design or play experiences. 187 MARY FLANAGAN Criticality in play can be fostered to bring a game’s content into focus or to highlight or uncover an aspect of the content. Thus a critical attention to both playing and making provides an essential viewpoint or an analytical framework for responsible design. Through many avenues, games can represent anything from concrete incidents to abstract ideas (such as equity and cooperation), and they can do so in a wide variety of forms. Those using Critical Play as an approach might create a platform of rules by which to examine a specific issue—rules that would somehow reflect core elements of the issue itself. As an example, Play Your Place (see Figure 17.3) is a series of ongoing game artworks that use drawing and play to catalyze and translate local, imaginative visions of place into games that not only exemplify community values but also contribute to real world urban planning. Crucially, every element in the game—setting, characters, and challenges—is entirely created by community members. People create their own game level by drawing a place in the town. Then they think about how their “place” could be changed for the better. They devise their own rules, drawing obstacles and rewards and building and sharing game level after level for an epic play session. The game makers also incorporate fantasy elements into their vision of everyday life. The games take the familiar format of Little Big Planet or Donkey Kong; they can be played online, on mobile phones, in schools and homes, as well as at public venues. Players take on challenges, such as obstacles, leaps, drops, prizes, and enemies, as they would in a typical 2-D platform game. Figure 17.3 Play Your Place game engine and event series 2012–14, by Ruth Catlow and Mary Flanagan (LOCALLY). Here, players “Play Southend” (in Essex UK). Source: Courtesy of the artists. 188 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN I created the platform with U.K. artist Ruth Catlow, as LOCALPLAY, to bridge the gap between urban planners and the public. The urban planners we met with at the start of the project noted that the most interesting challenge of public consultation and deliberation about a place’s future is encouraging people to imagine beyond their own wants and needs toward a common good. Play Your Place helps people develop collective visions of place that can then be entered and played by people all over the world. Players create over time, in game instances specific to their location, and the world grows through the addition of endless drawings. Community members have created entirely fictional calamities, but often these calamities correspond with existing social and environmental challenges, such as climate change, regeneration, transit issues, and more. For example, one original game featured monsters emerging from the waters of the Thames Estuary, reflecting the dangers of rising sea levels on coastal towns. The maker used a Critical Play approach to match the social issue to the rules and various game elements they create, including available actions, points of view, player choices, and rewards. Note that, without a somewhat structured practice, making alone will not necessarily bring about criticality, at least not immediately. People have played a lot of games and have a sense of common game tropes. Criticality can be fostered by thinking through the systemic issues the maker faces with the structure of a game, and thinking about what values the rewards and choices represent for the player. Some indie game developers have developed and distributed highly stylized fictional worlds for critical expression. Papers, Please (2013; see Figure 17.4) begins as a rather simple-looking, 8-bit style game. As an officer at an immigration booth, players admit people across the border of the nation of Arstotzka, a fictional former communist state that is intentionally reminiscent of former Soviet bloc nations such as Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. This “former Soviet” feel is set up not only in the game FAQ but also through the game soundtrack, the national logo and art style, and the grimness of the bureaucracy in which players must work. In the game, players spend their time as immigration inspectors to control entry into Arstotzka and its recently recaptured half of the border town, Grestin. Players must sort among travelers, smugglers, spies, terrorists, and those looking for work, either admitting or denying entry to these individuals, who are waiting in a lengthy queue outside the border control booth. Sometimes documentation just does not add up, such as when a photo in a passport does not match a character representation. Players work over a month (31 in-game days) to follow the Ministry of Admission’s Rules and Regulations guide in the admission of people across the border. Tension mounts as the player detects discrepancies and materials given at the border are expired or invalid. Accidentally allowing certain immigrants into the country comes at price. Players will likely make mistakes and receive citations from the Ministry. Their income may be impacted by any mistakes, and their family will suffer economically and spiritually—as the rent goes up, food prices and other costs remain high. The in-game newspaper keeps players up to date on particularly controversial characters and suspicious activities. As the game progresses, players are given notes about human traffickers and others who impact the play progression. Players may also receive large gifts from rebel parties. If players game the system without empathy and play to only benefit themselves and their family, then they might be reported by the neighbors for having too much wealth. Alternatively, their savings may be confiscated, or they may be forced to downgrade the quality of their apartments. A player’s son may become sick and need medication, or a player may run out of funds entirely. Players may end the game under arrest for colluding with the rebel organization. There are several possible outcomes. By forcing the player to conform to the rules of screening processes, and by allowing some power yet limited agency within a larger system of oppression, the game sets the stage for 189 MARY FLANAGAN Figure 17.4 Lucas Pope’s game Papers, Please: A Dystopian Document Thriller (2013) positions players as immigration officers who decide which immigrants can or cannot enter the fictional country of Arstotzka. the player to be cast as an actor in moral and ethical dilemmas. For example, female characters come through, clearly as part of human trafficking campaigns, and ask for help. As the player in a position of power, do you try to help? Your supervisor tells you to detain more people as part of increased security. If you do not, will you jeopardize your family with your decisions? Papers, Please offers an excellent example of roleplay as a character with painfully limited agency; such limitations may encourage the player to adopt a critical stance to the unfairness in which they participate. The effect is to serve as a critical witness and, perhaps on a larger level, encourage empathy toward workers as well as people in the throes of refuge-seeking and migration. In each of these three games, different strategies for criticality emerge. In Buffalo, the game relies less on conscious reflection and more on unconscious psychological associations—a design mechanism that is deliberately less overt than other media intent on societal change. In Play Your Place, the act of creation within a grounded location and context helps engage a dialogue about community through authorship, creativity, and spectacle. While the making itself may not be critical, the reflection and practice about the rules and rewards of a real life issue do lead to deeper thought on social ills. In Papers, Please, a stark environment combined with a system of rules and narrative-driven tasks foster a rich sense of limited agency and inequity. The player is likely to be frustrated at their lack of agency, and their limited point of view may lead them to see the whole phenomenon of migration and border crossing in a new light. These three examples represent distinct, yet equally useful, manifestations of criticality. Critical Play is characterized by a careful examination of social, cultural, political, or even personal themes that function as alternates to popular play spaces. The challenge, then, is to find ways to make compelling, complex play environments using the intricacies of critical thinking to offer novel possibilities in games, and for a wide range of players. As new forms of play emerge, each element of a game may foster a different sense of critical thinking, 190 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN reflection, and dialogue on the part of the player. To get to this point, designers must be highly conscientious of the materials they put into play and mitigate as much as they can against the possibilities of negative associations of players with their games. (For example, some studies find associations between certain games and binge drinking, smoking, unprotected sex, and dangerous driving. For one study, see Hull et al. 2014.) Thus, the goal in theorizing a critical game design paradigm is as much about the creative person’s interest in critiquing the status quo as it is about using play as a phase-changing cultural artifact. A Practical Turn for Media Studies and Digital Humanities Increasingly, media practice and theory are intertwined in a theory-practice dialogue that moves to praxis, and media studies and digital humanities are legitimately focusing on practice-oriented forms of critical production. If, as Latour argues, “technology is society made durable” (1991), then we must carefully examine what we craft and invent. This is a positive direction, for informed making leads to criticality outside of traditional academic texts. But the details count in the creation of new media artifacts. As noted earlier in this chapter, the impact of games and their capacity for criticality are not merely about representation. Games are a peculiar form of art that involve many other elements at play. These elements exceed those of representation and story, and games can set the stage for criticality across any media and within any story. The fact that games are their own art form—and not mere delivery mechanisms or media— is an essential concept to grasp when understanding the role they play in criticality and social impact. Although digital games are the most popular emerging media today, games themselves can be constituted from myriad media and performance-based forms, from immersive 3-D worlds to mobile street games to 8-bit vintage arcade boxes. Games embody hybrid media forms as well, easily synthesizing elements of digital games, board games, and sports, for example. The medium itself is important but not essential to the “gameness” of a game. This makes a game a unique object for media study and one not often understood deeply by those who have researched other media. Critical Play started in the arts, and art has helped indicate a way forward. As demonstrated in Values at Play (2014), we have a repeatable, scalable process involving an essential human activity—play—to create new futures. These futures, however, are real. Unlike discursive approaches to design, Critical Play actualizes and takes responsibility for the outcomes from particular games. For example, while those writing about speculative design might see a game as an avenue for discussion and possibility—a thought experiment—Critical Play assumes that games are themselves universes of actions. As experiences, they are dynamic, and their dynamics impact our thinking, minds, and lived experience. At their best, games are inspired models for social change. Conclusion As we move forward in playing and designing critically, the possibilities offered through other disciplines, traditions, and methods can play a key role in the practical and useful application of these ideas. At Tiltfactor, my team and I invented a new technique called “Embedded Design” to infuse some of the key ideas from social psychology into the game design process (Kaufman et al. 2015). For example, it is strategic to address psychological challenges inherent 191 MARY FLANAGAN in social inequity, such as implicit biases that can limit certain groups from excelling. The psychology literature shows us that repeated exposure to stereotypes or existing prejudicial attitudes in both broader culture and media can significantly curtail even the most wellintentioned social impact design projects. A truly hybrid approach between art and science lies in the future of playing critically, as does real impact through changed psychologies and the systems such changed minds produce. The techniques of social science provide both concepts and measurement tools for validation that, if used well, can benefit this hybrid approach. “Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can, however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change” (Bandura 1977: 213). In psychological terms, there are consequences in every game that we are only beginning to understand. The next wave of Critical Play would indicate that a deeper knowledge of social science must infuse the art of play to ameliorate, retrain, or reinvent how we approach playful engagement. Indeed, the key challenge in any critical design space is the question of impact. The arts already serve as provocative sites for criticality, and have done so for centuries. This is valuable, and criticality needs to evolve with highly interactive art forms that are revisited on a daily basis as sites for community and lived realities. Those engaged with praxis must also confront the task to ground criticism in practical objects and systems that can be deeply experienced and are transformative in nature—phenomena that move idealistic and introspective conversations to collective, imagined realities. Games are art forms that can provide such a transitional space. We know, too, that sheer amounts of capital sent to rectify social injustices are not the solution to societal crises: “If money could have changed the world, money would have changed the world,” claims prosocial entrepreneur Sharad Vivek Sagar (2014). Media and designed objects, processes, and strategies have a much greater potential to improve society than capital alone. Yet, while there is a growing community creating “games for change,” we are only beginning to understand their impact. Sherry Turkle has noted that, “[t]echnology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that first of all, we have to figure out what they are” (2010). The values of the designers and artists making games need to emerge for the next phase of Critical Play. However, many questions remain that we shall have to pursue. For instance, does Critical Play have to stay at the margins of mainstream media, or will it successfully enter a center arena? Is scale—for example, a high number of players or monumental commercial success—a logical and necessary next step for Critical Play as a practice? Will the increasing number of independently created games help create a diverse world of possibility in games and also help their positive potential flourish? From this chapter, I hope readers get the sense that all games change us: it is just a question of understanding how and why, and taking responsibility so that change can be beneficial. Games are a rehearsal space of imagined actions and their consequences. They are themselves conversations. But they are also sites for actual decisions, actions, and feedback systems that reinforce or change biases, empathy, and more. They provide us with models for problem solving and, as I have pointed out, can limit or expand the ways we frame conflict, collaboration, resources, and competition (Flanagan 2014). Those interested in humanistic thought and the speculative nature of media do well to play critically. Games are the artwork of agency, of action, and of ritual. They are formal and relational, but mirror—and indeed may cause—progress and change. They are critical operations where transformation is triggered, new relationships are formed, and the systems of everyday life meet the randomness of the universe. 192 CRITICAL PLAY AND RESPONSIBLE DESIGN Further Reading Boal, A. (1993) Theatre of the Oppressed, New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group. Flanagan, M. (2009) Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Friedman, B. and H. Nissenbaum (1996) “Bias in Computer Systems,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems 14(3), 330–47. Latour, B. (1991) “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in J. Law (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London: Routledge, pp. 103–32. Weber, R. N. (1997) “Manufacturing Gender in Commercial and Military Cockpit Design,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 22(2), 235–53. References Agre, P. E. (1997) Computation and Human Experience, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Associated Press (2008) “Charge Dropped against Artist in Terror Case,” The New York Times, 22 April, retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/nyregion/22bioart.html?_r=0. Ayoub, P. M. and J. Garretson (2015) “Getting the Message Out: Media Context and Global Changes in Attitudes toward Homosexuality,” in Proceedings of the Western Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, 3 April. Banaji, M. and A. Greenwald (2013) Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, New York, NY: Delacourt. Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bardzell, J. and S. Bardzell (2013) “What Is ‘Critical’ about Critical Design?” in Proceedings of CHI 2013, New York, NY: ACM. Bardzell, S., J. Bardzell, J. Forlizzi, J. Zimmerman, and J. Antanitis (2012) “Critical Design and Critical Theory: The Challenge of Designing for Provocation,” in DIS ‘12 Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, New York, NY, pp. 288–97. Catlow, R. and M. Flanagan (LOCALPLAY) (2013–15) Play Your Place, retrieved from www.playyourplace.co.uk. Craig, S. L., L. McInroy, L. T. McCready, and R. Alaggia (2015) “Media: A Catalyst for Resilience in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth,” Journal of LGBT Youth 12(3), 254–75. Dunne, A. (2008) Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dunne, A. and F. Raby (2001) Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Basel, CH: Birkhauser Verlag. ESA (2014) Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, retrieved from www.theesa.com/wp-content/ uploads/2014/10/ESA_EF_2014.pdf. Flanagan, M. (2009) Critical Play: Radical Game Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Flanagan, M. (2014) “Creative Solutions to Crisis: Through Play,” Huffington Post, 16 October, retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-flanagan/crisis-solutions-found-in_b_5992492.html. Flanagan, M. and H. Nissenbaum (2014) Values at Play in Digital Games, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Friedman, B. and H. Nissenbaum (1996) “Bias in Computer Systems,” ACM Transactions on Information Systems 14(3), 330–47. Hull, J. G., T. J. Brunelle, A. T. Prescott, and J. D. Sargent (2014) “A Longitudinal Study of Risk-glorifying Video Games and Behavioral Deviance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 107(2), 300–25. International Game Developers Association (IGDA) (2014) “Developer Satisfaction Survey 2014: Summary Report,” retrieved from c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.igda.org/resource/collection/9215B88F-2AA3–4471-B44D-B5D58FF2 5DC7/IGDA_DSS_2014-Summary_Report.pdf. Kaufman, G. and M. Flanagan (2015) “A Psychologically ‘Embedded’ Approach to Designing Games for Prosocial Causes,” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, Special Issue on Videogames, 9(3), retrieved from cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2015091601. Kaufman, G., M. Flanagan, and M. Seidman (2015) “Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change: An ‘Embedded Design’ Model,” in Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference, Luneburg, Germany. King Digital Entertainment (2014) F-1 form. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 18 February, retrieved from www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1580732/000119312514056089/d564433df1.htm. Latour, B. (1991) “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in J. Law (ed.) A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, London: Routledge 38, pp. 103–32. Leither, M., G. Innella, and F. Yauner (2013) “Different Perceptions of the Design Process in the Context of DesignArt,” Design Studies 34(4), 494–513. 193 MARY FLANAGAN Little, L. (2012) “Joe Biden Says ‘Will and Grace’ Helped Change Public Opinion on Gay Rights,” Wall Street Journal, 7 May, retrieved from blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/05/07/joe-biden-says-will-and-grace-helped-changepublic-opinion-on-gay-rights/. McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, New York: Penguin. McLaughlin, M. (2013) “New GTA V Release Tipped to Rake in £1bn in Sales,” The Scotsman, 8 September, retrieved from www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/technology/new-gta-v-release-tipped-to-rake-in-1bn-in-sales-1– 3081943. McLuhan, M. and B. Nevitt (1972) Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Mintel (2014) Mintel Gamers and Gaming US 2014, retrieved from mintel.com. Nissenbaum, H. (1998) “Values in the Design of Computer Systems,” Computers in Society 28(1), 38–39. Pope, L. (2013) Papers, Please, retrieved from papersplea.se. Sagar, S. V. (2014) Sagar quoted on Vine.com and in a tweet by @TheIncitement, 15 November, retrieved from twitter.com/theincitement/status/533808681562152960. Sengers, P., K. Boehner, S. David, and J. Kaye (2005) “Reflective Design,” in Proceedings of the 4th Decennial Conference on Critical Computing: Between Sense and Sensibility, New York: ACM, pp. 49–58. Think Gaming (2015) “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood,” Think Gaming, retrieved from thinkgaming.com/app-salesdata/8141/kim-kardashian-hollywood/. Turkle, S. (2010) “Interview: Sherry Turkle,” Frontline digital_nation, 2 February, retrieved from www.pbs.org/ wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/interviews/turkle.html. 194 13 leisure suit larry LGbtQ Representation Adrien n e Shaw Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Abstract: Much of popular and critical attention to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) representation in video games has focused on either samesex romance options or explicitly LGBTQ major game characters, but little has been written about more minor but equally important forms of representation. In this chapter, Adrienne Shaw analyzes a game series that is at its core about heterosexual masculinity, Leisure Suit Larry, to explore how LGBTQ representation permeates texts even when they are “not about that.” Compared to other media, little academic attention has been paid to the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) content in digital games. To correct for this, my collaborators and I have been building a digital archive documenting all known LGBTQ content in digital games created since the 1980s.1 In addition to allowing us to look at LGBTQ representation in games over time, the archive demonstrates the myriad ways LGBTQ people and issues are integrated into this medium. In this chapter, I use the game series Leisure Suit Larry (Sierra On-Line/Vivendi, 1987–2009) as an example for analyzing LGBTQ representation in digital games. Although the series is about a heterosexual man attempting to perform a version of white hegemonic masculinity, the game is rife with LGBTQ characters, content, and gameplay sequences. Although many of these examples are used in a homophobic or transphobic manner, the game offers a useful example for thinking about how games can include LGBTQ content holistically and not simply via same-sex romance options. Leisure Suit Larry (LSL) is a comedic, adult video game series first released in 1987 and created by Al Lowe for Sierra On-Line. The company invested little in the original game. It was wholly written and programmed by Lowe, and the art 110 How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Leisure Suit Larry 111 was done by a single artist, Mark Crowe. Lowe was also asked to forego any upfront payment in exchange for a generous cut of the royalties on each game sold.2 Although some distributors refused to sell or advertise it, blogger Jimmy Maher writes that “by the summer of 1988, the game’s one-year anniversary, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards had become the biggest game Sierra had ever released that wasn’t a King’s Quest.”3 It has enjoyed continued cult popularity ever since. Prior to a 2004 reboot of the franchise, LSL was a point-and-click adventure game series where players guided Larry Laffer, a middle-aged virgin (in the first game), through a series of interactions with women he was trying to seduce. The rebooted series from publisher Vivendi, created without Lowe and criticized by him, features Larry’s nephew Larry Lovage.4 The newer games have threedimensional (3D) graphics and more movement challenges than logic puzzles. LSL: Magna Cum Laude (High Voltage Software, 2004), for example, requires players to navigate a smiling sperm around obstacles in a scrolling bar across the bottom of the screen. Successful navigation makes Larry more or less successful in his endeavors to seduce women. Not counting remakes and spin-off games, there are eight games in the main LSL series. LSL is impressive for many “firsts” in Sierra’s game development process, including beta-testing and an ability to respond to an impressive array of player inputs.5 But LSL was also part of a long trend of sex-focused games. According to Maher, following Sierra’s 1981 Softporn Adventure there was a veritable explosion of sex-themed games.6 Conservative backlash, computer companies’ hesitancy to have their products associated with adult-themed software, and software distributors’ refusal to sell such software later made companies hesitant to invest in pornographic games. Following the mid-1980s game industry bust, however, publishers turned to sex games again to appeal to a largely young male computer enthusiast market. Leather Goddesses of Phobos from Infocom in 1986 was the first of the new wave of sex games and helped set the stage for LSL in 1987. Following its success, game developer Ken Williams at Sierra tasked Al Lowe with updating Softporn Adventure and making it funny.7 There is little academic research on LSL, although it is used as a passing reference in many pieces about sex and sexuality in games, and none address its LGBTQ content.8 LGBTQ characters’ gender and sexuality in the series are often conveyed via stereotypical signifiers (e.g., men acting effeminately or women acting masculine). This should not be read as bad in and of itself because as film scholar Richard Dyer discusses, sexuality is difficult to represent outside of those performative codes.9 What are often critiqued as negative stereotypes are performances of identity that are a part of some LGBTQ peoples’ lives (i.e., there are gay men who perform effeminately; there are women who identify as butch). How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. 112 A dri e n n e Shaw Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Figure 13.1 Shablee in Leisure Suit Larry 6 (1993). Dismissing them as unrealistic or bad dismisses people who are often marginalized within LGBTQ communities. Dyer argues that when we critique representations of homosexuality, rather than focus on questions of accuracy, we should focus on the purpose of using those stereotypes in the text. Are stereotypes used to demean and make other, or are they used as performative clues to signal a character’s sexuality? How does LSL use LGBTQ characters? Across six of the eight total LSL games, there are nine main non-player characters (NPCs) and several background LGBTQ characters. In LSL 3 (1989), for example, Larry’s wife Kalalau has left him for Bobbi, “an Amazonian, Harley-riding, former-cannibal, lesbian, slot-machine repairwoman.” The game ends with Larry and a woman named Patti being captured by a tribe of lesbian cannibals. LSL 6 (1993) has Gary, the gay towel-stand attendant; Shablee, “a dark-skinned makeup artist” who Larry discovers later is a transgender woman (see figure 13.1); and Cavaricchi, an aerobics instructor that on some sites fans have described as either bisexual or lesbian.10 In the reboot of the series Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (High Voltage Software, 2004), Larry Lovage seduces a fellow college student named Ione, who is interested in feminist poetry. Later in the game, she has come out as a lesbian and is now dating her bisexual roommate, Luba. During one sequence of the game Larry runs into Ione at the gay bar Spartacus. Finally, Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust (Team17, 2009) includes a reportedly bisexual pornographic movie How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Leisure Suit Larry 113 star, Damone LaCoque. In most of these cases, these characters are part of the overarching humor for why Larry fails so dramatically in his search for sex and love. He either goes after women who are uninterested in him or is pursued by people he is uninterested in. It is interesting that even as the games’ representations of gender and sexuality are problematic, they do show a wide variety of types of LGBTQ people. Each character draws on a different trope of LGBTQ representation, and the early games even have queer people of color. Bobbi is a classic “dykes on bikes” type of lesbian character and, although she does not appear in the game, is described as a native of the same fictional approximation of a Pacific Island Larry’s wife Kalalau is from. Although the couple might mimic a tradition of showing queer women in butch–femme relationships, the representation of two Pacific Islander women together is rare in any medium. Shablee is used as the butt of a transphobic joke, but she is, as far as we know, the first transgender woman of color to appear in a game. She falls into the trope of an overly flirtatious and sexualized transwoman of color, one who uses her sex appeal to influence Larry to get things for her. Yet, until the final moment of their date, she is represented as a desirable woman who knows what she wants. The post-2004 reboot games are actually more problematic in many ways, and all of the LGBTQ characters appear to be white, including all the patrons of Spartacus. Marking Damone as bisexual involves a problematic conflating of sex work with sexual identity. Ione is clearly meant as a parody of the “typical college feminist” who inevitably “becomes” a lesbian and cuts off all her hair, while Luba is represented as an open-to-anyone (when drunk) bisexual. Although the entire series is about sexual humor, nonheterosexual and noncisgender characters occupy a particularly marginalized space in that humor. The jokes being told or shown, imply a player who has a similar identity to Larry (i.e., a heterosexual, cisgendered male). Certainly, actual fans of the game run the gamut of sexual and gender identities, but LGBTQ characters in this game are used in a marginalizing fashion. Returning to Dyer, the stereotypes deployed in their representation are meant to reinforce their marginalization.11 Moreover, in the earlier games these characters’ sexual identities are usually something to be discovered rather than an outward marker of their difference to be made fun of by Larry. This allows for a bit more opportunity of LGBTQ players themselves to be in on, and not just part of, the joke. LGBTQ content also includes passing references found in the background or ambiance of the games. For example, in the first LSL game (1987) there are comedians the player can watch perform. Several of the jokes told are homophobic or are at least derogatory against LGBTQ people and women generally. In Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work (Sierra OnLine, 1991) there is an advertisement in the New York airport that reads “Gay? How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. 114 A dri e n n e Shaw Lesbian? Divorced? Single? Widowed? Depressed? Sorry, but the Blecchnaven Center offers weekly seminars for happy straight couples only.” It is a random passing reference, which is seemingly unnecessary and inconsequential, but that makes its inclusion all the more purposeful. Every choice made in game design is intentional, and so we must ask, “What was the purpose of including such an unnecessary slight to homosexuals via a background ad?” Clearly it was meant for humor, as were the passing references to lesbian cannibals in LSL 3, but the humor was clearly at the expense of, not for, LGBTQ people. Interestingly, however, when the original game was released and distributors were refusing to openly display it and, in some cases, carry the game, Maher reports that “Ken Williams himself got nervous enough that he ordered all of the jokes about ‘gay life’ to be removed from future versions.”12 What drove this decision is unclear, however. Perhaps it came from a concern that references to homosexuality were crossing a line in a game that was already offending mainstream sensibilities. Alternatively, perhaps in the late 1980s and the rise of queer activism following the AIDS crisis, the company didn’t want to be known as the software firm that traded in homophobic jokes. Turning to the ludic (or play) and narrative aspects of the game, this marginalization of LGBTQ content is reinforced. The goal of the game is helping Larry successfully perform his role as a heterosexual, white, cisgendered male by having sex with various women.13 In a game where heterosexual masculinity is the goal, however, one logical way to impede that goal and help make sexuality and gender funny is through LGBTQ characters and themes. At the end of LSL 2 (1988), for example, Larry marries Kalalau. To continue the series, at least without dramatically rethinking what the goal of each game would be, Larry had to become single again. Certainly his wife could have left him for another man, but given how regularly homosexuality is used for humor in the series, a lesbian relationship provided a narrative twist to transition into a third game. The ludic–narrative intersections in later games are more negatively framed. In LSL 6 for example, Gary flirts with Larry throughout the game, but if Larry flirts back the game ends with an image of Larry and Gary holding hands and walking off into the sunset and the following text: “What an ignominious end to a sterling career as the ultimate swinging single!” In a game where the player is tasked with helping Larry get the ladies, his finding love with another man is apparently shameful. The mild homophobia of this “gay game over,” however, is nothing compared to the explicit transphobia of Larry’s reaction to Shablee. Larry tries to seduce her by finding a dress she’s been searching for. In thanks she invites him to the beach for a midnight swim. Once they start to have sex Larry discovers she has a penis and begins to retch and spit on his hands and knees near the ocean. The screen goes dark, but the audio implies Shablee rapes Larry. The next scene shows Larry in a bathroom gargling furiously with mouthwash. He then proceeds How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Leisure Suit Larry 115 to go back to the beach, however, and happily picks up the champagne Shablee left on the beach, proclaiming with a smile: “I earned this!” indicating the sex was not as traumatic as one might expect. The transphobic narrative is oppressive enough, but this scene also subtly reinforces the assumption that men (at least “real men”) cannot be raped. Rape is punchline because there is no trauma to deal with after the fact. In LSL: Magna Cum Laude, there are a great many more actions Larry can engage in tied to LGBTQ themes. Intending to foreshadow her sexual identity reveal later in the game, when Ione and Larry finally have sex she asks him to use a strap-on dildo instead of his penis. Later in the game, after meeting them in Spartacus, a gay bar, Larry eventually proclaims that he is gay and walks Ione and Luba back to their room to watch them have sex. This interaction results in the player getting a double-ended purple dildo as a trophy. In Spartacus there are also several different mini-games for Larry to play. In one a man named Julius wants the player to take pictures of the scantily clad, muscular Helmut (more points for crotch shots), although Larry can also sell these pictures to other bar patrons. He can also, after telling Ione he is gay, try to impress the gay men at the club by dancing with them via a rhythm mini-game. Interestingly, although graphically the games became richer as time progressed, the relative agency of the player in exploring actions and reactions was reduced. In the early games much of pleasure is derived from typing in various words and seeing how the game responds (including seeing which nonnormative responses the designer accounted for). In LSL 3, Larry accidentally ends up in a woman’s burlesque costume after having sex with her between acts. The player can go through a variety of inputs before realizing that “dance” is the only one that allows Larry to successfully move on (i.e., embracing gender nonconformity is the answer to the puzzle). In later games, however, players are asked to navigate kinesthetic challenges rather than solve riddles. The playful exploration of a variety of sexual or gender expressions in the earlier games is reduced to generally one-liners or sight gags in the later games. These games span three decades, and although some specific aspects of the types of LGBTQ representation changed, the core messages that male homosexuality is undesirable, female homosexuality is only important to the extent that it is titillating to men, gender nonconformity is a mark of deviance, and transgender people are a joke are consistent. This challenges easy assumptions about the inclusion of marginalized groups in media being a story of linear and evolutionary progress. The tongue-and-cheek edge of the series’ humor certainly makes as much fun of Larry as it does the various NPCs I have described, but in the end the player is meant to be on Larry’s side. Heterosexual masculinity is joked about in the games, but it is not The Joke. How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. 116 A dri e n n e Shaw Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. The developers’ politics are clearly written into these games. In one interview Lowe claims the games were feminist because the women always get the upper hand and were smarter than Larry.14 This demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of feminist politics. As Maher describes, the game “is at heart an exercise in bullying, looking down on safe targets from a position of privilege and letting fly.”15 Even Lowe’s claims for why the game is appealing support Maher’s critique. Lowe asserts, “The guys like him because even they aren’t as dorky as Larry. It’s someone they can feel superior to, no matter how bad off they are. And I think the reason women like the game . . . because they’ve all dated a jerk like that. And I think the games were very feminist, pro-female.”16 The end of LSL 2 belies Lowe’s claim that the game is feminist, however. The final text screens of the game read, “As we leave our hero. . . . we ask ourselves the burning question. . . . Is women’s lib really dead? Is there still a feminist movement? . . . or will Al Lowe have to write yet another of these Silly Sin-phonies?” According to Lowe, the “Boss” against which LSL is fighting, on a meta-level, is feminism. Every joke about folks whose very existence challenges normative heterosexual white masculinity are always more than jokes; they are attacks. Although the series attempts to use humor to undercut its own oppressive messages, it can never really escape the politics of its design. The takeaway, however, need not simply be “Leisure Suit Larry” is oppressive. Throughout the series LGBTQ content is actually integral to the narrative. Looking past its sophomoric humor, designers operating under a different framework and politics could gain some useful insights from LSL for making a lighthearted game that represents a diversity of LGBTQ people. The act of tracing LGBTQ representation in games, in any medium, is not to simply document what has been. Rather, it is a starting point in figuring out why things are the way they are and then imagining how we can make things differently. Notes 1 Adrienne Shaw, LGBTQ Game Archive, accessed August 18, 2016, www.lgbtqgamearchive. com. 2 Jimmy Maher, “Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards,” The Digital Antiquarian, August 15, 2015, accessed September 12, 2016, www.filfre.net. 3 Maher, “Leisure Suit Larry.” 4 Brenda Brathwaite, Sex in Video Games (Middletown, DE: Brenda Brathwaite, 2013); and Chris Kohler, “20 Years, Still Middle-Age: Two Decades of Leisure Suit Larry,” 1up.com, August 8, 2007, accessed September 12, 2016, www.1up.com. 5 Maher, “Leisure Suit Larry”; and Matt Barton, “Matt Chat 50 Part 1: Leisure Suit Larry Featuring Al Lowe,” YouTube video, 10:02, published February 21, 2010, accessed September 12, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PGGEFQdZuw. How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. Leisure Suit Larry 117 6 Jimmy Maher, “Leather Goddesses of Phobos (or, Sex Comes to the Micros- Again),” The Digital Antiquarian, March 5, 2015, accessed September 12, 2016, www.filfre.net; and Al Lowe, “What Is Softporn?” Al Lowe’s Humor Site, n.d., accessed August 18, 2016, www.allowe.com. 7 Maher, “Leisure Suit Larry.” 8 Sue Ellen-Case, “The Hot Rod Bodies of Cybersex,” in Feminist Theory and the Body, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), 141. 9 Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping,” in The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay men in Media, Society, and Politics, ed. Larry P. Gross and James D. Woods (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 297–301. 10 “Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!” Wikipedia, n.d., accessed September 12, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org. 11 Dyer, “Stereotyping.” 12 Maher, “Leisure Suit Larry.” 13 In the interest of space I do not go into the long histories of how different groups of men of color are represented as overly sexual or desexualized but will mention in brief that it would be hard to imagine a US-produced game about a black man or Asian man in Larry’s role with whom the player is meant to identify. 14 Barton, “Matt Chat 50 Part 1: Leisure Suit Larry.” 15 Maher, “Leisure Suit Larry.” 16 Barton, “Matt Chat 50 Part 1: Leisure Suit Larry.” Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Further Reading Benshoff, Henry M., and Sean Griffin. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Consalvo, Mia. “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 171–194. New York: Routledge, 2003. Greer, Stephen. “Playing Queer: Affordances for Sexuality in Fable and Dragon Age.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 5 (2013): 3–21. Shaw, Adrienne. “Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games.” Games and Culture 4 (2009): 228–253. How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:03. 19 age of empires Postcolonialism S ouvi k M u kherjee Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Abstract: Despite early depictions of colonization in video games, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization or Microsoft’s Age of Empires, there has been little game studies scholarship on postcolonial perspectives. Viewing the presentation of history and the narratives of the colonized Other, as well as the processes of control and expansion of empire through an analysis of Age of Empires, Souvik Mukherjee offers a much-needed postcolonial intervention in the ways in which imperialism and colonialism are presented in video games. From early real-time strategy games, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization (MicroProse, 1994) and Ensemble Studio’s Age of Empires (1997), to their present-day sequels, gamers the world over have controlled empires, conquered lands, colonized peoples, and even changed history. Often, the countries they conquered and the people they colonized are their own, and there can be an underlying unease in such tacit participation of power, even in the virtual world. Recent discussions on diversity in video games have opened up ways to reassess the portrayals and politics of colonialism and the stereotypes of the colonized Other. This chapter analyses the roots of such portrayals taking the example of the early PC game, Age of Empires and following the trajectory of empire-building real-time strategy (RTS) games into the present moment. In doing so, this chapter engages with key ideas in postcolonialism that problematize such portrayals, and it prompts a rethinking of how digital media responds to questions of colonialism. Age of Empires (AoE), developed by the three-member Dallas-based company Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft, was a major success when it was released in 1997—one that has spawned many sequels. The developers aimed at improving the RTS genre by combining “the historic and strategic elements of 157 How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. 158 S ou v i k M u k h e rj e e Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Figure 19.1 Building the Hittite empire in Age of Empires. Civilization with the real-time decision making and animations of Warcraft and Command & Conquer.”1 As a reviewer comments, despite the criticisms of the game’s artificial intelligence, one major point where the game scored well was its representation of history: “the single most compelling aspect of this game is its feel, its atmosphere . . . instead of science fiction, or fantasy, the game draws on ancient history for its inspiration.”2 It is this lauded historical representation, however, that needs reexamining. The game’s title quite clearly identifies empire as its key interest. The closest parallel to the title in history books is Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914, where the eminent Marxist historian traces the development of capital in what he calls the “long nineteenth century.”3 The last book in a trilogy, Age of Empire depicts a comparatively stable period albeit with internal contradictions and conflicts, and—of course—contact with multiple non-Western cultures under Western colonial rule. Unlike Hobsbawm’s Marxist notion of the progression of capitalism, the Age of Empires video games, however, see almost all of human history as the history of imperialism. Beginning with the Hittites and the Babylonians in the ancient past and ending with the British and other Western empires How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. Age of Empires 159 in the nineteenth century, these games make imperial rule the norm and glorify the logic of empire (see figure 19.1). History, in its entirety, is written (and played) from the perspective of the imperial conquerors. Even when one gets to play (in multiplayer games or user mods) as the colonized and conquered peoples, the games still privilege the imperialist logic of conquest, control, and expansion. In this case, the sides may have been switched, but the logic of imperialism prevails. This underlying logic of imperialism embeds a grim reality of race, class, and economic disadvantage for the colonized. As the postcolonial thinker Franz Fanon outlines, Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. [t]his world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.4 In reassessing Age of Empires two decades after its initial release, one wonders why the developers chose to avoid critiques of imperialism in their design. Such critiques have been voiced for decades, during the freedom struggles of many Asian and African countries fighting for independence from their colonizers and in the years afterward as newly independent countries. Postcolonialism is “resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity of the many different cultural experiences it implicates [and] it addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of colonial contact.”5 Post does not simply mean “after” colonialism but comprises a range of issues connected to the master discourses of the imperial West and the responses to them by Others. Some of the key problems it addresses besides the exploitation of resources in the colonies are the questions of how spatiality, identity, and even cultural history are affected by colonialism. Before proceeding, a quick caveat is in order. As postcolonial literature scholar Ania Loomba rightly points out, European colonialism from the fifteenth century onward was a very different phenomenon from earlier imperial expansion (such as the empires of Rome or Egypt). Loomba notes that “[m]odern colonialism did more than extract tribute, goods, and wealth from the countries that it conquered—it restructured the economies of the latter, drawing them into a complex relationship with their own, so that there was a flow of human and natural resources between colonized and colonial countries.”6 The Age of Empires series, it is important to note, does not make such a distinction. Although the gameplay How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. 160 S ou vi k M u k h e rj e e changes somewhat in Age of Empires III (Ensemble Studios, 2005), which includes bonuses based on the player’s experience and removes the original game’s ability to convert opponent units, the games follow a similar pattern and even have the same victory conditions (usually military conquest, regicide, capturing relics or ruins, and building a “wonder” or culture-specific significant building). These games, arguably, represent a notion of empire that envisages the total displacement of the opponent (or “the Other” in postcolonial terms). Any trade that happens between the player and other nations is usually to the advantage of the player (unless the other nations are allies). These and other features of the game design express an intriguing notion of colonialism that is examined in the following. The “settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of the occupied lands”7 are the basic characteristics of colonialism, which is a specific form of imperialism. The AoE games usually conform to all of these—the logic of imperialism that they are based on, mirrors the workings of colonialism. In the case of AoE, the “empires” it represents from ancient history—such as Babylon, Greece, and ancient Japan— are each very different from the colonial systems of nineteenth-century Europe. The game, however, makes all of them work by the same colonialist logic. Indeed, the units for all the civilizations also look very similar on the whole. Some of the most notable differences are reserved for the how the game marks key socioeconomic characteristic of each ancient civilization. For example, unlike the Egyptian faction, the Greeks do not possess chariots, and their priests cannot convert buildings. Players select civilizations based on their specific tactical benefits. Victory is usually achieved in the AoE games with the overthrow of the opponent governments and/or the destruction of their entire populace. The adversaries in these games are the “Other” of postcolonialism. Edward Said, theorizing his notion of Orientalism, argues that the Orient is a construction of European nations, and as such, the Other is needed to imagine their own selves. In AoE, these questions come to light when the player is presented with what appears to be a simulation of the colonial system. Addressing this issue in Age of Empires II (Ensemble Studios, 1999), which is set in the medieval period, Angela Cox comments that the game is involved in the “othering of time.”8 The game creates an ideal imagined medieval period just as it creates similarly idealized constructions of cultures. On its face, these imaginings comprise token elements from the various civilizations and cultures that the game represents. However, a closer look reveals something different. Cox rightly observes that “the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean buildings use the same sequence of visual development, erasing distinctions between these East Asian cultures, as do the buildings for the Britons and the Celts—both of which take a strikingly English appearance.”9 This is also true in the first AoE game, where the Greeks and the Babylonians share the same How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Age of Empires 161 military units: the axmen look almost Neolithic, and the horsemen are richly armored, irrespective of their diverse history of martial cultures. The construction of diverse cultures and ethnicities using set stereotypes is problematic for the way this practice erases and elides cultural difference. In a way, the game reproduces through play the relation between the player and the opponents as that between the empire and its Other. When they are viewed together as the Oriental Other, the distinctions between the East Asian cultures are easy to erase. This is also evident in the later games, where Brian Reynolds, who heads Big Huge Games, comments about AoE III that “one other fun detail . . . you may be aware that for religious reasons Indians do not consume cows and so forth, and so indeed they do not in the game.”10 In this comment, he seems unaware that although the Hindus do not eat beef, there are many other religious communities in India that do (the Mughal rulers who were Muslim would be one such example), and there is already an oversimplification going on here. Even with the best intentions of accurate cultural portrayal, these games end up mired in Western stereotypes about the Orient. No wonder then that when commenting on the depiction of the Middle East in AoE II, game studies scholar Vit Šisler compares it to “orientalist discourses of European novels and nineteenth century paintings.”11 One key element of the colonial enterprise is that the Other needs to be known: knowledge enables control. The game map is, therefore, extremely important in AoE as is the “fog of war,” the dark space that signifies the unexplored area and that only becomes visible once the player’s units pass through it. The sooner the player explores the dark areas of the map to reveal what is hidden, the better are the chances of finding resources such as gold, stone, wood, and food. Sending scouts is the usual method of exploring uncharted territory. Exploring through the fog of war also makes the players aware of the buildings of enemy civilizations and finding the Other is both literally and metaphorically a journey where darkness is brought under control. This is very similar to the colonial stress on mapping and surveying, which gave the world some of the most rigorous cartographic surveys such as the Great Trigonometric Survey that calculated the height of Mount Everest. In the colonial system, mapping allows the colonizer to surveil territory, with visibility implying control. In the AoE games one can increase visibility as well as control access to areas by building watchtowers. Watchtowers can be upgraded to increase their defensive capabilities and their line of sight. The player’s ability to view uncharted sections of the map implies the power to control: how something is seen is crucial in knowledge creation and the consequent empowerment of those who create and possess such knowledge. The upgrades in technology are an important part of AoE, as well as with the civilizations advancing from the Tool Age, to the Bronze Age, and then to the Iron Age. Different units can be upgraded for a price of wood, stone, food, and How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. 162 S ou vi k M u k h e rj e e gold—the aforementioned resources. The technology trees available with the game (often as a glossy folding brochure) seem to privilege the notion of technological determinism—better technology—ensures a more successful nation. The cultural aspects of a civilization are not even acknowledged. The closest that the designers come to culture is the building of the national “wonder.” The wonder is not so much a cultural artifact as it is a pathway to a victory condition: “if it is constructed and stands for two thousand years, the player will automatically win the game.”12 In the game, most technological research is aimed at obtaining military upgrades—reinforcing the notion that success is achieved by colonizing other nations and occupying more territory, often by military means. As the player meets resistance during the attempt to capture and colonize land, there is another game mechanic that can be used against the adversary: conversion. The priests in the player’s civilization can convert soldiers and, sometimes, even buildings. Conversion makes it possible for the empire to assimilate people outside its own group. The foreign and the resistant populations can be controlled by turning them into soldiers of the empire. This has resonances, on many levels, with how the Other is conceived as a problem in colonial regimes and then subjected to a “conversion” of sorts. At the same time, attempts are made to control the Other by making it more like the colonizer. In 1835, British historian Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay published a “Minute Upon Indian Education” that decreed that the Indian population needed to be educated following a Western model based on the premise “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”13 The Minute influenced the English Education Act passed by the British-controlled Council of India in 1835, which reallocated funds away from education in Indian languages and toward Western curriculum and English-language instruction. The conversion of the Other to the more acceptable European-educated subject was about to begin. In the stereotypical schema of AoE, such a conversion is depicted as immediate and totalizing. Of course, the act of the priest waving his arms and the opponent unit changing its color to that of the player’s is akin to a total brainwashing, in the way it is often depicted in dystopian science fiction. The conversion could also be a metaphor for slavery—a key component of the colonial process that is often elided in empire-building games. The easy acceptance of assumptions that make empire look inevitable is quite characteristic of AoE. Bruce Shelley, designer of the AoE games, states that “one of the key element in any Age of Empires game is verisimilitude—the idea that while a game doesn’t have to be completely historically accurate, it should contain enough accurate elements that one gets the flavor of the period.”14 Esther MacCallumStewart and Justin Parsler contend that “history games cannot exist in a bubble, and need to be accountable for the version of history they present, as well as changing How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. Age of Empires 163 attitudes to historical theory and representation in the outside world.”15 Shelley’s argument that AoE aims to provide a “flavor” of history raises questions as to what exactly that flavor is. As is obvious from the title, AoE posits the empire as the key system of governance and engine for social transformation, one that privileges colonial stereotypes in its construction of strategic gameplay. Of course, it is possible to tell the story in another way; games have multiple endings, after all. As a counterfactual historical exploration, it is possible to see historical events reversed and a different victor emerge as conqueror in this rendering of our world. This alternative history, however, would be the product of the same underlying logic of empire. As MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler note, one should exercise caution when using these games as teaching tools.16 Beyond this, it is also necessary that players view the limitations of such games in relation to larger discussions in world history. Whether it professes to recount history or even just a “flavor” of it, AoE views history as stories of imperial greatness, something that current trends in historiography call into question. The game is unaware of debates in postcolonialism that have been popular in humanities discourses for more than half a century. Twenty years after its release, AoE continues to be popular among the historical RTS games; nevertheless, rereading (and replaying) it through a postcolonial lens provides a fresh perspective on both how the game represents history and how empire itself is constructed as a game to be played and won. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Notes 1 Jeff Sengstack, “Microsoft Takes a Stab at the Golden Age of Wargaming,” GameSpot, March 1, 2004, www.gamespot.com. 2 Old PC Gaming, “Age of Empires (1997)—PC Review,” Old PC Gaming, July 31, 1994, www.oldpcgaming.net. 3 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, repr. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989). 4 Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Homi Bhabha (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1963]), 155. 5 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (Abingdon and Oxford, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 1. 6 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 21. 7 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 8 Angela Cox, “The Othering of Time in Age of Empires II | Play the Past,” Play the Past, August 1, 2013, www.playthepast.org. 9 Cox, “The Othering of Time.” 10 Steve Butts, “Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties,” IGN, June 25, 2007, www.ign.com. 11 Vít Šisler, “Digital Arabs Representation in Video Games,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (May 1, 2008): 203–220. How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. 164 S ou v i k M u k h e rj e e 12 “Wonder (Age of Empires),” Age of Empires Series Wiki, 2016, accessed October 23, 2016, http://ageofempires.wikia.com. 13 Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Education (1835) by Thomas Babington Macaulay,” Project South Asia, accessed October 23, 2016, www.columbia.edu. 14 Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Justin Parsler, “Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game,” in Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo, 2007) , 203–210. 15 MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler, “Controversies,” 206. 16 MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler, “Controversies.” Further Reading Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Fanon, Franz. Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Perseus Books, 2007 (1967). Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005. Mukherjee, Souvik. “Playing Subaltern: Videogames and Postcolonialism.” Games and Culture 13 (2016): 504–520. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:29. 15 nBa 2K16 Race Tre aAndrea M . Ru ssworm Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. Abstract: The story-driven career mode in 2K Sports’ basketball series has evolved from a simple character creation system to become the most anticipated and popular component of the annually released game. In closely examining the use of facescan technologies and the story of NBA 2K16’s MyCareer mode, which includes the Spike Lee directed film-within-a game, Livin’ da Dream, TreaAndrea M. Russworm explores the ways in which race and a lack of empathy have become central to what it means for gamers to simulate NBA superstar greatness. The video game industry has a racial representation problem. It is tempting to think of this problem quantitatively, as a problem defined by a lack of “diverse” and “inclusive” characters and avatars—as a problem that can be addressed by simply creating more games with more racially diverse characters. Yet the video game industry’s problems with racial representation are much more complicated than this. The representation problem has less to do with the pitiably limited number of characters of color who appear as playable protagonists in games and more to do with the ideological work those characters facilitate, including how gamers feel about and express empathy for such characters when they do happen to appear in games across genres. Take sports games, for example, a segment of the industry that both generates millions of dollars of revenue each year and has always featured the highest number of racially diverse character representations in all of gaming.1 Not only are sports games the “crown jewel” of the industry in terms of revenue; sports games are also necessarily diverse or, as David J. Leonard has explained, “eight out of ten black male video game characters are sports competitors.”2 If approximately 75 percent of the National Basketball Association (NBA) is African American, then 126 How to Play Video Games, edited by Nina B. Huntemann, and Matthew Thomas Payne, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=5716724. Created from uci on 2020-03-26 09:57:20. Copyright © 2019. New York University Press. All rights reserved. NBA 2K16 127 thinking quantitatively about racial representation in sports games makes the obvious only clearer. That is, of course, the best-selling NBA 2K (Visual Concepts, 1999− ) series would be considered “diverse”—the games in the series necessarily include a comparable number of black “characters” in creating, and in most cases motion capturing, the digital reproductions of actual NBA stars such as LeBron James and Stephen Curry. Beyond the numbers, however, sports games also offer narrative experiences, just like more traditional story-based games that feature diverse character representations: The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2014–2018), Mafia III (Hangar 13, 2016), and Watch Dogs 2 (Ubisoft Montreal, 2016), to name a few. This chapter proposes that NBA 2K16, which in recent years has become a narrative game, struggles not at the level of visually representing racial difference. Instead, NBA 2K16’s competing cinematic story and simulation game mechanics disrupt gamic attempts at creating a sense of empathy for its fictional African American characters. In this case, the use of face scanning technologies, which would ostensibly strengthen an emotional connection to game world characters, seemed to further preclude immersion and empathetic association for nonblack players. So how did a basketball simulation become a narrative game? Acclaimed sports game developer Visual Concepts turned its industry-leading NBA 2K series into a narrative game by gradually tweaking its “MyCareer” experience, a mode in the game that has catered to fans wanting storytelling and role-playing along with basketball gameplay. Once face scanning technologies became widely available with the use of smartphones and built-in console cameras, Visual Concepts and publisher 2K Games began fully marketing “MyCareer” as a playable “feature film.”3 These technological innovations enabled the creation of realistic digital self-representations and intensified a need for professionally written and directed stories that could help gamers feel even more emotionally connected to their in-game doppelgangers. In an effort to ...
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