ADE FOR GAMES

Approaches to Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity,

and Inclusion in Games Research and Creation

EDITED BY DANIEL HARLEY AND GERALD VOORHEES

Play Story Press

Pittsburgh, PA
ADE for Games Copyright © by Play Story Press is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

ADE for Games Copyright © 2024 by Play Story Press is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Copyright © by Play Story Press 2024

Pittsburgh, PA
https://playstorypress.org/

ISBN: 978-1-300-87398-3 (Print)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17613/8ssws-rsy71

Cover design by John Dessler

TEXT: The text and images of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons
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Acknowledgements vii

Introduction. Documenting ADE for Games Communities 1

Daniel Harley and Gerald Voorhees

SECTION I. ORIENTATIONS

Chapter 1. Race in Games and Game Studies 19

Gerald Voorhees, Jackson McLaren, E Oropeza, and Jennifer Whitson

Spotlight 1: Building Equitable and Sustainable Game Development Education 42

Based on a workshop by Kenzie Gordon, Vishal Sooknanan, Itoro Emembolu,
Sean Gouglas, Alison Harvey, Johanna Weststar, and Jennifer Whitson

Chapter 2. The Impact of Genuine and Mindful Inclusion of 49

Marginalized Communities in Creative Works
Elaine Gómez-Sanchez

Spotlight 2. Just Research Relationships 60

Based on a panel with Kishonna Gray, Liz Nilsen, and Rhona Hanning

Spotlight 3. Structures of Care and Accessibility 66

Based on a workshop by Jess Rowan Marcotte and D. Squinkifer

Chapter 3. Anti-Racist Game Design 70

Jordan Clapper

SECTION II. INQUIRY

Chapter 4. The Changing Same: Blackness, Representation and Video Games 91

André Brock

Spotlight 4. Creating Black Worlds – Looking for New Realities in Gaming 104
Based on a talk by Akil Fletcher

Spotlight 5. The Effect of Cultural Capital on African American Men Who Game 107
Based on a talk by Steven Dashiell

Chapter 5. Playing the Race Card 110

Tara Fickle
Spotlight 6: The Non-Playable Character 122
Based on a talk by Huan He

Spotlight 7: Hallyu, Heels, and Global Im/Mobilities in Professional 126

League of Legends: A Gyopo Media History
Based on a talk by Matthew Jungsuk Howard

Chapter 6. Researching Disability and Play - Where’s the Fun in That? 129
Katta Spiel

Spotlight 8: Designing For Disability and Accessibility 137

Based on a panel with Triskal DeHaven, Cayley MacArthur, and Katta Spiel
 SECTION III. PRACTICE AND DESIGN

Chapter 7. The Case for Paratopian Design 143

Rilla Khaled

Spotlight 9. Mañanita on Digital Islands: Animal Crossing and the 158

#JunkTerrorBill Protests
Based on a talk by Sarah Christina Ganzon

Chapter 8. Black Virtuality 162

A.M. Darke

Spotlight 10. The Racialized Experiences of Avatar Embodiment 175

among Black Social Virtual Reality Users
Based on a talk by Cyan DeVeaux

Chapter 9. Game Design in the Imperial Mode 179

Meghna Jayanth

Spotlight 11: An Indigenous Perspective on the Digital Divide 197

Based on a talk by Kahentawaks Tiewishaw

Chapter 10. Doing Native in Game Design 203

Wendi Sierra

Spotlight 12. Indigenous Research and Epistemologies 217

Based on a discussion with Kelly Laurila and Hector Perez

Spotlight 13. History and Culture through Traditional Games 222

Based on a workshop by Dallas Squire

About the Contributors and Speakers 225

Index 232
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the result of a multiple-stage journey that owes both intellectual debts and
debts of gratitude to many people. In addition to Brad King and Drew Davidson at Play
Story Press, who immediately saw the significance and value of this book, we thank
everyone who contributed to the ADE Speakers Series for their foundational work, as
well as everyone who helped transform a series of talks and workshops into the book
you are reading.
The ADE Speakers Series emerged from the work of the Anti-Racism,
Decolonization, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (ADE) Committee of the Games
Institute at the University of Waterloo. Neil Randall, Director of the Games Institute,
gave a great deal of support— moral, discursive, and material—to the committee. His
efforts toward this project and toward making the Games Institute a more inclusive
space, generally, should be commended. Agata Antkiewicz, Games Institute Associate
Director for Strategic Planning and Initiatives, was also a vigorously engaged
supporter of the committee and champion of equity at the Games Institute. With
Neil and Agata’s aid, members of the committee applied for and received a Canadian
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection Grant that
funded the lion’s share of the ADE Speakers Series. The members of the committee
deserve thanks as well, but in particular, we want to recognize Umair Shah, Shana
MacDonald, Arielle Grinberg, and Alessandra Luz, who were collaborators on the
grant along with Cayley MacArthur, who participated in one of the panels. Thanks
also to committee members Jennifer Whitson and Hector Perez who contributed their
time and labour to hosting and participating in the series. Pamela Maria Schmidt,
Interdisciplinary Project and Communications Manager for the Games Institute, did
amazing work coordinating a team of staff, including Emma Vossen, Sid Heeg, and
Shae Ashcroft, and co-op students including Miguel Illustre, Akshana Ranganathan,
Kyle Mason, Elradia Suliman, Sebastien Plante, and Sofia Santos. With Agata’s support,
Pamela led the logistical planning and execution of the ADE Speakers Series from Fall
2023 through Winter 2024 and greatly facilitated efforts to document the series on
the Games Institute website. Finally, most of the events were hybrid, taking place
online, at the Games Institute, and at “watch parties” hosted at Concordia University,
the University of Alberta, the University of Wisconsin, Brandeis University, and the
University of California – Riverside facilitated by Marc Lejuenesse, Kenzie Gordon,
David Peter Kocik, James Heazlewood Dale, and Adriana Burton, respectively.
Our efforts to document the ADE Speakers Series through a website and,
eventually, this book, were made possible with the help of many hands. As a research
assistant, Sophia Richardson worked with us from January through August of 2023

ADE FOR GAMES VII

developing processes for archiving the talks and workshops and templates for the
video and web summaries of the events. Sophia also put her knowledge translation
skills to work creating the web and video summaries for the Winter 2023 events.
Justine Scheifele and Jared Cubilla came onto the project as research assistants in
September 2023 and created the web and video summaries for the Fall 2023 events.
This work was vital to the development of the website for the ADE Speakers Series,
which we hope you will visit to watch the full-length or summary videos of the events.
In January 2024, Aster Penny began work as a Research Communication Specialist
and played an integral role in developing this book. He converted the transcripts of
the events—originally presented to listening audiences—to more readerly chapters,
corresponded with the speakers to ensure that their meaning and intent was captured,
and wrote the initial drafts of the spotlight chapters (drawing from the web summaries
to some extent). Finally, Anthea Tawiah joined in June 2024 to help with the final
stages of formatting the book. Sophia, Justine, Jared, Aster and Anthea’s labour made
this book possible and turned this book from a collection of good ideas to the work
you have before you.
Daniel would like to thank his colleagues at the Stratford School of Interaction
Design and Business as well as his colleagues in the HCI Group at the University
of Waterloo. Seeing the support that students and faculty of the HCI Group offer
one another in weekly meetings shows how valuable cross-departmental and cross-
disciplinary collaboration can be, not just for our academic pursuits but also for our
personal growth. Throughout this work, I learned a lot from the generous leadership
of Christine McWebb, Jessica Thompson, Mark Hancock, and, of course, Gerald in his
role as chair of the ADE Committee. I am also consistently inspired by the dedication
and courage that Brianna Wiens brings to her own ADE work: watching her share and
learn from others as she builds community helps show the kinds of futures we can
collaboratively create.
Gerald would also like to thank his colleagues in the Department of
Communication Arts for providing advice on event hosting and planning, as well
as intellectual guidance that helped shape his conception of the potential impact of
the ADE Speakers Series. In particular, Grit Liebscher provided moral and logistical
support that helped me navigate some busy times and Kim Hong Nguyen encouraged
me to recognize the importance of bringing the ADE Speakers Series to a wider
audience. And whenever my hope for and work toward a better world seems abstract, I
am grounded in my commitment to make the world a less hostile and more welcoming
place for my daughter, Quinn.

VIII
INTRODUCTION: DOCUMENTING ADE FOR GAMES COMMUNITIES

Daniel Harley and Gerald Voorhees

In the spring and summer of 2020, as millions of people gathered across the world
to march in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and to protest police brutality and
anti-Black racism, faculty, staff, and students at the University of Waterloo started
initiatives that they hoped would create lasting change. At the Games Institute1, a
research centre at the university, student advocacy led to the creation of an Anti-
Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (ADE) Committee. The
acronym—ADE—was an effort to explicitly signal that anti-racism and decolonization
must be at the forefront of EDI work, offering a reminder that attempts to foster
‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ should not be modes of assimilating racialized people into
Western colonial structures organized around white supremacy and other systemic
forms of oppression and exclusion.
As we formed the committee and collaboratively mapped its initial goals, the
university was in a pandemic-related work-from-home mandate. Our work had
moved entirely online, and there was a sense of dread beneath the privileged banality
of our stay-at-home lives. The unknowns of the pre-vaccine pandemic had us wearing
our homemade cloth masks outdoors and using sanitizing wipes (when we could
get them) on everything in sight. We took comfort in the rhetoric that “we’re in
this together” (e.g., Warick, 2020) but it was increasingly clear that we were not all
equally at risk, and the noise of the pots and pans that we banged from our doors and
windows for frontline workers sometimes felt emblematic of how little we expected of
ourselves when we loudly proclaimed our solidarity. In the same vein, we understood
the urgency of our work in the ADE committee, but the broader uptake of equity-
oriented initiatives and actions (ranging from well-intentioned first steps to
performative virtue signalling) was a frequent reminder that there’s a valid skepticism
when this kind of work originates within any institution that has benefitted from or
perpetuated inequitable conditions.
At the time, Big Tech corporations like Google, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta)
were demonstrating their solidarity with a focus on financial donations to Black-
owned businesses and organizations promoting racial justice (Bursztynsky, 2020;
Peters, 2020). Technology writers quickly pointed out the disconnect between these
public acts of support and the widespread discrimination perpetuated by the tech
industry. At Axios, Kyle Daly (2020) contrasted responses and donations by Amazon,
Facebook, Nextdoor, Google, and other companies with some of the ways that these
companies perpetuate and uphold systemic discrimination, including the ways that

ADE FOR GAMES 1

racism is embedded and/or implicated in facial recognition technologies, labour
practices, and misinformation. At Tech Crunch, Megan Rose Dickey (2020) questioned
the rhetoric of solidarity in light of the ongoing racism and lack of representation in
the tech sector. One of Dickey’s examples was Google, which had reportedly reduced
its diversity and inclusion initiatives (Glaser, 2020) only a month prior to their
statements of solidarity and financial commitments. The games industry faced the
same scrutiny. As companies like Nintendo, Infinity Ward, Activision Blizzard, and
Ubisoft released their own statements, Noah Smith (2020) at The Washington Post
questioned what these statements meant given the broader lack of action to confront
racism in games and games communities.
We were also keenly aware of the challenges of this kind of work within the
bureaucracies, systems, and long-established practices of an academic institution. As
many have noted, even as organizations strive to appear more inclusive, the labour
and the recommendations of those who do ‘diversity work’ are often unrecognized
or ignored. For example, in Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed (2017) describes how
efforts to change current structures can also be used to reinforce those same
structures. Ahmed recounts how she participated in a working group to write the
university’s race equality policy, which was then praised by the incoming vice-
chancellor as demonstrating race equality. As Ahmed explains, “A document that
documents the inequality of the university became usable as a measure of good
performance” (p. 103). Ahmed describes this as an institutional mechanism that blocks
other forms of action: because the institution prizes the production of documents
(especially when those documents advocate for change but have no power to mandate
it), the production of documents becomes the only action that is possible. The same
concern applies to committees: can they effect change, or will their very existence be
justification to celebrate the institution’s promise of equity?
Many of us on the committee felt that any action we were able to perform was
slow and frustrating—efforts to do the work ‘right’ through consultation and
foundational research meant slowing the work to a halting pace that did not match the
pressing need for change that we discussed. As we debated the scope and action of the
committee, we noted that despite the varying degrees of social and institutional power
that we represented, the difficulty of the task at hand was made more complex by the
very thing that made us unique. The Games Institute is proudly multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary, welcoming faculty and students from disciplines that are formally
housed across a variety of faculties and departments. And although the committee was
representative of these departments, we also represented varying levels of precarity,
including graduate students, contract lecturers, and pre-tenure professors with
probationary appointments. Any power afforded to the committee as an institutional
body was slight in the face of the systemic problems that we identified, including
underrepresentation of racialized faculty, a lack of research approaches rooted in
racialized experiences and epistemologies, and a lack of research on topics related
to racialized experiences and communities. These problems are broader than the
practices of a single department or even a single university. Even the more immediate
problems that seemed like they might apply to a research centre like the Games

2
Institute were often rooted elsewhere in longstanding disciplinary practices. We
quickly learned that a multidisciplinary space does not automatically disrupt
disciplinary divides or expectations, but rather helps to reveal some of the internal
fallacies of these expectations through simple comparison.
Unable to directly alter institutional and disciplinary structures, we wanted to
create space to diversify what kinds of expertise (and whose expertise) were
considered and included in conversations about games. In their design justice
scholarship, Costanza-Chock (2020) notes that the slogan that originated in disability
justice, “nothing about us without us,” offers a useful foundation for solidarity and
accountability. Following the design justice principles that build on such advocacy
work, Costanza-Chock describes how a community-oriented approach must include
the leadership and experiences of those who are disadvantaged by multiple forms of
social and structural oppression. Developing this foundation in our communities is
crucial, both to amplify current diversity work and to model best practices that can
help to extend that work more broadly. Because the Games Institute does not hire or
appoint faculty, we focused our attention on inviting racialized scholars and artists
into our community and centring their work in the community’s discourse. With this
goal, we applied for funding from one of Canada’s federal granting bodies—the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)—to host an ADE Speakers Series,
a series of lectures, workshops, and panels that primarily featured individuals who
were actively showing how we might challenge current research and creation practices
and disciplinary expectations. We argued that deliberately creating space for these
conversations was an opportunity to foreground the voices and experiences of those
who are inadequately represented in games research and creation.
We also wanted to document the work of the speakers and workshop leaders
so that their insights could extend beyond the individual events that we hosted.
Collaborating with research assistants, we began creating summaries and highlights
of the events that we could feature on the Games Institute website. Throughout this
work, we reflected on the fact that even as these kinds of gatherings that we organized
are important, the moments we shared are also fleeting and easily forgotten within
the broader sweep of activities and events that are part of a university’s ongoing
production. Yet, recalling Ahmed (2017), we wanted our documentation to go beyond
the rote production of documents: how might we look back on the labour of everyone
who participated to make these gatherings possible while also creating opportunities
for new gatherings? We conceptualized this book as part of our response.

AMPLIFYING ADE IN GAMES RESEARCH AND CREATION

As we contacted potential contributors for the series, we began proposing several

questions as a starting point for conversations about actionable change: How do we
make the principles of ADE vital elements of the research and development of games
and playable media? Why and how should the specific experiences of Indigenous,
Black, and other racialized people inform the questions we ask in our research? What
can we do to ensure that the methods and approaches we practice in our scholarship
and creative work are respectful and responsive to the needs of oppressed and
ADE FOR GAMES 3
marginalized communities? How might we better recognize and challenge the logics
and imperatives of white supremacy and colonialism in our research and creation?
How might we better address inequalities related to race, gender, Indigeneity, ability,
or other facets of identity?
Within our own academic networks, especially within a multidisciplinary space
like the Games Institute, it was also clear that the strategies that we apply to engage
with questions relating to ADE will necessarily require disciplinary specificity
alongside new interdisciplinary approaches. We have seen, again and again, the ways
that systemic injustices impact (and are exacerbated by) a variety of digitally mediated
contexts that extend beyond the purview of a single discipline. Evidence of factors
like racial discrimination and algorithmic bias in everyday technologies (Noble, 2018;
Benjamin, 2019), the enduring legacies of colonialism in design (Schultz et al., 2018;
Tunstall, 2023), and white supremacy at the foundation of computational technologies
(Brock, 2020; Everett, 2009) all point to a need to apply lessons learned across the
many communities that intersect with games research and design.
Importantly, we also wanted to highlight that there is a growing body of work
across academia and industry that is already demonstrating how we might respond
to the questions we proposed, providing crucial insight into how we might apply the
critical orientations that those questions require. Acknowledging a broader need for
cultural and political change within our communities begins with acknowledging the
work that is already being done to advance ADE.
For example, games user experience research, which is heavily influenced by
human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms, is one of the ways that our community
examines technologies to better understand their design and use as well as their
experiential qualities. As a field, HCI has been increasingly involved in adapting and
applying critical perspectives, including a turn towards critical and feminist HCI over
a decade ago (Bardzell, 2010; Bardzell and Bardzell, 2011). Recent work offering
practices to improve inclusivity (e.g., Scheuerman et al., 2019; Spiel et al., 2019) or
work that continues to expand the emerging critical orientations of HCI (e.g.,
Ogbonnaya-Ogburu et al., 2020; Rankin et al., 2023; To et al., 2021) is a reminder that
these are active areas of scholarship that deserve more timely attention.
Similarly, the largely humanist field of games studies has charted the ways that
games perpetuate problematic representations of historically marginalized identities,
with a particular focus on gender and sexuality (see e.g., Chess, 2017; Jenson and de
Castell, 2010; Gray, Voorhees, and Vossen, 2018; Harper, Adams, and Taylor, 2018;
Kafai et al., 2008; Ruberg and Shaw, 2017; Ruberg, 2020; Shaw, 2015; Taylor and
Voorhees, 2018). Scholarship that integrates these critical considerations with other
intersecting identity markers like race and ethnicity (e.g., Gray, 2014, 2020; Malkowski
and Russworm, 2017; Murray, 2017) and disability (e.g., Spöhrer and Ochsner, 2023)
has revealed additional forms of discrimination and abuse—as well as resistance and
alternatives— across the virtual and real-world settings of gaming cultures. Recent
work continues to broaden these inquiries, including scholarship on Indigenous
creation and self-determination (LaPensée, Laiti, and Longboat 2022; Wallis and Ross,
2021), critiques of colonialism and whiteness within game studies (Fickle, 2019;

4
Fletcher, 2022), and investigations of racialized epistemologies and approaches
grounded in marginalized experiences (Patterson, 2020; Trammell, 2023). Each of
these areas highlights opportunities for further research.
While public attention turned to some of the interrelated problems experienced
within games communities during the misogynist gamergate harassment campaign
(Cross, 2014; Nieborg and Foxman, 2018), it would take several more years for games
workers to advocate for change en masse. In 2019, employees at big-budget ‘AAA’
games studios began staging walkouts and strikes, protesting sexual harassment and
toxic labour conditions. Workers at Riot Games staged a walkout over workplace
harassment (Farokmanesh, 2019); workers at Blizzard staged a walkout over
discrimination and sexual harassment (Liao, 2021); and employees at Ubisoft reported
sexual harassment, hostile behaviour, and ongoing expectations of ‘crunch’ work hours
(Glasner, 2020). Getting to these moments of collective action often came at a cost
and required many years of advocacy in the face of possible reprisals. Sexism in the
games industry, for example, has been characterized as involving “years of escalating
exposure” despite significant backlash from game companies and game communities
(MacDonald, 2020).
For those working in the games industry, these conditions are compounded by a
history of precarious and poorly compensated labour with inequitable pay and a lack
of opportunities for advancement (Bulut, 2015; Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, 2006).
Independent games studios face additional layers of precarity, even though many
of these spaces offer a valuable alternative for historically marginalized designers
and developers (Harvey and Fisher, 2013; Ruberg, 2019; Whitson et al., 2021). The
year that we launched the speakers and workshop series, the most recent survey
from the International Game Developers Association showed that although developers
predominantly claim to value diversity, “[m]any respondents (74%) felt that there is
not equal treatment and opportunity for all in the industry. In addition, 56% of
respondents perceived inequity towards themselves and 71% perceived inequity
towards others based on gender, age, ethnicity, ability, or sexual orientation” (Weststar
et al., 2021, p. 45). Reading these results alongside current scholarship underscores a
critical reality: while progress has been made in identifying and addressing systemic
challenges, there is still much more we need to do to share and implement current best
practices.
A common concern for academics, especially as we study exclusionary norms
in contemporary contexts, is how to communicate our work beyond our own
disciplinary silos, or beyond traditional academic venues like journals and
conferences, which are often locked away behind paywalls or require costly
registration and subscription fees. But for many years now, games scholars and game
creators engaged in ADE have been especially active in looking for ways to share and
communicate their work to wider audiences. This includes projects like the LGBTQ
Video Game Archive2, the years of writing on Critical Distance3, the resources, best
practices, and services on Represent Me4 and Able Gamers5, the projects that strive to
create more diverse developer communities like Black Game Devs6 or Dames Making

ADE FOR GAMES 5

Games7, and the blogs and resources on the sites of individuals working on games or
games scholarship. As Bo Ruberg writes about the resources section of their website8:

Why share resources? It’s not just pragmatic; it’s political. Sharing resources is a crucial part of
supporting one another as feminists, queer folks, and others who are so often marginalized. Especially
in academic and industry environments that push us to compete, collaboration is key. By building
knowledge together, we resist the narrative that we are separate, niche, small, or minor. (Ruberg,
n.d., para 2, original italics.)

For junior scholars, finding and sharing these resources is often a first glimpse at
what games scholarship can be. Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency9 is perhaps the
most well-known of this kind of public scholarship, in part because Sarkeesian was
among those targeted during gamergate, but students today—at least in our
classrooms—come to class more aware of her content than the remembered horror of
gamergate. Learning about gamergate and the broader context of Sarkeesian’s work
remains important, but there is also something hopeful in encountering the students
who come across her video essays and enjoy them for what they are: clear and
accessible analyses of games. Today, Feminist Frequency is an archive of this past
work, which has garnered millions of views, and now offers a podcast for broader
media discussions and analysis. We all benefit from these rich histories of critical
work, not only as sites and records of ongoing resistance to various forms of
oppression but also because they often show us joyful and inclusive alternatives.
Working at the Games Institute, we have also seen the value of middle-state
publications such as First Person Scholar10, created by four PhD students in 2012: Kent
Ardse, Michael Hancock, Jason Hawreliak, and Steve Wilcox. Wilcox (2013), wrote that
a goal of this kind of publication venue is that it offers a platform for “feed-forward”
scholarship, not just responding to trends in games from the artificial distance of our
scholarly work, but recognizing that we are part of the broader games community and
using the digital tools at our disposal to create space for discussions that contribute to
the kinds of games and games communities that we want to see. In this way, middle-
state publications construct new publics from games academia, journalism, industry,
and social advocacy groups, bringing readers from these somewhat disparate contexts
into community.
Imagine the student or game developer who discovers any of these resources for
the first time. Not Your Mama’s Gamer (NYMG)11, for example, started as a blog by
Samantha Blackmon and Alex Layne in 2011, and is now a repository of over 200
podcast episodes, links to Blackmon’s Twitch stream, as well as a “signal boost” page
that includes dozens of other relevant sites. As TreaAndrea Russworm and Samantha
Blackmon (2020) note in an article presented as a mixtape—a structure that is an
exemplar of their larger argument—the kinds of knowledge that we gain from these
formats, including autobiographical reflections and public forms of play across
podcasts and livestreams and other digital contexts, is an extension of creative and
scholarly traditions grounded in Black feminist thought. NYMG is now also a venue
for free, peer-reviewed feminist games scholarship and exemplifies how middle-state
publications create their own public across existing contexts and communities.
This book, therefore, strives to contribute to all these traditions: humanistic game
6
studies, games user research grounded in HCI, and the diverse publics of the middle-
state. As a text that is available online for free, our hope is that remediating current
work and bringing it together here provides a repository and collection of ideas, as
well as yet another starting place to find the conversations and practices that are
creating more inclusive games communities.

STRUCTURE AND THEMES

This book primarily features edited transcripts of lectures and summaries of

workshops and panels that we hosted as part of the ADE Speakers Series,
supplemented by chapters based on position papers and recent talks at other venues
that were thematically related to the goals of the series. Rather than simply reproduce
these events and presentations, we saw this book as an opportunity to engage
educators, junior scholars, and practitioners in the kinds of conversations related
to ADE that are happening across the various intersecting spaces concerned with
games and interactive media. Each of the core chapters is derived from a longer
talk or presentation, while the shorter chapters—which we call ‘Spotlights’—describe
key points from shorter presentations, panel discussions, or workshops. To facilitate
uptake from researchers new to ADE issues and to encourage the use of this book in
classrooms or other gatherings, each chapter also includes: 1) a Summary to provide an
at-a-glance overview of the content of the chapter; 2) Application Points to draw the
reader’s attention to specific areas of interest as they begin the chapter; 3) Reflection
Questions to consider after finishing the chapter; and 4) Key Terms to help situate
concepts the contributors used.
While we hope readers will use this book to engage in conversations about ADE
in games, by no means do we intend to suggest that this book is a comprehensive
overview of current perspectives or questions within this space, and indeed many of
the contributors are pointing to the fallacy of that kind of academic expectation rooted
in imperialist efforts towards a totalizing capture of ideas. As many of the contributors
note, our perspectives and experiences are shaped by our intersecting social locations
in relation to existing and contextually-specific power structures, and attending to
those nuanced facets of our lived experiences requires increased specificity even as
we work to create what Patricia Hill Collins (2019) refers to as ‘pragmatic coalitions’
within our communities. Instead, the book is both a record of the kinds of studies and
strategies that a handful of scholars and practitioners have been describing in the last
few years, and it is direct evidence of current practices, experiences, and perspectives
that have already demonstrated actionable change. We hope this is a useful, practical
antidote to the proliferation of initiatives and institutional rhetorics valorizing equity,
diversity, and inclusion in higher education in the last five years, which has so far
not been matched with education about the critical tools, ways of thinking, and best
practices for doing anti-racist, decolonial, and equity-oriented work. It is also a call
for more events like those we feature here—not as an academic cataloguing of ‘diverse’
experiences and perspectives—but as a welcoming of community, opening ourselves
to listening and learning from each other.
We worked with an undergraduate co-op student, Aster Penney, to help prepare
ADE FOR GAMES 7
the initial drafts of most of these chapters based on the event transcripts and/or
summaries that we had previously prepared with other undergraduate research
assistants (Sophia Richardson, Jared Cubilla, and Justine Scheifele) for the Games
Institute website. Our conversations with these students often returned to questions
about how we can best represent the unique voices and perspectives of the
contributors. In many academic disciplines, there is a tendency to expect the flat,
dispassionate voice of the ‘expert,’ and to learn the discipline is to learn to speak in
that same voice. But because many of these chapters are derived from presentations
to live audiences, they also reflect the immediacy of the moment, and for us now it
is impossible to read the transcript without remembering the cadence and presence
of the speaker. With this in mind, there’s an opportunity to read each of these
chapters—and especially the core chapters—differently, reflecting and remarking on
the ways that each individual contributor is uniquely themself, showing us how they
work through ideas in ways that are much more conversational than the more
impersonal style of a traditional academic article.
Because each chapter includes a summary, we will forego the typical chapter
summaries that we might otherwise include here and instead situate the contributors’
work within the book’s overarching structure. We organized the chapters into three
sections, Orientations, Inquiry, and Practice.
Section 1: Orientations features work that establishes some of our motivations for
the book alongside examples of possible responses to current challenges. Chapter 1,
by Gerald Voorhees, Jackson McLaren, E Oropeza, and Jennifer Whitson is the only
chapter in this book based on a knowledge synthesis paper rather than a presentation,
and it provides a scholarly backdrop to many of the conversations in this book around
race and representation. This rich history of scholarship offers the necessary reminder
that even as there are new games and new games studios, we are often asking the
same questions about whose stories are told in games, and who gets to participate
in game-making and game-playing. This is paired with a talk by Elaine Gómez-
Sanchez in Chapter 2, who describes the importance of more diverse representation
in games and games studios, as well as the advocacy, mentorship, and organizational
work that she is doing to create more inclusive games communities. In Chapter 3,
Jordan Clapper begins unpacking the difficulty in theorizing what we mean by anti-
racist game design, and what it might mean to outline practices for anti-racist games.
These three chapters are accompanied by three Spotlight chapters showcasing the
work of many contributors. Spotlight 1 features Kenzie Gordon, Sean Gouglas, Alison
Harvey, Vishal Sooknanan, Itoro Emembolu, Johanna Weststar, and Jennifer Whitson
discussing the First Three Years project, which tracks students in games education
through the early years of their careers. Spotlight 2 features Liz Nilsen, Kishonna
Gray, and Rhona Hanning discussing just relationships among researchers. Spotlight
3 features D. Squinkifer and Jess Rowan Marcotte, who led a workshop on
organizational structures that support care. These spotlights offer a parallel to the
first three core chapters in the sense that when they are read together (and as part
of a larger conversation), they outline the challenges embedded in the structures that

8
govern games—across scholarship, design, and education, as well as strategies and next
steps that we can take to develop the foundations for more equitable relationships.
Section 2: Inquiry presents multidisciplinary work across targeted sites of academic
inquiry. Here, again, we encourage readers or educators using the book in classrooms
to think about the kinds of conversations that we might have across possible pairings
of chapters and spotlights. Readers might compare, for example, the analytical
strategies employed by André Brock’s study of Black masculinity in the God of War
series in Chapter 4 with Tara Fickle’s examination of the racial dynamics of playing
Pokémon GO! in Chapter 5. Or, readers might consider the pointed nuance of the focus
across the work of emerging scholars like Akil Fletcher in Spotlight 4, Steven Dashiell
in Spotlight 5, Huan He in Spotlight 6, and Matthew Jungsuk Howard in Spotlight 7.
Taken together, these spotlights show that even as we note important commonalities
of various racialized experiences and representations, we must do more to recognize
the intricate differences in the context, effects, and implications that this new work
is beginning to identify. The Application Points in each of the chapters and spotlights
are included to help reveal some of these connections, but we have also noticed in
our conversations with the students working on this project and in the Q&A sessions
after many of the presentations that there are opportunities for thematically related
considerations even when the more overt research questions might appear unrelated.
For example, there’s an obvious pairing in Katta Spiel’s presentation on the question
of ‘fun’ in disability and game research in Chapter 6 with Spotlight 8, featuring Triskal
DeHaven, Katta Spiel, and Cayley MacArthur discussing the institutional constraints
of working at the intersection of games and disability research. However, some of
the considerations that DeHaven, Spiel, and MacArthur raise about the underlying
structures and expectations that guide their work can also be read alongside spotlight
chapters in Section 1 about the structures that guide our research and work
environments.
Section 3: Practice focuses on how we design, play, and (re)interpret games and
other interactive media. In some academic spaces, the term ‘practice’ is sometimes
used as a contrast to theory, and presented as if the clean academics are in one room
thinking, while the dirty practitioners are in another room (or outside!) doing. In these
spaces, the idea that there is a possible combination of thinking and doing—praxis—is
mentioned only as an elusive and impossible dream, a goal to attain one day, but
not right now. The reality, of course, is that many of those who are doing are also
deeply engaged in examining and theorizing their own practices and those of their
disciplines and/or markets. This can clearly be seen in Rilla Khaled’s talk on what she
terms ‘paratopian design’ featured in Chapter 7, or in Meghna Jayanth’s talk about
design in the imperial mode in Chapter 9, both of whom are helping to create new
theory within and because of their design work. Practice in this context is also not
exclusively the domain of the designer or maker. Sarah Christina Ganzon (Spotlight 9)
and Cyan Deveaux (Spotlight 10) show how the people who use gaming technologies
are engaged in forms of practice as they configure, interpret, and reinterpret their
experience. Similarly, in Chapter 8, A.M. Darke shows how we participate in the
prevailing phantasms of dominant interpretations, and how new practices and new

ADE FOR GAMES 9

tools can help us intervene in these spaces. If practice is repetition, what ideas and
actions are we repeating when we play games? What is required to encourage more
inclusive forms of practice? Kahentawaks Tieweshaw provides an example of this in
Spotlight 11, showing us how media literacy, education, and digital access can lead
to games that contribute to the survivance of Indigenous languages and cultures.
As Wendi Sierra describes in Chapter 10, there is an important distinction between
‘seeming’ and ‘doing’ in these contexts, and it is the critical combination of the two
that leads to community-oriented connections and impacts. Moreover, as Kelly Laurila
describes in her conversation with Hector Perez in Spotlight 12, applying these
Indigenous perspectives requires us to decolonize the taken-for-granted practices and
narratives of Western institutions. With these considerations in mind, it is fitting that
we close the book with Dallas Squire in Spotlight 13, who emphasizes the cultural and
historical significance of games in Indigenous communities as well as the ways that
games bring us joy and bring us together. If games offer us a way to make, study, and
participate in the creation of communities, and if we are iteratively striving in our
practice, what communities are we striving towards?

CONCLUSION

It is up to us—as scholars, students, researchers, makers, and leaders—to normalize

and make sustainable community-oriented cultures in gaming, games research, and
game-making spaces. This book and the ADE Speakers Series it is based upon are
starting points. They both provide a platform for diverse scholars, practitioners, and
students to foster dialogue and promote public discourse on how we might better
incorporate ADE across our games research and creation. While the events in the
Winter and Fall of 2023 reached hundreds of people, this book brings their voices,
perspectives, and arguments to a wider audience in a manner that’s less ephemeral and
easier to cite. These talks and workshops were inspiring, but historically marginalized
people are not simply inspiring; many of them have been doing this necessary work for
years, and they deserve to be a part of the citational record as games research moves
toward a fulsome embrace of ADE.
As the ADE Speakers Series created training and networking opportunities for
young games scholars and practitioners and provided them with the language,
practices, and tools to address current barriers and exclusions in the games industry,
this book carries these lessons to emerging scholars of this generation and the next. Of
course, this book is also for established researchers and creators: it is a reminder that
learning also requires unlearning, questioning the standard operating procedures of
Western academe, and rethinking conventional wisdom about who knows what, and
how they come to know it.
Ultimately, our institutions and disciplinary organizations cannot do this work on
our behalf. They are governed by white supremacist and colonial logics and propelled
by inertia. Too many institutional efforts toward equity, diversity, and inclusion omit
the focus on anti-racism, decolonization, and Indigenization, and in this way, expect
to assimilate historically marginalized communities into established ways of thinking
10
and doing. For these institutions, marginalized people are ‘included’ only when it
does not disrupt colonial systems, treated ‘equitably’ so long as they uphold white
supremacy, and their ‘diversity’ is celebrated only when it is contained at a superficial
level and showcased in marketing images. So, while universities champion equity-
oriented discourses and make spectacles of the committees that display their
commitments, this book provides insights about the ways in which we might interrupt
the conduct of scholarship, disrupt the organization of labs and research groups,
and redirect our output for the benefit of those who have been disempowered and
oppressed.
There are many ways one might read this book. Perhaps you pick and choose the
chapters and spotlights that resonate with your knowledge and interest, or maybe you
read those that speak to the gaps in your knowledge. Or you might read this book
from cover to cover. Whatever your approach, we hope this book introduces you to
new ideas, challenges your thinking about familiar issues, and provides a platform
for continued thought and work that more fulsomely incorporates principles and
practices of anti-racism, decolonization, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. This last
part is crucial; doing the reading is only the first step. Thinking about these matters
and working to embed them in our routines, or to reinvent those routines that cannot
be reformed, is the challenge to which we must rise.

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52. Warick, J. (2020). ‘We’re all in this together’: Saskatoon Residents Sing, Bang
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Notes
1. https://uwaterloo.ca/games-institute/
2. https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/
3. https://www.critical-distance.com/
4. https://representme.charity/
5. https://ablegamers.org/
6. https://www.blackgamedevs.com/
7. https://dmg.to/
8. https://ourglasslake.com/resources/
9. https://feministfrequency.com/
10. https://www.firstpersonscholar.com/
11. https://www.nymgamer.com/

ADE FOR GAMES 15

16
 SECTION I

ORIENTATIONS

ADE FOR GAMES 17

18
CHAPTER 1.

RACE IN GAMES AND GAME STUDIES

Gerald Voorhees, Jackson McLaren, E Oropeza, and Jennifer Whitson

SUMMARY

Voorhees, McLaren, Oropeza, and Whitson synthesize current research on

games and race to historical and contemporary trends in game studies
involving race and ethnicity, as well as topic areas that are not yet fulsomely
explored. This exploratory literature review found seven themes in the
research. (1) There is a continued prevailing whiteness in games and game
studies, which, (2) is also evidenced in the Eurocentric hegemony of approaches
to studying games and likely contributes to (3) the uneven uptake of research
on the representation and experiences of various racialized collectives. (4)
Racialized game developers are marginalized in the commercial entertainment
games industry but making in-roads through independent and
community-oriented game making practices. Finally, (5) representation, (6)
play, and (7) socialization between players are sites that both contribute to
racialization and enable the joy that racialized folks find in gaming experiences.
The chapter ends by offering suggestions for future research that decolonizes
game studies methods with alternate approaches and epistemologies, and by
substantively focusing on community engagement and intersectional identities
and experiences.

APPLICATION POINTS

By outlining the current state of research on race, ethnicity, privilege, and

marginalization in game studies, Voorhees, McLaren, Oropeza, and Whitson
describe work on race and games that has gained traction in the wider field,
identify topics that have been ignored, and draw attention to areas of research
that deserve more recognition. These are areas where very little work has been
conducted and that future research might explore. Addressing these gaps can be
an opportunity to make a direct contribution to the field: how can your
scholarly and/or creative practice address these research deficits? They also
explicate the biases that inform critical approaches to game studies, and suggest
how researchers might adopt new theoretical and methodological approaches.

ADE FOR GAMES 19

 Noting these biases is an opportunity for reflexive consideration: even when
we engage in research striving for positive and prosocial change, how might we
identify what perspectives are missing, and how might we better include those
perspectives? Finally, they illustrate how race is implicated in multiple facets of
games, from development processes to game representations, play, and player
interactions. Consider how your own work might cut across two or more of
these facets to better explain player experience or game design patterns.

We know that representation matters, and that repeated popular media images
influence consumers’ perceptions of the world and the people they share it with
(Morgan et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2009). Studies of other media forms show that
marginalized social groups tend to bear the brunt of negative representations that
accumulate and bleed over into social behaviours (Gray et al., 2017; Aspler et al., 2022).
While game studies has a long tradition of examining representation, in the main,
these studies have focused on gender (Kennedy, 2002; Gray, Voorhees & Vossen, 2018;
Taylor & Voorhees, 2018) and sexuality (Shaw 2015; Ruberg & Shaw 2017), and have
only inconsistently centred race and ethnicity. We also know that industry norms
impact the health and well-being of professionals, and that the game industry has a
negative history of exploitative and extractive labour conditions (Dyer-Witheford &
Peuter 2006; Peticca-Harris, Weststar, & McKenna 2015). Problematic labour practices
and white, masculine cultures are the norm for North American developers (Johnson,
2014; Whitson, 2019; Bulut, 2021) and constitute barriers to entry, retention, and
advancement for women and racialized professionals (Perks & Whitson, 2022). And
we know that media is a basis for community, and that gaming has birthed a plethora
of communities both online and offline (Taylor, 2006; Pearce, 2011). However, like
the game industry, these communities are often dominated by the norms of masculine
technoculture, which either deter diversity (Fisher, 2015; Fron et al., 2007; Ivory, 2006)
or actively exclude members of marginalized groups (Cameron, 2019; Shaw, 2012).
We do not yet have a clear understanding of how these factors compound; that is,
how representations of racialized people, the experiences of racialized game makers in
the industry and other arenas, and the experiences of racialized players coexist with
(and likely codetermine) one another in the games ecosystem. Games scholarship has
an ambivalent record of attending to the combined effects of these issues, which are
typically marginalized while questions about game aesthetics, design, and storytelling
are centred. Players and developers alike mobilize the cultural presumption that games
are frivolous and thus the ways race is represented are not worth studying. This
sentiment shuts down “thoughtful and thereby useful discussions of racism in
gaming’s representational economies and narratives” (Everett 2014, p. 3).
While research in other media forms enables an understanding of the stakes, our
understandings of the relationships between videogames, race, and shifting dynamics

20
of privilege and marginalization are nascent and evolving. The field of study has only
recently shifted to these questions. This chapter surveys and considers this emerging
body of work to: (1) synthesize current scholarship in the humanities and social
sciences that focus on the relationship between games and race; (2) identify the topics
and areas of this research that are well developed in terms of quantity of scholarship
and diversity of approaches; and, (3) identify gaps in knowledge and emerging areas
where further research is warranted.
We collected and examined the most relevant and cited academic literature related
to games, game development, and gaming cultures as they intersect with race,
including representations of race, the experiences of racialized players and game
makers, and how these racial dynamics shape the game industry and game studies
scholarship. Based on our exploratory literature review we identified seven themes
related to the joy and harms experienced by racialized game players and makers and
to the whiteness of games and cultural and academic objects. This research addresses
game production and development but more often focuses on how videogames
contribute to processes of racialization, or the social construction of race (Hochman
2019) – both in terms of how people inhabit and embody their avowed racial identities
and performances and how people develop and act upon their perceptions of other
racial communities and identities. This work includes scholarship considering how
race is represented visually and procedurally, as well as how social interactions shape
and are shaped by race. We conclude with a number of recommendations for future
scholarship on race and games.

THEMES IN THE LITERATURE ON RACE AND GAMES

In examining scholarship on racialization in games and game cultures, it was

impossible to overlook what Russworm (2018) calls the pervasive whiteness of games.
A strategic rhetoric that renders the racialization of white people invisible and the
precepts and practices of white culture as normal (Nakayama and Krizek 1995),
whiteness is nearly ubiquitous in videogame texts, technologies, and cultures, as well
as most academic approaches to researching video games. This is the first theme
we discuss, and directly contributes to the second theme identified, which concerns
the Eurocentric hegemony of approaches to studying games and nascent efforts to
theorize and analyze games starting from racialized experiences and epistemologies.
And this is related, and in some ways determinate of, the third theme we identify,
which is the uneven uptake of the kinds of representation and experience that are
commonly studied in the field of game studies. While Black and postcolonial game
studies are bringing whiteness to visibility in games research, work in Latinx and
Middle East and North African (MENA) game studies are not so prominent in the
field, and East Asian and Indigenous game studies both occupy an odd space where
there is a good amount of the work that doesn’t enter the literature broadly. The
fourth theme concerns racialized experiences and encounters with whiteness in game
development, which also suggests a determinate relationship to the next three themes
emphasizing how games contribute to processes of racialization. Racialization occurs
in visual and narrative representation, as the fifth theme elaborates, and through
ADE FOR GAMES 21
procedural representation and the play that unfolds within these game logics, which
the sixth theme explores. While the majority of the literature in these themes look
at how race is constructed and represented by white supremacy, some work about
independent game makers in theme four considers how representation and play can
reflect racialized perspectives. The seventh and final theme concerns racialization
through social interactions within gaming communities and games culture.

Theme 1: Whiteness is ubiquitous in games

Whiteness is, in part, maintained and perpetuated in and through games. In the
literature on race and games we found a relative abundance of scholarship that
examined and challenged whiteness, though often as a starting point to justify the
study of race rather than the primary concern and object of analysis.
Whiteness tends to appear most often in the context of inquiry about
representation in games, both procedural and visual. On the procedural level, Brock
(2011) explores how white privilege is embedded within the social structure of play
(p. 429). For instance, Brock finds that Resident Evil 5 reifies the “civilizational power
of Whiteness to control the savagery and inhumanity of Blacks and non-Whites” (p.
449). Voorhees (2009a) comes to a similar conclusion in his analysis of the Sid Meiers’
Civilization series of strategy games, highlighting how the ideas about technological
progress underwriting the games’ systems for progression and advancement are
organized by white, Western values. Brey (2023) argues that whiteness even structures
efforts to resist both designers’ intentions and cultural norms of playing. Whiteness
is also the norm for the visual presentation of game characters. The “virtual census”
conducted by Williams et al. (2009) accounting for 150 commercially successful games
from nine platforms points to the systematic over-representation of white male adults.
Beyond preexisting game characters, whiteness also shapes player’s avatar creation as
the assumed “normative” character model for players to inhabit. Dietrich (2013) found
that the vast majority of games do not allow players to create avatars with non-white
appearances, which creates all-white virtual spaces. As Dietrich argues, the problem
with this is that it creates virtual “hypersegregation” with the “potential to structure
ideas regarding race in a way that privileges whiteness and denigrates racial others” (p.
85).
Whiteness also characterizes the communities and cultures of videogame play.
An early line of inquiry examines how white players embody racialized characters in
videogames, such as Higgin’s (2009) examination of how ‘Blackless fantasies’ enable
and even encourage players to engage in digital minstrelsy. This line of inquiry can
be traced to Nakamura’s (1995) work on cybertypes and identity tourism, but first
entered games research in Leonard’s (2003) study of Grand Theft Auto III, in which he
borrows Adam Clayton Powell’s notion of “high-tech Black face” to describe how non-
Black players inhabit the game’s Black main character (p. 4). Building on Leonard’s
work, Chan (2005) argues that sports games engage in pixilated minstrelsy where the
focus on inner city play contributes to “preconceived ‘common sense’ understandings
of the ghetto, blackness and the black community’s work ethic…a racialized politics
is being enacted in the process of supposedly telling it like it is” (p. 27). Pixelated
22
minstrelsy occurs when white players’ “pleasure is derived through black male bodies”
(Chan, 2005, p. 28).
In another line of analysis, Brey (2023) and Daniels and Lalone (2012) interrogate
how white supremacist groups use videogames. Looking at both independent games
with explicitly racist and white supremacist content as well as commercial games that
are ‘read’ as supporting white supremacy, Daniels and Lalone analyze how extremist
and mainstream games and game players share many of the same forms,
representations, and pleasures. Daniels and Lalone argue that an overarching problem
with games that applies to technology writ large, is that “dominant white culture
claims to be ‘colorblind’ and dismisses concerns about racism as irrelevant…added to
this is an Internet culture, also predominantly white, in which humor is the highest
value and charges of racism are regarded as the purview of the humorless and the
overly serious” (pp. 96-97). In short, the whiteness of videogames, technology, and
the spaces associated with them makes it very difficult to tackle the hegemony of
whiteness and the problems of both overt and subtle racism in gaming spaces, as they
are ignored or dismissed.

Theme 2: Nascent reflexivity about racialized approaches to studying games

The marginalization of research and writing on race has been critically tied to racial
privilege and the social location of game scholars themselves, particularly in regards
to early “canonical” works in the field. As Fron et al. (2007) argue, the unexamined
default assumption that developers and researchers work through is a construction of
the typical game player as a white male. To this day, many scholars argue that game
studies is framed and influenced by whiteness, and whiteness oftentimes is assumed to
be the normative standard that exists unnamed.
This is because, as Brock (2020) argues, most computational technologies are
developed and designed with white users in mind. Daniels and Lalone (2012) argue
that there is “ample evidence to suggest that game design, like the high-tech industry as
a whole, is a white and male-dominated industry…this means that from user interface
design to hardware design, it is predominantly white males who design, test and
distribute video games” (pp. 88-89). Russworm (2018) similarly muses how white
supremacy and videogames intersect, as “every inflection of the digital can service
white supremacy just as the ideology of white supremacy is itself a technology of
capitalism…game culture’s proximity to these things is widely apparent when doxxing,
trolling, and overt threats of violence are the ready-made tactics of online hate
campaigns” (para. 7-8). In this call to action, Russworm wants game studies to examine
how games and gaming culture are marked and intersect with white supremacy (para.
8). Ultimately, Russworm also argues that whiteness is a defining feature of game
studies (para. 11), and that scholars need to continue to reckon with that fact. In
this way, critiques of whiteness are a starting point for efforts to retheorize the
relationships between games and society and explore new approaches arising from the
local knowledge of racialized players and researchers.
At base, this is seen in calls to reexamine the presumptions of whiteness that
frame studies of games and players, particularly the body of work on the so-called

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“digital divide,” as well as work on digital technological use, which tends to start from
normative uptake and use of technology as defined by white communities of users
(Brock 2020; Everett 2009). Everett (2009) focuses on African diaspora communities
and seeks to correct the notion of a digital divide, noting how the “structured absences
of black bodies that have marked most popular imaginings of the brave new world”
are premised on observations that Black technology users are not adopting and using
technology in the same manner as white users, and thus are “in danger of reifying an
updated myth of black intellectual lag or black technophobia” (p.20). Both Brock and
Everett insist on, instead, studying how Black individuals and communities actually
use technology for their own ends and to support their own pleasures, “to suggest an
alternative scenario—a fact of black technophilia” (Everett 2009, p.20).
Both Murray (2017) and Malkowski and Russworm (2017), on the other hand,
contend that there has been too much focus on technological aspects when studying
games, and too little application of cultural lenses and approaches, which reifies the
unexamined cultural biases of the technology. Murray (2017) sees videogames as a
crucial site for “negotiating unresolved cultural, social, or political frictions” (pp. 2-3)
and makes a convincing argument that cultural studies is an important approach to
studying games as a “site of contestation in the struggle for recognition” (pp. 20-22).
Similarly, Patterson utilizes a timely and creative approach by analyzing games using
the methodologies that centre affect and erotics. Patterson (2020) argues that an erotic
reading of videogames as Asiatic playthings enables scholars to identify how gaming
“affords new pleasures, desires, and attachments” that confront our positions in the
world as complicit imperial subjects” (pp. 226). Like Murray’s (2017) argument that
videogames are forces of cultural influence, Patterson’s focus on affect, erotics, and
pleasure, similarly calls attention to the power dynamics shaping and shaped by play.
Others aim to retheorize play from racialized perspectives. Tara Fickle’s 2019
monograph, The Race Card, discusses the Orientalism at the heart of Huizinga’s
conceptualization of the relationship between play and culture. Aaron Trammell’s
2023 monograph, Repairing Play, reexamines and challenges definitions of play as
voluntary, constructive, and positive, arguing that these definitions are complicit in
the systemic erasure of Black, Indigenous, and racialized people from leisure. By
expanding the definition of play to account for involuntary, dangerous, and harmful
activities, Trammell challenges the white, European thinking at the foundation of
contemporary games research and considers ways to reconcile already existing
theories of play with the fact that, for racialized people, play has always
contained hurtful and toxic aspects (e.g., demeaning representations and cultural
erasures).
While reflexivity about the role of racial privilege shaping the conduct of the field
and contributing to the continued marginalization of research and writing on
race has not been entirely absent, it is only since the late 2010s that these meta-
analyses have been taken up in leading venues and by prominent voices in the
field. These, and other efforts to rethink the racial biases of academic
understandings of play, set the groundwork for decolonizing existing frameworks
and advancing approaches emerging from racialized experiences and epistemologies.

24
Theme 3: Uneven uptake of research on race in games

Scholars have been researching how race is implicated in games for nearly thirty years,
with the work of Lisa Nakamura on race and cyberspace standing as an early beacon
for scholars. The intersections of race and game have been taken up intermittently and
from a number of perspectives by, for instance, Douglas (2002), Leonard (2003), Chan
(2005), Höglund (2008), Voorhees (2009b), and Everett (2009). But this topic only rose
to prominence with the publication of monographs, anthologies, and journal special
issues in the second half of the 2010s. In particular, there has been an increased focus
on Black game studies, including: representations of Blackness (Russworm 2018),
Black game makers (Grace 2021), and Black players’ experiences while gaming (Gray
2014). This is complemented by postcolonial studies concerning the role of
videogames supporting neocolonialism (Murray 2017), empire (Dyer-Witheford &
Peuter 2009), and the playing experiences of South Asian audiences (Mukherjee 2017).
Both these lines of inquiry, and studies of race in games generally, not only elucidate
the role of whiteness in game development and gaming cultures but are key to
effecting the topic’s rise to prominence.
But this does not mean that research has been attentive to a wide range of
racialized concerns in games. Research on how Indigenous, East Asian, Middle Eastern
and North African (MENA), and Latinx peoples are represented in games, as well
as their experience in games cultures, playing games, and the games industry, is not
emerging to prominence at the same pace in games and new media venues. More
scholarship on these topics can be found in area studies journals and other forums.
While scholars have been researching Asian and Asian/American issues in games for
some time (Chan 2005; Nakamura 2009; Rivera 2014), this work is not broadly cited
in game studies literature. The work of Chris Patterson and Tara Fickle, including
Patterson and Fickle’s monographs and their co-edited 2024 anthology on Asian-
American game studies with Duke University Press, may indicate greater uptake is
imminent. Similarly, Indigenous representation, experience, and game making has
been a consistent subject of work by LePensée, Bird, and others since 2010, but the
uptake and citation of this literature has been slow and uneven. Carlos Kelly’s (2023)
monograph on Latinx masculinities in games, as well as work by Ortiz (2019) and
others signals a potential change in the works for Latinx game studies, but there is no
such high-profile work on MENA representation and experience forthcoming. These
uneven trajectories of research on different racialized peoples and experiences present
both a gap in the field and an opportunity for further scholarship.

Theme 4: Racialized experiences in game making

Scholarship about how marginalized people are included in game studios, game
making, and the commercial industry illuminates the harms experienced by racialized
developers and creators. Specifically, racialized game makers working in the
commercial entertainment games industry feel pressure to adopt professional and
cultural norms characteristic of the predominantly white and masculine communities
of game developers and their target audience of players. Srauy (2019) explores how

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North American developers understand and craft representations of race, suggesting
that “game developers operate under an internalized pressure to create game
narratives that are quickly understandable and, thus, sellable” (p. 479). This, Srauy
argues, results in designers defaulting to the lowest common cultural denominator and
centring white cultural knowledge and experiences, borrowing themes and narratives
from previously successful games to “quickly clue the player into the setting and
rules of the game” (p. 479). Srauy makes a compelling argument for game studies
scholars to focus more on the informal, cultural inaccessibilities and impediments,
often described as casual racism, “within culture that affects the industry and the social
and economic structures that maintain racism” (p. 480). Bulut (2021) extends studio
studies of race, considering how white masculinity is coded into games themselves,
concluding that the “desire that runs the game industry is racialized and gendered”
(p. 331). Bulut argues that white masculinity ultimately “shapes how game workers
desire, informs how they imagine escapism, and ideologically structures how they
relate to technological work” (p. 331). Importantly, the scholarship in this area points
out how game production is racialized, especially by assuming certain player positions
and, at times, uncritically recycling racialized logics in game design that privilege the
knowledge and experiences of young, white, straight, cisgender men.
A growing area of scholarship aims to centre the voices of Black, Indigenous,
and racialized game makers and showcase how certain racialized communities are
representing their communities in games. Artists, activists, and (to a lesser extent)
development studios are increasingly making games that reflect the lives, values, and
experiences of racialized players and engage in advocacy for social change. Grace
(2021) catalogues and curates the work of Black game makers in order to understand
their experiences and to highlight the “cultural, artistic, and educational value of such
games” (p. 3) giving prominence to makers from racialized backgrounds that are
generally left out of wider conversations around game production. Further evidence
for this trend includes independent developers, including Momo Pixel’s acclaimed
game Hair Nah, NuChallenger’s Treachery in Beatdown City, and Thirsty Suitors from
Outer Loop games, as well as A.M. Darke’s work at the University of California at
Santa Cruz building the Open Source Afro Hair Library, a resource for developers to
access 3D models of typically “Black hair.” Gray and Leonard (2018) document more
of this work in their anthology on Woke Games.
However, the most sustained inquiry in this area involves Indigenous game
designers centring Indigenous ways of knowing in games and engaging in Indigenous
survivance, which is not simply survival and endurance but “a way of living and
creating that nourishes Indigenous ways of knowing in the context of our self-
determination in the world today” (LaPensée 2014, p. 264). LaPensée (2021) uses
the Indigenous-developed game When Rivers Were Trails to showcase how Indigenous
storytelling, values, and worldviews persist and find new expression. Bird (2021)
explores how games such as Never Alone require players “to enact and embody cultural
values and knowledges of the community,” centring Indigenous representation in
meaningful ways and thus offers a way for Indigenous communities and creators
to convey their culture (p. 255). Indeed, LaPensée et al. (2022) argue that putting

26
Indigenous people in lead roles in game development can lead to “dynamic spaces of
self-expression through code, design, art, and sound) (p. 329). Bird (2021) terms these
spaces sovereign digital spaces but highlights the challenges of instantiating them.
Still, as LaPensée et al. (2022) argue, “sovereignty can be enacted in how games are
developed, with consideration for who is involved and in what roles, how funding
is gained and distributed, how intellectual property rights regarding Indigenous
knowledge are managed, and how decisions are made regarding who can access a game
and in what ways” (p. 329). Other academic work focuses on building Indigenous game
making capacities in the context of cultural development and storytelling, examining
the Skins workshops in Canada (Lameman et al., 2010) and the Sami Gam Jam in
Sweden (Laiti et al., 2020). This type of work highlighting game-making in local,
racialized communities evidences a counterpart to the way commercial game
development assimilates racialized game developers into the narrative and
representational conventions of whiteness (Srauy 2019). This work also includes
resource development and sharing within Indigenous game making communities,
such as the Indigenous Game Devs website, and the Indigenous Interactive Digital
Media and Video Game Database developed by Meagan Byrne.1

Theme 5: Visual representation and racialization

Videogames are “platforms for multiple modes of visuality, including video and
computer- generated animation, as well as still images in the form of computer-
generated art and digitized photographs and drawings” (Voorhees 2012a, p.3). It
should be no surprise, then, that visual representation and how videogames ascribe
attributes and actions to people who look a certain way, is the most studied dimension
of racialization and videogames.
Everett (2014) writes about the symbolic annihilation of racialized people in
games through harmful representation, linking this to both the experience of players
and the dynamics of game production. Noting the absence of racial and ethnic
diversity in terms of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Asian main characters, or must-
play-characters (MPCs), and the dearth of racialized characters who fall outside of
familiar and demeaning stereotypes, Everett nonetheless acknowledges that “efforts
to expand gaming’s revenue stream in a transnational global media ecology have
resulted in the industry’s… nod to racial and gender diversification in the creation
and development of MPC characters outside of dominant white masculinist
heteronormativity” (p. 3). But, while this diversification is sometimes seen as a
breakthrough, Everett points out that these characters often cleave to popular
stereotypes and familiar companion, helper, or side-kick character types.
This is, in part, due to the conventions and tropes associated with different kinds
of stories and contexts common in videogames. Certain game genres, such as war
games like the Call of Duty franchise, fantasy-themed games like those based on the
work of JRR Tolkien, sports games like the NBA series, and action-adventure games
like the Grand Theft Auto series rely on settings that foreground racialized characters in
marginal or ancillary ways. Focusing on adventure games and sports games, Leonard
(2003) argues that these games embrace racial stereotypes, imagery, and stock figures

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and tropes, which depict Chinese, Japanese, Hispanic, African-American, and Jamaican
street gangs engaging in violent turf wars. According to Leonard,

the racial dynamics of GTA III are overshadowed by its in-your-face imagery: the heavily
accented East Indian cabbie; the poor-English speaking Chinese women walking on the
street; and the purple-clad black pimps. Almost all of the innocent citizens of Liberty City
are white, the majority of whom are upper class and elderly. (p. 4)

Chan (2005), while also examining sports games and action adventure games, focuses
on war games, which are often linked to arguments around historical authenticity and
perpetuate “dominant constructions of racial otherness” while certain authoritative
histories often exclude and overwrite the history of marginalized groups (p. 26). It
is in the context of war games such as America’s Army and Full Spectrum Warrior that
the Middle East and North Africa are most commonly represented. Höglund (2008)
notes how much the Middle East has been the focus of both American economic
and military interest since the Cold War, and argues that the game space in these
military games “reveal the architecture and the iconography of a (usually generic)
Islamic nation and the people the gamer, playing as an American soldier, encounter are
dressed as the stereotypical Arab” (para. 12). Höglund further suggests that Western
military games are concerned with “dramatizing the necessity of continuous military
violence in the Middle East by describing this space as a site for perpetual war” (para.
24). Furthermore, Šisler (2008) observes that games that include the Middle East tend
to reinforce “stereotypical notions of arbitrary cruelty and barbarism” (p. 207). In
these games, the player usually controls American forces and is never given the chance
to play as or with Arab or Muslim characters. The enemy, always depicted using
stereotypical signifiers, such as wearing headcovers, is linked via in-game narrative to
international terrorism and/or Islamist extremism (p. 208). As such, these games are
premised on dehumanizing and/or anonymizing those in the Middle East.
Representations of Blackness, while more common in some genres, can be found
across a wide variety of games and have caught the attention of more scholars.
Notably, Brock (2011) explores how Blackness stands in for cultural evil in Resident
Evil 5 through its usage of Africa as a location and its depictions of African people as
savage and malevolent (p. 442). As Brock argues, the “combination of narrative, game
mechanics, and cultural rationales of primitive strength and genetic susceptibility
yield this result: an electronic rendition of savage, deformed, colored bodies that
build upon long-standing stereotypes and in-game mechanics to power the player’s
revulsion and justify their extinction” (p. 443). Looking primarily at massively multi-
player online role-playing games (MMORPGs), Higgin (2009) argues that

Black and brown bodies, although increasingly more visible within the medium, are
seemingly inescapably objectified as hypermasculine variations of the gangsta or sports
player tropes, which reduce race to an inscription of the ‘fears, anxieties, and desires of
privileged Western users.’ (p. 3)

Russworm’s (2017) chapter on Blackness in dystopian and apocalyptic fantasies points

to similar representations that devalue Black lives and experiences, leading her to
argue that the game industry needs to do better than just simply adding racially diverse
28
characters. She contends that “even as the medium moves toward including more
Black characters, it is largely still failing to do so imaginatively or progressively” (p.
11).
Research on Indigenous, Latinx, and East Asian representation is less prominent.
However, Lagace (2018) writes about the common appearance of the savage and noble
savage tropes, and Bird (2021a) writes about the pre-eminence of sexualization, white
revenge fantasies of killing Natives, and the “vanishing race” trope in narrative
representations of Indigenous people and cultures. Bird (2021b) also notes the
tendency to homogenize Indigenous peoples in games, resulting in the erasure of
“Native American characters whose regional attachment might stand in the way of
that” (p. 249). Kelly (2023) describes how Latinx characters are, when they do appear,
often sidekicks and comic relief, but most often they are just props to establish mood
and setting. Kelly describes an “amalgam of tropicalized Anglo viewpoints that deploy
stereotypes structuring how we are seen by global audiences, not just people within
the United States” (pp. 11-12). Patterson (2020) shares this concern for how race is
used to establish a tone or sensibility, arguing that games draw upon Asian discourses
to “create an ‘Asiatic’ space of racial otherwise” (p. 27). As Patterson (2020) elaborates,
Asiatic is a “style or form recognized as Asianish, but that remains adaptable, fluid,
and outside of the authentic/inauthentic binary” (p. 27). Rivera (2014) takes up both
this aesthetic as well as the prevalence of techno-Orientalism in games featuring Asian
characters and settings.

Theme 6: Play, procedural representation, and racialization

Beyond visual representation, videogames procedurally represent by means of

processes modeled in gameplay, as “procedural systems like computer software
actually represent process with process” (Bogost 2007, p.14). This shows up in the
logics that govern and the patterns that emerge from play. Play is widely accepted
as the interactive element that differentiates the experience of a videogame player
from a cinema viewer, as it involves the player in the material unfolding of the text.
Unlike philosophical conceptions of play as a free and voluntary activity, in games
play is always shaped by the game’s affordances and constraints. In this way, gameplay
can contribute to racialization as players virtually embody ideas and perform actions
within the procedural logics of the game.
While research about pixelated minstrelsy (Chan 2005) and how playing specific
characters is implicated in racialization is still invaluable, games scholarship now tends
to look at how the overarching operational logics of videogame play racializes players.
Fickle and Patterson (2022) offer an examination of racial logics across three decades,
from the 2000s to the 2020s, to suggest that “diverse casts” of characters are often seen
as a win condition for games researchers and developers alike. However, within these
increasingly diverse representational economies in games, they identify different roles
that the player is placed in, including the divine avatar and the racial empath, and how
those roles predispose play experiences that fetishize racialized experience. The divine
avatar is the most commonplace and involves playing and experiencing the game and
its story from a specific racialized position so that racial difference is constructed

ADE FOR GAMES 29

as a fundamental determinant of experiencing the world. The racial empath, on the
other hand, describes when the player is encouraged to voyeuristically play with the
pain of racialized marginalization. Fickle and Patterson argue that these forms of play
may lead to the fetishization of marginalized people and their experiences, while still
engaging in racist acts through the sorts of minstrelsy discussed above. By pointing
out the procedural implications of how diversity is designed into games and seen
as a win condition, Fickle and Patterson reinforce Everett’s observations that more
representations of racialized people is not necessarily a good thing, carrying this
argument into the operationalization of a game’s representational economy.
The small body of work on multiculturalism, which tends to examine the cultural
politics of racialized representation in the context of the procedural logic in games,
also interrogate the operationalization of the representational economy of games.
Voorhees’ (2009b) work on the Final Fantasy series takes into account the narrative,
visual, and procedural aspects of representation to argue that not only do videogames
allow players to experiment with different responses to racial differences, games also
shine a celebratory spotlight on liberal multiculturalist ideology. In practice this means
that to beat the game, players must assemble and then manage a cast of playable
characters and nonplayable helpers of different racial, ethnic, and cultural
backgrounds. Voorhees (2012b), Patterson (2015), and Callahan (2019) take up similar
questions around multiculturalism as a social and political strategy to manage
difference in relation to the Mass Effect series, while Douglas (2010) finds that the
immensely popular MMORPG World of Warcraft does similar ideological work.
Patterson and Fickle (2022) also discuss how some games position the players as
a multicultural manager, as the disembodied authority over NPCs who are often
racialized or others as aliens, elves, or hobbits. Players who want to win must therefore
“learn and reinforce the rules of tolerance” (p. 213) which aligns closely with the liberal
multiculturalism of North America, and Canada in particular (Callahan, 2019).
A methodologically similar line of analysis is extended in Indigenous games
research. Bird (2021a) argues that “not only has the actual, physical removal of
Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands created intergenerational trauma,
grief, and displacement, but within the digital spaces of videogames that feature
Indigenous peoples, these violences are being perpetrated once again” (p. 246).
Analyzing Minecraft, in which the land is consumable as players dig up resources and
use them to craft other game components, Bird explores how this game mechanic
encourages players to consume resources and engage a fantasy of domination and
control of the natural world. This game logic works “to mollify the majority of the
player populace who would view the earth as a consumable object for them, not
a living, meaning-making being that is bound to them and them to it” (p. 252). In
this sense, these operational logics and the experience of play they predispose are
incompatible with Indigenous worldviews.

Theme 7: Socialization and racialization

In tandem with designed elements of games, communities of play shape how players
experience games and make meaning from their play (Pearce 2011). The white,

30
masculine character of mainstream North American gaming culture provides
important context for understanding how socialization through interaction with other
players impacts racialization in gaming spaces. Ultimately, videogame players
experience disproportionate levels of harassment in online gaming, ostracization from
mainstream gaming communities, and feelings of alienation from the characters and
stories featured in games.
Nakamura’s influential work on gold farmers in MMORPGs is foundational to
studies of racialized social experiences in and around games. In her work on the
racialization of the work-play dialectic, Nakamura (2009) notes how specific forms of
gamic labour and styles of play “have become racialized as Chinese, producing new
forms of networked racism that are particularly easy for players to disavow” (p. 130).
She explores how gold farmers, players who acquire and sell in-game resources and
credits for out-of-game currency, are particularly hated in MMORPG’s, resulting in
anti-Asian sentiment that comes through as anti-farmer memes and overtly racist
machinima (Nakamura, 2009, p. 136). Nakamura’s work is key to seeing how a style
of play becomes synonymous with race, and how negative sentiment against those
players becomes the “common sense” of the social experience of gaming.
However, the most field-defining and well-cited work in this area is Gray’s
groundbreaking 2014 book on Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live, in which she
catalogues the many ways that Black players are targeted for abuse, and the then-
nonexistent safety tools available to players whose existence is a deviation from the
norms of mainstream gaming culture. Additional studies of the experience of Black
women gamers on Xbox Live explore how these players are linguistically profiled
based on auditory cues that signify Blackness and then targeted for harassment (Gray
2018). Nakamura (2013) similarly catalogues and analyzes the forms of abuse aimed at
racialized players through in-game communication tools, while Ortiz (2019) explores
how racialized men negotiate racist trash talk in gaming spaces and how this process
shapes and is shaped by masculinity (p. 573). Ortiz argues that “overtly racist
interactions within Xbox Live operate as processes of gendered race-making,” and
that men who experience this learn to “navigate racial boundaries online in ways
that encourage strategies of silence and emotional desensitization to racism, but only
after experiencing stigmatization from peers and family” (p. 573). Akil Fletcher (2020),
meanwhile, showcases how esports communities construct both skill and labour in
order to justify the continued exclusion of Black players.
Gray’s work is also vital to studies of positive social interaction. It identifies the
development of Black lesbian networks on Xbox Live, “paying particular attention to
the ways the space influences their identities and aids in community building because
of their marginal status rooted from their intersectional standpoint and expressed in
digital gaming” (2018, p. 286). Here, Gray centres the experiences of lesbian Black
and Latinx women to emphasize how they negotiate their individual and collective
identities in hostile spaces. Interestingly, it is this very hostility that enables
community-building as:

“the private spaces within gaming culture that many marginalized groups inhabit are the
few spaces that value the articulation of marginalized interests and viewpoints…in the

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 small community that these lesbians of color have established, they build social cohesion,
and establish alternative and equally valuable interpretations of what it means to be Black,
Woman, Lesbian, Poor, and geographically isolated in many contexts” (p. 293).

In short, Gray found that Xbox Live and its private party chat capability actually
fostered a supportive gaming environment that facilitated identity and community
development among Black lesbians.
Other studies demonstrate how racialized players form community outside of but
nevertheless through videogames. Fletcher’s (2022) work on intermediality and Black
community points to how racialized players are able to come together using social
networking and other venues outside of games, though it also highlights the precarity
of these communities. Ortiz’s (2019) study on how Black men navigate racist trash talk
and the support, or lack of support, they receive from those around them, points to
the development of an oppositional community, though a masculinist and chauvinistic
one. Ultimately, Ortiz (2019) finds that racialized men retreat to and entrench their
notions of masculinity in order to build group solidarity to deflect and counter racism.

CONCLUSION: RESEARCH GAPS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

As an increasingly ubiquitous media form, games are not only an index of existing
inequities but also shape public knowledge of privilege and marginalization. As
cultural and artistic objects, games can perpetuate harmful constructs or advance
positive representations that become embedded in institutional and political decision-
making; delimiting for the public what futures and solutions are considered
reasonable, sensible, and even possible. While more research on racialized experiences
in the games industry is necessary, current evidence suggests that game development
replicates these beliefs in the norms and patterns of hiring, retention, and promotion,
directly reproducing and further contributing to inequitable conditions. In short,
games have both material and symbolic importance for the changing dynamics of
privilege and marginalization in society.
As an exploratory effort, these conclusions are premised on the largely qualitative
analysis of a substantial body of scholarship. A systematic review of the literature
that quantifies and traces the citational web of research on race and games beyond
the humanities and social sciences may suggest further refinement of the themes
identified, or entirely different themes altogether. The remit of the grant that
supported this work, to focus on social sciences and humanities scholarship, resulted
in the exclusion of a large body of public-facing writing and gray literature produced
by game makers, non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, journalists, and
critics. Indeed, most of the empirical data about the experiences of game developers
is produced by industry organizations like the Entertainment Software Association
and the International Game Developers Association. This also excludes a good amount
of writing by racialized developers and critics for whom traditional scholarship may
be structurally or culturally inaccessible. Indigenous game makers and advocates, in
particular, seem to self-select out of academic venues to pursue more community-
oriented practices and knowledge building. Expanding the review by scoping beyond

32
humanities and social sciences literature and and/or including grey and public-facing
works are important next steps to developing a comprehensive picture of this research
area.
Within its limitations, this research synthesis of social sciences and humanities
scholarship at the intersection of race and games revealed several key themes in the
literature, notably work on whiteness in games, gaming culture, and game studies,
research on how games are implicated in the process of racialization, as well as studies
of how racialized players find meaning and joy in their gameplay and game making.
But this is still very much an emerging area and there is much work to be done. We
therefore suggest four avenues for future research on games and race.
Confront and Pursue Alternatives to the Whiteness of Game Studies. Critiques of
whiteness in games are a well-established line of inquiry, but critiques of and
alternatives to the whiteness that characterizes approaches to doing game studies
are only just emerging. Recently, the discipline of communication studies engaged
in a period of self-reflection as a result of the #CommunicationSoWhite hashtag
movement, though it’s an open question about the degree to which the outcome can
be considered successful (Ng et al., 2020). Can we build from Trammell and Fickle’s
work highlighting how foundational works to the field are rooted in white, hegemonic
conceptualizations of play and games to the point of recognizing and reflecting on the
fact that #GameStudiesSoWhite? Not only the subjects and objects we study, but the
ways we study them and how we conceptualize the knowledge this study produces?
Future work should keep these important questions in mind, and continue to confront
the whiteness that pervades game studies.
Linking decolonization, Indigenization, and Blackness with Post-colonialism. Game
studies scholarship on Blackness and Indigeneity is largely disconnected from the
more established study of post-coloniality in and around games. This may be because
of perceived tensions between postcolonial and decolonial theory. Certainly, the
postcolonial approach of identifying the trace of the colonizer or colonialist logic in
the aftermath of the colonizers’ exit could be seen as being in conflict with theories
that centre Indigenous sovereignty through decolonization. But, in fact, scholarship
on decolonization and Indigenization doesn’t suggest that these processes entirely
eliminate or eject colonialist ideology and practices. That is to say, research pursuing
decolonization tends to recognize the process is ongoing and that decolonization
is not a task so quickly and completely accomplished. It is more likely that the
periodization of decolonization processes and the postcolonial condition is the crucial
factor; as the work of decolonization and Indigenization are prerequisite to the
emergence of postcolonial conditions. In the North American context, Blackness is not
(as far as we found) linked to coloniality outside of the historical context of the African
diaspora in North America via the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Nevertheless, making
explicit the linkages and disjunctures between these theories and approaches would be
an asset to the larger project for social justice they contribute to.
Examine and interrogate community interventions. There have been multiple
community interventions to diversify the games industry, such as organizations that
provide marginalized individuals with the opportunity to learn more about game-

ADE FOR GAMES 33

making software such as Unity through Code Coven, as well as organizations that
engage with high-school age students to encourage a love and enjoyment of computer
science as a creative tool, such as Girls Who Code. It is necessary to further study these
organizations, their relationships with industry, and to what extent they challenge or
reproduce the imperative to assimilate racialized and otherwise marginalized people
to the norms of androgyny and white supremacy (Srauy, 2019). Alternatively,
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC) has been hosting the Skins Workshops
to introduce Indigenous youth to the tools and techniques of game design since 2006
(Lameman et al., 2010), Russworm’s Radical Play Lab connects UCS games faculty
and students with high-school students in the local community, and Gray’s annual
Camp Kiki introduces secondary school students to positive social influences through
games and esports. While we might study the impact of these and other like efforts
at community intervention, we also need to move, as a field, to recognize this kind of
community engagement as a form of scholarly practice and creative making (and not
the making of novel objects but of engaged political subjects).
Further non-trivial exploration of race and Intersectionality. Despite the body of work
on the intersections of race, gender, and occasionally sexuality, there has been less
focus on other dimensions of intersectionality, such as how class, caste, religion, age,
disability, queerness etc. intersect with race. For example, the intersection of race and
disability is rarely touched on in scholarship around race, and is usually a secondary
or even tertiary focus when it is. For instance, Gray (2020) briefly discusses inclusive
game design and the different accessibility issues that disabled players face in
videogaming in chapter five of her book and Hutchinson (2017) briefly takes up race
and disability in discussing blind Triad boss Wu Zi Mu in Grand Theft Auto: San
Andreas. Sexuality and queerness are also not often combined with concerns around
race, though Gray’s (2018, 2020) work on Black lesbian gamers is cited in other
scholarship on race, and Brey’s (2023) thesis on queer play of Skyrim focuses on
how queering the game involves the performance of white, colonialist subjectivity.
However, there is a notable dearth of research linking race and caste, religion, or age
in game and gaming, though age, religion, and caste have been studied independent
of race. Additionally, it is vital that future studies on intersectionality meaningfully
interrogate how race and other social locations contribute to the representation and
experiences of marginalized communities, players, and game makers. There is a real
danger in superficial analysis that highlights intersectionality without careful
consideration of how each social location is implicated.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How does whiteness influence your approach to studying or making games? Is the
influence methodological, in terms of how you conduct the research or creative

34
practice? Is the influence substantive, in terms of the questions you ask, or the objects or
texts you focus on?

2. How is the process of game-making factored into your work? Do presumptions

about racialized characters or presumptions of the whiteness of the target audience
for commercial games impact how you understand the player’s experience? If
you make games, how do you understand your audience?

3. What other directions do we need to pursue to better and more thoroughly understand
the relationship between games and race?

KEY TERMS

Procedural representation: A property of algorithmic media whereby social, political,

and other systems are modelled by mediated systems. According to Ian Bogost, who
coined the term, capitalism is modelled in the gameplay of Animal Crossing, in which
farming and other labour is performed in order to pay off debts and acquire virtual
possessions
Racialization: The social, political, and communicative process through which people or
groups are identified with a race. Games participate in racialization by linking a set of
appearances and behaviors to racial identities and players contribute to racialization
by interacting with one another through presumed norms (e.g., whiteness) and
attributing racial characteristics to other players.
Symbolic annihilation: Describes the lack of media representation or the negative media
representation of marginalized groups. Originally coined by George Gerbner in the
context of cultivation theory, Gaye Tuchman elaborates that symbolic annihilation can
occur through the media’s omission or erasure of the group, their trivialization through
diminutive and supporting roles, or their condemnation through vilifying or
dehumanizing portrayals.
Dehumanization: The process of further marginalizing an othered individual or group by
comparing them to nonhuman objects such as animals or creatures, calling for their
destruction, or justifying these processes. This is often done in games by anonymizing
non-player characters whose only purpose is to be killed to further the goals of the game.

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Notes
1. https://www.indigenousgamedevs.com/resources/

ADE FOR GAMES 41

SPOTLIGHT 1: BUILDING EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE GAME
DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION

Based on a workshop by Kenzie Gordon, Vishal Sooknanan, Itoro Emembolu, Sean Gouglas, Alison Harvey,
Johanna Weststar, and Jennifer Whitson

This chapter reflects data compiled in April 2024.

SUMMARY

With recent waves of layoffs, high-profile workplace harassment cases,

and a notoriously short career length for gender minorities and people of
colour, the transition of new workers into the game industry involves
navigating a spate of barriers to equity and success that have been
understudied in academic research. Experts in their field were gathered
to talk about The First Three Years, an ongoing longitudinal study of
graduates of game programs in Canada and the United States, following
the journey of students as they move into the game industry. The project
analyzes variables to accessing employment in the games industry, what
entry-level employment looks like today, and the identities of the
students making their way into the industry. Additionally, researchers
delved into the claims and learning strategies employed by game design
programs at various post-secondary institutions to investigate the degree
of preparation participants felt for their future careers.

A P P L I C AT I O N P O I N T S

The preliminary findings of The First Three Years project point to a

number of areas where games education should be improved, as well as a
few aspects that educators should consider adopting more broadly.
Students’ concerns that their racial or gender identity, sexual orientation,
or physical and mental differences would lead to challenges in the
industry were affirmed by experience in their academic programs and
internships, suggesting that educators still need to unlearn implicit biases
and prepare students to overcome those biases in work environments.
While opportunities to network with games professionals were seen as
valuable for securing employment, students found the common practice
of simulating studio work patterns and/or expectations in
the educational setting problematic, suggesting game educators need to

42
 do more to ensure that students are prepared to challenge or
negotiate to the commercial games industry’s culture of overwork. With
a significant portion of graduates expressing that the industry’s
responses to their identities impacted their career trajectories, and the
pronounced drop-off in employee satisfaction particularly for
minorities, game educators must consider what their programs can
do to centre and support marginalized people as they transition into
the game industry.

THE FIRST THREE YEARS

While the number of post-secondary programs in games has increased tenfold

from 2010 to 2020, the games industry itself can be a difficult environment for
graduates to work in. It’s not uncommon to hear about mass layoffs, sharp drop-
offs in employee satisfaction, and stories of people, especially those in
marginalized communities, leaving the industry quickly.
Within this context, The First Three Years project was created to understand what
happens in the first three years of employment for people entering the games
industry. Testing claims that post-secondary programs make about preparing
their students for success in the games industry, the project examines what
challenges these workers face, and what factors make for supportive work and
educational experiences.
The study initially recruited just over 200 students in their final year of either a
graduate or undergraduate post-secondary program in games studies in Canada
or the United States. Through networks such as the Higher Education Video
Game Alliance (HEVGA), the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), and the
International Game Developer Association (IGDA), students were given a
preliminary survey for demographic information, followed by an interview.
These interviews began in 2021 and each graduate will be interviewed again
every year for the next three years to understand their career trajectory. The
findings shared here are preliminary results based on the first two years of the
study.

WHO ARE THE PARTICIPANTS?

• From a final sample of 173 undergraduate students, the average age

for setting out on their career journeys was 22 years old (Figure 1).

ADE FOR GAMES 43

 • The sample included 43 cisgender men, 32 cisgender women, and 15
individuals identified as transgender, non-binary, genderfluid, or another
identity along the gender spectrum (Figure 2).
• 44% of individuals identify themselves as members of the LGBTQIA+
community. 51% of individuals did not identify themselves as LGBTQIA+,
but half of those individuals indicated themselves as allies.
• In the United States, 41% of participants identified themselves as white.
Amongst the undergraduate participants, 10.8% of individuals were Asian,
and 8.9% identified as multiracial (Figure 3).
• In Canada, 54% of participants identified as white. Amongst undergraduate
participants, 10.8% of individuals identified as Chinese, and 9.4% identified
as multiracial (Figure 4).
• 48.8% of individuals believed that their identity (be it race, gender, or
sexual orientation) would impact their experience in the games industry.

Figure 1. Graph displaying the age of participants

44
Figure 2. Pie chart displaying the gender identities of participants

Figure 3. Stacked graph comparing the ethnic breakdown of participants in Canada and the USA.

The initial interview delved into how students perceive their various identities as
impacting their journey as they start their careers and try to get their foothold in
the industry. About half of the participants indicated that they believe their race,
gender, or sexual orientation would potentially impact their ability to establish
their careers in the games industry. Similarly, of the 33% of individuals who
identified a physical or mental difference, 60% believed their differences would
harm their career. Very few (around 15%) believed that that difference would be
celebrated and that they would it would have a positive impact on their ability to
gain employment.
Alongside the startling statistics about individuals’ concerns and perceptions
about discrimination in the workplace, a small subset of students reported that it

ADE FOR GAMES 45

 was common for gender and racial minorities to be spoken over in professional
settings, including classrooms. These workplace challenges can speak to the need
for a greater diversity of faculty and industry role models as well as strategies to
facilitate conversations about a lack of representation and/or inclusion in the
workplace. While some white male participants talked about the importance of
allyship, others reported not being worried about discrimination because it did
not affect them.
Students were also interviewed about their career aspirations, and where they
would like to go upon completion of their education. The overwhelming majority
chose the games industry as their main career path. Generally, students were
looking to go into AAA (53%) or Indie companies (37%), with 41% indicating that
they would like to start their own company or studio. Approximately 70% of
students indicated that they would be open to an internship before gaining entry-
level employment after they graduated.
The first cohort of 50 students was interviewed after they had been in the
industry for about a year. Researchers connected with the participants to check
on their postgrad experience and found that about half had found work in the
games industry. Some had found work in parallel tech sectors, but others had not
been able to find secure employment. Participants applied to an average of 46 jobs
each, with 30% of the participants applying to over 100 jobs. The study found that
the number of job applications sent was not a predictor of success. Research team
member Kenzie Gordon notes that “applying to 100 jobs does not seem to have
guaranteed you will get a job any more than applying to two jobs.” Of the
graduates in this cohort who found work in the game industry, only 25% had
found a permanent position. Some participants never applied to a single job; they
were recruited directly through previously held connections. Internships were a
particularly fruitful way to find long-term work, with a significant portion of
participants returning for a contract or full-time position at the company where
they interned.
Participants noted that they had been told their games programs and school
projects would not help them find work, but that extracurriculars would. One
participant shared that 20% of a job applicant’s ‘value’ seemed to come from their
school while the rest came from work experience. However, many participants
either found it difficult to build tangible connections in the games industry or did
not know how to. The ability of students to create connections varied depending
on proximity to game hubs, faculty members’ connections to the industry, and the
extent to which game programs had built-in opportunities like alumni networks.
When it came to translating academic practices into the industry, participants
were split on the usefulness of creating ‘realistic’ game studio experiences to
mimic industry practices. Some found the practice helped them build experience
and feel prepared, while others found it led them to burnout similar to industry
professionals’ experience of ‘crunch.’ Participants suggested that programs can set
up expectations for students and can help change ideas around game design by
using lo-fi tech like Twine, learning about alternative work structures like co-ops,
and discussing the importance of mental health in the game development process.

46
While almost all students were talking about labour issues in the games industry
with their peers, games programs often addressed these issues indirectly and
without providing possible solutions. Participants discussed how game programs
should emphasize collaboration over competition. Some brought up the idea of
the ‘meat grinder’ ethos in the industry, which can sometimes be adopted by
games programs that condition students into thinking that they should expect
poor working conditions in the industry.

INDUSTRY CONDITIONS

• Individuals who worked in contract labour were significantly more

likely to be in hourly or lower-paid positions.
• Only about 20% of the participants were in positions that paid $80,000
a year or more.
• The most significant portion of participants were making closer to
$30,000 a year working full time.

The researchers concluded by noting that their study does not intend to show
that games programs and educators are bad; on the contrary, many students had
overwhelmingly positive experiences in their programs and left more than
prepared for the industry. That said, some students reported feeling that their
games programs had promised outcomes that weren’t delivered. Overall, the
ongoing study seeks to find out what can be further improved within these
programs to enable students to find greater success within the game industry
after graduating.
You can read the latest news and updates from the project website for the First Three
Years: https://first3yearsproject.com/

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Given the popularity of the internship pathway for games program graduates,
how much should internships and co-op experiences be embedded into games
programs themselves? What does a just and equitable approach to these types of
experiential education look like?
2. How involved should game educators be in advocating against ‘crunch’ or the
‘meat grinder’ ethos by pushing for unionization and/or other modes of organizing
work such as worker co-operatives?

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 3. What other ways can games educators advocate for a more just games industry,
within the classroom and beyond?

KEY TERMS

The ‘meat grinder’: Issues of poor working conditions and discrimination and
harassment in the workplace have helped create an idea of the games industry as a
‘meat grinder.’ As games programs prepare students to enter the workforce, games
programs should be careful not to reinforce this ethos and should raise questions
about what can be done to change these issues in the industry. The ‘meat grinder’
metaphor helps us see the problems in a different light than the ‘leaky pipeline’
traditionally used to describe how game workers drop out of education and the
industry.
Crunch: A common term in the game industry used to describe periods of intense
overtime work during the development of a game. Workers in ‘crunch’ frequently
work 60-80 hours a week (or more), sometimes for weeks or months at a time, and are
often not paid overtime. Crunch is often used to cut costs in game development and/
or to get a game to a fixed development milestone such as a product launch.

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CHAPTER 2.

THE IMPACT OF GENUINE AND MINDFUL INCLUSION OF

MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES IN CREATIVE WORKS

Elaine Gómez-Sanchez

SUMMARY

Elaine Gómez-Sanchez shows how genuine inclusion and cultural appreciation

in game development and other creative endeavours create opportunities for
meaningful representation that impacts the games we play, our workplaces, and
our everyday lives. She discusses her own lived experience as a Latina game
developer, describing how Latinx representation in games is lacking, both
behind the scenes and in the final product. Starting from the premise that
gaming has the power to counter the perpetuation of stereotypical perceptions,
she discusses how games can be designed in more uplifting ways. By
understanding one another’s experiences, histories, cultural experiences and
backgrounds, Gómez-Sanchez argues, we can shape creative decision-making
in game development to be more inclusive, mindful, and authentic.

APPLICATION POINTS

Gómez-Sanchez shows the importance of self-reflexivity for the development

and growth of her creative process. Her conceptualization of genuine and
mindful inclusion is a result of this kind of thinking, which emphasizes the
importance of recognizing the complexity of identity to create opportunities
for empathy and cultural change. Throughout her advocacy work, Gómez-
Sanchez also demonstrates the difficult task of opening doors for others,
creating space to improve representation and inclusion, leading to more diverse
teams in games studios. Take a moment to explore the websites associated with
her advocacy work when considering this chapter. These efforts, combined
with her work in game design, her work creating an inclusive culture at her
studio, and her mentorship, all show effective action: at multiple levels, she is
doing the work that is necessary to help improve the conditions for
marginalized individuals.

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I started working at Brass Lion in 2021. I decided to start working there because, at
my previous studio, I was surrounded by a lot of people who were not like me.
Namely, cisgender white men. I learned a lot from people who had been in the
industry for decades and had a lot of knowledge to impart to me. But I felt othered,
and I felt alone. For a long time, I felt like I didn’t belong, that my voice didn’t matter,
like I was just another number that was there to help with whatever they wanted to
do. I didn’t feel uplifted and empowered to grow and be myself in that space. I tried to
find a place that would celebrate me for me and would respect me for everything that I
had to give. I’m happy that I was able to find Brass Lion Entertainment, which I would
describe as a studio for people of colour and by people of colour. I’ve never been on a
design team where there are people from all walks of life and all ages, but also all
backgrounds and all skin tones. It’s fantastic to be able to share in that and talk about
complicated things on a daily basis because we feel safe to do so.

MY WORK

As a senior game designer, I design aspects of the game that have to do with the non-
combat type of design: exploration, social design, thinking about progression, and
working with live ops and the progression designer to figure out how we can surface
the player experience. Those are the types of things that I concentrate on as a game
designer. I also lead our accessibility design strike team. In all facets of the game, we
ask, how can we make it as accessible as possible? I’m constantly working with the
UI/UX team and other folks who are interested in accessibility to try to figure out
how we can incorporate accessibility from the design of the game and the systems
that we’re creating. Our goal is to improve access and help make the gameplay itself
easier to understand or more fluid so that everybody can play. We talk a lot to people
about accessibility, we do a lot of exploration, a lot of documenting. And of course,
as a senior designer, it’s a leadership position: having conversations with people daily,
sometimes all day; leading conflict resolution; listening to people if they are upset
about something that I may have said, or some feedback that I may have given. We do
these things to make sure that we’re still working as a team and that everybody feels
respected and heard.
I’m also very lucky that Brass Lion allows me to create games outside of work.
There are a lot of studios, especially in AAA, that do not allow you to do that. I can
do freelance work, I can get paid for it, I can do game jams and I can take courses
to make games. I can do anything that I want as professional development, which has
been great for me so that I can continue to grow outside of my job.

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Figure 1. LatinXinGaming and other non-profits help build community and offer resources.

I also co-founded LatinXinGaming1 (Figure 1) with some friends. Having a non-

profit is hard because we are serving other people, not ourselves. We’re constantly
thinking about ways to bridge the gap and overcome challenges with and for other
people, and being an advocate for those who may not be an advocate for themselves
or perhaps don’t feel the strength to be able to do that. That’s why I involve myself in
different organizations. One of them is Code Coven2, which is based out of the UK
and offers courses and game development resources to marginalized communities. I’m
involved with gay gaming professionals and the work that they’re doing in different
initiatives when it comes to game development—even helping with their website, for
example. As long as I can help in some way, I’m happy to give my time. And of course,
also the Puerto Rican Game Developers Association3 because I was born and raised in
Puerto Rico, and they are starting to grow and do a lot of cool things on the island. I
try to help as much as I can, whether that be as a mentor for an event or speaking at an
event.

IDENTITY AND ISOLATION

I was born in Puerto Rico. My father is from the Dominican Republic. On my father’s
side, he is African Indigenous—Afro blood through slavery, which has to be
acknowledged because all of us in the Caribbean islands have very mixed blood.
We have mostly African descent, Indigenous descent, and European descent. I am of
European descent from my mother’s side back to Spain, with people who would come
to work and build haciendas and work on farms. I have a very complicated history and
experience with my own identity because I have to reconcile that I have the blood of
the colonizer and I have the blood of the colonized. And how do I, as a person living in
2023, honour my ancestors and the people who have come before me, and who have
suffered and experienced trauma? What can I do to serve my community and give back

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and make sure that I remember my history and I remember what my family has gone
through?
All in all, this has really formed me: the history of my island, the politics
surrounding Puerto Rico, the complexities of being a Latina who speaks English ”well.”
I put quotations because I learned English at an early age, and other people have not
had that privilege. But speaking “well” or looking white. Being white-passing, but not
being born in the United States. Being Latina but not being viewed as a Latina, because
Puerto Rico is a US territory. I’m not Latina enough for some Latinos, but I am not
American enough either, even though I am an American citizen. It’s a very complicated
thing that has always been part of me. It comes out in many ways, especially creatively,
where I try to dissect some of those complexities.
In 2001, my family moved from Puerto Rico. I grew up close to the metro area,
which is where San Juan is, the beautiful coast, the beautiful water, where it’s sunny
and warm all day long. We moved to New Jersey, where everything felt the same.
Everything was so monotonous, all the houses looked the same, and everybody looked
similar. My family and I stuck out like a sore thumb.
It was a difficult time. I was only 11 years old. I was trying to figure out my place
in this new world because it really, honestly felt like a completely new world. The air
smelled different. The weather was different. My mom grew up in a military base, so
she spoke English well. And I spoke English well, coming from a bilingual school. But
my father did not speak English well. So, I had an immigrant experience, even though
I technically only moved from one US territory to another. It’s almost like moving
from state to state. But as a family, we experienced what it was like leaving our home
country for another and not having family around. Not having friends. Not being able
to even find ingredients that we would use to make our food. We would have to drive
into New York City to find certain things to be able to make the food that we are used
to eating every day.
It was a very tough transition, and it was the first time in my life that I felt othered.
Being in Puerto Rico, I’m just Puerto Rican. Everybody else is Puerto Rican. We all
speak Spanish. We can all speak to the same culture, we have the same experience in
society, we eat the same food. There’s so much that brings us together because we’re all
from the same place. It was the very first time that I felt marginalized. Now suddenly,
I wasn’t just Puerto Rican, and I wasn’t just a young girl who’s Puerto Rican and half
Dominican, even. I was Latina. I was a non-native English speaker. I was an immigrant.
I was all these labels that I’d never even heard of. Honestly, I didn’t even understand
when I first moved at 11 years old, when people started to say, “Oh but you don’t look
Latina, oh but your skin is not caramel or is not brown, your hair is not curly, so how
can you be x, y, z?” I questioned myself a lot. I wondered, who am I, and what do I do
with all these labels? I started to feel very isolated.
In Puerto Rico, we have a saying: “Ni soy de aquí, ni soy de allá,” which means I
am neither from here nor from there. And I started to feel that growing up, and that
included places like extracurricular activities, or on sports teams. I felt that isolation.
Even though you’re supposed to feel like you’re in a team, you get ‘othered’ because
you’re different from everybody else or you have a little bit of an accent.

52
 The food that I brought to school, I had to stop bringing rice, beans, and protein,
which is what we would normally eat in Puerto Rico. The school cafeteria would give
you a whole tray of rice and beans and greens and protein, and that was just normal.
But when I would bring my little Tupperware with my rice and beans, I always used to
get made fun of at school, because it was too strong smelling, it was too exotic. They’d
say, “Why would you eat rice and beans for lunch? That’s dinner food.” Even a little
thing like that affected me, and I didn’t know what to do with myself for a long time.
And I ended up just assimilating. I started bringing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
to school. I started dressing like everybody else so that I would stick out less and less
and less, and I could just survive. I could survive being around school, and I could
survive not getting made fun of. I could survive just by trying to be like everybody else.

CREATIVITY THROUGH TRAUMA

This is my personal experience. I cannot speak to the experiences of other

marginalized people. I cannot speak to how they were able to overcome this, or their
trauma, or their life experiences. I’m basing this on my experience to ask how this may
influence our creativity. I came to this question: what do I do with all of this? I have
a few choices. I can wallow in it. I can wallow in the misery, and I can wallow in the
negativity. I could use it as a catalyst for good so that I can create spaces and I can
create experiences for the people around me that fight against how I felt. Or I can use
it as a catalyst for negativity to put the blame and point the finger at people who have
hurt me, at experiences that have hurt me and take that bitterness and take all that
anger and use it for something else. Those are all the avenues that I could have gone
down.
I started trying to figure out, well, what do I carry? What is it that I’m carrying into
the work that I create, into the conversations that I start with people? There are the
labels, everything that I mentioned—being Latina, being a non-native English speaker,
being an immigrant, all of these things, the trauma. It’s not just my own personal
trauma, even when it is as little as getting made fun of for bringing food to school,
it’s the generational trauma of the history of my people, the history of my islands.
Knowing what it means to carry the Puerto Rican flag and the pain that comes along
with it– because for a long time, even displaying the Puerto Rican flag on my island
was illegal. The United States made that illegal for decades. Now it’s not illegal, so,
what does it mean to hold my flag and be proud of where I came from?
Some biases come from moving from one country to another. I’m Puerto Rican
born, but anybody who’s in New York who’s Puerto Rican, you’re told you’re not really
Puerto Rican. You don’t understand what it’s like to be on the island. I’m carrying
those biases and having to break them. My dreams, my aspirations, my hopes, my
expectations of how I want to be treated and how I want to treat other people. I carry
all those things, and we all carry all those things. This is not just for a marginalized
person like me, it’s all of us. We all carry this.
When we talk about inclusion, diversity, and equity, we have to understand that
when we want to be genuine and mindful about being inclusive, it means that we are
acknowledging and understanding that I am carrying—and we are all carrying—these
ADE FOR GAMES 53
labels, traumas, biases, dreams, aspirations, hopes, expectations. You cannot pick and
choose the good things about somebody’s culture or somebody’s personality and only
fixate on that. You have to remember everything else that comes with it, the good, the
bad and the ugly, because that is truly seeing somebody for what they’re worth and
helping them be seen.
This is tough because we don’t want to face the negative, we don’t want to face
the ugly, we don’t want to look inside what’s behind that door or open Pandora’s
box. But it is critical to understand and make people feel that they matter, that you
are seeing past the superficial and going a layer deeper into who they are, what has
made them, and what has brought them to where they are today. Genuine and mindful
inclusion means that there is an understanding and acknowledgement of everything
that a marginalized person carries.
I had to try and dissect how the impact of being mindful and genuine of
representing, of telling stories, of being authentic, and the impact that has on our life
as a creative. I noticed that there were three key things in my life. Again, I’m speaking
from personal experience, but I’m sure this can be something that everybody can relate
to as well. There’s a pivoting point at some place in your life where you’re going to
face an experience, go through something, or see something that is going to change
your life. Creativity is an extension of self that is everything. Creating games, creating
music, creating film, and creating art. You are giving a piece of you for people to see.
You are expressing how you feel, you’re telling the story or being able to embrace
an experience in a certain way and allow somebody to experience it with you. Then
there’s influence: how do you take all of those things and turn them for good and
impact somebody’s life? That’s where the social change comes from.

THE PIVOTING POINT

The pivoting point can be so many things. Many times, it’s a negative thing. It can be
something that somebody said or something that a parent said or did, and you decided
for yourself, I’m never going to be like x, y, z. I’m never going to do x, y, z. The pivoting
point takes many forms. It could be an event that could be life-changing for you; maybe
you heard somebody that really inspired you and motivated you and now you are fired
up and hyped up to do something. It could be a piece of media. Watching a movie,
watching a show, watching a documentary, watching the news. It could be anything
creative that has come from somebody or something that has motivated you. It could
be related to a personal experience, whether negative or positive. It could be related to
representation, when you see somebody do something that looks like you and all of a
sudden inspires you to change something about your life, to change careers or pursue
something that you weren’t even thinking about before. But seeing that person made
all the difference.
How does that impact creative works? Well, it impacted me in the form of Dr.
Joe Sanchez. Dr. Joe Sanchez was the only Latine educator in my whole life, outside
of Puerto Rico, of course. Living in the United States, he was the only academic,
teacher, and mentor that I had who was Mexican, who I could relate to on a deeper
level than just a superficial, and who saw my potential as a Latina, as a creative, as an
54
intellectual, and gave me wings to fly. Of course, I’m not saying that my parents weren’t
encouraging or that my friends weren’t encouraging because yes, they did. My parents
always believed in me, and they always told me that I could do anything that I wanted
to be that I was a go-getter and that I could do it.
But Dr. Joe Sanchez was special because he opened the door to many things that
other people may have never opened the door to, and for me, that was in the form
of research. He extended an opportunity to me to be able to go to university and do
a research program for marginalized students. That opened the door for me to apply
to graduate school, learn game design, and get to where I am today. For me, he was
my pivoting point. It was a little bit of everything because it was the representation
of seeing him as a Latino professor who could understand where I was coming from,
who could understand my immigrant story, could understand the bullying that comes
with it, and the ostracization that comes from all of that. But it was also him being my
TA and just being present at an event, like a course or a class. There were many, many
forms. Dr. Sanchez was my pivoting point and influenced me to be here and create
games.

CREATIVITY AS AN EXTENSION OF THE SELF

The second thing would be creativity as an extension of self. I always dislike it when
I read posts online where people say, “Stop putting political stuff in games because
games are not for that—it’s my escape from reality.” But that couldn’t be further
from the truth, because every single person making a game or a piece of media is a
living human being, and they’re experiencing something. They’re getting influenced
by something, they are hurting in some way, and they have something to say. It is
impossible to divorce creativity from self because it is an extension of self.
We see this a lot in music. I’m a big metalhead, and I love rock, I love heavy
music, and it’s always an extension of how you feel. In Linkin Park, where they talk
about mental health, they talk about things that other people didn’t talk about and
people could relate so much because they were extending themselves into the lyrics
that they were writing. Same thing with Kendrick Lamar. Same thing with Beyoncé.
When they go through experiences of being hurt by other people, or using substances,
and getting over that and telling the story of what that was like, it’s powerful. We can
use our experiences and what we have been through and extend them to creativity in
music in a way that impacts millions of people. People can relate and feel connected
to somebody that they have never and may never even meet ever in their life, but they
feel seen and heard through their music.
The same thing happens with film. How many films have we seen that have made
us cry or have moved us emotionally? Because the story is relatable, or we see ourselves
in the characters. I’m not Mexican, but when I watched Coco (Unkrich & Molina,
2017), I cried like three times, and it was because I could feel that sense of family. The
importance of needing love from the people that you surround yourself with. That was
very, very moving. It’s an extension of the creator’s self, their experiences, and what
they value. If we stop seeing creative works for what they are, it’s just a superficial
thing that we can just consume and absorb. When we go a layer deeper, we see the
ADE FOR GAMES 55
people who are creating these works and what they have been through. We can start
seeing the impact that they’re leaving behind for us to experience. The motivation and
encouragement that we can get from these works integrate into our own lives so that
we can create. It can be so powerful and life-changing.
And lastly, games. When it comes to seeing yourself on screen or somebody who
looks like you, the feeling is incredible. Especially because when you play a game,
you must fully immerse yourself in it. It’s not like in a film where you are passively
participating, you’re watching things unfold, and the story is unravelling before your
eyes. With a game, you have to actively participate in it. You are making the choices,
you are moving around, you are choosing to inspect, or read certain things. It’s very
active, and it’s very intentional, and being able to play as somebody else or seeing a
little piece of you or your story in the game is unlike anything in other media.
This is why I advocate so much. When we create games, or when we consult for
games, or when we consume games that other people have made, we see it with a lens
of: ‘What was the intention behind this story, this character; what is the creative team
trying to tell me? What are they trying to communicate?’ It’s not just a cool story, it’s
not just a dope environment. It’s always a bit deeper than that. Reading between the
lines can make a world of difference for you to understand what the dev team poured
their hours and their lives into in creating that project.

Figure 2. Gómez-Sanchez shares her culture through her project, Vejigantes.

In my life, this took the form of a project that I made last year, a very short project
called Vejigantes (Gómez-Sanchez et al., 2022). I extended myself in a way that I never
had before in a game. In this game, I fully immersed myself in Puerto Rican culture
and digitally created the craft of making the Vejigantes mask (Figure 2). In Puerto
Rico, these masks are worn at carnivals and festivals and they’re very much a piece
of our cultural identity. People hang them on their walls. They come in all different
colours and shapes, and different colours can mean certain things. I chose to use mask
crafting that is of African descent, where they take a coconut shell and grind it. They

56
remove all of the fibres and cut it, and it’s very labour-intensive. I chose to use the
coconut mask instead of the paper mâché, which is more of the European kind
because I wanted to embrace the African Indigenous roots of the art of Puerto Rico.
That’s also why the characters are brown, because I wanted to tell a little bit about
the African and Indigenous peoples of my island. That’s my father’s skin colour. I don’t
see my father’s skin colour a lot in games. When people think about Puerto Rican, they
don’t think about Afro-Puerto Rican. I wanted to say something special and different
with that. I was able to extend myself and my history and watch people play this game
who are not Puerto Rican and have them give me feedback and help them experience
something that they may never have even seen before because maybe they would never
go to Puerto Rico. In this digital experience, they were able to absorb a little bit of what
makes Puerto Rico so beautiful and special, and that meant the world to me.
Lastly, influence.

INFLUENCE

After the pivoting point and after creativity as an expression of self comes influence.
With something that you do, with something that you say, you can create a life-
changing experience for someone. You could create a pivoting point in somebody’s
life with the creativity and the things that you bring forth into the world. How have I
been able to do that with all of my labels and all the things that I have been through?
With my pivoting point, my extension of creativity in the games that I create, and the
time that I have given to create community, I’ve been able to influence by creating
LatinXinGaming, even though LatinXinGaming wasn’t for me. LatinXinGaming was
created out of the lack of a community existing. We didn’t see anything for Latinos in
the United States, and we decided to do it ourselves so that somebody else wouldn’t
feel as alone as we did when we first started. That has opened a door for so, so many
things.
I’ve been able to speak at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and speak to
senators and people in power about the Latino experience in the United States, and
what it’s like being a Latina game designer making games about cultural things and
how that can be used for good. I’ve been able to speak to kids. I’ve been able to speak
to high schoolers. I’ve been able to speak to college students. I’ve been able to speak to
other game developers. I’ve been able to speak to parents and people from all ages and
walks of life, to let them know that games are just my medium of expressing who I am
and what I have on the inside. It’s so powerful, and it makes me feel like I was made
for this—but anybody else could use that for good. They could write a book, they can
write an essay, they can write an article, they can make a short film. Anything creative
that comes out of the heart can be used for good and can be used as an influence to
impact the lives around you.
If it wasn’t for all these things, both negative and positive, all of my pivots, all
of my experiences, all of the games that I have created and the games that I have not
created that are stuck somewhere on my computer in a hard drive—if it wasn’t for all
these things, I wouldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t be able to inspire other people to
create and to see other communities as much more than just superficial differences,
ADE FOR GAMES 57
more than just a skin tone, more than just colours. It’s way deeper than that. It’s
celebrating our histories and our ancestors, making sure that we don’t forget the bad
so that we can celebrate the good. It’s all connected. That’s all included in the package.
It’s not just picking and choosing.

EMPATHY AND IMPACT

After all of the stuff that I said, the impact of genuine and mindful inclusion in
marginalized communities and creative works has the power to create social change
through empathy. I am speaking from my heart. I’m sharing my experience and my life
with you in hopes that it can empower you. I hope that it can inspire you and help you
see that I am more than what meets the eye. I am much more than just a senior game
designer. I am much more than just a Latina. I am my past, I am my present, and I am
my future. Through empathy, you’ll be able to read me and to see me for who I am and
see people who are like me and see people who are marginalized in other communities,
and who may have different experiences than me. But you have who you can come to
learn and appreciate, understand and respect and value because they are more than
what meets the eye.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What pressure to assimilate do you encounter in your research, creative

practice, and life?
2. What are some pivoting points in your life? What kinds of impact did those
moments make? When you think about “all that you carry,” how do those facets of
your life influence your own creative and/or intellectual production?
3. What kinds of opportunities for influence do you have? How might you tell your
own story to promote positive change?

KEY TERMS

Genuine and Mindful Inclusion: The understanding and acknowledgement of

everything (e.g., cultural values, material hardships, and other lived experiences) a
marginalized person carries, which is necessary for marginalized people to thrive in a
given environment.
Mentorship: Guidance from someone with similar lived experience who can help,

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discuss, and advise you through to your goals. Mentors can be difficult to find because
marginalized people in senior positions often juggle multiple responsibilities.
Representation: Describes the quantity and quality that people, and especially people
from marginalized backgrounds, are present in both media and entertainment products
and the industries and organizations that create them.

REFERENCES
1. Gómez-Sanchez, B., Sanchez, A., Gómez-Sanchez, E., Soto Massol, G., Dodge,
R., and Prudencio, X. (2022). Vejigantes (PC). Chulatastic.
2. Unkrich, L. & Molina, A. (Director). 2017. Coco. Disney, Pixar

Notes
1. https://www.latinxingaming.com/
2. https://www.codecoven.co/
3. https://www.prgda.net/

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SPOTLIGHT 2: JUST RESEARCH RELATIONSHIPS

Based on a panel with Kishonna Gray, Liz Nilsen, and Rhona Hanning

SUMMARY

Moderated by Dr. Gerald Voorhees, this interdisciplinary panel featured

Dr. Kishonna Gray, Dr. Liz Nilsen and Dr. Rhona Hanning, who
discussed how to foster and maintain just relationships in academic
research settings. The panel focused on the principles and practices of
animating non-extractive student-supervisor relationships, outlining
roles and responsibilities as well as best practices. The panellists shared
their knowledge of institutional guidelines for student supervision and/
or experience with cultivating and leading non-oppressive research
groups. Furthermore, they encouraged conversations about what
constitutes just research relationships within and across disciplinary and
institutional contexts. In the following sections, their conversation is
summarized through five actions that researchers and students can take
to create more just research relationships.

APPLICATION POINTS

Increasingly, academics are asked to envision and implement respectful

and non-extractive research involving marginalized communities.
Although many researchers and academics understand that power
dynamics play a part in their research with participants, many fail to
recognize how power differentials interact in supervisor-student
relationships. Indeed, researchers are rarely challenged to bring those
principles to bear in research groups, where asymmetries of institutional
power between colleagues, students, and staff are normalized. While
many graduate students are satisfied with their supervisor relationship,
there is a vast mental health crisis among graduate students more
generally. The panellists’ discussion offers several topics that supervisors
and graduate students can use to begin conversations about how we
might address these concerns. Common questions about how and when
the supervisor may participate in the research process can open broader
questions about individual, institutional, and disciplinary expectations
for research relationships. Linking this chapter to the workers’ collective

60
 presented by Soft Chaos (Spotlight 3) can also raise important questions
about ways to establish ‘structures of care’ that create meaningful
foundations for research practices that can apply to, and extend beyond,
graduate school.

RECOGNIZE THE ASYMMETRIES OF POWER IN GRADUATE

SUPERVISION

Relationships are key to a thriving academic community. They are important to

the successful completion of graduate programs and are also important for
student well-being. However, the historical foundations of academia, rooted in
colonial practices, have established supervisory traditions that often rely on
exploitative power dynamics. These dynamics can manifest in various forms, such
as imposing unreasonable demands on graduate students (e.g., tight deadlines,
work during evenings or weekends) or coercing students into
“volunteer” labor under the guise of professional development. These practices
disproportionately harm marginalized students who face intersecting forms of
oppression, further entrenching inequities.
Dr. Gray underscores the importance of applying an intersectional lens to
student-supervisor relationships to deconstruct and disrupt entrenched power
structures. Without such critical reflection, academic hierarchies risk
perpetuating or exacerbating exploitation, leading to significant harm.
Supervisors must recognize and mitigate the inherent power imbalances in their
roles, fostering relationships built on mutual respect, trust, and equity.
Importantly, power dynamics in academia are not exclusively hierarchical; they
are also shaped by social identities and lived experiences. While supervisors often
hold significant authority, students who are white, heterosexual, or cisgender men
may wield institutional privilege in ways that can harm faculty members who are
women, racialized, or part of LGBTQ+ communities. Such harms might include
placing unreasonable demands on supervisors or leveraging institutional
structures to intimidate or undermine them.
Addressing these complexities requires a nuanced and empathetic approach to
power within academic relationships. Supervisors and students alike must engage
in ongoing reflection, communication, and commitment to equity. By fostering
relationships that prioritize collaboration and mutual accountability, academic
institutions can create more inclusive and supportive environments for all
members of their communities.

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 IDENTIFY GOALS AND EXPECTATIONS PRIOR TO STARTING NEW
SUPERVISOR RELATIONSHIPS

Every student-supervisor relationship is different. With each new relationship

comes a unique set of interests, styles, practices, and learning needs. Having early
discussions about overarching goals and expectations for research and
collaboration can help ensure that everyone is aligned and reduce the potential for
harm. Articulating clear expectations can mitigate many obstacles and foster an
environment where individuals feel comfortable addressing concerns.
At the University of Waterloo, for example, 87-90% of graduate students report
having a positive relationship with their supervisor, which is in line with
provincial and national results. While this is a promising statistic, there is still
room to improve practices at the supervisory level.
Several years ago, an article in Nature highlighted the mental health crisis facing
graduate students, identifying the student-supervisor relationship as one of the
primary factors contributing to this issue (Evans et al., 2018, p. 283). Even with
clear expectations and protocols in place, supervisors have a significant influence
over their graduate students, underscoring the importance of this dynamic.
In addition, professional boundaries between supervisors and students are crucial.
Dr. Nilsen emphasized the need to establish and maintain these boundaries, and
Dr. Voorhees warned against replacing professionalism with friendship. Such
blurred lines can create conditions for emotional and psychological harm, further
highlighting the importance of clear, professional relationships in academia.

UTILIZE STRUCTURES OF SUPPORT BEFORE PROBLEMS ARISE

Relationships are the key to a thriving academic community. They are important
for the completion of graduate programs, as well as student well-being. In these
relationships, the supervisor and students support each other in various ways.
However, each relationship will be different in terms of what support is needed.
As Dr. Hanning notes, “These are individuals, and maybe they are parents, and
maybe they do need to work 20 hours a week outside of their work as a graduate
student just to make ends meet.” Once both parties have identified what supports
are needed, there is a shared awareness of circumstances, and an opportunity to
discuss how this support will be given or achieved.
Although universities are equipped with appeals procedures, grievances, and
protocols surrounding changes in supervisors, as a whole, universities have much
better mechanisms for responding to problems only after they occur. In these
cases, institutional and supervisory power must be a consideration as there is risk
to the student in coming forward with grievances. This is another reason that it is
important to practice prevention techniques. As Dr. Hanning explains, this
involves helping graduate students know what to do if a problem arises
and setting expectations that are consistent across supervisors for a particular

62
program. Importantly, it also means being proactive to ensure that institutional
processes account for individual circumstances and needs.
Dr. Nilsen notes that this matter goes beyond individual student-supervisor
relationships. The culture of a department is dictated by the types of supervisory
relationships that exist within it, and holding each other accountable at the
departmental level is the first step to improving relationships with students. Dr.
Nilsen also noted that for students, advocacy in these cases is often the
responsibility of the graduate chair, but many students do not know who to speak
to about their grievances or the harm they experience: “One of the things that I
will often start by sharing with students is our guide to graduate research
supervision because that outlines the responsibility of the department of advisory
committees, of the students themselves, and the supervisor.” Actions such as these
highlight the appropriate expectations for students to have of their supervisor and
their department. If those expectations are not being met, at a minimum students
know the channels that they can take.

RESPECT, RECIPROCITY, AND RELATIONSHIPS

For Dr. Hanning, whose research involves collaborations with communities that serve
First Nations and Métis students, there are three fundamental principles for success in
graduate-supervisor relationships: respect, reciprocity and relationships. Respect
includes respect for people, knowledge, and communities, but also respect for culture,
the land, and protocols and ceremonies that are part of working with Indigenous
communities. Reciprocity strives for equal partnerships within research: Dr. Hanning’s
own research is governed by the First Nations principles of OCAP, which are ownership,
control, access, and possession. All the data gathered is owned by First Nations
communities, and the research conducted is meant to be for their benefit. Similarly, the
need to build relationships offers a reminder of the principles of relationality in many
Indigenous teachings: when individuals spend time together and get to know one
another, the stage is set for mutual learning and sharing.
Modelling just academic relationships on the principles that guide Indigenous research
helps shed light on the asymmetries of power between colleagues, students, and staff
across the university. As Dr. Hanning describes, “We must constantly remind the
universities that we have populations here who are vulnerable and are being impacted,
whether intentionally or unintentionally, by the practices of the university.” Students
and supervisors must work together to recognize the impact of these practices, striving
to enhance just relationships and a sense of belonging.
In conjunction with structures of support for students, creating networks while
conducting research can play a large role in building just research relationships.
Dr. Gray explains that in her research projects, a social worker or counsellor is
always present, especially when working with communities. During this research,
participants are put into a vulnerable position as they share their trauma and their
stories. Too often, researchers become preoccupied with publishing their findings,
and in their eagerness to move on to the next project, community members risk
being left behind. As researchers, Dr. Gray argues, we have a responsibility to the
communities that we engage in research: working with communities also

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 requires that we identify how we are building relationships so that the research
benefits that community.

CALL FOR INSTITUTIONAL CHANGES IN HARM REPARATION

From a university standpoint, punishment functions under a settler-colonial

carceral logic. Perpetrators are punished, and any reparation for the harm
done is an afterthought, if it’s even considered at all. Even when racial attacks, sexual
assault, and homophobic remarks are addressed through legal and university
procedures, students are expected to go back to their everyday lives. There is a need to
consider what happens afterwards, whether to the person who has been harmed or to
the person who has caused the harm.
Current structures assume that if harm is done to someone, the person who has been
harmed can separate themselves from the event and go back to work with ease. As Dr.
Grey describes, victims are often told to ‘Take time off then just come right back’ or that
‘We fired the problem person, just come right back.’ We just expect these people who had
harm done to them to get over it and forget it happened. Much of the burden continues to
fall on individuals from historically marginalized groups to protect themselves and
change the culture of academic spaces. “[There are] women, queer women, women of
colour doing a lot of the care because we know what [harm] feels like,” Dr. Gray says. Dr.
Gray argues that to practice equity and decolonization of academic norms, institutions
must emphasize and foster a culture of support and accountability that addresses the
lasting impact of these harms.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What are your individual and institutional expectations for research relationships?
2. What are the disciplinary expectations for research and authorship? How do those
expectations consider differences in power between various contributors to the
research, from participants, to students, to supervisors?
3. What expectations do the students and supervisors have? How would you want to
be supported if your positions, student and researcher, were flipped?
4. Will the supervisor only help the student’s research process? How will articles and
research reports be written? Who will oversee each aspect of the research?
5. Based on your lived experience, can you foresee or predict potential aspects of the
research process that may cause harm?

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KEY TERMS

Exploitative relationships: Describes where research collaborators or participants

receive a form of harm from the researcher instead of benefits. This harm could be the
result of overworking, inequitable work expectations or a lack of harm mediation if a
problem occurs.
Harm Mediation: Describes the methods and processes used to heal the harm done to
a person or group. These harms could be due to the direct effects of a research project
or be the result of generational harm.
Expectation setting: When discussing the expectations of a supervisor-student
relationship, both parties should carefully consider what arrangements are necessary
to ensure that each person’s needs are met while acknowledging the inherent power
dynamics in the relationship. These needs may include work hours, time off, or
decision-making procedures. Supervisors should create an environment where
students feel comfortable voicing their needs and concerns without fear of negative
repercussions. Open and respectful communication is essential to fostering a balanced
and supportive relationship.

REFERENCES
1. Evans, T. M., Bira, L., Gastelum, J. B., Weiss, L. T., & Vanderford, N. L.
(2018). Evidence for a Mental Health Crisis in Graduate Education.
Nature Biotechnology, 36(3), 282–284. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4089

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SPOTLIGHT 3: STRUCTURES OF CARE AND ACCESSIBILITY

Based on a workshop by Jess Rowan Marcotte and D. Squinkifer

SUMMARY

Squinky and Jess, two of the three co-founders of the worker-owned

cooperative Soft Chaos, discussed how structures of care surrounding
game-making and research can improve working environments for
researchers and creative professionals. Soft Chaos designs meaningful,
playful interactions that connect people across physical and digital
worlds. Their work includes intimate and vulnerable interactive
experiences across a range of formats including video games, tabletop
games, and theatre. The presenters shared how their positionality as
queer and racialized people and their lived experiences working in
academia and industry influenced how they want to work. After striving
to create more meaningful support systems in academia, they creating a
company that foregrounds values of solidarity, playfulness, queerness,
and compassion.

APPLICATION POINTS

The workers’ collective that Jess and Squinky describe is a direct effort to
enable more compassionate working environments and more
equitable relationships. Reflecting on their principles challenges us to
consider the underlying values of our organizations (e.g., our own
academic departments, labs and working groups, or research institutes),
which may reveal opportunities to develop strategies of our own to
create more equitable conditions for our work. We can also ask how we
might apply these principles to our research practices. Games user
research and game studies both offer a variety of approaches to
account for how players experience games. Squinky and Jess’s focus on
positionality and the ways that social locations are affected by power
dynamics reminds us to be more granular, more specific, and
ultimately more accurate in how we account for different player
experiences.

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UNDERSTANDING STRUCTURE AND CARE

Squinky and Jess began by providing an overview of how their positionality

influenced their experiences with postsecondary education and games, which
ultimately led to the creation of their worker cooperative.
As a queer, non-binary, mixed Mi’kmaw and white settler, Jess described some of
the effects of both having and lacking privilege: e.g., the privilege of being white-
passing while also experiencing generational trauma and a need to reclaim
Indigenous culture; or, experiencing chronic pain, but also being able to access
their spouse’s health benefits for physiotherapy. Similarly, Squinky’s description
of their positionality and experiences as a racialized, neurodivergent, queer,
transgender man showed reflexive considerations for how their identity is
situated within broader structures. For example, in contrast to Jess, they are not
white-passing, but belong to an upper-middle-class family that provided
educational funding and early opportunities to pursue video game design. When
they met during their graduate studies, Squinky and Jess were both frustrated
with the lack of structural support to better respond to their lived experiences. As
they advocated for change, they were met with resistance. Leaving academia was
an opportunity for them to envision more supportive work environments that
could more accurately reflect the specificity of their needs.
Building their cooperative from the ground up allowed Squinky and Jess to focus
on wellness in ways that traditional workplaces do not. Worker’s cooperatives are
a business structure in which the workers share ownership of the company. As a
democratic workspace, business decisions are made collectively rather than by a
single CEO or boss. Squinky and Jess outlined four key aspects of creating a
healthy and sustainable workplace in their cooperative.

KEY ASPECTS TO CREATING A HEALTHY AND

SUSTAINABLE WORKPLACE COOPERATIVE

Time – Ensuring that the workplace structure emphasizes flexibility of time, from
work hours to allowed time off.
Health – Balancing physical and mental health through accommodations for
neurodivergence and respect for physical health risks (like wearing masks).
Bylaws – Structuring the economic side of the workplace through principles around
‘degrowth’ and ensuring work meets income needs.
Process – Establishing clear expectations in projects, and organizing tasks to both
recognize strengths and create learning opportunities.

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 Using their individual positionality and accessibility needs, the pair
demonstrated how each of the aspects of care connects to the responsibilities and
work environment at Soft Chaos. For example, the ‘Bylaws’ allow the group to
have a cohesive vision of how their cooperative is run: debt-free, with clear pay
structures and considerations for both growth and degrowth, which refers to
their efforts to ensure that their workload never increases at the cost of worker
wellbeing. By balancing their capabilities and interests with professional
development, the group can expand their skills as game developers and company
owners while still respecting their individual needs.

ACTIVITY

Part A: Identifying Your Positionality

To begin assessing how structures can lead to better care, start by identifying your
own positionality. What are your personal and ascribed identities? Take a couple of
minutes to list your various intersecting identities, such as race, gender, nationality,
sexuality, class, disabilities, etc. After creating this list, reflect on how these identities
are perceived, recognized, and/or considered in your organizational (e.g., workplace
or school) structures.
Part B: Identifying Accessibility and Care Needs Within Existing Structures
Based on your positionality, expectations, and experiences within your organization,
reflect on your accessibility and care needs. Create a short list of these needs and
relate them to the “four structures of care” (time, health, bylaws, and processes)
discussed previously. Choose two of the needs from your list and use them to answer
the reflection questions below.
Part C: Micro and Macro View of Accessibility Needs
Using one of the needs you identified in Part B, brainstorm what changes to the
organizational structure would help to meet this need.
Part D: Mapping Power and Access
Visualize the structures of care that already exist or could potentially exist in your
organization. Draw a rough (or even abstract) floor plan of your work environment
and begin mapping the connections and power dynamics between the people who
work there. Identify how these existing relationships shape particular forms of access
and identify where there may be opportunities to improve these structures.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Are there resources and/or processes to ensure that your accessibility and care
needs are met? What are the barriers to using these resources?

68
2. What are the values that define work in your organization? How do these values
support care and accessibility?
3. What does allyship look like in your organization, and what are the nature and
limits of that allyship? How do you fit within the structure? Who has power over
who?Does social power influence the structure?

KEY TERMS

Worker Co-operative: A style of business where the workers are the main owners,
decisions are made with input from workers, and there are no investors to profit from
the labour of others. The cooperative model gives every member of the team a voice
in the direction of the organization.
Positionality: How one’s position and power in society affect identity and access to
care. People with privilege and power often have access to or control of their care,
safety, and financial well-being, and tend to neglect or overlook how to ensure the
same for marginalized people.
Structures of Care: Organizational structures that emphasize what one needs to be
successful and thrive e.g., time, health, bylaws, and processes that foreground care and
well-being.

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CHAPTER 3.

ANTI-RACIST GAME DESIGN

Jordan Clapper

SUMMARY

Jordan Clapper begins this chapter by outlining the challenges and necessity of
defining anti-racism. These considerations then become the foundation for
Clapper’s analysis, comparing the ways that Cards Against Humanity perpetuates
a discriminatory and racist status quo, while games like Radical Queer Witches
and Thirsty Sword Lesbians offer anti-racist alternatives in their rules and
structures as well as in their stories and the forms of play that they invite. For
Clapper, these latter games also offer heuristic inspiration, acting as exemplars
that we can use to identify actions that game designers can take to engage in
anti-racist game design.

APPLICATION POINTS

In this chapter, Jordan Clapper develops conditions and considerations that can
shape anti-racist game design. As Clapper describes, this also requires an
assessment and clear articulation of what we mean by “anti-racism,” but
defining such terms is no easy task. This becomes an opportunity to more
clearly define our own commitments to anti-racism: what foundations are we
drawing on, and what do these commitments mean for our everyday life and
everyday practices? Note how these commitments become especially clear
through Clapper’s comparative analysis, where both differences in the
structures that govern game design and gameplay re-entrench a racist status
quo or, alternatively, challenge it. Yet Clapper also prompts us to go beyond
simplistic binaries: there are both Dos and Don’ts of anti-racist game design, and
the multifaceted ways that racism is perpetuated in games require a
multifaceted response.

“If the kids catch you and should ask, tell them Custer and the maiden are just dancing.”
– Custer’s Revenge

These are the closing remarks to Mystique’s Custer’s Revenge, a game where you rape
a Native woman for points, referred to in the game manual as “scor[ing].” I’ll do my
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best not to use this as an excuse to critique another aspect of this game, which I’ve
done elsewhere and will likely do again at another time. But I want to use this as an
example of the history that games, especially those in the west1, must contend with.
This game, where violent sex is the goal, frames its gameplay around “ADULT [sic(k)]
fantasies,” because “grown-ups have been known to be imaginative and competitive,
as well as have fantasies.” Although games have often been framed as the realm of
child’s play, by politicians and media pundits alike, this media and play form has
never been purely aimed at children. Advertisements as far back as the Atari 2600
and beyond have showcased a range of ages, though gender is most often restricted
to masculine types, and the games industry has always needed to contend with the
economics of purchasing such gaming devices to be out of the range of your average
western child. Even extending to tabletops and other board games, gaming represents
a significant investment in materials to interact with. Nevertheless, Mystique did not
emerge from the gamer aether as some outlier or counter to more traditional forms
of western play. Even if one wanted to argue that Mystique’s other titles, Beat ‘Em &
Eat ‘Em and Bachelor Party are somehow more representative of non-racialized sexual
fantasy—they are racialized, just in the normative, ‘invisible’ way—the racialized
example presented in Custer’s Revenge, where a white man dominates that brown-
skinned other, has tendrils that extend into larger gaming practices as a whole. In this
chapter, we’ll establish how encounters with anti-/racism in games are done at both
game designer and player engagement levels, how those design choices constitute both
norms and everyday practices, and how we can imagine design choices in physical
games impacting future tabletop and digital video game designs.
So, what does it mean to practice “anti-racist game design”? This would require
us to set up some parameters for what counts as “anti-racism,” but this presents
an equally difficult problem: just what type of anti-racism are we talking about?
To paraphrase Yin Paradies in 2016: it’s a mess. To better give context, “there are
numerous conundrums being explored by scholars dedicated to understanding and
challenging race, racism, and racialization globally. In asking whither anti-racisms will
voyage, this article has posed many more questions than it has answered” (Paradies,
2016, p. 10). The dialectics and discourses of anti-racism studies do not offer the
particularities that academics may be used to (p. 2), or, rather, the particularities are
just that: particular. The context in which one deploys anti-racism is as important
as the overall effort to combat racism, which seems to be the overarching concept
that various anti-racisms operate under. Is the anti-racism of wanting to see greater
representation in media the same as wanting correlative actors to play similarly raced
characters in games? Is the anti-racism of demanding upward mobility in the
workplace the same anti-racism of not wanting to be harassed in a tech-bro
workplace? Yes and no is the (un)fortunate answer, as there can be parallels and
overlaps but rarely a cut-and-dry distinction that allows one type of anti-racism to be
ported over to an even similar (on its surface) problem in another area or field.2 But
attempt to define some version of anti-racism we shall.
Anti-racism in game design brings up many relevant questions as it pertains
to the end product: the game itself. Where does “racism” in the context of games

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begin? This is another longer question that I will have to compartmentalize for the
sake of brevity. Racism in gaming, whether video or tabletop, has many origins and
throughlines. We could be talking about the racial hierarchies of Tolkienesque role-
playing racial systems or the steady homogenization and hegemonization of the tech
field, directly affecting game development and company structures, or even how these
systems impact the very players that find a seat at the table, but what we can see is
that even narrowing down the types of racism that enter games is complicated and
changes depending on where and how far we zoom into the issue. However, if we
can take, yet again, Gamergate as a point of reference and veritable proving ground,
gaming remains in this zone where sticking to established practices nevertheless calls
upon problematic traditions and systems that do not take kindly to questioning. As
Crystal M. Fleming (2018) points out, “Hundreds of years after establishing a nation on
colonial genocide and chattel slavery, people are kinda-sorta-maybe-possibly waking
up to the sad reality that our racial politics are (still) garbage” (p. 1). Western gaming
systems are not developed outside of these traditions, so why would we be surprised to
find out that there are racist notions caged within said systems? Gaming systems are
not so different from other systematic forms of oppression.
Anti-racism as a design choice is one that must be done conscientiously and in
the face of racist norms and the threat of oppression to both represented marginalized
identities and players that may share similar marginalizations. However, anti-racism
as design philosophy is not simply a cure-all for this big ol’ network of problems that
we call “racism,” as if either term could capture the enormity, even in specificity, of
what any particular racism does or how to counter it. Basically, I’d like to lead by
noting that leveraging “anti-racism” does not mean that we will be solving racism in
game design writ large. I’m not quite so clever. But “anti-racism” can combat racism
in its specific social and cultural locales. As Alastair Bonnett (2000) would put it,
“anti-racism cannot be adequately understood as the inverse of racism” (p. 3). Rather,
anti-racism is a form of response, one that “refers to those forms of thought and/or
practice that seek to confront, eradicate and/or ameliorate racism. Anti-racism implies
the ability to identify a phenomenon—racism—and to do something about it” (p. 3).
Critiques of anti-racism, at least ones we could classify as being in good faith—or, at
the very least, ones that aren’t of the overt variety that seeks to uphold supremacist
views as its main motivation—seem to stem from the fact that that “anti-racism(s),”
much like “racism(s),” is a slippery term, one that resists concrete, all-encompassing
definition as it attempts to apply broadly in every situation that calls for it. I focus
on one criticism in particular, as it summarizes general skepticism of anti-racism as a
framework or motivation, one that seems to be coming from a place of good intention
but sees a lack of specificity and material results as a weakness rather than a feature of
anti-racism.
Ghassan Hage’s (2016) “Recalling Anti-racism” boxes in anti-racism as a “product”
that fails its stated goal, and gamifies the struggles between racism and anti-racism
as a blow-for-blow exchange in which racism seemingly has prevailed. Hage states,
“Yet, despite this long history and some remarkable victories against the forces of
racism in their variety of forms, it cannot be said that anti-racism has been particularly

72
successful as a social, cultural, and political force. Everywhere we look today, racism
is on the rise” (p. 123). If we are treating anti-racism as the solution to racism, well,
yes, of course it has failed, as creating a binary between these competing networks
and strategies necessitates a winner-loser scenario. Hage couches his analysis in Bruno
Latour’s notion of “recalling,” which results in a thinly veiled treatment of anti-racism
as a “product,” a simplifying move that smooths out the contours of any individual
anti-racism one might put to the test. He lays out six features of anti-racism
(paraphrased here): “reducing the incidence of racist practices, fostering a non-racist
culture, supporting victims of racism, empowering racialized subjects, transforming
racist relations into better relations, [and] fostering an a-racist culture” (pp. 124-125).
Each of his points warrants a full response, but it is the main (flattening) analysis that
requires our attention in regards to anti-racism as praxis:

It is when looking at these functions and objectives that the necessity of ‘recalling’ anti-
racism in its full Latourian sense becomes clear. While anti-racism has had some notable
successes at achieving its goals, it has been, as already mentioned, far from an efficient,
fault-free product. It has often failed to perform and rise to the situations it is confronting.
Indeed, if we are to compare racism and anti-racism as products, we can say that across
history racism has been far more successfully ‘recalled’ and made operationally suitable for
a variety of socioeconomic and cultural environments. (p. 125)

It’s important to note that Hage fails to define “product” anywhere in the article, but
his arguments clearly draw on a capitalistic, hegemonic sense of the term. While I’m
not here to debate the nuances, successes, and failures of modernity in the Latourian
(1993) sense—in short, modernity was rotten to begin with, but I’m a bitter hybrid
NDN—the idea of the recall, even as Latour (2007) imagines it, necessitates the filing
down of contours that distinguish particular anti-racisms in the first place. Wherever/
whenever anti-racisms begin, they are rooted in a specific situation that necessitates
speaking truth and acting against an oppressive system that seeks to first racialize
people and then subjugate them under a system that would never accord them full
humanity. Hage (2016) identifies several elements of what he calls “neo-liberal
globalization,” a feature of which is “particularist anti-racism,” defined as “the anti-
racism of those who are racialized and are as such struggling against their
racialisation” (p. 127). But this is textured with Hage’s smoothing over: “But in their
struggle, what is important to them is not that ‘racism is wrong,’ Rather, it is that
racism against them is wrong. Such people don’t mind racism as such, they mind
being subjected to it themselves” (p. 127). This seems to implicate whiteness’s desire
to sink into the murky deracialized sea of invisibility where race does not apply
to their actions but to actions toward them. This application to a larger “recalling”
of anti-racism and racism alike establishes a binary that makes it difficult for both
contemporary and historical anti-racist movements and ideologies to flourish and
inspire.
This establishes a binary where racism is the more successful and thus the more
desirable object to the west, which isn’t Hage’s or other similarly minded critics’
intents. Yet, this is the unintended consequence when we measure anti-racism by the

ADE FOR GAMES 73

success of racism or, again in a binary opposition, what racism has suffered in the face
of anti-racism, which often is very little.
Anti-racism as a method for both resistance and creation, as far as game design is
concerned, helps to combat this binary structure. Manuela Bojadžijev (2020) in “Anti-
racism as Method” frames racism and the work that goes into its maintenance as
“racism as episteme,” which “refers to more than a set of knowledges, for an episteme
must be understood as the very historical grounding of knowledge and the conditions
of its possibility” (p. 194). These knowledge formations are affected by present, past,
and future conceptions but must still be situated within the parameters of their
formation, again influenced by these temporalities. She continues, “racism as an
episteme also refers to temporalities of racisms, i.e. the periodisation of racist
discourses that itself constitutes a contested field of scholarly debate in terms of to
what extent we can make plausible generalising accounts of trending conjunctures
of racism” (p. 194). As such, the strict temporalizing of terms can make it difficult
to trace connections between similarly problematic racialized formations, especially
when applied to games. “That’s just how it was then,” one can imagine a detractor
arguing, “and we just didn’t think about that stuff.” When initially looking at anti-
racism, Bonnett (2000) would lay out criteria for motivations to anti-racism:

1. “Racism is socially disruptive.”

2. “Racism is foreign.”
3. “Racism sustains the ruling class.”
4. “Racism hinders the progress of ‘our community’.”
5. “Racism is an intellectual error.”
6. “Racism distorts and erases people’s identities.”
7. “Racism is anti-egalitarian and socially unjust.” (pp. 4-7)

Bonnett’s (2000) construction of anti-racist motivations illuminate some of the

elements that constitute anti-racist projects. But when applied to games there can be
a disjunct where there is a porous division between the player and the game, as well
as whatever ways that player is inserted into the gameworld at present, that we can
understand as interrelated but complicated and not always stable. These divisions and
movements will be brought up more later, but taking number 1 as an example, “Racism
is socially disruptive,” this performs a double function in, say, a tabletop role-playing
game (TTRPG). If I want to play an orc character and the DM imposes the traditional
rules of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, my character should have a racist inclination
against elves. This mirrors existing traditions, which I may separate from my social
and cultural constructions of racism for the sake of the game, but if I am bothered
by this it still exists within both my social interactions at the table as a referent and
within the game as an explicit, hard-coded division in the world. These discordant
oscillations between identificatory dissociation when playing and the lived, racialized
individual who is doing the playing better reflect the influence of the motivations of
the game designers, which draw on real-world racism rather than some independent,
74
creative formation that allows that exploration of how to combat similarly built racial
formations in-game. In short, a player can recognize both the racism racialized within
the game world and its associated referents that the game designers had to draw from
in order to create the fantasy world. Should a player resist this, whether in game or
out of it, they may not always refer to the external racism that has influenced western
games and gaming practices. Looking at these polymorphous cases, where locating
anti-racism as well as racism can be a varied, multiply-influenced thing,

The conjunctures of racism do not depend only on its internal reproductive capacity –
racism’s reorganisation and development is shaped decisively by those who defend
themselves against it. The fight against racism can thus be taken as the methodological
starting point. Racism itself is a form of social confrontation in which it renews itself and
contributes to capitalist development’s complex forms. A theory of racism must therefore
not only include anti-racist practices in theoretical analysis and critique, but also include
conflicts that go beyond resistance to racism in which struggles and critiques are not
necessarily articulated as anti-racist. (Bojadžijev, 2020, pp. 202-203)

More specific frameworks like Bonnett’s (2000) and the more flexible formations in
Bojadžijev (2020) must shift as much as the social, critical, and cultural definitions used
to look at them if we are to apply them to anti-racist game design.

PLAYER INTERACTION, THE ‘EVERYDAY,’ AND HOW I LEARNED TO

LOVE THE SHADE

Radical Queer Witches is a game by Yas Awsem (2022a) and friends that aims to create
an anti-racist version of games similar in design, and you can buy it at
https://radicalqueerwitches.com/collections/all. The game is similar to ludic
juggernaut Cards Against Humanity (Dillon et al., 2011) and follows a similar format:
A prompt card is drawn and played by an individual who will select a winner in the
round; the other players put forth answer cards to try and elicit a humourous response
from the prompt card player as well as each other. Once play is over, those who have
the most points…well, it doesn’t say that they win, but one assumes that is the goal.
Nevertheless, both Radical Queer Witches (RQW) and Cards Against Humanity (CAH)
leave this ambiguous, presumably to allow for flexibility in play. On its surface, these
games are very similar in design from a ludic standpoint. Their similarities include:
selecting ten answer cards, appointing one player judge, and humour as an underlying
design principle. But similarity does not mean that they draw from the same traditions,
nor does it account for the diversity of players that will come to engage with these
games, at least on the part of CAH.
CAH’s design pulls from existing normative gaming tropes that attempt to make
fun of racial, sexual, and other variable human traits while preferencing whiteness and
related colonial traditions as a foundation for further marginalizing non-normative
players. The game does this using language and ideology that both recognizes the
privilege of whiteness while obfuscating it through a seeming denigration of that
position to diminish that privilege. CAH positions itself using relatively neutral terms,
“A party game for horrible people,” as stated on its base card set; the website adds
further, “…a fill-in-the-blank party game that turns your awkward personality and
ADE FOR GAMES 75
lackluster social skills into hours of fun! Wow” (Cards Against Humanity, 2024). This
emphasis on poor sociability is akin to language taken up by contemporary incel
(“involuntary celibate”) communities online, where many construct this as a sign of
feminists taking social power and somehow shifting norms unfavorably away from
cisgendered men (Sugiura, 2021). This disruption of social norms otherwise rooted
in whiteness and coloniality writ large is at the core of the “politically incorrect”
sensibility and a prominent feature underlying the backlash against “woke culture,” a
term mischaracterized by conservatives to mean anything that doesn’t fit with hetero-
/cisnormative social and cultural designs that often favour whiteness. Incel, politically
incorrect, and white supremacist cultures draw from the same well of hegemony to
push back against presumed progressive politics. As Terrance MacMullan (2009) puts
it, “As with the habit of antipathy to the strange, there is an instinctual response
beneath the habit of entitlement that is, in and of itself, neither good nor bad, but that
requires intelligent harnessing in order to correct the habits of whiteness,” (p. 177),
what he calls “the impulse of pride.” CAH takes up the charged language of “horrible
people” and “awkward personality” to engage with systems that make it seem as if
we’re all equally terrible on the inside. For normative white and gaming cultures,
this involves taking pride in engaging in that normativity, as if that is some sort of
reparative or resilient position. MacMullan further characterizes this pride in “not
being oppressed” as a problem of exclusion, where “pride in whiteness entails being
proud of not being the excluded other” (p. 177). Strategically, to take this position,
normative rules adherents—those that privilege rules as the beginning and end of the
discussion—must draw upon the very privilege they have in order to eschew possible
rules discussion, interpretation, and alteration. Incels, conservatives, and white
supremacists need to feel oppressed in order to reconcile their presumed exclusion,
even when exclusion was always the name of the game. For CAH, its engagement with
normative gaming cultural ideals puts its use of problematic stereotypes into focus: the
humour would not make sense if one could not take a privileged position to punch
downward at the marginalized positions presented.
The gameplay, namely the cards that presumably draw on the players’ worst
impulses (the quiet part) being used explicitly to make the funny ha-ha’s (the out-
loud), is based upon a bias toward whiteness and other normative identities. In their
2016 study of CAH, Hephzibah V. Strmic-Pawl and Rai-ya Wilson find that the game
has a connection to racial components, with “one-fifth of the cards hav[ing] some
sort of tie to race” (p. 362) and heavily biasing a neutral to positive connotation for
white folks. As the game is meant to draw on political incorrectness (e.g. normative
whiteness), or as Strmic-Pawl and Wilson put it, “Given the intention of the game,
these references to race are not that surprising; however, the ways in which those
cards are particularly negatively biased toward people of color is more disturbing” (p.
363). They give a detailed breakdown of 2016’s base set, arguing that ultimately CAH
draws on the Black/white binary, providing “players a means to normalize personal
bias and structural racism” (p. 363). This isn’t abnormal in gaming. TTRPGs have a
historic connection with race and racism in-game, which CAH (2011) even recognizes
with the card, “A magical kingdom with dragons and elves and no black people.” These

76
cards highlight stereotypes of deviant and exotic marginalized people, but none are so
obvious as the game’s obsession with Black genitalia, reaffirming the classic argument
that there is some “scientific, biological”—scare quotes necessary—sexual elements
baked into people of color, with cards (2011) including but not limited to: “A big, black
dick”; “A bigger, blacker dick”; “The biggest, blackest dick”; “A dick so big and so black
that it is a problematic stereotype”; “The even biggest, blackester dick” (Dillon et al.,
2011).
This type of humour constitutes what Michael P. Wolf (2002) calls “denunciative
forms of humor” where “We mock them for their difference and we have no intention
of ignoring their deviation and welcoming them back” (p. 338). CAH (2024) attempts
to subvert criticism by noting the “problematic stereotype” and in their Frequently
Asked Questions: “’I’m offended by your game.’ So are we. It’s pretty fucked up!”
For CAH, to engage in the practice of this game is to uphold stereotypes that put
marginalized folks into an impossible position, as they are then the butt of the joke. As
Wolf (2002) writes:

When we make fun of someone or can personify the butt of the joke, they are in the
unenviable position (at least from our perspective) of being on the outside and wanting back
into the fold. The effect of such a performance is not simply pleasure at the character of the
joke’s target, but an affirmation of our own status (we who share the joke) as members in
good standing with respect to the norms they violate. (p. 334)

So, what is the norm of CAH? It isn’t the recognition of privilege in the sense that
we can deconstruct normativity, break it down, and critique it to its various degrees.
Rather, CAH is about normativity itself: its recognition being the privileged form
of play. Its players aren’t here to admonish problematic whiteness, they’re here to
use whiteness to further demonize Blackness and Otherness through their respective
stereotypes. In western cultures, we can see that “racist jokes” are bad, but CAH invites
them, drawing on an exclusion that “suggests that people of other races are not human
in the way we are” (p. 338). These racial jokes, like any, are a conscious recognition
of the norm, but it nevertheless benefits those that share in the norm. In other words,
“They have that power and they really do want to exercise it” (p. 338). That CAH co-
founder Max Temkin was ousted for being a sexist and racist in the workplace (Kelly,
2020) surely says nothing about the basis of the game. Right?
Radical Queer Witches bases its gameplay on CAH but does so from a
deconstructive position that points at the problems of normativity rather than
drawing from it. RQW acts as a response to CAH that acknowledges its ludic
forebearers. On their Kickstarter page, they respond to the question, “Is this like Cards
Against Humanity?” Their response: “Yes & no. The structure is similar to many card
games out in the market…The difference with this game is that it’s queer, anti-racist
& spiritual. This game is light-hearted and doesn’t play off ‘dark’ humor” (Awsem,
2022b). RQW possesses an understanding of the logics underlying gameplay in CAH,
and therefore the engagement with power is very different. As they clarify in the
answer to the question, “If this game is anti-racist, why are there jokes about white
people?”, they state:

ADE FOR GAMES 77

 Anti-racism work includes accountability. To be anti-racist doesn’t mean to just not be
racist, it means to be AGAINST racism and the systems that uphold its existence. This
means acknowledging whiteness and the harm white supremacy does to marginalized
people. In this game, there is humor in accountability around topics of colonization,
capitalism, cultural appropriation, and avoidance of racism that does not feed the existing
oppression of BIPOC people…We address hard topics in ways that do not blame or shame
already marginalized people but instead hold the privileged group accountable. (Awsem,
2022b)

From a position of racialized power, CAH references certain elements in order to

make fun of them, but that humour is not from a place that recognizes genuine harm
or the lived experiences of the marginalized positions it references. Compare the cards
“Smallpox blankets” (CAH) to “Land acknowledgments” (RQW). Both point to similar
problems, those being the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the dispossession of
their lands. But positionality matters; who is saying this matters. Can white people
reference coloniality and Indigeneity? Certainly, but consider the tactics that CAH and
RQW use. CAH is from a collective of eight white men (initially) whose motivations
were, as Temkin puts it, “We were writing jokes for ourselves and we weren’t really
thinking about how it would affect other people” (quoted in Roy, 2014). So the card
in question, “Smallpox blankets,” makes light of genocide, sees it as the punchline
to the joke of coloniality. Similarly, RQW references land acknowledgements, which
also points to Indigeneity and genocide, but takes the approach of hollow whiteness,
attempting to reconcile land dispossession by merely referencing that the lands were
stolen. Contemporary criticism of land acknowledgement’s normativization, made
clear by panels and papers alike, forms the basis for RQW’s reference. For Dylan
Robinson (as well as others), “what I am proposing, paradoxically, is that we decolonize
acknowledgement—or more exactly what acknowledgement has become—in its
formalization, bureaucratization, and rote presentation, by considering how
acknowledgement’s form has a place within our lives and work that is always in
relationship with the specificity and context of its use” (p. 22). RQW references that
land acknowledgement is necessary but not always reparative, especially if that’s the
end of it. That’s how you do reference humour effectively, and how you make power
systems the joke, not by adding “White privilege” after people get mad that your
straight white creator and his buddies did a transphobic oopsie or two in the past (Roy,
2014). As Radical Queer Witches might say, “On today’s episode of white people doing
shit that only white people do, we present to you _____” (Awsem, 2022a). “Smallpox
blankets” remains a CAH card, if anyone was curious.
Both cards use “White privilege” as a playable piece, and for both, they represent
an aspect of the “everyday” that comes into the particularities in play between players
and between player and (game) system. The “everyday” I draw from here is Philomena
Essed’s (1990) “everyday racism.” Before we get to the full term, it’s useful to see
how she defines “racism,” as “the definitive attribution of inferiority to a particular
racial/ethnic group and the use of this principle to propagate and justify the unequal
treatment of this group” (p. 11). Essed (1991) describes “everyday racism” as that
“which connects structural forces of racism with routine situations of everyday life.
It links ideological dimensions of racism with daily attitudes and interprets the
78
reproduction of racism in terms of the experience of it in everyday life” (p. 2). But are
games the “everyday” Essed describes here? This requires two considerations. First,
to consider our present media landscape, games (especially the technological kind)
have pervaded the western media landscape, and following the COVID-19 pandemic,
gaming has become even more prevalent. A study by Matthew Barr and Alicia
Copeland-Stewart (2022) examines how this shift to gaming had positive effects on
peoples’ well-being, including agency, normalization, and socialization, with negative
effects being minimal. These effects aren’t the only ones shown in the study, however,
they are important in how to theorize a notion of gaming as an extension of the
“everyday” and the ways that “racism” have been a part of that gaming landscape. For
Essed (1991), “everyday” suggests:

a familiar world, a world of particular interest, a world of practices we are socialized with
in order to manage in the system. In our everyday lives sociological distinctions between
“institutional” and “interactional,” between ideology and discourse, and between “private”
and “public” spheres of life merge and form a complex of social relations and situations. (p.
3)

There is a conceptual gap that exists between the social functions of gaming/playing
and the systemic, interpersonal relationships that form the storyworld/gameworld
that stem from those rules. To engage in a game of RQW or CAH is, like with most
games, to create a microcosm where the players agree to interact with one another and
the rules that create that play space. Contemporary games have never been a neutral
sphere where all players can simply leave their cultures and skins at the imaginary
door; though, in the case of CAH, the expectation is that players, in fact, do that
in order to engage with the hierarchies and traumas present and to create the most
shocking or humourous results. Not doing so would be to exclude oneself from that
community. “White privilege” as a playing piece in this regard represents very different
engagements with the system in question. It was not included as an initial offering
in CAH, and feels more like a reactive gesture than a sincere effort to delve into the
systems initially in place when eight straight white men made the game for themselves.
RQW, conversely, includes it as something to be recognized and torn down. If played
in response to RQW prompt cards “White people love ______” or “Nothing says
colonizer more than ______”, the humour comes from calling out the social and racial
system in place. Playing it for “______. The solution to everything” could suggest
an absurdity that, depending on one’s position, could be a both/and consideration
between lived reality and ironic mockery. And in any case, playing “White privilege”
requires the player to interact mechanically with the game system, an oppressive racial
system, and their fellow players—who are also engaging with these dual, related, and
referential systems—in a way that is normalized, whether that normalization comes
from the lived racial system in place, the ludic system agreed upon, or both at once.
Is it easy to take cards out of CAH to amend it toward one’s needs or identities? Of
course, anyone should consider this as an option, especially if they’ve already invested
their capital into the physical cards. While players need strategies to play existing
games in ways that do not ask them to give up their cultures nor confer them onto
either the game systems or other players without consideration or agency, editing
ADE FOR GAMES 79
or altering rules in a given system to address problematic issues is only one mode
of resistance. This is also the kind of resistance-based anti-racism that falls into the
“everyday.” Robin Kelley’s (1996) Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
characterizes the resistance to everyday racism as one that centers around everyday
movements, activities, and social structures that might not be considered a right fit for
normative politics. In discussing his work at McDonald’s, Kelley gives equal weight to
the what as much as the how in everyday anti-racist resistance: “But what we fought
for is a crucial part of the overall story; the terrain was often cultural, centering on
identity, dignity, and fun. We tried to turn work into pleasure, to turn our bodies
into instruments of pleasure” (p. 3). Play is an intrinsically political social form; to
focus only on the pleasurable elements does not diminish that RQW makes pleasure
explicit (ludically and metaphorically/bodily) in acknowledging the adult nature of
the game it is playing. Adults are its audience, and the game incorporates inclusive
sexuality into its sphere, on top of the already whiteness- and colonizer-deriding
cards. In responding to “The whole system is fucked! But don’t worry _____ will fix it”
with “Fucking the system”, “A full body orgasm,” or “Consent” brings a multiplicity to
play that potentially challenges hierarchical elements while welcoming in players from
marginalized backgrounds. RQW doesn’t ask one to engage in a ludic system that does
not have their back or their struggles in mind, nor does it see marginalized peoples
as the butt of the joke. Why should I put my trust in a system that sees my position
as not only inherently lesser than whiteness, straightness, and cisgenderedness and
makes any sensitivity I may have exclusionary to me? CAH’s 2021 version of its rules
contains a section on “House Rules” that serve the dual function of both suggesting
helpful or interesting additions to the rules as well as continuing to further the joke
of “horribleness” in its stated existential purpose. “Hard Mode” suggests that “Players
play Cards Against Humanity while raising four kids, dealing with chronic back pain,
and waiting tables at Chili’s. Bonus! For an added challenge, try being gay or black.”
What’s the punchline? A bunch of white guys think it’s hilarious that these are all real
experiences that folks have to face, and now these must be mediated for both gameplay
and humour at their expense.
Getting angry or upset at this diminishment of one’s reality isn’t an issue of
sensitivity; it’s one of validity and seeing oneself represented equitably within a
system. To get angry, or play around the rules, or self-select cards for removal, or
destroy a game is engaging with what Kelley (1996) calls “the so-called margins of
struggle,” where little resistances can nevertheless have impact on combating an unjust
system. As with play and emotions, these can be “unorganized, often spontaneous
battles with authority or social movements thought to be inauthentic or
unrepresentative of the ‘community’s interests’” (p. 4), and players do this on a micro-
and macro-ludic, -cultural, and -social scales to find their place in games. Through
anti-racist design that sees the players’ everyday as something that exists in multiple
forms, RQW alters an established foundation of gameplay to give marginalized players
a space to authentically challenge a system on multiple layers without losing access to
an entire media form and genre.

80
FUCKING AROUND BY (NOT) FUCKING AROUND: A LOVE LETTER TO
THIRSTY SWORD LESBIANS

Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a TTRPG system published by Evil Hat Productions in

partnership with Gay Spaceship Games and can be purchased here:
https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/. With RQW, the social location
of the game’s developer contributes to anti-racist design structures, but other
techniques contribute toward anti-racism in game design. Lai-Tze Fan, Kishonna
Gray, and Aynur Kadir (2021) respond to this call by laying out several guidelines for
imagining an anti-racist game. I will quote these but embellish to clarify certain details
I find important:

1. “Don’t ask for stories” from marginalized peoples. This can be extended
beyond race to gender, sexuality, and Indigeneity, among many other things.
2. “Don’t ask BIPOC if your game is ‘realistic’ enough.”
3. “Don’t ask BIPOC to play and verify the quality of your anti-racist message
unless they want to.”
4. “Don’t design any character role-play that relies on the painful and harmful
performance of racialized identities, especially where appropriation, mockery,
or satire is involved.”
5. You can’t fix real-world racism by making the most anti-racist game. You
won’t annihilate the racist particles with anti-racist particles.
6. “Don’t critique BIPOC’s game design if the content does not involve racial
politics. They are allowed to create and design things that make them happy”
(pp. 10-11)

This list caters to the well-intentioned folks who want to combat racism through
games but, perhaps due to their positionality, are not fully equipped to handle that
responsibility. Much of the article focuses on inviting marginalized folks to the table
throughout the process, rather than addressing marginalized designers. These
suggestions are geared toward keeping well-intentioned folks self-critical enough to
avoid easy mistakes in designing anti-racist games. It’s worth reframing this list by
looking at another game and creating a more actionable list.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians is an important TTRPG as it takes the vastly complicated
systems from its traditional format and reframes each in ways that allow a player
to buck norms established by some of the bigger systems in the industry, ones that
have set the stage for racial conflict as they rethink their storyworlds. This isn’t to
say that one can’t reframe rules in an existing system, but like trying to make CAH
work in spite of its traditional framework, it is nowhere near as effective as having
those rules already in question and anti-racist, inclusive design front and center from
the get-go showcasing ways that queer and BIPOC folks can imagine themselves
into these worlds. Thirsty Sword Lesbians wastes no time in welcoming players into
its world through its cover design (Figure 1). Two women of color lock swords and

ADE FOR GAMES 81

display differing but related pleasured expressions, whether from the heat of battle or
because they’re just that into each other. One has soft pastel pink get-up reminiscent
of wild west fantasy attire, complete with tassels and pseudo-Indigenous designs, hair
a more neon pink, while the other woman is dressed very much like the lesbians in
Revolutionary Girl Utena (Ikuhara, 1997).

Figure 1: Thirsty Sword Lesbians cover design.

The swords also combine genres, with one a more traditional fencing sword and
the other a laser sword with adornments akin to the woman holding it. This visual
signaling, if not apart from the title emblazoned along the top, lets players know that
there is genre-bending afoot, whether from the perspective of the blending visual
aesthetics or an intervention in TTRPG mechanics to follow. The woman’s simulated
hair on the right is even a pixelated hologram, the glitch signalling indeterminateness
and resistance against normalizing sexual forces (Shabbar, 2018).
From the start, Thirsty Sword Lesbians welcomes players into a world where
hierarchization and abhorrence of difference are not the law of the land. In this setting,
“Misogyny, transphobia, racism, and other forms of bigotry are not the norm here,
though they may be the norm elsewhere if the players wish to confront these issues”
(Walsh, 2021). This kind of choice is a distinguishing feature in anti-racist game design.
One does not need to plan out every detail in a setting through the rules because
allowing for players to co-create these details as the story progresses facilitates players’
negotiation of the ludic and narrative structures of the game. In other systems, race
and racism are hard-coded into the diegetic and ludic foundations of their respective
universes. Here, racial variation is welcome and encouraged. This element, however, is
not codified into stats or lore or any such character-/world-building trait. The system
encourages players to take a broad, positive perspective, while accounting for the
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possibility that players may want to tackle harder issues. It does not, however, allow
folks to role-play a racist. Rather, a thirsty sword lesbian can:

• “Change the world for the better by acting with integrity and compassion
• Fight when something is worth fighting for
• Redeem and seduce adversaries
• Make out, dance, and carouse
• Solve problems with courage, wit, and style
• Deliver zingers and bon mots
• Make lasting friends and enemies.” (Walsh, 2021, p. 5)

These rules, put in the context of Fan, Gray, and Kadir’s (2021) “How to…” guide,
empowers players to play from their respective lived positions or as a character in
a world where race still can play into their (and their character’s) perspectives.
Specifically, rule 4 in the “How to…” guide advises against designing “character role-
play that relies on the painful and harmful performance of racialized identities,
especially where appropriation, mockery, or satire is involved” (p. 11). Again, race is
not a codified quantity in Thirsty Sword Lesbians. In a more traditional RPG setting,
racial conflict is baked into the world: orcs hate elves; elves situated themselves at
the top of the hierarchy; humans have the broadest range of possible hero-to-evil
alignments. Thirsty Sword Lesbians resists this by allowing for multitudes of racial
identities without structuring them; in fact, the rules resist such structuring by making
racism an explicit other, occurring “elsewhere” or an invasive force, for instance, if
one were to “battle a tyrannical ruler when her enforcers march down from the frosty
north” (Walsh, 2021, p. 5), this directionality evokes links to the real-world colonialism
of the western and global north.
The relationship between the players and the GM (Gaymaster) do not contain the
same power imbalance that traditional systems have, particularly as it comes to player
agency. Thirsty Sword Lesbians structures its gameplay around players pushing the story
in equal measure with the GM there to emphasize those decisions. The game accounts
for these decisions with the “Player’s Agenda” section containing encouragement for
feeling the characters’ emotions, being excited about everyone’s stories and their
associated player characters (Walsh, 2021, p. 7), standing for “justice and liberation”
(p. 8) and flirting (pp. 8-9). This is supported by the “Safety and Consent” rules. Two
elements in particular are emphasized to help safeguard players and interpret their
interactions. The first is, “the game is structured so that you the player always get to
choose the actions of your characters” (p. 10). This is contrary to most TTRPGs, where
one may start an action but the interpretation and consequences of that action lay
solely with one individual. Players hold this power in Thirsty Sword Lesbians, in part
because this is a necessary thing for players to feel true agency over their characters.
A second element in the rules states, “the game mechanics are always available if
you find yourself in an emotional roleplaying moment and need some distance from
embodying your character’s feelings” (p. 10). This inverts traditional TTRPG
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mechanics, where mechanics can often dictate action and interpretation entirely. Here,
the player’s needs and wants take precedence. As flirting, romance, and sexuality are
heavily emphasized in this game, a player engaging in this type of interaction may
feel that they need to take some psychic distance from the encounter. Both players’
interests are safeguarded without removing joy or attachment to the storyworld. But
what if one needs further assistance?
For TTRPGs, one of the most influential forms of rewarding players is in the form
of experience points. Depending on the system, experience points quantify various
ways that the player-character has accomplished something that later translate to
things like stat increases, access to better attacks or spells, or abilities that they were
previously not prepared for. Thirsty Sword Lesbians uses a similar system, but there
is a twist. Whereas systems like Dungeons & Dragons treat experience similar to a
meter—when one has enough experience, they advance a level—Lesbians treats
experience similar to an expendable resource. Experience can be rewarded when using
different abilities, advancing the story, or any number of player-guided interactions
with the world. One of the most relevant to an anti-racist project is if someone uses
a Safety Tool, based on the “TTRPG Safety Toolkit,” which is both linked to and
outlined in the rule book (pp. 12-13). Safety tools have become more commonplace,
but putting them in the rules proper sets a standard in the same way that a list of
spells or feats does; it suggests courses of action and lays the framework rather than
relying on players individually being responsible for challenging what’s happening at
the table. These tools are generic in the sense that they can be deployed inclusively
to accommodate identities across the various spectra that we use to define ourselves.
They also do not require one to out themselves or provide a justification; as they
say, consent is sexy. This can be as firm as the X Card, which allows any player to
“remove an element from the game” (p. 13). If players seem to be moving in a direction
that suggests a racially charged element: X Card, and it’s out. Though this is probably
mitigated earlier during session 0—a meeting before the game where players build
their characters, flesh out the story beforehand, and suggest game rules and table
etiquette; it’s a good way to get players on the same page with “The Palette.” This safety
tool allows players to add elements, anonymously if needed, to a set of lists, ones that
“[excite] you about the setting so that the other players can highlight those aspects” or
“what elements of the genre you don’t want to include, for whatever reason” (p. 12).
These documents are editable at any time. The anonymous feature allows players to
keep their identities safe without fear of retribution or outing. The list heads many
things off at the pass, but the designers recognize that this isn’t a perfect feature, so
players are always able to add things or simply stop story beats ahead of time. Playing
TTRPGs is akin to designing games from the player-perspective (or the Gaymaster, for
this system), and they are always a work-in-progress.
Fan, Gray, and Kadir (2021) attempt to address the complexity of anti-racist games
with item number 5: “Don’t design games that are meant to fix all problems of racism.”
This summation is important, but it is made more complicated in the remainder of the
Not: “If your game’s main objective is to promote anti-racist activism, don’t sidetrack
that goal” by including other important themes (p. 11). This might be addressing

84
the difficulties of designing a game without distracting from anti-racist issues, but I
have to push back slightly, as the cautionary nature of this list only goes so far. Is
the anti-racist message in Radical Queer Witches watered down by the inclusion of
queer and spiritual themes in service of holding “the privileged group accountable”
(Awsem, 2022b)? Because the game is imagined from the get-go to account for the
interweaving ways that identities inform one another, I would argue that it is not
watered down, that there is a feedback effect that bolsters how players choose to
engage with and deploy their identities in service of critiquing colonialism and its
adherents. The same can be said with Thirsty Sword Lesbians, where race is deployed by
the individual but not quantified in the same was as other TTRPGs, where races not
only have specific stats but real-world influences and equivalencies. Items 1 and 3 in
Walsh’s (2021) “No Fascists or Bigots Allowed” list states that, as conditions for playing
the game, players have to “Support racial liberation, intersectional feminism, and
queer liberation” and “Respect racialized people; respect Black, Indigenous, mixed-
race people, and other people of color” (p.11). The game does not prescribe race but
allows for its incorporation in service of queer romance and storylines. “Racism” and
other problematic hierarchies are not absent but need to be drawn upon with care
so that they are not simply replicated in playable form and become a precondition
for said play. Lived experiences and traumas may be important to players as they
explore this world so the book cautions, “This is not to say that you can uncritically
import settings that marginalized queer identities, but the framework of the game
will help you analyze and critique them. In much of the media celebrated under
racist patriarchy, authorities are going to be Toxic Powers. You may need to invent
the community that nurtures the PCs [player characters] within the setting you have
chosen” (Walsh, 2021, p. 109). Fan, Gray, and Kadir’s (2021) sentiment isn’t unfounded;
every push toward anti-racism is rife with needing to set up hard boundaries between
one’s project and how those intentions can be made foggy or even flipped onto itself by
racist (from benevolent to overt) forces. Successful anti-racist designs must certainly
not “fix all the problems of racism,” but a designer taking account for the multifaceted,
intersectional ways that identities will impact a player’s interfacing with said game
or the storyworld should not be considered “the content version of All Lives Matter.”
Caution is necessary in approaching anti-racist game design, yet it cannot be reductive,
lest it treat these projects in a similar fashion to a “product” (Hage, 2016).

CONCLUSION: AN ATTEMPT AT A LIST

I’m not a fan of lists myself, but they can serve as useful hermeneutics to guide both
budding designers and critical players. And as I previously mentioned, there should be
DOs to accompany the DON’Ts.
Anti-racist game design should consider the following when designing,
implementing, and revising their games:

• Consciousness, self-consciousness; awareness, self-awareness; from start to

finish, keep your project’s design in mind.
• Be open to critique and feedback.
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 • “Bring everybody to the table” (Fan, Gray, and Kadir, 2021). Don’t just imagine
different types of players, engage with them.
• Game mechanics are not apolitical, ahistorical, or acultural. They have roots
that stem from somewhere, and their contemporary implementation should
not be adopted without consideration.
• Race, sexuality, gender, Indigeneity, or any other identity-based formation
should not equal a numeric value, and cultural, ludological, or narratological
framings should be considered carefully.
• Built-in ludic flexibility invites players to be flexible in ways even the game
hasn’t imagined.
• Empower players; deprivilege rules.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What other games might you analyze to help develop considerations for
anti-racist game design? How do the broader contexts and metanarratives of
these games play a role in shaping how these games are played and
interpreted?
2. Which of Bonnett’s seven motivations for anti-racism are animating your
interests and work toward anti-racism? How does your research or creative
practice challenge or otherwise negotiate the epistemic grounds of racism?
3. What would it take to apply the anti-racist Dos and Don’ts described
throughout this chapter? How do these considerations challenge or enhance
your existing practices? can these design considerations be rethought and
inform the questions guiding your games research?

KEY TERMS

Anti-racism describes efforts to combat racism but, as Clapper argues, cannot be

described in abstract terms. Rather, anti-racism emerges from the specific contexts of the
racism that it combats, and it is defined by actions that counter racialization and related
forms of oppression.
Structures, in the context of games, refer to the ways that game rules, procedures, or
mechanics determine how the game is played as well as how cultural values, ideologies,
and systems shape player actions. As Clapper points out, the racist ideologies of North
American, white supremacist, and settler culture impact both the design of game rules and
how players interact within them.

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 Agency refers to the freedom that players have to determine their own individual or
collective experience with games. Agency always exists within and is constrained by
structures, but some systems are open to, and encourage, greater degrees of agency for
players.

REFERENCES
1. Awsem, Y. (2022a). Radical Queer Witches. [Card game].
https://radicalqueerwitches.com/collections/all.
2. Awsem, Y. (2022b). “Radical Queer Witches: A Queer, Anti-Racist Card Game.”
Kickstarter [blog]. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/yasawsem/radical-
queer-witches-a-queer-anti-racist-card-game.
3. Barr, M., & Copeland-Stewart, A. (2022). Playing Video Games During the
COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being. Games and Culture,
17(1), 122-139.
4. Bojadžijev, M. (2020). Anti-racism as Method. In Routledge International
Handbook of Contemporary Racisms (pp. 193-204). Routledge.
5. Bonnett, A. (2005). Anti-racism. Routledge.
6. Cards Against Humanity (2024). “Cards Against Humanity Homepage”
www.cardsgainsthumanity.com
7. Dillon, J., Dranove, D., Halpern, E., Hantoot, D.M., Pinsof, D., Temkin, M.,
Weinstein, E. (2011) Cards Against Humanity. [Card game].
https://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/
8. Essed, P. (1990). Everyday Racism: Reports from Women of Two Cultures.
Hunter House.
9. Essed, P. (1991). Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory
(Vol. 2). SAGE.
10. Fan, L-T., Gray, K., Kadir, A. (2021). How to Design Games that Promote
Racial Equity. Electronic Book Review. https://electronicbookreview.com/
gathering/critical-making-critical-design/.
11. Hage, G. (2016). Recalling Anti-racism. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(1),
123-133.
12. Ikuhara, K. (Director). (1997) Revolutionary Girl Utena. TX Network.
13. Fleming, C. M. (2018). How to be Less Stupid about Race: On Racism, White
Supremacy, and the Racial Divide. Beacon Press.
14. Kelley, R. D. (1996). Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class.
Simon and Schuster.
15. Kelly, S. (2020, June 23). “Cards Against Humanity Co-Founder Max Temkin
Steps Down Amid Allegations of Racism, Sexism.” Chicago Sun Times.

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 https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2020/6/23/21301274/cards-against-
humanity-co-founder-max-temkin-steps-down-allegations-racism-sexism.
16. Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard
University Press.
17. Latour, B. (2007). The Recall of Modernity. (S. Muecke, Trans.). Cultural Studies
Review (13)1, 11-30.
18. MacMullan, T. (2009). Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction. Indiana
University Press.
19. Yin, P. (2016). Whither Anti-Racism?. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(1), 1-15.
20. Robinson, D., Hill, K. J. C., Ruffo, A. G., Couture, S., & Ravensbergen, L. C.
(2019). Rethinking the Practice and Performance of Indigenous Land
Acknowledgement. Canadian Theatre Review, 177(1), 20-30.
21. Roy, J. (2014, June 18). “’Cards Against Humanity’ Co-Creator Publicly
Apologizes for Transphobic Card. http://fusion.net/modern_life/story/cards-
humanity-creator-publicly-apologizes-transphobic-card-790882. Archived at
http://web.archive.org/web/20140625070443/http://fusion.net/modern_life/
story/cards-humanity-creator-publicly-apologizes-transphobic-card-790882.
22. Strmic-Pawl, H. V., & Wilson, R. Y. (2016). Equal Opportunity Racism? Review
of Cards Against Humanity, created by Josh Dillon, Daniel Dranove, Eli Halpern,
Ben Hantoot, David Munk, David Pinsof, Max Temkin, and Eliot Weinstein,
distributed by Cards Against Humanity LLC. Humanity & Society, 40(3),
361-364.
23. Shabbar, A. (2018). Queer-Alt-Delete: Glitch Art as Protest against the
Surveillance Cis-tem. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 46(3 & 4), 195-212.
24. Sugiura, L. (2021). The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual
War against Women. Emerald Publishing Limited.
25. Walsh, A. K. (2021). Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Silver Spring: Evil Hat Productions.
https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians
26. Wolf, M. P. (2002). A Grasshopper Walks into a Bar: The Role of Humour in
Normativity. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32(3).

Notes
1. Like other academics, I will be using a lowercase ‘w’ to deemphasize the west as a superior
cultural force, in addition to suggesting other cultural and social approaches that might not
be considered western in their conception or application.
2. In this vein, I encourage folks to read Paradies’s (2016) article summarizing the challenges
and discussions that have faced anti-racism as a study, so as not to reiterate many good points
and questions they raise.

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SECTION II

INQUIRY

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90
CHAPTER 4.

THE CHANGING SAME: BLACKNESS, REPRESENTATION, AND

VIDEO GAMES

André Brock

SUMMARY

Applying methods from Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA),

André Brock explores how Blackness, particularly Black masculinity, is
communicated and represented in digital spaces and video games. Brock begins
by outlining ways that identity is distributed across online spaces. He argues
that although people tend to try to recreate themselves in digital spaces, Black
people and people of colour have fewer opportunities to express their identity,
in part because they are more likely to face harassment, toxicity, and experience
a lack of representation. In video game contexts, this is exacerbated by norms
that assume gamers are white, male, masculine, heterosexual, and middle class,
which can also lead to more hostile environments for Black and other racialized
people. Drawing on examples of characters across game franchises Resident Evil,
Uncharted, and God of War, Brock describes how a variety of factors, ranging
from the interface and mechanics of the video game to characters’ identities and
motivations, to the voice actors who portray them, can impact how players see
racialized characters, and how those characters can perpetuate stereotypes.
Brock also describes several ways to improve representation in video game
design, such as ensuring that Black people and racialized people are hired as
voice actors and models to create more authentic representations of Black
identity in digital spaces.

APPLICATION POINTS

Brock’s presentation offers a compelling extension of ideas he previously

explored in his other applications of CTDA, including his analysis of Resident
Evil 5 (Brock, 2011), and his examination of ‘Black Twitter’ (Brock, 2012). These
articles offer important companion pieces to this presentation and can help to
elucidate additional strategies for analysis. Crucially, Brock’s approach is
deliberately wide-ranging: in his theorizations of identity in digital space, he is
not only interested in the ways that we present ourselves online, but also in the

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 ways that the platforms and the technologies we use add additional layers to
those enactments of identity by enabling and constraining possibilities for
expression and connection. Similarly, in the context of video games, he is not
only interested in the narrative and visual representation of a character, but
also who gives voice to that character, and what actions the player performs in
bringing that character to life. These considerations add important complexity
to the analysis, and as Brock examines these facets of Blackness and
representation in video games, we can note new opportunities to improve
representations across the multiple ways that identity is communicated and
enacted across digital space.

I originally started looking at video games in earnest with an article on Resident Evil
5 (Brock 2011), which talks about race, representation, and gaming. I’m really proud
of that work because in many ways, I think it set the tone for later efforts, such as
#CommunicationSoWhite and #GamingSoWhite that have happened in recent years
(Chakravartty et al., 2018). It provided a critical approach to understanding how game
interfaces, game mechanics, and game audiences work together to constitute racial
identities that people are experiencing and enacting on screen.
If you’re familiar with my work, you know that I’m interested in how racial
identity, specifically Blackness, gets enacted in digital spaces. In Distributive Blackness
(Brock, 2020), I argue that Blackness can be understood as an informational identity,
one that’s expressed through semiotic and material relationships between content,
hardware, code, performances, and cultural phenomena. By this, I mean that digital
identity, even in our current multi-mediated TikTok era, is still largely a textual
enactment of self. Unlike our physical selves which are limited to one material space at
a time, online identities can exist in multiple places at once, although not always in the
same context for enactment.
When I first started doing this work in the early 2000s, the most abundant body
of research on race online was digital divide research. It argued that there were
few minorities to be found online because it held what I call a deficit model, where
minorities were understood to lack material access (e.g., they didn’t have a computer),
or economic access (e.g., they couldn’t afford the subscription), or didn’t have technical
literacy (e.g., they didn’t know how to use a computer), or connection (e.g., they didn’t
have access to broadband). That framing bothered me, in part because when I lived
in New York, I constantly saw people around me using the latest telecommunications
devices, whether it was drug dealers with two-way pagers or random people having
Blackberries or even cell phone usage. I never felt like Black people were being left
behind. We were using the devices as they fit into our daily lives.
To contest this framing of Black and minority digital practice, I argued that
in large part, Black digital practices go above and beyond the Western paradigm
of productivity and efficiency. We tend to use things that augment our lives in a
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particular way. From that perspective, we can understand that there is a Black digital
expertise. I started talking about racial identities then and I constantly got asked,
“Well, how do you know they’re Black?” I used to use Chris Rock’s definition of what
Blackness is, although it doesn’t hold up very well and I never repeat the joke properly.
But there’s a bit in one of the early comedy specials where he talks about how the
place he’s performing has a white busboy with a prosthetic leg, and he’s like, “This poor
man who barely makes any money and is disabled, would rather maintain and keep his
whiteness than be a rich Black man like me.” There, I think Rock makes a compelling
argument that to be Black is to not just enjoy the capacity to dance well or to play badly
like some NBA basketball players in Atlanta, or other characteristics associated with
Blackness. It’s also to accept that being Black comes with a large set of impairments
and obstacles that keep you from being your fullest self, and the digital does a lot to try
to reduce that.

RACE WITHOUT BODIES? INFORMATIONAL IDENTITY AND

BLACKNESS ONLINE

If you’re familiar with Frantz Fanon, in “Black Skin, White Masks” he talks about being
hailed as a black man on his native island in the Caribbean. He says that as he was
walking down the street, he encountered a young woman shopping with her son,
both white, and as he walked down the street, the son turned to his mother with
horror, and said “Look Mama, a negro” (Fanon, 1986, p. XVII). And Fanon calls this a
phenomenological return, he said in that moment he was returned and reduced to his
body. He argues that, in some ways, that is a pathological association with being part of
the Western civilization project, in that he can only be a Black man. At the time he was
studying to become a doctor; he had published a couple of books. He was relatively
accomplished and what we would call a white-collar professional today. But that cry of
horror and recognition from that young white child reduced him to simply his body.
So, I argued in Distributed Blackness that Blackness online does something to relinquish,
to diminish that phenomenological return.
Borrowing a quote from the philosopher Lewis Gordon (2005), I argue that in
online spaces, I’m not only a point of view, but I am a point that is to be viewed. In the
multiple spaces that you occupy as a social media user, whatever your racial identity
may be, bits and pieces of you are present in each space you occupy. whether that’s
LinkedIn, whether that’s your group chat, whether that’s Twitter—which is where
I live—or other spaces. Parts of you are inhabiting each of those spaces. You can
distribute your informational body across multiple spaces, which is one of the benefits
of the digital.
Even more, once you do that digital practice of publishing yourself to whatever
online space you prefer, your self becomes available as an archive, mostly for access
by the platform. It becomes available to archive for retrieval, for discernment, and
sometimes even for debate. Overall, I argue that people use technologies to reproduce
themselves in whatever configuration the technology allows. Those of us who are
gamers, who obsess over character creation, know, (and Path of Exile and Black Desert
have some of the best character creators around) we must publish the person we are
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in these spaces. Which is odd, because I’ve run into any number of non-Black gamers
who are much more interested in becoming purple, or elves, or anything else. Instead,
I usually try to recreate myself as faithfully as possible given whatever the technology
offers. But I would argue even in your imaginary posturings, when you play with
the character creator, you’re still creating an image of yourself. And so we publish
ourselves online or digitally. A lot of that is intentional. Doing so means that the digital
technologies we use shape us and are shaped by us. This definition of online identity
largely applies to our social network infrastructure.

SIGNS GIVEN, AND GIVEN OFF

Because I’m a humanist, I tend to lean towards sociology, particularly Erving

Goffman’s (1956) work on the dramaturgical self, where he argues that the self is
a series of performances in a particular context, with particular appearances, and
particular mannerisms. Goffman focuses on micro-interactions between people to
determine how appearance solidifies the role that you’re going to play for the audience
in front of you, given the context around you. He says in these micro-interactions,
people give off two signals, one that they give, intentionally, and one that they give off.
If you think about any social media profile, the signs given are usually content they
post: words, sounds, images, or videos. The signs given off are less in your face, but
they’re still visible, and they help to contextualize the content that each user posts.
This might include display names, banner images, friend and follower lists, or profile
pictures, which are displayed at the front of every post. Whatever social media sites
you use, there is usually a tiny circle or square thumbnail with your picture so that
people have an additional layer of information to know who is posting.
Another way to understand signs, and signs given off, can be found in our use
of modern GPS apps. Once you enter your destination and hit start, the application
signifies or makes you appear on the representation of the street that you’re on, and
the destination that you’re going to. It either uses a little arrow, or a little car if you
use Waze. There are signs being given off about you as you navigate from your origin
to your destination. Data about your speed, your phone, the application you’re using,
the network you’re on, your operating system, and even every Wi-Fi network is a sign
given off during your performance or enactment of self as a traveler using a GPS app.
I think this is important to understand as a gamer, in part because gaming identity
is still an interestingly gendered and fraught category. I often ask my students which
one of them is a gamer. I would argue that most of the men and a few women raise
their hands. Most of the women, however, will not raise their hands. That’s because
the sign that many people associate with gaming is the use of either a PC or a console.
Those are relatively sophisticated gaming systems which require a lot of technical
know-how or a lot of money. So gaming, as a sign, is gendered. It’s economic. It
requires the acquisition of specific equipment and literacies to understand.
Then, I expand the definition of gaming, and I asked the women who didn’t raise
their hands “Well, hey, how many of you play The Sims?” Hands go up. “How many
of you play Stardew Valley?” Hands go up. It turns out that people can understand
themselves as gamers if you point out that many of the activities they do for leisure
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in these applications on our phones, or on a Nintendo Switch, are also part of what a
gaming identity can be, even though we tend to restrict it or reduce it to the particular
arcane practices that we associate with games. This has become important to me,
because if you don’t identify yourself as a gamer, or if you do identify yourself as a
gamer, what signs do you look for in the media that you love to interact with the most?

SEEING SOUNDS AND LISTENING TO RACE

I mentioned that one of the signs that you give off, or at least in your social media
life, is sound. Sometimes that’s your Spotify playlist, sometimes that’s the audio to
your video. But also think about it in terms of the recent rise of voice chat apps such
as Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces, many of which are centred around virtual settings
where people talk at and over one another, repeatedly. Thanks to podcasts, videos,
and chat spaces, we’re more aware of sound and online spaces than ever before. In
gaming, sound has become more important than ever as developers use high-fidelity
audio engines to provide immersion through surround sound, where audio provides
environmental and interactive cues.
However, sound also has a narrative and cultural capacity. Researchers have long
been interested in understanding whether listeners can determine another person’s
race just by hearing them talk. These studies have largely been used in linguistics,
sociology, social work, and other spaces, often to determine whether discrimination
is happening. Whether employers, landlords, or other authorities will discriminate
against people they talk to over the phone, based on their perception of their racialized
audio identity, or their voice.
It turns out, because Americans are over-studied and over-generalized as a
research population, that Americans are good at determining if a caller is a Black man
or a Black woman. Many of these researchers have found that being able to determine
whether a person occupies a particular racial identity has attendant possibilities for
racial discrimination. This becomes interesting with voice chat because gamers know
this already. Kishonna Gray found that many of the Black and queer women gamers
that she studied turn voice chat off or use mods to alter the pitch of their voice because
men can be nasty, or sexual, or both towards minorities in multiplayer games (Gray,
2012, pp. 411-428). She contends, and I agree, that many male gamers believe that
gaming is a masculine activity. I’ve argued in my work that the default digital identity,
of which video games are a part, is white, male, masculine, heterosexual, or in some
cases hypersexual, and middle class.

WHITE ARCHETYPES IN VIDEO GAMES

In what other ways can we see this archetype work in video games? Video games
have long had a whiteness problem. Most video game protagonists over the last three
console generations have been grizzled, nondescript, genocidal kleptomaniacs—I
mean, white males. I call them genocidal kleptomaniacs, in part because I’m thinking
of one of the games I’ll talk about in a few minutes, which is Uncharted, featuring
Nathan Drake. Nathan seems to be an everyman, which is why I say he’s nondescript.

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You wouldn’t recognize him if you passed him on the street because he looks like
everybody else. But Nathan has an extraordinary capacity to kill waves upon waves
of antagonists. He’s an expert shot. He also knows a little karate to pursue his goal of
robbing temples and romancing his romantic interest. He kills hundreds of people to
the point where in the third game they were even calling out why he was doing this as
part of the game’s narrative and progression.
In my article on Resident Evil 5, I argued that Asian video games also afford
Western audiences the capacity to read whiteness onto the characters, in part because
of the Western occupation of Japan and the attendant post-World War II domination
of media by Hollywood. But even before Japanese and later Chinese and Korean
companies began catering to the Western gaming market, the characters that they put
on screen, whether it’s anime or video games themselves, were easily able to be read by
Western gamers as white.
There are similar stereotypes around race and identity for women protagonists as
well, except they are worse. The women I’m thinking of, from a design studio called
Vanillaware, are often portrayed with hypersexualized bodies. Developers have gone
on record as bragging that their games have the best breast physics in the industry. If
they’re in games that require combat, they often wear chainmail bikinis, or super short
skirts to show off as much of their legs and buttocks as possible. When it comes to
playing them, if you can play them, they have lesser attributes than the men. They may
be more agile, but they’re never as strong. They’re not necessarily portrayed as more
intelligent or wise.
Another archetype for women and games can be seen in the concept of fridging.
The idea is that the motivation for the male protagonist in many aspects of Western
media is that a woman must die to set him off on his pathway of redemption or
vengeance. The only recent exception is John Wick, where his dog is killed, and his
wife dies of natural causes. John Wick, if you think about it, is the most aggrieved dog
owner in the entire universe.

Figure 1. Sheva Alomar often follows behind Chris Redfield, despite her role as a guide.

In the Resident Evil 5 article, I talked about these really limited possibilities for women
in games, and I was focusing on a character in that game known as Sheva Alomar.

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Sheva was one of the first problematic women characters that I paid attention to, in
part because Resident Evil 5 was a co-op game. She had to survive for you to advance
in the game, but she wasn’t very good in the game itself. She couldn’t be controlled in
the initial version (though I believe in the update you can control her now). She was a
pack mule: she carried most of the ammunition supplies or whatever that you needed.
She would occasionally heal you and her narrative said that the reason why she was
in the game in the first place was that she was supposed to be a native guide for the
white character that she was working with, Chris Redfield. But largely the narrative
centers around Redfield. It doesn’t talk about her history. You have to read the lore
to understand that. She’s a terrible translator and half the time she’s following behind
Chris, not leading him as they navigate the various set pieces in the game (Figure 1).

FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL: MINORITIZED CHARACTERS

If you’re a Black gamer looking to be represented as a video game protagonist, you’re

pretty much out of luck. While multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs) and battle
royales feature diverse casts of heroes and heroines, their characterization is largely
presented as lore. In other words, their backgrounds, their histories, and their
motivations are largely absent because all you’re there to do is treat them as action
figures. You inhabit their bodies with whatever skills they possess, and you take on
your opponents, who are also being inhabited by other players. From that perspective,
you don’t necessarily need to know that much about the character. The game I was
thinking of as I wrote this was a game called Apex Legends. They have characters such
as Bangalore (Figure 2), Gibraltar, and at least one who is not tied to a minoritized
location, Seer, all of whom are brown-skinned. But you will not be able to apprehend
how their racial or ethnic identity informs the character.

Figure 2. Bangalore from Apex Legends is an example of a brown-skinned

character whose racial identity is not heavily involved with their character.

This is a relatively new trend, but for years, gamers have complained that when
minorities are placed into multiplayer games, they are presented as reskinned versions
of white characters. Their features wouldn’t change, their mannerisms wouldn’t
change, their voices wouldn’t change, but they’d be brown instead of white.
At this point, I’d like to give a shout-out to a developer/designer A.M. Darke. They

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are quite notable and have received several awards. One of the things they began doing
was trying to interrogate what it meant to be Black in video games and creating a
library of African-oriented hair textures1. As a Black gamer, one of the most difficult
things you have to deal with when attempting to recreate yourself in digital form is
the fact that the hairstyles are terrible. You might get fuzzy cornrows. You might get a
bad Afro that doesn’t move. It’s completely motionless, like you have a black basketball
on your head. What A.M. did was create tools for developers to recreate the kinkiness,
the coil, the texture, and importantly, the movement of Black and brown hair in these
video games. There are increasing possibilities to be the person of colour that you
envision yourself as offline in these online spaces.

VOICE AND RACE

In 2017, one of my favourite developers, Naughty Dog, the creator of the Uncharted
video game series, released a game called Lost Legacy, which was originally intended to
be downloadable content (DLC) for their game Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. It featured
a very sexualized femme fatale who also had bit roles in the previous couple of games,
named Chloe Frazier. Chloe Frazier is biracial—she’s Indian and white—and at the
time, most people didn’t pay attention to how she was voiced because it was
remarkable that someone so brown was featured in a video game featuring the
colonialist, imperialist exploits of a treasure hunter destroying multiple Indigenous
areas in their search for gold and killing people. So, Chloe Frazier ended up getting
her own free-standing game. As I mentioned, it was originally DLC, but it got so much
interest the developers released it as a stand-alone game. In that game, she teamed up
with another woman of colour who was also featured in one of the previous games.
This is a South African character named Nadine Ross. Nadine is a former mercenary,
and the daughter of a mercenary who runs her own army, which of course was bested
by Drake in Uncharted 3 in his quest to find the McGuffin. She is not biracial, but she is
not, say, extremely dark-skinned, and this is relevant when we compare her portrayal
to the model used to create her likeness (a Black woman), and the actor who provides
her voice (a white woman).
This use of Black models for Black characters is not a new thing. When I wrote
about Resident Evil 5 and Sheva Alomar — I noted that the game was created by
Capcom, and we can talk about what it means when a Japanese game creates African-
descended or American characters — Capcom had two women provide their likeness
for her representation in the game. One woman was used for her motion capture and
her body, and another model was used for her face because the producer said the first
model wasn’t attractive enough. And so, they used another model’s facial features to
map onto Sheva’s head. Problematic. I find it interesting that this tradition of using
Black models for Black bodies is continuing. I like it, although I understand that bodies
don’t necessarily ‘have race’, but it makes me hopeful that Black people will continue
to participate in the game industry no matter how they get in.
Earlier I talked about how sound is a major part of understanding a person’s
identity. Nadine Ross and Chloe Frazier’s voice actresses look a little different than
their in-game counterparts. This sparked a huge controversy, particularly around
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these voice actresses, when the game Lost Legacy was released because, as you may
know, neither of them matches the ethnic or racial identity of the characters they
portray.
For Chloe, it’s fair to say that because she’s Indian and biracial, there’s not
necessarily a real understanding of how she would sound. She has a posh British
accent. The idea that many gamers had a problem with was the idea that they couldn’t
find a South Asian actor with a posh British accent, even though there are many people
in the UK who could more accurately represent this character on screen.
Similarly, for Nadine, there was controversy because when the director of the
Uncharted series was asked why he chose this voice actress for this character, he said:
“Well, you know, Laura nailed the interview. She sounded like the type of person that
we want to see.” I took what she did, and what she performed, as a credible South
African accent, but I still find it troubling that even behind the scenes, whiteness seems
to find a way to represent itself and the characterization of Black bodies.
In a different context, we might call this digital blackface. While I’m not always
comfortable with that term, I can see how it is applied here. These Uncharted games are
largely narrative-driven, Hollywood-style, third-person shooters. There’s a lot more
focus on how a character’s backstory and motivations inform the type of gameplay
they do. Nadine is a brawler, she’s good at hand-to-hand combat and armed combat,
while Chloe is a deft hand with a gun, but she’s also a getaway driver and a thief. But
while these white women may be particularly apt at voicing these characters, and while
there are problems involved with saying only a Black woman can play a Black woman
who’s good at fighting, and only a South Asian woman can play a woman who’s good at
stealing, I still wish Naughty Dog had the foresight to provide voice actresses of colour
to give them further entry into the profession. There are several who could have done
a credible job. The comedic actor Deborah Wilson has a long list of video game voice
actor credits, as does Cree Summer. There are several people that they could have
tapped, but they chose not to. It’s tempting to say this is racist, but I try to hold back
from those types of accusations. I will simply say that colourblind casting introduces
some problems in being able to fully connect with the character’s representation on
screen. Uncharted: Lost Legacy came out in 2017, but I was first able to connect with a
video game character in 2005.
In 2005, Sony Santa Monica introduced the Spartan warrior Kratos (Figure 3) as
the lead character in their new intellectual property, God of War. He is distinguished
by his deep voice, his brutality, and his anger. They are the hallmarks of his ethnic and
gendered identity. In the game, he’s Spartan, which technically means that he’s Greek.
There are Orientalist tropes that we could assign to that particular identity, but for this
presentation, I want you to think of his phenotype. From the cover of the game, even
though he’s supposed to be Greek, he could easily be read as a white man. In the lead-
up to the game, they published several articles detailing why his skin is a particular
colour and why he has that tattoo. It turns out that Kratos is as white as he is because he
suffered a tragedy and then offered his soul to one of the gods of the Greek pantheon.
The tragedy was he lost his wife and child. To grieve for them, he said, “Aries, if you
take me as your avatar, I will kill everybody you need me to kill.” In the process, the

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ashes from their burned bodies were grafted onto his skin, giving him this ghost-like
appearance, leading to his sobriquet—his name in the game—the ghost of Sparta.

Figure 3. A Spartan character, voiced by a Black actor.

Kratos is portrayed across the first six games as a haunted man who has declared
a vendetta against the entire Greek pantheon for forcing him into this role of the
God of War after he kills Ares in the first game. Like many male “heroes,” when
Kratos grieves his dead wife and child, their passing provides additional torment and
motivation for his rage-filled rampage. Spoiler alert: I think it’s fair to say that Kratos
has daddy issues. At some point during the game, in addition to killing the entire Greek
pantheon, he kills his father, because it turns out that Kratos is half God himself.
I enjoyed these games—they were thrilling games. The combat was good, the
setting was original. There weren’t a lot of games set in Greece in that era of legends, so
they were fun to play. They were so popular that in 2018, Kratos was rebooted. Kratos
has a son with another dead wife to grieve. He has relocated to Viking mythology,
on land not necessarily named, but he’s fighting against the entire Norse pantheon
and events lead him to begin fighting against this new pantheon as he seeks to bury
the ashes of his child’s mother. Now you may notice that Kratos 1.0 and 2.0 are pale,
and even with their Greek origins, there’s no real reason to suspect that their voice
actor wouldn’t be white as well. So I was hugely surprised to learn that an actor (TC
Carson) from one of my favourite shows, Living Single, was the voice actor for Kratos
1.0. And another favourite, Christopher Judge from Stargate, was the voice actor for
2.0. And both men have really deep, resonant voices. Even though most of their voice
acting is roars, grunts, screams, and yells, and for the 2018 version of Kratos, a lot of
repetitions of the word, “boy,” it was immediately clear to me—again, I’m American,
and I’m good at the whole detecting race thing—that these voice actors were Black.
So, I began to think, what does it mean that this hyper-violent character with daddy
issues is so popular? And does the Blackness of the voice actors have anything to do
with understanding how violent he is?
In comparison, I could go back to the Uncharted series. Both Nolan North, who
plays Drake, and Troy Baker, who is another hugely visible voice actor, who plays
Drake’s brother Sam, have been cast in tons of games as a leading voice actor. There’s
no reason why those actors could not have been chosen for this voice role, the lead
voice of a new game. There’s something to be said for why this Blackness, these Black
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voices were chosen for this. Some of it is, I would argue, the hyper-masculinity of
Kratos. Not only is Kratos violent in the first couple of games, but he also has sex
scenes. They’re not Grand Theft Auto ‘hot coffee’ mod sex scenes—they’re Kratos going
into a hot tub with a couple of willing women and then the scene fades to black. But
he does have sex. Then, in the second game, Kratos 2.0 doesn’t have sex. He’s too
busy grieving. But he does have a child, so it implies that he’s had sex. So how do I
understand then the first Kratos who is technically a criminal—he’s committing crimes
against gods and the second Kratos who is a very distant, I would argue, maybe even
deadbeat dad who has returned to raise his child after his wife has passed. It’s very easy
to throw them into stereotypes of Black deviance and mythology. But what I found as
I began studying is that stereotypes are complicated.
In a book called Communicating Masculinity, Ronald Jackson (2013) writes that
throughout the literature on Black masculinity, many of which were written by Black
feminists, there are five sensitizing constructs that reappear through this literature,
and they’re indicative of Black masculine positionality: struggle, community,
achievement, independence, and recognition.
Now Kratos gives not a damn about community, and his achievement is either the
satisfaction of his vendetta or the protection of his son. But struggle, independence,
and recognition are all marks that we can assign to Kratos’s journey through these
eight games. It offers an additional perspective on understanding how Blackness can
then be reinterpreted as not necessarily a default identity, but a state of being, which
I think is a much more valuable way to understand not just Black masculinity, but
masculinity in general. That masculinity is a process, not necessarily a serious trait.
Even as the game asks you to dismember, set on fire, or freeze numbers of supernatural
entities and gods, there’s something to be said in these last two games of the journey
that Kratos undergoes as he seeks to first inter the white ashes of his dead wife, and
then try to settle his score with the Norse pantheon where he builds a relationship with
his son.
The studio Sony Santa Monica has done, I would argue, fantastic work in
rebooting Kratos not only as a grizzled older man but in showing his journey from
a man who doesn’t understand how to raise a child he’s been left with, to building
a growing bond of intimacy and familiarity and helping gamers understand his
protectiveness towards this child. He’s never not rough. He’s never not difficult with
other people. He hates helping other people. But he will go to whatever length is
necessary to protect his child. That is a depiction of Black masculinity that you rarely
get to see on any screen, whether the one in your hand, the one in your living room or
the one that these video game consoles and PCs put up.

CONCLUSION

I plan, as I did with my earlier work, to continue to use a method called Critical
Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), which asks researchers to apply a critical
cultural framework to digital objects and the discourses that the community using
those objects holds about the technology. I find CTDA to be helpful because by
applying that critical cultural framework you begin to understand how for video
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games, the interface, the mechanics and the industry try to portray characters of
colour, or whoever you prefer to discover (I’ve known folk who use CTDA to examine
queer games or queer characters in games). These examinations can show how
characters are portrayed by the industry and how the fans of that technology
reinterpret them, or continue to heap further stereotypes upon the representations of
those characters in the game.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. In what other digital contexts is white masculinity assumed to be the norm? How
else does this identity assumption affect technological or media design?
2. What clues lead the player to assume and/or learn the various characters’ identity?
Why is identity representation through specific narrative characterization, rather
than just visually or auditory, particularly impactful?
3. How might we reimagine digital and technological access beyond a Western
paradigm of digital expertise? How might we reframe the ‘appropriate’ use of technology?

KEY TERMS

Deficit Model: Within a deficit model, historically marginalized groups are framed as
lacking material and/or cultural access to technical expertise, rather than focusing on how
Black and other marginalized users actually use technology for their own, often counter-
normative, ends.
Dramaturgical Self: The self can be seen as a series of performances in a particular
context, with appearances and particular mannerisms.
Fridging: Using the death of an underdeveloped character, typically a woman, to motivate
the main character into a revenge plot and/or jumpstart their story.
Digital Identity: A semiotic and material relationship between content, hardware, code,
performances, and cultural phenomena in digital spaces. We construct our identity in
different contexts by adapting our performance and curating how we represent ourselves
in various online media spaces from LinkedIn to a group chat to Twitter.
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA): CTDA is a methodology that asks
researchers to apply a critical cultural framework to digital objects by looking at the
discourses of communities using those technologies.

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REFERENCES
1. Brock, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. New York
University Press.
2. Brock, A. (2011). ‘‘When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong’’: Resident Evil 5 , Racial
Representation, and Gamers. Games and Culture, 6(5), 429-452.
3. Brock, A. (2012). From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(4),
529–549. https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732147
4. Chakravartty, P., Kuo, R., Grubbs, V., & McIlwain, C. (2018).
#CommunicationSoWhite. Journal of Communication, 68(2),
254–266. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003
5. Fanon, F. (2002). Black Skin, White Masks (Repr.). Pluto Press. (Original work
published 1952)
6. Gray, K. L. (2012). Intersecting Oppressions and Online Communities.
Information, Communication & Society, 15(3), 411–428. https://doi.org/10.1080/
1369118X.2011.642401
7. Goffman, E. (1956). Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. University of Edinburgh
Social Sciences Research Centre.
8. Gordon, L. R. (2005). Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A Reading of Black Skin,
White Masks in Celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday. The CLR James
Journal, 11(1), 1–43.
9. Jackson, R. L., & Moshin, J. E. (Eds.). (2013). Communicating Marginalized
Masculinities: Identity Politics in TV, Film, and New Media. Routledge.

Notes
1. A.M. Darke describes the Open Source Afro Hair Library in Chapter 8.

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SPOTLIGHT 4: CREATING BLACK WORLDS – LOOKING FOR NEW
REALITIES IN GAMING

Based on a talk by Akil Fletcher

SUMMARY

Dr. Fletcher explores how gaming provides avenues for Black gamers to
form communities. Reflecting on the ways that racial biases can
constrain Black identity exploration and community interaction in
digital spaces related to video games, Fletcher describes how new
communities are forming in response to anti-Blackness. Fletcher
introduces the term ‘Black Intermediality’ to describe these spaces,
highlighting how Black individuals are thriving by creating new digital
spaces.

APPLICATION POINTS

Fletcher’s talk points to the underserved needs of Black technology

users, and to opportunities for application and service developers,
including 1) to imagine what Black sociality in digital spaces might look
like if users did not feel they need to utilize the intermedial spaces
discussed, and 2) to create those spaces in collaboration with Black
technology users. Fletcher’s talk also suggests new lines of inquiry for
scholars of games and digital media by making a case to look beyond
representation at how communication is enacted on different platforms
and spaces, and how the affordances of those platforms impact the
sociality that emerges on them. This could be productively combined
with Brock’s CDTA methodology (see Chapter 4).

In Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of The Sower, the main character, a Black woman,
works to create space for herself while the world burns around her. For Fletcher,
there are echoes of this story in historical and contemporary spaces where Black
individuals have been able to thrive and create culture despite neglect and
hostility from outside environments. With the advent of the Internet and video
games, Black people have been given new digital worlds to explore. Along with
this came the need to create space to escape the new digital fires that make
existence in these spaces difficult. It’s not just that Black representation is lacking

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in these games and digital spaces, but that these places, whether on World of
Warcraft, Twitter, or Discord, are frequently toxic to Black existence.
Communities are being built within and between these digital spaces to combat
this toxicity; such communities allow Black people to continue to exist in these
spaces and build new worlds they want to see. It isn’t just a Twitter space or
Discord group, but an intricate network of spaces and games that can’t be
understood as a world without understanding the pathways taken to create them.
Dr. Fletcher uses the term ‘Black intermediality’ to describe this world between
worlds or a combination of digital spaces and games to create protection against
hostility faced by Black gamers.
Fletcher concludes by stating that blackness is not a monolith, and that there isn’t
one way to be Black. Responses to anti-Blackness and racism have varied within
the construction of these worlds, impacting how Black individuals create space in
a hostile environment. Fletcher expresses hope that we will not just think about
how we create games and improve representation, but how these games are built
upon and used by individuals and communities to find and create space. These
worlds, while they are in response to anti-Blackness, are not defined by anti-
Blackness. They are building worlds created out of love and beauty and are
providing Black individuals with the opportunity to explore Black identity when
racism is removed.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What kinds of possibilities do these online spaces offer to Black users in contrast to
offline spaces?
2. What are the limitations of these spaces, and what are the responses to these
limitations?
3. What does the creation of these spaces require, and how might online spaces more
generally learn from these practices?

KEY TERMS

Black intermediality: The networks of digital spaces and games that Black players
form together to experience community and thrive within hostile, toxic gaming
spaces. These spaces do not exist within a single game or social network but rather
across multiple media platforms.
Worldbuilding: the process of creating shared social spaces for players and
technology users alienated from commercial games and platforms. Games sometimes

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 feature representations, stories, and even communities of players hostile to Black and
other marginalized users, which necessitate this world-building.

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SPOTLIGHT 5: THE EFFECT OF CULTURAL CAPITAL ON AFRICAN
AMERICAN MEN WHO GAME

Based on a talk by Steven Dashiell

SUMMARY

In this talk, Dr. Dashiell describes expectations of what it means to be a

Black man in gaming spaces. He explores the stereotypes of gamers,
Blackness, and masculinity, highlighting how Black masculinity often
involves expectations of maturity that are not placed on young white
men. Dashiell argues that the rise in the popularity of video games has
been accompanied by a moral panic that leisure is distracting men (and
especially Black men) from their social responsibilities such as marriage,
or work, or education. For Black gamers, identities are caught between
the intersecting expectations of what it means to be a gamer and a Black
man.

APPLICATION POINTS

Dashiell draws our attention to the ways that social and cultural
expectations around race and gender (and Black masculinity specifically)
can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about game cultures. These
insights can add further nuance to research striving to acknowledge and
account for the ways that social and cultural factors shape our
experiences. For example, when recruiting participants or designing
studies, we might consider the impact of players’ and developers’ cultures
on their perceptions and experiences. Moreover, if we apply Dashiell’s
conceptualization of ‘gamer doxa’ as not just shaping belief but also
action, we can also ask how our research might reveal more diverse
forms of expression and action beyond those expected by the status quo.

Drawing on prior work on Black masculinity, Dashiell argues that Black men are
expected to negotiate their gaming alongside expectations around gender and
cultural capital, which can operate in conjunction with (and/or in defiance of)
societal images of Black men. Dashiell uses the concept of ‘gamer doxa’ to
describe how Black men who play video games deal with the web of expectations
around what it means to be “authentic” Black men. Given that doxa refers to

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 unspoken or assumed truths based on stereotypes and generalizations, gamer
doxa includes ideas like “gamers are all nerds,” or “gamers are outsiders.” These
kinds of ideas underpin other narratives like gamer exceptionalism, which
presents gamers as smarter and otherwise more capable than their peers.
However, Dashiell argues that narratives within gaming doxa have a problematic
relationship with North American constructions of masculinity and Black
masculinity in particular.
The idea of hard work defining masculine cultural capital, for example, fuels what
Dashiell calls a “manchild panic,” which emerges from the fear that video games
are distracting men from their societal responsibilities. Recent trends towards
men becoming increasingly uninterested in marriage or higher education appear
to reinforce this idea. This, along with the supposed connections between gaming
and violence, has prompted efforts to move men away from video games; gaming
is an easy target for politicians.
Beyond this general scepticism about gaming and work ethic, Dashiell highlights
how, typically, ‘authentic’ Black male excellence and hegemonic Black masculinity
are correlated with the idea of achieving success through hard work. The lack of
generational wealth in Black communities produces the expectation that the vast
majority of black men have to be self-made men, to “get rich or die trying.” The
‘adultification’ of Black boys means that these expectations are imposed early in
life, with expectations that they must act ‘better’ and be far more mature than
their white counterparts. Thus, Black men have their leisure choices vilified more
than other demographics, despite the social benefits of leisure. The ‘adultification’
of Black boys contributes to this vilification of leisure; there is an expectation that
is put on them through the broader society that they are supposed to act ‘better’
and be far more mature than their white counterparts.
Compounding these challenges, people of colour are often seen as illegitimate
participants in virtual spaces, and Black men in particular face an ‘othering’ both
from gaming cultures and from within their communities. This means they must
negotiate the expectations placed on them as gamers as well as expectations
around Black authenticity. Dashiell terms this double bind a ‘constrained
masculinity’ that is caught between an intersection of expectations of being an
authentic gamer and an authentic Black man. This constrained masculinity
animates much of the verbal interplay that Black male gamers partake in, such as
making fun of each other online and using African-American Vernacular English
(AAVE) in gaming spaces that are not otherwise coded as Black spaces. It also
helps explain why Black men may feel the need to justify their gaming leisure as
also contributing to productive labour.
Dashiell concludes by emphasizing the implications of cultural capital on Black
men. Black men who play games earn scrutiny from both the macro standpoint as
Black men, and the mezzo standpoint as members of the Black community.
Gaming capital and the network of privilege surrounding gaming involves the
integration of practices that are not ‘Black’, putting a strain on expectations of
authenticity and identity for Black players.

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REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What does it mean for someone to be an ‘authentic’ gamer, and how ways does
this gamer authenticity clash with ideas of Black male authenticity?
2. How do internal differences of class and education within the Black male
community change this relation to these conflicting ideas of authenticity?
3. How do your research practices account for the conflicting imperatives of
identity that players and developers face?

KEY TERMS

Hegemonic Black masculinity: The set of expectations and ideals that delimit the
proper performance of Black manhood. Black masculinity is a constrained
masculinity caught between intersecting expectations about authenticity and realness
in the Black community and about Black male excellence and otherness from society
generally.
Manchild: A label applied to male gamers, and others in the context of the increasing
mainstream popularity of gaming and other ‘childish’ leisure pursuits, which are said
to threaten social order by undermining productive economic activities and
reproduction that is expected when traditional gender roles facilitate traditional
relationships, marriages, and families.
Adultification: The expectation faced by Black boys and girls when they are
perceived as adults, despite being children. Black girls face adultification through
sexualization and objectification while Black boys are treated as if they were bigger/
tougher or more responsible than others their age.

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CHAPTER 5.

PLAYING THE RACE CARD

Tara Fickle

Adapted from a talk hosted by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at
Brown University in 2021 as part of the virtual Summer Reading Series.

SUMMARY

Fickle begins by unpacking myths that present games as post-racial utopias, or

as safe, magical spaces where one can be whoever they wish to be, protected
from the real world. Fickle argues that games participate in the construction of
racial hierarchies, reinforcing inequalities by portraying them as natural
features or consequences of the game. Looking closer at the Asian American
experience, Fickle highlights how minorities must learn to play by ‘American
rules,’ and how Asian Americans are often racialized across game contexts.
Fickle then turns to social mapping, explaining how racism and segregation in
the real world are still present in the virtual world of games like Pokémon GO.
Though it is a game with cutesy creatures that encourages exercise and
friendship, Fickle highlights the numerous risks that racialized individuals face
in the game as a result of social, spatial, and technological boundaries in the
real world. In addition to the data mining and the monetization of surveillance
in Pokémon GO that breached player privacy, non-white players were also put
in the dangerous position of becoming trespassers and rulebreakers just by
playing the game.

APPLICATION POINTS

Fickle’s argument that games are “race-making spaces” draws from history,
literature, rhetoric, and other spheres to show how racialization is embedded
into the technologies, actions, and the lived reality of playing video games. Her
theorization and application of the term “Ludo-Orientalism” offers a valuable
tool for both descriptive and analytical practices. As with other methods, like
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA), Fickle shows the
importance of examinations of games that go beyond the game itself. In her
analysis of Pokémon GO, for example, consider the range of data that
Fickle gathers and analyzes. Consider also the layers of analysis that are

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 applied, including the colonial logic of this kind of capture, the spatial borders
that the game crosses, and the racialized differences in how these forms of
play are experienced. These considerations can prompt questions about how
we might situate other games and other forms of play within broader social,
historical, and cultural realities, providing what Fickle calls “a radical
revision of our current assumptions about games as innocent apolitical
escapes.”

This talk is intended to contest a couple of widespread myths about games. The first of
those myths is the idea that there are post-racial utopias. Post-racial or “colourblind”
in the sense that your identity (your race, your gender, nationality, class, etc.) doesn’t
matter in games, that everyone is equal behind the screen or at the table. And utopian
in the sense that games are free of the inequality found in real life. The idea is that it’s a
level playing field for all, a meritocracy where the only thing that matters is how good
you are, your skill level—as long as, of course, you follow the rules. Second, utopian in
the sense that games are a safe magical space where you can do whatever you want and
be whoever you want to be. That connects to that post-racial ‘be whoever you want to
be’ identity level, but also connects to what we call this idea of the ‘magic circle’ where
games function like a border or membrane that’s protecting you from the real world,
in which things that can happen in-game can happen precisely because they can’t in
the real world. Over the last decade, but especially over the last year or so, we’ve seen
a lot of this utopian logic making its way through the media: this idea that reality is
broken and games can save us, or that games are educational and healthy—especially
over the last year because it’s one of our primary sources of connection and pleasure
during a global pandemic.
If you play video games regularly, of course, you already know that this utopian
post-racial idea is an ill fit with real experiences. Many video games are, in fact,
immensely toxic spaces where racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, and
xenophobia abound, both in live interactions between players over voice chat, but also
around in-game characters who are most often presented as racialized and sexualized
caricatures. Games are safe havens in the sense that violence and domination tend to
constitute core game mechanics. The whole purpose of the game is often to hyper-
realistically simulate real-world violence, war, or military intervention.
What we’re searching for, then, is understanding why—given how patently false
it is—we continue to cleave to this first myth about games as an idealized utopic
version of the real world. What I found in doing research is this myth as well as
this issue of toxicity, which might seem to be very contemporary to the digital space,
precedes video games by a significant degree. I got curious about how games, from
the beginning of their analogue stages, were a place where race and inequality were
perpetuated, but also erased and utopianized. This is why in The Race Card, I begin

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in the late 19th century, describing how gambling was used effectively to galvanize
arguments to end Chinese immigration to the US.

GAMES AS RACE-MAKING SPACES

As I started to do some research into games as race-making spaces, I also encountered

a secondary myth, which is the question of why study games at all. They are seen by
definition as frivolous, simplistic diversions that aren’t worthy of scholarly inquiry.
And in some ways, that’s arguably why they’re allowed to have these offensive
retrograde representations—because they’re seen as not mattering. To quote, “It’s just
a game.”
What I show in The Race Card, and what the growing field of game studies has
been showing, is that contrary to appearance, games are, in fact, highly complex and
often quite subtle political technologies that directly participate in the construction
of racial hierarchies. This happens not just within individual games, but within the
whole concept of gaming. What we ascribe to games is tied up with ideas of fairness,
meritocracy, social mobility, and of course, national identity—all ideas which are,
themselves, highly racialized.
This brings me to a statement of the argument of The Race Card, which is
essentially that games can be used as a technology to racialize in the sense of rendering
meaningful this whole social fiction that we call race, but also to rationalize the
material and social inequalities that are produced by race. In other words, because of
their form, games are effective ways of naturalizing inequalities, and by extension race,
by making them seem justifiable and inevitable.
All of this is likely sounding quite abstract, so I wanted to anchor these points
through a couple of concrete examples. Although I think the connection between
gaming and racialization has broad resonances, my inspiration for The Race Card came
from thinking about Asian and Asian American culture and history. That’s not just
because East Asia, especially Japan, but more recently South Korea and China, have
been a singular force in the history of the video game industry, but also because Asian
American literature, I found, was an unexpected place where authors and artists have
used gaming to illuminate what it means to be Asian in America.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE ASIAN IN AMERICA?

My interest in games to better understand race came explicitly out of the ways that
authors and artists like Maxine Hong Kingston, Hisaye Yamamoto, John Okada, Gene
Yang and many, many others have, since the 1940s and 50s, been defining the Asian
American experience as a matter of decoding the puzzle of conflicting cultures,
distinguishing the real from the fake. Learning to play by “American rules” as so-called
model minorities. Or, using mah-jong, Scrabble, chess, Pac-Man, and game theory to
dramatize the impossible choices and risks that are demanded by assimilation, or by
assertions of national loyalty in wartime. Or the way that they present gambling or
baseball as alternate modes of national belonging when citizenship proved no match
for racism or xenophobia. Examples like these help us explain an overlooked way in

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which Asian Americans get racialized, including the seeming paradox of Asians as both
the hardest of workers, but also the most hardcore of players (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Asian Americans have a conflicting stereotype of being both

hardcore workers and hardcore players.

For me, that’s one half of this dynamic that I mentioned earlier—in The Race Card,
I called it Ludo-Orientalism. The term refers to the way that games function as a
racializing discourse that renders ‘Asian-ness’ meaningful as a racial category by
characterizing it in gaming terms. In other words, Asians are those who supposedly
play cheap, or don’t play fair, or are inscrutable, uncreative, robotic, allergic to fun,
obsessed with work, money, all of those things. All of those are ludic, or what we call
game- and play-related stereotypes.
What I find interesting, though, after looking at these individual texts, is that so
many of these Asian racial stereotypes about individuals as “cheap players” are also
national stereotypes that dominate the way that US relations with China, specifically,
have been characterized over the last century, but especially now. In the second half
of The Race Card, I describe how gaming has been deployed for nation-building in
an orientalist fashion, building on Edward Said’s (1977) term by defining East and
West in opposing relations to these abstract game ideas of fairness and freedom. These
racialized images of individual game players haven’t gone away, but instead have been
repackaged and continue to shape the racial imagery about Asians in America, as those
of you who have seen Crazy Rich Asians (Figure 2) or follow contemporary esports
know. For example, the Joy Luck Club, written in 1989 by Amy Tan, is all about mah-
jong dramatizing intergenerational conflict, and there’s a more intimate scene of mah-
jong from Crazy Rich Asians (Chu, 2018, 1:42:39).

Figure 2. The Mahjong scene from the 2018 movie Crazy Rich Asians.

We also see much older late 19th-century ludo-orientalist tropes getting revived in
contemporary xenophobia. For example, the 19th-century American narrative of
Chinese workers as degenerate gamblers and cheaters was famously dramatized in the
poem, The Heathen Chinee by Bret Harte (1871). The story is of a Chinese labourer, Ah
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Sin. The game of euchre, a popular card game at that time, is used to dramatize the
fact that Ah Sin’s cheap labour is also metaphorized by the fact that he’s cheating in the
card game. The satire here is that the Irish-American miners that he’s playing against
are also trying to cheat him at the same time. It’s a satire that was unfortunately taken
at face value and used to argue for Chinese exclusion.
That image and that trope of the game became a way to articulate the threat
of cheap Chinese labour to the honest white American working man. And now we
find it recycled in the dominant narrative where the US as a whole is standing for
fairness and China is this rule breaker, counterfeiter, and cheat against whom no
honest competition is possible. So, Ludo-Orientalism for me, on the one hand, is a
way of describing the artistic and historical processes where a relationship between
gaming, race, and nation gets established. I also find it useful as a reading method
for games, and as an analytical tool to think about how some of these ideas are being
transmitted through games themselves.

POKÉMON GO AND SOCIAL MAPPING

I want to show you some applications of this Ludo-Orientalist reading method by way
of an example. It comes from the summer of 2016 when Pokémon GO, an augmented
reality mobile game based on the beloved 1990s Japanese franchise, took America
by storm. Initially, the game was praised for promoting exercise and fostering new
friendships. However, its novel lamination of virtual and real spaces soon exposed
more insidious forms of social mapping. Minority players described being the target of
suspicious glances while playing in predominantly white neighbourhoods. Suburban
children were cautioned against straying into so-called bad neighbourhoods. An Asian
American grandfather, the game’s first casualty, but not the last, was shot for alleged
trespassing while playing near a Virginia country club.
Many rightly saw these incidents as evidence of the de facto segregation that still
defines how race and space are delimited in the United States. Game designers like
Omari Akil, and his much-cited article, “Pokémon GO is the death sentence if you are
a Black man,” (Akil O., 2016) rued the fact that real-life inequality shattered that ludic
illusion, that magic circle—racism spoiled the game by making it too real. Despite its
cast of adorably cartoonish pocket monsters—that’s what Pokémon stands for—the
game counterintuitively provided a disturbingly realistic approximation of the racial
and economic schisms of everyday life. But the question that I want to start with is,
was this unwanted intrusion of reality just an unfortunate contamination, a glitch of
the game? By making distant travel a necessity, didn’t the game force players into such
boundary-crossing enterprises?
For those of you who haven’t played it, the game is a GPS treasure hunt. You walk
around with the game open, and creatures appear on screen in certain locations, and
you capture them by clicking and aiming at them with a ball. The key is that you have
to sometimes travel to rather specific locations that are quite far away to capture the
rare among them because the goal is to catch all of them to complete this index. Omari
Akil’s (2016) observation is that the premise of the game, “asks me as a Black man
to put my life in danger if I choose to play it as is intended, and with enthusiasm,”
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suggesting that Pokémon GO is not simply a reflection of existing white privilege, but
an active participant in augmenting what we call the reality of racial difference—our
sense of race as a socially meaningful sign of human difference—by extending it into
the realm of play. If, as Friedrich Schiller (1795) famously remarked, “man only
plays when in the full meaning of the word, he is a man, and he is only completely
a man when he plays,” then in Pokémon GO, non-white players encountered a “real-
life Pikachu” superimposed through the camera, and the fact of their own incomplete
virtual humanity at the very same moment. Because like the Pokémon themselves who
only appeared on the game map when the player is within sufficiently close range, the
social meaning of race is activated—it is put into play—only once players traverse these
spatial borders and become very aware of being out of place, being made to feel at once
threatened and threatening.
If a cute, seemingly “colourblind” post-racial game like Pokémon GO could be said
to play any role in the way that race acquires its meaning in everyday life, then grasping
the implications of that kinship requires a radical revision of our current assumptions
about games as innocent apolitical escapes. The question is further complicated
because, in a game like Pokémon GO, there may seem to be no visible signs of race—at
least not in the limited way that we have come to think about that term, through
corporeal qualities like skin colour, hair, body type, accent and so forth, especially
from within a black-white binary. And yet, as an example of what it means to look
at gaming itself as a racializing technology, with Pokémon GO’s use of GPS and
augmented reality, from another perspective, you could say it’s simply a digital version
of a much older racial logic that has served the objectives of imperialism and
exploitation for centuries.
This similarity is nicely illustrated by the Aleppo-born photographer, Khaled Akil,
as a comment on the war in Syria, with images that depict Pikachu and other Pokémon
characters surrounded by the rubble of war (Figure 3). What this work highlights is
how the mechanics and dynamics of Pokémon GO—in other words, the game’s rules
and the kinds of behaviours that are rewarded—are, like so many other games, about
violent conquest and innocent exploration, not one or the other. In other words, not
only does this art bring home how much a game like Pokémon GO resembles these older
what we call world domination games that you may be familiar with, like Risk, but it
also renders visible the continuity with contemporary wars. US military personnel,
when the game came out, played this Japanese game so incessantly that they had to be
banned from playing it on base. Beginning, where else, in Pearl Harbor.
Beyond the explicit parallels between the imperialist aesthetic and military
implications that it draws out, to go back to Khaled Akil’s images, what they
importantly drive home is this deceptive logic that makes games like Pokémon GO
so compelling. The force of Akil’s images comes from the dissonance created by
superimposing these cute, brightly coloured, harmless little cartoon characters against
the suffering and devastation that we would actively prefer not to visually apprehend.
The extremist violence, too, goes hand in hand with histories of US imperialism.
In other words, if you take it a step further, Khaled Akil’s art—like Omari Akil’s
comments about playing while Black—is revealing what the game itself also already

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creates, which is the illusion of that dissonance between the pleasure of the game
world and these little cartoon characters and the misery of the real world. That’s how
the magic circle that I mentioned earlier is working, by securing the perception that
these two spheres—the game world and the real world—are antithetical rather than
what they are: mutually constitutive.

Figure 3. “Pokémon GO in Syria” (Akil, K., 2016).

We can talk about Pokémon GO—and this is just one application of the Ludo-
Orientalist reading method—we can talk about it in an imperialist game in the
historical sense in terms of this war, or in the literal sense, given that the whole point
of the game is that you, the conqueror, are encroaching on sovereign territory, you’re
violently imprisoning the native inhabitants in these little hermetically sealed cages
called Pokeballs, and then you’re forcing them to fight for you. What I propose in The
Race Card is also an additional layer which goes beyond seeing a game like this—and
there are many, many games like this, most recently having something like Animal
Crossing come out and be recognized as a lived metaphor for settler colonialism is
an interesting one—but beyond seeing just a game like this as a defanged simulation
of real-life colonization, to recognizing how the interface—the game’s location-based
technology—also relies on and reproduces forms of colonization. By location-based
technology here, I don’t just mean the GPS—the phone GPS that the game uses—but as
I’ve been saying, that longer analogue history of the logic upon which that technology
is based.
The logic behind Pokémon GO is nicely exemplified by what Charles Mills, the
Jamaican philosopher, called a “central part of the racial contract” (Mills, 1997). Mills
was describing a circular reasoning through which non-white subjects get

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interpolated, defined and made into these things called non-white subjects, by
colonizing forces. And that reasoning ties together race and space. It goes like this, in
Mills’ words: “You are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind
of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures
like yourself” (Mills, 1997, pp. 42). What I find compelling and fascinating about this
explanation—about the way that racialization happens through spatialization and vice
versa—is that it’s also an uncannily apt description of the organization of the Pokémon
Universe. These Pokémon are divided into what they call elemental types. Each of
these, in Pokémon GO, tends to spawn in specific types of places, what they call biomes.
In other words, one has a much higher chance of encountering a water-type Pokémon
near lakes or oceans, while an electric-type Pokémon can often be found on college
campuses or large cities.

Figure 4. Pokémon GO relies on current and historical logics of GPS and

augmented reality.

We can think about Pokémon GO as essentially encoding the analogue colonizing

logic of racial specialization into the digital technology of GPS and augmented reality
technology, which drives the game (Figure 4). And this makes a lot of sense, too,
when we consider the development history of Pokémon GO. We realize that it began
life, actually, as nothing but a Google Maps hoax. It started in 2014 as one of the
April Fools Day jokes that Google had started annually embedding in its products.
And that’s a tradition that started in 2000 with the release of Mental Plex, a service
that supposedly allowed users to search the web telepathically. I tell the full story of
this Pokémon Challenge (Google Maps, 2014) in The Race Card, but by using a slickly
produced promotional video that showed people travelling to these exotically coded
locales using their mobile devices to discover and capture Pokémon, the Challenge was
essentially a clever ploy to get users to download the latest version of Google Maps
app on their phones.
What emerged two years later as the actual Pokémon GO was essentially the Google
Maps marketing campaign made playable. It was a collaboration between the Tokyo-

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based Pokémon Nintendo company and a San Francisco-based company, Niantic
Labs. The CEO of Niantic, John Hanke, had been a Google Maps employee at the
time of that April Fools joke. Pokémon GO was an even more impressive showcase of
Google Maps than the original challenge had been because it demonstrated how GPS
navigation technology could be used not just for the mundane purposes of obtaining
driving directions or checking real-time traffic conditions—in other words, the work
of daily life in the age of smartphones—but that it could also be used for the purpose of
play. It was, after all, the very same smartphone and satellite technology being used to
locate the nearest gas station in Google Maps on the one hand and the nearest cartoon
quarry in Pokémon GO on the other. The difference was simply that what had been
laminated within a single interface in the Pokémon Challenge had now been divided
into two apparently distinct applications.

APRIL FOOLS: THE INVENTION OF POKÉMON GO

The Pokémon Challenge used crude static images, just pictures of Pokémon that had
been pasted onto the Google Maps interface by game developers. When you updated the
Google Maps app for the challenge, you would scroll around and be able to see Pokémon
appear in places, and you would capture them just by taking a screenshot.

The functionality of Google Maps, in other words, was what authorized the location-
based fiction that made Pokémon GO so fun. But I say that they were apparently distinct,
apparently separated here, because the implications of Google Maps as an authority,
what we might call the punchline of the real April Fool’s joke, were not apparent
until several weeks into the game’s release when concerns about privacy and data
mining began to surface. To make a long story short, players’ geospatial data—in other
words, information about where they’ve been, for how long, what speed they were
travelling at, and so forth—were being actively harvested and monetized. One example
of this was the creation of in-game incentives that directed players towards particular
local businesses, as was the case with the 3,000 McDonald’s restaurants in Japan that
were converted to Pokémon gyms, or important battling sites, following the fast-food
chain’s national sponsorship of the game, Pokémon GO was certainly not the first app
to use location data to monitor its users’ movements nor to make that information
pay, but Pokémon GO is doing more than simply jumping on the lucrative data mining
bandwagon alongside—and the list grows—innumerable location-based mobile apps
starting with things like Fitbit, Foursquare, Waze, and Uber.
Pokémon GO was also effectively capitalizing on the colonizing logic of capture
that, as we’ve seen, is already inherent to the game itself. In other words, a doubling
is happening where game developers are using the very same GPS technology to
track and collect data about players even as the players themselves used it to track
and collect nearby Pokémon. The true victims of the April Fool’s Day joke, in that

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sense, were the players who, in their minds, saw themselves as these Pokémon masters
commanding an army of hapless mercenaries while they performed hundreds of hours
of uncompensated, voluntary micro-labour in exchange for a “free to play” dose of
nostalgic fun.

CONCLUSION

I want to conclude then by bringing back together these two seemingly very different
concerns that manifested over Pokémon GO which replaced the “go” with the “no”
as a way to, in the minds of their authors (Khaled Akil and Omari Akil),
unmask these otherwise hidden forms of surveillance, extraction, and risk in a
seemingly innocent game. The concerns that were expressed over data mining and
privacy gained a lot more traction in the media and by Niantic, in part, because of
this colourblind universalizing rhetoric. The idea of privacy being breached was
the privacy of this abstracted player or user—especially one coded as a child or
young person. Indeed, there’s a really vicious irony, I think, in recognizing as
Omari Akil and other non-white players did very early on, that the greatest threat
that the game posed to the racialized was that it put them in the position of
being perceived as the privacy breachers, the trespassers, the rule breakers. So
while the fact of Pokémon GO’s Asian otherness—in other words, its Japanese origin
—receded to effective irrelevance, the racial otherness of bodies like Jiansheng Chen
became hyper-visible, hyper-surveilled, hyper-threatening to the point that the
security guard who murdered the sixty-year-old Chen for suspected trespassing
claimed that he did so out of fear for his own life (Golgowski, 2019). In Pokémon
GO, two forms of racial otherness—Asianness and Blackness—collide, such that the
murder of a Chinese American man gets justified in the same racialized rhetoric
we’ve become accustomed to hearing around the police killings of Black and Brown
people.
Chen’s tragic death, his victimization as a threatening perpetual foreigner, starkly
illustrates how games, far from the myths that we like to tell about them, are
immensely serious sites that can reveal the social dynamics of the real world, precisely
because they promised to provide us relief from those inequalities. And Pokémon
GO, to be clear, is not the only game that does this, and I hope that many more
analyses—and I’ve seen some coming out of this sort—will emerge about all sorts of
different games. The payoff of taking this particular game seriously, though, is being
able to shine a light on one way that racialization today functions as a location-based,
augmented reality technology whose violence has been seamlessly automated into the
interface of everyday life.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What are some ways that video games naturalize or reinforce inequalities?

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 2. How do Asian stereotypes in gaming reflect real-world harms and inequalities?
3. What are other examples of social and technological realities that challenge the post-
racial utopias of games?

KEY TERMS

Post-Racial Utopia: [Regarding video games,] an environment where identity, race,

gender, nationality, and class do not matter, because everyone is equal behind the screen.
Magic Circle: The presumed border or membrane between the real world and the video
game world, which has been contested and challenged by game scholars because it does
not account for the ways that real-world cultures and lived experiences also shape game
experiences.
Ludo-Orientalism: A reading method for games, or an analytical tool. Describes Asian-
ness as a racial category framed in gaming terms through concepts such as fairness,
freedom, and more. Characterizes the artistic and historical process of the relationship
between gaming, race, and nation.

REFERENCES
1. Akil, K. (2016, July 22). Pokemon GO in Syria. [Artwork, background
photograph by AFP]. https://www.khaledakil.com/blog/pokemon-go-in-syria-
part-1
2. Akil, O. (2016, July 7). Warning: Pokemon Go is a Death Sentence if you are a
Black Man. Medium. https://medium.com/dayone-a-new-perspective/
warning-pokemon-go-is-a-death-sentence-if-you-are-a-black-man-
acacb4bdae7f
3. Chu, J. (Director). (2018). Crazy Rich Asians [Film]. Warner Bros.
4. Fickle, T. (2019). The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model
Minorities. New York University Press.
5. Golgowski, N. (2019, June 25). Ex-Security Guard Sentenced To 30 Years For
Killing Grandpa Playing Pokémon Go. Huffpost. https://www.huffpost.com/
entry/johnathan-cromwell-sentenced-pokemon-
go_n_5d121277e4b07ae90da3ee84
6. [Google Maps]. (2014, March, 31). Google Maps: Pokemon Challenge (Video).
Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YMD6xELI_k
7. Harte, B. (1871). The Heathen Chinee. Boston: James R. Osgood and
Company.
8. Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt5hh1wj

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9. Safdar, A. (2016, July 22). Artist Khaled Akil Imagines Pokémon Go in
Ravaged Syria. Aljazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/7/22/artist-
khaled-akil-imagines-pokemon-go-in-ravaged-syria
10. Said, E. (1977). Orientalism. Penguin Books.
11. Schiller, F. (1795; trans. 1914). Letters upon the Æsthetic Education of Man. In
C. W. Eliot (Ed.), The Harvard Classics: Literary and Philosophical Essays:
French, German and Italian. New York, NY: P.F. Collier & Son.
12. Tan, A. (2019). The Joy Luck Club (30th Anniversary edition). Penguin Books.

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SPOTLIGHT 6: THE NON-PLAYABLE CHARACTER

Based on a talk by Huan He

SUMMARY

Dr. Huan He explores the phenomenon of NPC streaming, in which

streamers adopt the physicality and mannerisms of non-playable
characters, or more commonly non-player characters (NPCs). Alongside
the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), with viewers gaining
enjoyment from scrutinizing artificially generated humans and artificial
personhood, Dr. He situates NPC streaming as an Asiatic form
combining gaming culture, sex work, and sensorial media like ASMR
content. Using Natuecoco (the ‘original’ NPC streamer) as an example,
Dr. He argues that her popularity is also driven by a reproduction of
racist and gendered stereotypes about Asian women.

APPLICATION POINTS

Dr. He’s examination of NPC streaming shows that combining game

studies and Asian American studies offers valuable critical interpretations
of how race and gender are implicated in new forms of communication
and expression. Dr. He’s use of concepts and frameworks from Asian
American studies in his analysis should also raise questions about how
other considerations from that field (e.g., examinations of the ongoing
impacts of imperialism and colonialism, or examinations of the diversity
of Asian and Asian diasporic cultures, experiences, and communities) can
be leveraged in other contexts related to games cultures (e.g.,
the prominence of generative AI and bots in games and culture
more broadly). Given Natuecoco’s motivations and her success,
these theoretical orientations can also foreground considerations
around agency, counter-narratives, and resistance: how might
these new communicative forms empower people to resist stereotypes
and reassert their cultural identities? or exploit stereotypes to
escape material deprivation?

In video games, a non-player character (NPC) is, unlike a user’s in-game

controllable avatar, any character that cannot be controlled or played. With roots
that can be traced back to the characters controlled by the Game Master in

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Dungeons & Dragons, NPCs in video games are programmed to serve many
possible functions within the game world, ultimately creating a sense of depth
and dimension to the game and/or narrative experience. NPCs are thus part of
the game’s narrative architecture and world and even if they can be interacted
with, NPCs function to fill out the game space and make the playing experience
more dynamic.
More recently, streamers on platforms like TikTok have been creating their
own NPC personas, embodying the repetitive words, phrases, gestures,
and actions of NPC behaviour in exchange for small monetary contributions
from viewers as microtransactions or tips. With personas that play
into the objectification and sexualization of Asian women, Dr. He argues
that NPC streamers blend aspects of gaming culture with elements of sex work
and ASMR content. And, as the popularity of NPC streamers coincides with
the rise of generative AI tools and an increasing scrutiny of human versus AI
expression, Dr. He argues that NPC streamers are also playing off
stereotypes of Asian roboticism which construct Asians as machine-like
labourers, shaping broader perceptions of Asian identity in the digital age.

Figure 1. Natuecoco is a Japanese streamer

credited as being the “original NPC streamer”.

Natuecoco, for example, is a Japanese streamer who became a focal point for
the rise in NPC streaming. She has been referred to as the “original AI
queen,” echoing historical associations of gendered Asian bodies with ornamental
objects. Drawing on Asian American studies, Dr. He argues that this framing
relies on Natuecoco’s Japanese origin and explicit references to Japanese
culture, linking her robotic and programmatic NPC behaviour to a longer history

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 of gendered and racist stereotypes of Asian bodies being likened to
abstract, ornamental objects.
In an interview for Business Insider, Natuecoco describes the intention behind
her live streams as “a thought experiment with her viewers and
followers, stimulating her audience in new ways and transforming her body into
a screen of projected fantasy” (Han, 2023). Calling her performance an
“experiment,” she likens NPCs to statues in museums, and similarly refers to her
NPC performance as something like a statue, a “piece of art.” Dr. He
suggests that Natuecoco’s virtual performance therefore bridges personhood
and objecthood, and for her viewers, it opens a conceptual space in which her
Asian-ness is marked by a style or procedure of digital activity rather than a
marker of biological or cultural authenticity or inauthenticity.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What are some of the other ways that race and/or gender are implicated in our
growing ‘AI culture’?
2. How might AI reproduce and further entrench stereotypical ideas of Asian-ness?
How might we resist these stereotypes?
3. How might NPCs and/or NPC streamers disrupt these gendered and racial
stereotypes?

KEY TERMS

Non-playable character, or non-player character (NPC): NPCs are characters in

games that cannot be controlled by players and instead help fill out the game space.
NPCs in video games serve many possible functions within the game world, ranging
from characters who provide narrative and dialogue to automated allies or enemies
within the gameplay
Asiatic: a term that describes Asian-ness and Asian identity as constructs tied up in
the conflation of perceptions of Asian persons, objects, and ways of life. Historically,
Asiatic has been used as a pejorative in a similar vein as the use of “Oriental” to
describe Asian persons, but Dr He and other Asian-American scholars employ the
term for its analytic power given the continued conflation of Asian subjects and
objects.

REFERENCES

1. Han, Y. (2023, July 22). Natuecoco, Tiktok’s Original Queen of NPC

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Livestreams, Says She Started the Trend as a “Thought Experiment.” Business
Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/natuecoco-npc-livestreams-tiktok-
viral-trend-pinkydoll-2023-7

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SPOTLIGHT 7: HALLYU, HEELS, AND GLOBAL IM/MOBILITIES IN
PROFESSIONAL LEAGUE OF LEGENDS: A GYOPO MEDIA
HISTORY

Based on a talk by Matthew Jungsuk Howard

SUMMARY

Dr. Howard looks at Riot Game’s response to the ‘Korean

Problem’ in League of Legends esports. Informed by diaspora studies,
Howard describes how the phenomenon of Asian gamers travelling to
Western countries for better pay complicated the East-West narrative
drama that was animating esports marketing. This led to Riot
instituting a policy of region-locking, a policy that is structurally similar
to real-life immigration bans because it imposed rules that set quotas
based on citizenship and/or permanent residence for each region’s
teams. Dr Howard argues that the concept of gyopo-gam, the feeling of
being a member of the Korean diaspora contending with global and local
tensions alongside the pressures of being both a model minority and a
perpetual foreigner, is a helpful framework for thinking about the lived
experiences of racialized people in esports.

APPLICATION POINTS

Howard’s conceptualization and application of ‘Gyopo-Gam’ offers a

critical interpretation of several layers of Asian American experience in
esports. Crucially, his theorization draws links between policies by
international esports organizations, labour conditions, and player
actions. His analytical focus bridges global and local contexts with
structural and historical forms of racism. Note how far his analysis
extends beyond the game itself while still focusing on the experiences of
players. The scope of his analysis raises important questions and
considerations for games studies: as games reach global audiences, where
and how do we draw the lines of our analysis? What are the historical,
social, and structural factors that shape the prevailing narratives within
video game cultures? How can we think about player experience beyond
the game interface, or in relation to the socio-technical infrastructures of
games and gaming communities?

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For most of its existence, professional League of Legends esports tournaments have
been won by Asian teams, particularly South Korean teams. Dr. Howard notes
that this dominance has created what some call the “Korean Problem,” in which
Asians dominate the game, and Americans and Europeans have no viable
contenders to root for. Organizers of professional esports profited from this by
creating drama in the form of an East vs West narrative that frames North
Americans and Europeans as disenfranchised white underdogs against an ‘Asian
Other’ that was constructed as naturally better at esports.
This narrative is built around North America being constructed as ‘trash,’ despite
the North American design and production of League of Legends, and is driven by
the reiteration of the question “Are you trying harder?” evoking the American
ideology of success through hard work to maintain the hope that the gap between
Korea and the rest of the world is closing and that North American and European
contenders are putting up a good fight that they might eventually win.
However, in 2014, a “Korean Exodus” occurred, in which many South Korean
League players left the country, going to China, North America, and Europe for
improved wage opportunities. While detrimental to the East-West drama used to
monetize Korean dominance in esports, “importing” aspects of “Korean-ness” to
North America and Europe was seen as necessary for white survival in a techno-
Orientalist apocalyptic future.
In response, Riot Games implemented region-locking. The World Championship
official rules state that three of five starting players in any given match need to
have citizenship or proof of permanent residency with the region they are
affiliated with. With structural similarities to immigration quotas and the Chinese
Exclusion Act, region-locking effectively created a Korean Exclusion Act: when
Koreans started leaving the peninsula en masse, region-locking greatly restricted
their efforts to seek better wages in other markets.

Figure 1. Riot Games, the developers of League of Legends, implemented ‘Region Locking’ to control Korean
players leaving their country for better pay.

Dr. Howard introduces his theorization of gyopo-gam to explain the impact of

racialization, racial narratives, and racialized policies within these esports
contexts. Gyopo-gam is, typically, a negative term that describes the feeling of
being a member of the Korean diaspora contending with global and local

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 tensions alongside the pressures of being both a model minority and a perpetual
foreigner. This echoes the ambivalence of historical racializations of Asian
Americans, which frame them simultaneously as both the tool that is going to help
North America overcome its greatest challenges and also the greatest threat to
white North American job prospects. With its region-locking policies, Riot Games not
only contributes to the commodification of Koreans and “Korean-ness” as a
profit-producing resource within esports marketing narratives but also frames them
as a threat to the industry’s overall livelihood and ecosystem. Gyopo-gam, therefore,
adds new layers to examinations of esports by documenting and analyzing the
experiences of the Korean esports players and situating their present-day
conditions within broader Asian American histories and contexts.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How might theorizations of gyopo-gam be applied to other studies of Asian

American experiences in games? How does the origins of gyopo-gam as a Korean
concept and experience constrain its application to other Asian American
experiences?
2. Are there feelings similar to gyopo-gam that exist for other diaspora groups, and
how might these theorizations interact and inform one another?
3. How might players, designers, and/or researchers help to intervene on the
perpetuation of racist narratives within esports or other game contexts?

KEY TERMS

Gyopo-gam: ‘Gyopo’ is a Korean term that literally translates to ‘sojourner’ and

negatively describes Korean emigrants as ‘pleasure travellers’ who have lost touch
with their true Koreanness, while ‘-gam’ is a suffix used to denote a hunch about
something. Taken together, Dr. Howard describes ‘gyopo-gam’ as the feeling of being
a member of the Korean diaspora while contending with the idea of being both a
model minority and a perpetual foreigner.
Korean problem: Dr. Howard’s term for how Riot Games and esports communities
construct Korean dominance in League of Legends esports, playing on the historical
construction of Asia or the Orient as a problem for the West and Western geo-
political and cultural hegemony.

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CHAPTER 6.

RESEARCHING DISABILITY AND PLAY - WHERE’S THE FUN IN

THAT?

Katta Spiel

SUMMARY

What does it take for someone to have an experience of access? How

might games provide disabled players with more consistent experiences of
access?Currently, gaming research presumes that players are motivated to
play and interact in games in ways that are enjoyable, self-determined,
voluntary, and unproductive. However, this notion of ‘fun’ is premised on
normative and neurotypical experiences, which are not necessarily fun
for disabled and neurodivergent players. Games for these populations often
do not emphasize playfulness, and instead base their play on external
motivators that frame disability through a medical model that positions
disability as something to be fixed. Why do others get to play games for
enjoyment, yet neurodivergent and disabled people don’t? Dr. Spiel concludes
that games should not treat disability and neurodivergence as something to fix
in games, but instead as a unique way of viewing and interacting in games.
Everyone deserves to engage in playfulness in games.

APPLICATION POINTS

Dr. Spiel asks us to think about who can really access the games that we study
and make. Their grounding in surrogate body theory challenges researchers
to think carefully about the ‘fun’ aspect of play by drawing attention to how
many mass-market games rely on players inhabiting the character’s surrogate
body in inaccessible ways, while games made for disabled players
are most often training simulators aimed to impart neurotypical behaviours
and other ways of assimilating to able-bodied norms. This should
challenge researchers and developers to think about how we might
foreground an experience of access so that everyone has an opportunity
to engage in all forms of play. That is, when we recognize that the
default player in our design or scholarship is an able-bodied and
neurotypical player, how can we make different ways of playing possible?
Moreover, thinking about Dr. Spiel's preferred identity-based model of

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 disability, how might we foreground disability justice principles in our work to
create more equitable access to games and play?

[In the presentation, Dr. Spiel began by using Austrian Sign Language before saying the
following.] Ich verstehe schon. Ich muss es hier in Lautsprache machen, weil sonst versteht mich
niemand. Ah, sie schauen immer noch so. I understand—you need it in English.
I wanted you to have an experience there, and that is an experience of access. The
point was for you to experience what access could mean. I first used sign language,
Austrian Sign Language, in fact, then I started speaking in German.
This modality, speaking, is familiar to most hearing people, but unless you speak
German, it’s unlikely you knew what was going on. Then, when I switched to English,
you probably had a moment that I call an experience of access. Suddenly things made
sense. It was no longer difficult to figure out what the situation was.
Parallel to an experience of access, there is afforded access, which comes to those
of you who can read German. Access is afforded in many cases, to most people, in ways
that they are not necessarily aware of. If you speak or read German, this may have
happened for you a bit earlier. The point I am trying to make here is that access is
afforded in many cases, to most of you, in ways that you are not necessarily aware of.
I want to point out that access is not always afforded to my disabled peers and myself.
That is why I do work in this area because access is equally as important in games. This
brings about the main question many may have—where’s the fun in that?

DISABILITY IN PLAY

I know that play is not always fun, but I would argue it is kind of fun. We engage
in gaming in a variety of different ways. There are consoles, tangibles, objects and
augmented environments. There’s virtual reality, and so much more. There are
generally many methods of play. Overall, I try to understand it as a self-guided
personal interest activity that is often self-determined. This is also why a lot of game
researchers, at least in human-computer interaction, turn to Self-Determination
Theory when they try to look at how people enjoy their games.
When it comes to disabled populations, there is a unique difference in the
experience and definition of play and playfulness. Kathrin Gerling and I have defined
playfulness as “an enjoyable, self-determined, voluntary fun, and essentially
unproductive.” But in defining this, we discovered that this concept is largely absent
for many neurodivergent players. Instead, the rhetorical concept of fun and games
is exploited for the sake of ‘othering’ neurodivergent populations further; to ‘cure’
or ‘identify’ them through diagnosis, implying that their sociality and knowledge
are insufficient. Notions of inclusion are often present, but pointedly conceptualize
neurodivergence as being deviant from the general population. This comes with

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fundamental consequences when communicating with neurodivergent people at large,
including neurodivergent researchers as peers.
Research in this space needs to be careful not to fall into a trap where
neurodivergent existence is rendered ‘undesirable’ and ‘abnormal’. Essentially, why
do all the games built for neurodivergent people suck, at least in how they are
conceptualized as explicitly for neurodivergent people? Not all of the games are
terrible, but few have the driving force of using games as self-determined play and
instead serve external motivations and goals.
For a field that uses self-determination theory so frequently, I was wondering
how researchers in the space missed such an important aspect of what makes games
enjoyable. Ultimately, I was wondering: why does everybody else get to have games
for fun, enjoyment, and leisure? Why do neurodivergent people then have to do games
to reach a goal? Why are we still using that rhetoric to put in place a forced type of
interaction, meant to serve as a motivation for extrinsic goals? I was trying to figure
out: what makes play interesting, and where are our bodies in play?

SURROGATE BODY THEORY

I understand bodily differences as holistic, in the concept of a body-mind strategy.

I don’t see mental or physical disabilities as a difference. I understand them all as
different embodiments in the world, which is why I speak of bodies just as bodies. You
have a body. Everything you do is embodied, as a function of your body, including play.
Kathrin Gerling and I used the Surrogate Body Theory to understand this.
Methodologically, we used visual analysis to figure out where our bodies are in play.
Where are they positioned? How close are they to the artifact? What is happening?
This refers to the specific aspect of how bodies are positioned in different dispositives,
or circumstances, and we try to understand the different qualities of how bodies are
contorted and positioned within play (Spiel & Gerling, 2019). We then used Surrogate
Body Theory developed by Christiane Voss, which comes from media studies,
particularly film studies, to understand the interaction between the body and media.
The theory states that immersion happens when a viewer lends their affective,
emotional response to a film by embodying those emotions. That leads to a
metaphorical body that is made up between the inter-subjective interplay between
viewers and the film, and facilitated by aesthetic distancing.
To gain a better understanding, I went to a drawing board and tried to figure out
what it might mean for games. Where is the surrogate body when we play? I tried to
link it to other aspects, too. The cinematic dispositive suggests that people don’t do
a lot. The affective response can be outward or not, but the screen is far away and
must bridge a large physical distance with embodied reactions that are fairly limited by
the constraints of chairs and seating options, as well as social expectations of how to
conduct oneself in a setting such as a movie theatre (imagine a child asking very loudly
what happened when someone dies onscreen). When we move to consider Surrogate
Body Theory as applicable to different forms of media than film, it explains a lot about
how it is important that we have an embodied response that is effective and emotional,
and how that emotion is embodied as well. More than that, there’s a sort of ‘stepping
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into a body’ that creates an experience that’s so much more than just an emotional
response.
However, I’ve also been angry for a few years. There’s one footnote in a book
that falsely claims that games and digital media are equivalent to cinematic dispositive.
To explain why this isn’t necessarily true, why they are different, we can take a
stereotypical gamer. Someone who has a personal computer set-up, complete with
multiple screens. This player still has a surrogate body. In video games, the surrogate
body is in two positions; one that contains the emotional responses of the player, and
one that contains the actions that are reflected in the game. Given that playing video
games tends to be a somewhat solitary and private activity, at least in the physical
sense, emotional responses can be embodied in more expressiveness. For example, if
you’re being expressive about your responses to actions that occur in-game, that might
have consequences for gameplay. Accidentally throwing a drink across the keyboard
or moving your mouse when you didn’t mean to—because it’s all embodied, there’s
a connection between the emotions you experience and the expressiveness of the
actions you take. One influences the other, and that plays out differently in different
scenarios but ultimately holds regardless of the type of play. When we play, we lend
not just emotions, but also actions to a surrogate body that we submerge into.
Now, we can consider the importance of the surrogate body theory in the context
of actions that are more or less possible with different body types. We don’t always
consider this in video game design; we aren’t thinking about it as ‘if I play this, I need
to have hands.’ We don’t imagine the exact bodies we need to have to experience the
game as it is intended; we often conceptualize that more implicitly and design with
ourselves and others like us in mind.
Bringing the Surrogate Body Theory into play, there is a wide degree of bodily
environment involvement across different kinds of video games. In some cases you do
have more constrained actions mapped to specific meanings, such as a kind of fishing
movement that is only related to fishing. But then you have a keyboard where the same
kind of action or movement can mean different things. And many bodies are playing
every game, and they are playing in different contexts. This is not simply a matter
of representation. While representation in games is incredibly important—we’ve got
many amazing individuals such as Kishonna Gray, Cale Passmore, Sabine Harrer, Bo
Ruberg, Gerald Voorhees, and myself working to challenge the hegemony of play as
games are played by diverse groups of people and so they should represent diverse
groups of people and address their various types of lived realities. But that’s not
necessarily what I am describing here, which is to instead focus on how different
players can access these experiences.

ACCOUNTING FOR DISABILITY IN DESIGN

Illustrating this, I tend to use visuals in my presentations that are not necessarily
important to understand what I’m saying, but expand upon my words and can enhance
them for someone who processes things differently than I do. But when it comes
to design, this concept is foreign. Most technological and developmental work is

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underpinned by ableist assumptions that lead to the design of inaccessible
technologies.
To expand upon this point, I have observed Deaf people using virtual reality
(VR). The general understanding of users in the virtual world is that other players
communicate with their environment through hearing and speech. However, Deaf
people cannot communicate with their environment the same way hearing people do
and so they are constantly removing their headsets to orient themselves. This makes
for a completely different experience and alters the understanding of ‘immersion’ in
the virtual world. What would it look like to design virtual reality from a disabled
and deaf point of view? What would it look like to eliminate the inherently ableist
assumptions that lead to the design of inaccessible technology and embrace bodily
diversity? That is, how can we reimagine games and the technological dispositives that
shape them?
I think we need to recognize that both within research and industry we’re still
engaging in the creation of disabling and exclusive body-based technologies. As an
industry, there is a habit of designing a game without disabled individuals in mind and
then later making additional efforts to patch up a persistent oversight. From a money
point of view, if you want to engage with that perspective, it’s probably more expensive
to do it this way. More importantly, it’s exhausting for everyone who wants to engage,
for example, with VR, as they realize they’re going to have a very different experience.
This suggests that there’s a general need to move from a paradigm of improving,
or making accessible for others, or patching as a second thought, to a paradigm of
creating voice. This places duty to engage with these processes upon stakeholders who
seek to reap the benefits of the systems they design by accounting for diverse bodies
from the start of development in a cost-effective way, and will help ensure that there is
no surprise regarding the gaps in accesssibility in the technology we design.
Perhaps we should have been able to draw this conclusion at the beginning of the
design process, but it is evident that as an industry we don’t understand how access
fundamentally shapes the experiences we have with technology. We don’t understand
how access is facilitated, but it is paramount to understanding how we have different
types of experiences with games. How we gain access to technologies shapes our
experience with games, and the diversity of bodies plays a huge role in how that is
shaped. A game can be frustrating but have a positive failure that reassures the player
that they can get there in the end. Dungeon crawlers support you more and more the
further you get into the game, and that creates a much more enjoyable failure. This is
in stark opposition to being physically unable to carry out a series of movements in a
certain type of speed or rhythm; that is not a joyful form of failure and it can feel like
there is no way to get past it. Both of these examples are inaccessible experiences, but
one shapes a positive experience of failing, whereas the other creates a barrier within
the game.
This speaks to a corporeal standard within video gaming. We have actions in a
game that end up communicating the designers’ biases through what you’re expected
to do, for example, perform these fast, specific kinds of button presses. In this case, in
the design phase, you aren’t expecting that someone has a tremor or doesn’t have full

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hand control. You’re designing with the majority in mind, and that communicates an
implicit standard to those who have found themselves never meeting those standards.

MODELS OF DISABILITY

There are different models of disability that are relevant to understanding disability
and design, including the medical, social, and the self-determined.
The medical model takes differences in bodies as a medical issue that needs to
be corrected. This is how you end up with games mentioned earlier that ‘other’ and
alienate a proportion of the population: systems meant to identify and diagnose and be
used as therapy. Games that are designed under the medical model are not actually for
play and often end up utilised in therapy to ‘correct’ players.
The corporeal standard stems from the medical model, where you’re being pushed
into the notion that, as a disabled person, you cannot lend your actions and emotions
to the game because the game is not prepared to take them from you and isn’t
interested in engaging with those. Following the money, if you buy a game and then
realize you can’t play it, it doesn’t matter to the publisher; but it matters to the
individual, and it matters because a barrier is being created to a meaningful experience.
The money model often ignores the principles of access and disability justice.
You can also have games coming from a social model, which assumes that
disabling experiences come from the outside. Within the corpus of games that we
analyzed, we had, for example, a game that tried to build sympathy for living with
ADHD for players who lack that understanding. In this sense, the game frames
neurodivergent people as being ‘disabled’ by a lack of social awareness or
understandingof their experiences. This is also how you end up with games that
assume that neurodivergent people need to be taught ‘social skills’ without questioning
what those skills are, or for who’s benefit.
I operate from a model that is identity-based and self-determined, where you take
up a disabled identity that is not completely independent from a bodily status, and
assumes that there is a way of engaging with the world through bodily difference that
acknowledges differences without labelling them as deviant. It also acknowledges the
role that social environments have to play in disability from a rights-based perspective.
That doesn’t just mean a legal context, but also how you interact with your immediate
environment and what kind of interactions you expect or want to have.

DISABILITY AND DEVELOPERS

I encourage developers and researchers to work on understanding disability as

something that is not just other and different, but as having a unique lived experience
and types of knowledge, as well as intricate ways of culture and coming together.
Games designed with disability in mind may have different priorities when it comes
to gameplay, but contribute to playfulness and enjoyment just as much as any other
design.
I still dream of a game made for a brain like mine, where you don’t have to regulate
your attention, and you’re encouraged to switch tasks frequently. Games such as this

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do exist out there, but they aren’t the focus when researchers are looking at what
makes games fun; rather, they’re looking to apply the medical model, and understand
how games can identify and correct a social difference. Expanding upon this, the
models of disability can be broadened to include neurodivergence. Some assessments
frame neurodivergence as deficient, or ‘less than.’ But you can also have a model that
defines neurodivergence as an identity through the self-determined model, where we
acknowledge that all brains are different and function differently; each mind is still
needed, just like biodiversity.
I want to encourage people to prioritize access to play and to play experiences. It
doesn’t have to be that everyone all the time has access to everything, but we need to
start thinking about what access entails and who it’s provided for. Again, most of this
talk was in English and so whoever understands the English language in the spoken
form had an advantage and was provided access. Most people who experience access
do so as an ordinary experience, but this isn’t afforded to disabled people. If we think
explicitly about what kind of access is provided in games, it might help us more to
understand which exclusions are occurring. Not everything has to be universal design,
but you are always affording access to someone and it’s better that you make a choice
rather than simply always follow that corporal standard.
There are also principles of access and disability that come into play in technology.
There are experiences made by disabled people that are always the same and have been
perpetuated by inflexible technologies—this closes options instead of opening them
up. Disabled people are among those who notice that somehow things are even less
possible with technology, at least on a wide rollout.
The ‘general purpose’ technology indicates inclusion and exclusion criteria, and
the people who are excluded experience that exclusion all the time. This is where
disability justice comes in—because you have to make up for that. Or rather you could
decide to make up for that but the first step is to understand who you’re including and
excluding, and also who you’re providing fun for. And you don’t have to take it that
seriously; you can play with it. Access can be fun. We can queer things. We can find and
subvert ways of gaining access to things that are not fundamentally made for disabled
people. Thinking about different forms of access has an element of fun and enjoyment
in it, where you can play and appreciate the diversity of human bodies and challenge
the inaccessible status quo.

CONCLUSION

We love games, otherwise we wouldn’t research them. As societies, we need them, and
we need to make sure they’re accessible. To think about accessing games, it’s less about
the functional things because that’s a later step. First, we need to understand that we
have a body, that all bodies are different, and that access is afforded to us in one way
or another. For some, this access feels ordinary, but it’s anything but. I encourage you
to think about your own body more explicitly and those of others, and to celebrate the
differences. Let us all play and let us all lend our actions and emotions, and not just be
identified or cured.

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 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Think of a game. What are the required actions within that game? How is the player’s
body involved in successfully performing those actions?
2. How can we include considerations for access throughout a game design process?
3. How might disability justice principles enable more broadly appealing and marketable
kinds of play and games?

KEY TERMS

Experience of Access: One has an experience of access when there are no barriers to
understanding what is being delivered or using something. We experience access
whenever a structure or experience matches our needs and/or abilities. When games are
not designed with consideration for diverse accessibility needs, the experience of access
might only be possible for able-bodied and neurotypical players.
Surrogate Body Theory: A theory that comes from media studies, which states that
immersion in media occurs when the viewer embodies an emotional response to the
actions presented. In games, there is a higher degree of immersion as players are not
embodying a characters’ emotions but also their actions.
Disability Justice: A concept and movement centered on collective access and liberation
in a world built for able-bodied and neurotypical people. In the context of games, creating
games and opportunities for play that consider the diversity of bodies who would engage
with them is critical starting point as the design norm is to not consider body differences
and thus perpetuate the use of inflexible technologies preventing many players from
engaging in the games.
Disability models: Dr. Spiel highlighted three models of disability: (1) A medical model,
where disability is seen as something to be fixed; (2) A social model where people are
disabled by inaccessible social and environmental structures, and (3) an identity model
where disability is seen as a different way of thinking and living in the world. In play
research, disabilities are often treated under models 1 and 2, thus many games are created
to “fix” disabled players instead of just being for fun.

REFERENCES
1. Spiel, K., and Gerling, K. (2019). The Surrogate Body in Play. In Proceedings of the
Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 397-411). https://
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3311350.3347189

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SPOTLIGHT 8: DESIGNING FOR DISABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY

Based on a panel with Triskal DeHaven, Cayley MacArthur, and Katta Spiel

SUMMARY

In this panel, Triskal DeHaven, Katta Spiel, and Cayley MacArthur

discussed key challenges in designing for disability and accessibility for
games, including gaps in digital games accessibility research, problems
with knowledge mobilization and translation, and how to improve
accessibility in games. The panellists described a need for better
connections between academia and the industry, with a need for
accessibility research and best practices to be implemented across all
stages of games research and design. The panellists argue that creating
accessible games is an opportunity to design for a diversity of
experiences, and these efforts can start by ensuring that disabled
individuals are included at all stages of games research and design.

APPLICATION POINTS

By drawing attention to the gaps between industry and academia, the

panellists raise questions about the impact of research and how it can be
more effectively applied to industry contexts. Importantly, these
critiques are not one-sided: the panellists’ comments suggest that biases
and norms across industry and academia are hindering the broader
application of accessible design. As Spiel notes, these are questions of
prioritization, and we must critically examine the limitations of our
current efforts if we are to create more accessible games.

ACCESSIBLE DESIGN ACROSS ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY

Accessible design must become more ingrained into the process of making games. While
academic research can help by providing theoretical and practical considerations,
applying these guidelines and recommendations to industry contexts is not always
straightforward. Though there is a good deal of research on accessible game design,
much of this research is unavailable to the public because of the costs of accessing the
research or because it is communicated in language that is not easily understood or
applied. As a result, findings in academic spaces can take years to make their way into

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 application in the industry, leading to much of the industry still functioning under
paradigms that inhibit effective accessible game design. We must support better
knowledge mobilization and translation of this academic work, and we must ensure that
accessible design is considered at every stage of game development and research.
For game design researchers and industry professionals, accessible game design can
start with considerations about whose voices and experiences are effectively
considered across the production pipeline. As MacArthur describes, diversifying game
design teams is crucial: “Make sure there is diversity on your team since each person’s
lived experience will impact what assumptions they make in the process. If everyone is
the same, then you’re only going to be designing for yourselves, and not the diversity
of people who may use the game.” Similarly, testing the game at various stages with
disabled stakeholders is necessary to create more inclusive games. Accessible design
cannot be an afterthought: differences in mobility, motor control, cognition,
sensory perception, or any other differences of experience each require
considerations for improved accessibility.

RECRUITING FOR PARTICIPANT-BASED RESEARCH

In academic spaces, there is a need to more equitably and consistently recruit disabled
individuals to engage in games-related studies. While institutional ethics boards can
work with researchers to find ways to expand recruitment, many university
researchers rely on convenience sampling that fails to diversify the sample, and/
or does not adequately consider the specific needs or perspectives of disabled people
by applying an extractive approach. Spiel, who conducted a study with a single
disabled child while documenting the specificities of making the game more
accessible for them, notes that there is a lot that we can learn from research that
benefits disabled participants. Ethical recruitment must involve careful consideration
for improved accessibility at all phases of the research process, as well as a clear plan
for how to recognize the specificity and diversity of disabled perspectives.
Importantly, developing more accessible design and research practices can also
involve a shift in social and cultural biases. Too often, games across academia and
industry apply the ‘medical model’ of disability, framing disability as a deficit, or as
something to ‘fix’, rather than as an important facet of human diversity. Similarly,
conventional game design and accessibility are often framed as being in conflict, as if
accessible games are not (or cannot be) fun. As Spiel describes, reframing such ideas
shows that many games provide a limited form of access: “We already facilitate access
all the time, we just need to shift our prioritization of specific people and whom we
give access to.”

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What can we do as individual researchers to make our work more accessible to

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developers and designers in the game industry? What are other ways you can increase
the number of diverse perspectives to create accessible works?
2. How and when are we including the perspectives and experiences of disabled
people in our research?
3. How do the norms and practices of your institution and/or discipline create
barriers to accessibility research, and how do those norms and practices fail to ensure
ethical accessibility research?
4. What kinds of gameplay are accessible regardless of ability?
5. How might games contribute to a culture that values the experiences of disabled
players? How can you use effective and respectful user testing to learn about the
accessibility of your work?

KEY TERMS

Extractive research: Describes instances in research where only one party involved,
usually the researcher, receives the benefits, and the other party, usually the
participants, does not receive any benefits.
Disability models: Dr. Spiel highlighted three models of disability: (1) A medical
model, where disability is seen as something to be fixed; (2) A social model where
people are disabled by inaccessible social and environmental structures, and (3) an
identity model where disability is seen as a different way of thinking and living in the
world.
Institutional constraints on research practices: Western academic research
practices follow a strict process that can often not allow for freedom of different
methods that could be better for the research question.
Standpoint and Positionality: Your standpoint and positionality describe your
identity and how your identity relates to your experiences in society. Your standpoint
includes identity labels (both visible vs non-visible) that are assigned to you (ascribed)
or a form of self-identification (avowed). Positionality describes how your identity
relates to your position and power in society.
Team diversity: Game developers put their lived experience into what they create.
This means that it is important that there be a variety of lived experiences, ie.
diversity, in-game creation teams so that the games are created in ways that more
people can identify with.

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140
 SECTION III

PRACTICE AND DESIGN

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CHAPTER 7.

THE CASE FOR PARATOPIAN DESIGN

Rilla Khaled

SUMMARY

What if we could make complex social and cultural questions playable? And
what if we could do so through interactions with familiar digital interfaces set
in alternative presents and near futures? Dr. Rilla Khaled discusses her work as
being located at the intersections between the traditions of speculative and
critical design, the philosophies and best practices of game design and playful
media, and interaction design. In this talk, Dr. Khaled makes the case for
paratopian design, which is neither utopian nor dystopian, but proposes
paradigm shifts that invite us to reconceptualize and reconsider the building
blocks of “here” & “now” by combining speculative design with the rhetorical
dimensions of player experience.

APPLICATION POINTS

Khaled’s conceptualisation of paratopian design provides valuable insight into

the process and considerations behind a design methodology that stems from
—and ultimately challenges—speculative and critical design (SCD) traditions.
As Khaled explains, SCDs originally presented an important contrast to (and
critique of) ‘traditional’ design, moving from design as problem-solving to
design as problem-finding. Note how paratopian design now similarly
provides a contrast and critique to SCDs, while also exploring and
implementing other design traditions, including those from game design,
interaction design, and user experience design. Crucially, these are
considerations that acknowledge and integrate the audience’s perspectives and
experiences. Extending these considerations, we might also reflect on how
Khaled is applying her critical design approach to the practices that define her
methodology: rather than take the practices and traditions of our discipline for
granted, Khaled asks how we can learn from other domains, and how we can
respond to the challenges we see within our field, adapting and proposing
alternatives that can reshape the foundations of our work.

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 The ideas and concepts behind the case for Paratopian design grew out of a
research-creation project called Speculative Play, which was about merging two
schools of design thought: playful media and game design on one hand, and speculative
and critical design on the other.
This type of design is closer to contemporary art than mass-produced design, and
the subject matter that it tends to deal with is frequently complicated, nuanced, and on
occasion, provocative. For example, Figure 1 shows a project by my former student,
Théo Chauvirey, offering speculation on how to build urban transit infrastructure
with biodegradable renewable resources. Almost everything in this speculative metro
car is made from mycelium. Théo literally grew this metro car in a lab, and that
mycelium prototype is classic speculative design. It’s kind of weird on initial
inspection, but it asks the serious question: what if we use biodegradable materials
for urban infrastructure? But as someone with a history of working with games and
interaction design, I’m interested in amplifying this kind of rhetoric with audience
participation and playfulness.

Figure 1. Théo Chauvirey offers a speculation about renewable urban transit infrastructure.

First, specifically, I think about this: How might we leverage playful and digital
interactions to bring complex social and cultural questions to life? Then, further, can
you do this in a way that brings experiences to people beyond universities, galleries,
and the ivory towers that our community has ready access to? But this is jumping the
gun. We can’t answer that question without thinking through what speculative and
critical design entail, which I’ll do in the form of an ordered series of propositions.

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SPECULATIVE AND CRITICAL DESIGN

1. Speculative and critical design (SCD) proposes alternative visions of the world through object
rhetoric.

The thinking of SCDs is that by drawing attention to alternative visions, people will
end up critically thinking about how the world currently is. Because SCDs frequently
take the form of objects, the manifestation or evocation of possible worlds is expressed
through the functionality that is proposed by these objects.
For example, Data Tomb is the work of my former student, Milo Reinhardt, in
which he posed the question: who should control our digital data after we die? Should
that data be buried or destroyed, mirroring what happens to our bodies? His work
proposes a certain type of functionality which is archiving all of one’s personal data
after death. This, in turn, gestures to an alternative world in which that functionality
makes sense (Lai & Reinhardt, 2016).
Often, that functionality doesn’t exist, or rather it doesn’t exist here and now.
Cook Your Way, an alt controller game by my PhD student, Enric Llagostera, asks us to
imagine if obtaining immigration to new countries boiled down to our ability to cook
exotic dishes for our new countries. Cook Your Way is real and functional within its
diegetic world, but it’s not functional within this world (Llagostera, 2019).
SCD grew out of the cracks between interaction design, industrial design, and art
in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Kickstarted by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, James
O’Shea, Julian Bleecker and others, it’s set against a backdrop of consumer-oriented
design, or as Dunne and Raby would call it, “affirmative design.” Crucially, SCDs are
defined in opposition to many of the qualities we associate with consumer-oriented
design. Instead of focusing on problem-solving, coming up with answers, optimizing
for production, and assumptions about the user as a target, the focus is on problem-
finding, asking questions, focusing on societal needs as opposed to production, and
thinking about people as opposed to users.

2. SCDs grow best in uncanny design valleys

Best practice advice for speculative and critical design suggests that there’s a sweet
spot for contextualizing or situating an experience: a space between familiar and
unfamiliar. Too familiar and the concept will be understandable, but boring. Too
unfamiliar, and the concept might be interesting but irrelevant. My term for this
Goldilocks spot is the Uncanny Design Valley. To be clear, normally, best practice
advice is to avoid the uncanny valley. But in the case of SCDs, it’s beneficial. Why?
Well, people are quite good at noticing slight irregularities. And this hearkens back
to Viktor Shklovsky’s (1917) observations about defamiliarization, or making the
familiar strange. Shklovsky’s claim was that when we make things a little unfamiliar,
we can’t operate on autopilot and we bother to pay attention while still retaining
enough understanding or expertise to not be totally derailed. With SCDs, you want to
target an uncanny valley outside of here and now, which is made uncanny because it
includes modifications and edits to: facts; the course of science; cultural and societal
norms; laws and rules; or the perspectives that history is told through. When

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experiencing an SCD, people shouldn’t feel totally out of place, but they should feel
like they’re on the back foot. As learning scientists argue, when we feel unsure, we’re
more motivated to pay attention and engage in critical thinking.

3. SCDs operate in the context of particular fictions

When SCDs first started emerging about 20 years ago, they followed a distinct design
vernacular: flawless-looking products that looked like they came from the near future.
One seminal example is the audio tooth implant designed by James Auger. To borrow
Auger’s (2001) own description, “the audio tooth implant is a radical new concept in
personal communication. A miniature audio output device and receiver are implanted
into the tooth during routine dental surgery. These offer a form of electronic telepathy
as the sound information resonates directly into the consciousness (para. 1).” Auger has
no plans to actually build or release this as a product. It was a speculative design about
cybernetic body modification. But divorced from their fictional framings, SCDs can be
misinterpreted as real.
Journalists who wrote about Auger’s implant got complaints from doctors about
the moral decay that such dental technology would cause. So, herein lies the rub for
SCD. If, like these doctors, you weren’t privy to the fictional packaging, you might
get irritated at these stupid ideas that designers come up with. SCDs need to be
closely bound to their diegetic fiction, or their rhetoric can be misinterpreted. But this
connects to another point about SCDs concerning their functionality.

4. It is often difficult to experience an SCD’s function

SCDs always convey some kind of function, but it’s often the case that it’s the
communicated function as opposed to one that you can personally experience.
Let’s take Milo’s Data Tomb. For Data Tomb, and this is true of many SCDs, the
function remains in the realm of the conceptual. You’re not going to find a Data Tomb
service online. Appearances might suggest that the functionality is real, but you’re
usually dealing with layers of technical wizardry which are there to evoke or mimic the
function. The term design prototype doesn’t quite suffice here either because design
prototypes are often understood as interim tools as opposed to final propositions.
This is exactly why my collaborator, Pippin Barr and I, started wondering about
games and playful media as vehicles for SCDs. With games, we can use expressive
interactivity to convey and simulate functions in the context of game world fiction.
Both function and fiction can be bound together, and depending on platforms and
technical requirements, access and circulation can be wide.
In 2017, Pippin released It Is as if You Were Doing Work or simply Work, shown in
Figure 2. Work conveys functions within a fiction. It presents itself as an application to
give a sense of purpose to the idle humans of a near future in which all work has been
delegated to robots. It takes the form of a 90’s window-style desktop environment with
office-like tasks to be performed through the manipulation of standard UI elements.
Work is an SCD motivated by the question: what is work for, if it’s no longer about
getting things done? Work is also a web game, which has been played by over 500,000
people, which is hands down a larger number than what it would have been had this
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only been on show at our university. I’ll go as far as to say that games seem like they
should be amazing vehicles for SCDs, but there’s a problem that we’ve brought on
ourselves.

Figure 2. Work by Pippin Barr explores a near-future reality where all work has been delegated to robots.

5. Games normalise weird; that’s not necessarily helpful for SCDs.

After several decades of explosive growth and maturation of the expressive capacities
of games and what we dare to represent with them, it’s become hard for anything to
remain weird. Everything has been defamiliarized, to echo Johanna Drucker’s claim
about visual art and contemporary times. But whereas Drucker (2022) suggests that
we’ve become immune or numb to alienating images, in games, we’re not immune.
We normalize. Two examples from the simulation game House Flipper: I can sell and
remove things around me with a handheld point-of-sale tool, and it’s no problem if I
sell the door that lets me into the house because I can just buy a new one to let me back
out. Or, if I need to mow a lawn, but it’s taking too long, I can turn the mower on high
speed and exit the full screen mode so that I can watch Drag Race All Stars while I mow.
When we play, we’re so good at normalizing weird and then optimizing it, that game
content almost doesn’t matter anymore. Any experience we have of an uncanny design
valley as expressed via a game system gradually disappears as we work out the rules of
play and as we become enculturated within that game system. Weird always becomes
the new normal.

6. Dystopias are common in SCDs.

Let’s move on to design dystopias. Specifically to Neo//Qab, which is a dystopian

SCD that I designed with my project team. I live in Quebec, which happens to have
legislation in place that bans niqab, which is the full face cover that some Muslim
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women wear. As a Muslim woman living in Canada, it’s a political issue that I have
personal stakes in. Neo//Qab is an experience that poses questions about how we deal
with religious diversity in secular Western countries. The fiction of the Neo//Qab
presents a dystopian technology for cultural and religious tolerance, but it mostly
targets Muslim women who wear niqab. The Neo//Qab technology enabled censoring
and, in a sense, uncensoring of people whose faces are covered, so you can force a face
onto someone who didn’t want to be seen.
We simulated this function using a Kinect, projection, and a swipe-based mobile
UI. The rhetorical intention here is not to convince people that this is an effective
product or even a good idea. It’s to make people reflect on their community and
society’s stance towards visible religious difference, and our boundaries regarding
tolerance. The rhetoric operates at a visceral and experiential level as well. People have
to edit away someone’s face as they stand near them. There’s no hiding behind the law,
and that’s just how we do things. The design intention is to make what is mandated at
the legislative societal level enacted at the individual level.
I want to reiterate: what we propose through Neo//Qab is a terrible solution. I’m
not advocating that we make this thing real. It’s most definitely dystopian design. I’ll be
the first to admit that dystopian design is fun. It invites you to lean all the way in, to let
go. But when I started testing the Neo//Qab, I encountered the phenomenon that I now
think of as the ‘woke problem.’ When you undertake play tests or user tests with people
who coexist around you in a university or research setting, those people will more or
less share your political leanings. There was a lot of head nodding as I explained my
design motivations during a debrief session. Perhaps too much head nodding if the
design was to accomplish anything other than make people uncomfortable. In part,
this is because the people I was testing with were not so different from me, and part of
it was also because the fictional world cast around Neo//Qab was clearly dystopian.
Dystopian design is the final word. It’s a mic drop. And how do you talk back
to a mic drop? Dystopian design is fun, but it’s irresponsible. It means that we leave
the burden of articulating alternatives on the shoulders of our audiences, which is
arguably kind of lazy. The other problem with dystopias is that it’s too easy for the
audience to work out a story where it doesn’t apply to them. There’s a psychology
model about attitude change that supports this line of reasoning, and this is the
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The ELM postulates how persuasion and
behavior change happen. If we think something doesn’t apply to us, we’re not
motivated to expend effort thinking about it, because by and large, we’re pretty lazy
when it comes to thinking. We do a minimal job of thinking and instead, we rely on
surface-level heuristics to shortcut having to think. We let ourselves off the hook.
So, if we’re avoiding dystopias. What do we have left? I mean, we probably don’t
want to design utopias, because those are impossible, doomed to fail. What’s left? Well,
fortunately, all the space in between. Lateral alternatives, and possible parallel worlds.
For argument’s sake, let’s call those paratopias.

7. Paratopias as lateral alternatives to the dystopian/utopian binary

Let’s take a look at a paratopian design that grew out of speculative play work. Chabot

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is a ChatGPT-powered chatbot that serves as a therapist of sorts. Chabot’s employs
a therapy approach that is equal parts cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and
dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT). Chabot is also a flirt … as much as a chatbot
can be a flirt. When the flirtation setting is set to the max, it adopts language used
by pickup artists. If any of you are familiar with Reeves and Nass’s book, The Media
Equation (1996), they demonstrated that people enjoy flattery, even if they know it’s
preprogrammed and originates from a computer. Chabot takes the idea of flattery to
a PG-13, gross, pick-up artist kind of level. The speculative question that the Chabot
experiment proposes is “What if some parts of mental health care could be offloaded
to AI?” By not including a human in that specific loop, what new behaviours can we
now explore that we would normally rule out because of human-to-human standards
of ethics and professionalism? What previously off-the-table behaviours might have
potentially positive outcomes?
You might, at this point, say that this is just semantics. Is Chabot paratopian? Why
is a paratopia any different from a dystopia? Well, paratopias are not characterized
by obvious undesirability, and the prefix ‘para’ is doing more work than simply
reminding you of sideways. It’s also there to evoke a paradigm shift. Think about
paratopia like the present world, except there is a paradigm shift of separation between
what we currently have here and now, and the projected paratopia. When I say
paradigm here, I want to evoke a sociocultural take on Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) idea of
scientific paradigms, which is to say, frameworks and philosophies that we currently
subscribe to that explain how we think the world works. By embedding an SCD within
protected paratopias, our design work could have greater payoffs, and the design
situations we bring to life could perhaps, maybe, lead to different ways of doing things
here and now.

8. Paratopian design feels close because it is close

Speaking of connecting to here and now, within two days of posting my code for
Chabot on a public GitHub repository, I was contacted by a company that said they
were also exploring GPT CBT solutions, and they asked if we could consider
collaborating. I wrote back to them to say “Well, it’s still early days.” But meanwhile, I
was thinking, I don’t think that my Chabot is what you had in mind. But that is also
when it occurred to me that Chabot almost isn’t a speculative design if other people are
seriously considering something like it as a commercially viable product. This largely
becomes possible because the core functionality that Chabot builds on, which is the
ability to emulate a human-sounding conversation partner who brings up expert-level
domain knowledge, is handled by Open AI’s API services. There’s nothing unusual
about doing this. Any software developer you ever meet will default to doing this type
of code reuse and extension as much as possible, whether in the form of borrowing
actual code, using existing software frameworks, or building on top of APIs. All of
this leads to a faster implementation that is usually more robust, but the pragmatics
of building on existing technical layers almost breaks the idea of SCDs because the
functionality of the thing may actually function here and now, exactly as claimed.
With Chabot you don’t just have an emulated experience of talking to an AI

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chatbot therapist. You really do just talk to an AI chatbot therapist. The evoked
function functions as claimed, and the fictional aspect now only describes the context
of use. Because we built Chabot on top of a proper API layer, we quite naturally fell
into a kind of Donald Schön ‘conversation with materials’ design approach, where
your design decisions are as much driven by whatever you had in mind at the
beginning, and backtalk: what your design materials want to do when they’re put
into conversation with you and with each other. By virtue of using and working with
known materials, we fell into a ‘conversation with materials approach’ to paratopian
design, which essentially took the following form.
1) Implement a partial feature. In our case, this was a UI layer to chat with
Chabot. 2) Use it until it’s no longer interesting. In our case, we became familiar with
where it broke down, where it was clear you were no longer talking to a human, and
where we encountered design flaws, including classic UX design flaws. 3) Consider
what other design standards it ought to be in conversation with. In our case, this
was input mechanisms. Standard UX web input mechanisms: sliders, radio buttons,
emoji responses. 4) Connect it to those existing UX standards. So, a conversation
with materials approach in paratopian design will inevitably lead to stitching together
between the projected paratopia and the here are now, bringing the two of them closer
together.

9. Participatory approaches also create threads to here and now

Chabot and Neo//Qab were both the result of my having an idea and wanting to
flesh it out further, which is a common way that the design of SCDs are approached.
Most often, they’ve been associated with an auteur design sensibility, but if SCDs are
about engaging critical thinking amongst a broad audience, then it’s worth exploring
whether we can make them in participatory ways. In the late 1970s, the futurist
Robert Jungk and his colleagues invented a workshop process that had the objective of
empowering communities to co-create their futures. These workshops are now simply
known as ‘future workshops,’ so I used future workshops for another speculative play
subproject called Aunties and Algorithms, which is in the near future, an algorithmically
assisted online matrimonial platform for people based in India.
Why, you might be asking, is marriage subject matter for a speculative play
project? Well, few life events capture and are captured by culture and protocol as much
as marriage. Growing up as a Bangladeshi in New Zealand, I remember the first time
I encountered a biodata document and its physically mediated form as a singular sheet
of A4. If you’ve never seen biodata like this before, think of it as a Tinder profile,
which is written by parents and traditionally exchanged along their non-digital social
networks to find their child a life partner. So what power was ascribed to that one
sheet of A4? What power did our non-digital networks have in terms of whose bio-
data might end up in our hands?
In the Aunties and Algorithms project, the underlying design research question is: As
more people turn towards the Internet and algorithmic matching to seek life partners,
can we reimagine the assumptions of online matchmaking and ways that move beyond
linear extensions of bio-data and newspaper ads? And, what design trajectories can we

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develop from how young Indians think about marriage today and what they want for
the future?
In setting out to do this project, it was rapidly evident to me that I couldn’t develop
this idea on my own, or even with my team. The idea exists within a paratopia, and it
needs to be developed by people who could inhabit that paratopia. So, we used future
workshops: my team and I ran a series of workshops with participants based around
the Bangalore area in the 20-to-30-year age group to get a feel for how they and their
peers think about relationships, marriage, and the role of the family both right now as
well as in the near future.
Future workshops have three main stages. The first phase, the critique phase,
involves communities analyzing their situations critically and identifying ‘pain points’
as they would be described in the language of UX. In week one, we had our
participants respond to themes that we had found in earlier qualitative research about
Indian youth and their experiences and perceptions related to relationships and
marriage. We also had them design online profiles for themselves.
The second phase, the fantasy phase, involves identifying a vision of the future
where those pain points are no longer of concern. In week two, we had our
participants write near-future fiction narratives about their children getting married.
Then we had them brainstorm and design speculative platforms that exist in the future.
The third phase, the implementation phase, involves working forward from the
critique phase to the fantasy phase and also backwards from the fantasy phase to the
critique phase, to work out what the biggest obstacles are, and then to come up with
workarounds. In week three, we had our participants work with the narratives and
the future platforms that they developed in week two to prototype platforms that they
might want to use now or in the very near future.
Over those three weeks, my team in our participants undertook travels together,
both in time to the future and back, and also in space to the paratopia and back. We
developed trust, shared language, shared understanding, and a shared perspective of
that paratopia.
Core insights we took away from this process include the following: Young people
wanted to significantly involve their families and the process of finding a life partner,
but they cared about identity separation. Identity separation included what their
family knew about them and what their peer group knew about them. When there
were large differences between who their family would choose for them and who they
would choose for themselves, this was often due to differences in value priorities, and
it can be very difficult to acknowledge and even articulate value differences.
So as such, we thought, what if there were two types of account, one for the
person seeking to get matched where the profile info is editable, and another for a
parent or family member, but with a limited view of the profile’s full data component,
but still offers the possibility to recommend matches? What if the system, through
its different views and ways of algorithmically determining matches, could facilitate
some of these difficult conversations about value differences, traditions, and the many
different identities we embody and present at different times?
We can speculate on what a near future matrimonial system wants to be, but

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tangibly linking the concept to people’s expectations from now relies on existing
artefacts such as biodata, and well-known platforms like shaadi.com. These are
existing platforms, so Aunties and Algorithms is creating familiar links, it’s drawing on
familiar threads between here and now. The paratopian world is still fairly similar
to this one. Because of these familiar threads, people are also more able to give open
feedback to discuss consequences and consider ramifications. If the point of this type
of design is to invite conversation and consideration from audiences, then we should
continuously remember the design needs to stem from their existing literacies.

10. Threads that are stretched thin can snap

One of the research assistants on my speculative play team is my PhD student Chip
Lymburner, who also happens to be an escape room designer. I tasked Chip with
planning a kind of test apparatus around Neo//Qab and we proceeded to have
essentially the following conversation:

CL: What character should I play when I experience Neo//Qab?

RK: Play yourself.
CL: But I wouldn’t use this thing. I’m ethically against what Neo//Qab
suggests as the solution. So who am I when I use this?
RK: Oh… right. Well, just use it.
CL: Umm…
RK: As a Muslim woman, I give you permission to do this.
Then we both went into a kind of awkward silence as we thought about the
history of the world and how to respectfully tell your boss that you think she’s
in the wrong. Then it struck me.
RK: “New” idea: you play someone who has to critically analyze and reflect
on Neo//Qab.
CL: That I can do.
And as uncomfortable as that exchange was, it’s how I started thinking about
onboarding design as applied to SCDs.

11. Onboarding design matters when the diegetic context is complicated.

You might be familiar with the notion of onboarding design from a UX context.
It’s sort of like a tutorial stage where there is a meta voice explaining what things
are and how to use them. So, we came up with a roughly analogous design stage
for Neo//Qab. Neo//Qab now gets presented as an app that has been submitted to a
fictional distribution platform called Pocket Net. Audience members are assigned the
role of Content Policy Violation Moderator, where the task of content moderation
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concerns verifying that an app’s content does not violate Pocket Nets content public
publishing guidelines. This is not unlike real rules that exist on familiar distribution
platforms like the App Store or Steam.
Audience members are given Pocket Net’s guidelines to evaluate Neo//Qab against,
and they have to enter a written report into a web-based system that uses familiar
language, familiar policy, familiar UI conventions and familiar web content, including
a Google Form. Playing this fictional role is less likely to present an ideological clash
with people’s ideas about themselves. The role also demands that audience members
exercise analysis, which is hopefully critical. To return to Chip’s question again, what
character should people be playing when they experience Neo//Qab? The answer is,
you play a content moderator who must assist whether Neo//Qab ought to be released
to the public.
A useful metaphor for thinking about this type of onboarding is an airlock.
Airlocks are sealed off compartments between environments of differing pressure
conditions. They have doors to different environments that do not open at the same
time, and they have seals, and a lock that helps an inhabitant acclimate to the
environment that they’re about to enter. If airlocks are about acclimatization, then we
can ask, “What do you need your design audience to know and to assume? Who do you
need them to be, and how do you assist the blurring of their everyday identity with
their diegetic role?” Well, it turns out that LARPers deal with the blurring of identity
all the time.
Here’s the fastest and loosest introduction to role-playing theory you’re ever
going to encounter. Within LARP circles, people talk about ‘bleed’ when there’s a
carryover of experience, either from player to LARP character or from LARP character
to player. The classic example of bleed is the LARP crush or emotional bleed, for
instance, with characters who are lovers. When those feelings carry over to players’
feelings for each other outside of the game, it’s considered bleeding. With Bella and
Edward from Twilight, for instance, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson ended up
together in real life for a few years.
If anyone mentions bleed, of course, you’ll think of blood, but ink is another
substance that famously bleeds. Consider what happens when you hold an inky pen
down on paper. Especially if your paper is thin. The wisdom of fountainpenlove.com
says that, “Bleeding occurs when ink soaks through a piece of paper to the other side
… ink might soak through onto the next piece of paper, or even the surface you’re
writing on!” (Bosley, 2019) This turns out to be quite a nice metaphor for explaining
LARP bleed. If ink is analogous to the play experience, paper is the boundary of the
magic circle. I bring out the magic circle because it roughly overlaps with another very
important LARP concept which is alibi.
Alibi is more complicated to explain than bleed, so allow me to unleash the
definition from the Nordic LARP Wiki: Alibi can include “individual legitimizing
strategies, which enable players to interact and reconstruct a socially acceptable
spectrum of play” (Nordic LARP Wiki, 2019). It’s a negotiation of what is acceptable to
do in a certain LARP. The same page proposes that an Alibi is what makes the player
able to do the LARP, but also what legitimizes their actions after the LARP to the world

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and to themself: “we agreed it was OK to do x, so it’s okay that I did it.” Alibi and bleed
are oppositional and complementary, so bleed is your day-to-day self melting into the
play experience, and alibi is what allows you to play in ways that don’t conform to your
ideas of you. The stronger your alibi, the less likely you’ll experience bleed and the
weaker your alibi, the more likely you’ll experience bleed. So, bleed and alibi are useful
design tools, especially for thinking through diegetic framing in SCDs. Let’s put these
LARP ideas to use.
SCDs can be about anything at all so long as they’re not too far away from
here, or here and now, or what is familiar. With any SCD there should be residual
thought about the diegetic world after experiencing it. If the character you set up
for your audience or players is fairly innocuous, or the diegetic assumptions aren’t
obviously offensive, you can get away with dropping audience members into the
diegetic world, but keep the idea of threads in mind. Make the design experience
familiar enough that your audience can intuit what to do. Alibi here is weak, so some
degree of bleed is likely. If, however, your diegetic assumptions are provocative or
difficult, design for onboarding and acclimatize your audience by designing an airlock.
This acclimatization should give your audience an alibi. You can still have a core
design experience that gets people to explore difficult scenarios, but now it happens
between the onboarding and offboarding phases. Spontaneously occurring bleed will
be weaker, but the alibi provided helps compensate for bleed. As all good serious game
designers know anyway, you will magnify and multiply the effects of any diegetic
learnings when you include something like a post-play debrief session.

A RECAP

Let’s retrace where we’ve been.

1. SCDs propose alternative visions of the world through the lens of objects.
2. They grow best in uncanny-designed valleys, places that are somewhat
estranged from here and now.
3. They operate in the context of particular fictions, and can be misinterpreted
outside of those fictions.
4. It’s often difficult to experience an SCD’s function for various pragmatic
reasons, which is why SCDs inspired by games and interaction design are
promising.
5. However, games normalize weirdness, and that’s not necessarily helpful for
SCDs.
6. Dystopias are common in SCDs, but straight dystopias don’t leave much room
for dialogue.
7. Paratopias, or paradigm-shifted presence, give us a diegetic target that moves
us out of the dystopia/utopia binary.
8. Paratopian design can be tethered to here and now via threads in the form of
engagement with existing technical or design standards.
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 9. Participatory design, likewise, invokes threads in the form of audience lived
experience.
10. But threads alone aren’t always enough, especially if your diegetic context is
provocative.
11. In these cases, please consider using onboarding design.
12. Last but not least, or last and perhaps most, in SCDs you always want bleed. If
you can’t have it, then you need an alibi, and that gets us to the end, here and
now.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. In what ways can you apply SCD thinking in your own projects? How can the idea of
‘paratopias’ be useful in other, non-design contexts?
2. Who are the targeted audiences of your designs? How do you involve audiences in your
design process? What onboarding processes might be useful to help audiences engage with
your own projects?
3. Besides the terms Dr. Khaled borrows from LARPing, what other play-related concepts
can be useful for furthering critical engagement with SCDs?

KEY TERMS

Speculative and Critical Designs (SCDs): Rather than consumer-oriented designs that
focus on problem-solving, speculative and critical design is a form of design thinking that
uses objects with fictional functions to allow audiences to imagine alternative versions of
the world, and to think critically about how close these alternatives are to our present
world.
Uncanny valley: The Oxford English Dictionary refers to the uncanny valley as the
phenomenon in which a “computer-generated figure [bears] a close but imperfect
resemblance to a human being, [arousing] a sense of unease … in the person viewing it.”
Dr. Khaled notes that SCDs should aim to be situated in the uncanny valley of design,
somewhere between the familiar and unfamiliar. By making modifications to what
audiences take as familiar without making large enough changes that audiences might
interpret as completely out of place, SCDs can become uncanny, forcing audiences to pay
more critical attention to the questions that the SCD raises.
Paratopia: Since dystopian designs can limit critical responses from audiences, and
utopian designs are impossible and doomed to fail, Dr. Khaled urges the design of

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 paratopias instead, which exist as lateral alternatives in the space between dystopias and
utopias. Unlike the distant feeling of dystopias or utopias, paratopias are meant to be very
close to our current world. In other words, paratopias do not require audiences to take
major imaginative leaps to apply the design to the conditions of the present world.
Bleed/alibi: Dr. Khaled borrows the ideas of ‘bleed’ and ‘alibi’ from LARPing. Bleed refers
to the transfer of emotions between the player and the player’s character within the
fictional world, while alibi refers to the strategies used to come to rationalize actions and
ideas that are not acceptable in the real-world as acceptable in the fictional world. If the
design experience is familiar enough, SCDs can induce a level of bleed in a design
audience; however, if the fictional world of the SCD includes provocative elements, design
audiences should be protected through alibis to that orient the player to accepted or
appropriate actions within the context of the paratopian design.

REFERENCES
1. Alibi. (2019, January 3). Nordic Larp Wiki. https://nordiclarp.org/w/
index.php?title=Alibi&oldid=16411

2. Auger, J. (2001). Audio Tooth Implant. Auger Loizeau. https://auger-

loizeau.com/toothimplant.html

3. Auger, J. (2013). Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation. Digital Creativity,

24(1), 11-35.
4. Bleecker, J. (2009). Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and
Fiction.
5. Bosley, J. (2018, February 9). What’s the Difference between Ink Feathering,
Bleeding and Ghosting? Fountain Pen Love. https://fountainpenlove.com/
fountain-pen-education/whats-the-difference-between-ink-feathering-
bleeding-and-ghosting/
6. Drucker, J. (2022). Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity
to the Present. The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/ 10.7208/
chicago/9780226815800.001.0001
7. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social
Dreaming. MIT Press.
8. Lai, C., & Reinhardt, M. (2016). Data Tomb. Concordia University.
https://graduationshow.concordia.ca/2016/data-tombs/
9. Newton, K. M. (1997). Victor Shklovsky: ‘Art as Technique.’ In K. M. Newton
(Ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory (pp. 3–5). Macmillan Education
UK. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25934-2_1

10. Granzotto Llagostera, E. (2019). Cook Your Way. https:/

enric.llagostera.com.br/cookyourway.

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11. Reeves, B., & Nass, C. I. (1996). The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers,
Television, and New Media like Real People and Places. Center for the Study of
Language and Information; Cambridge University Press.

12. Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in

Action. Routledge.

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SPOTLIGHT 9: MAÑANITA ON DIGITAL ISLANDS:
ANIMAL CROSSING AND THE #JUNKTERRORBILL
PROTESTS

Based on a talk by Sarah Christina Ganzon

SUMMARY

In this talk, Dr. Sarah Christina Ganzon examines what protest looks
like when physical gathering spaces are banned or unsafe. She
draws on examples from the social simulation game Animal Crossing: New
Horizons, and outlines how the game was used in the socio-legal and
culturally specific constraints of the Philippines, to protest unjust laws
passed by the Duterte government. Ganzon concludes her talk by
highlighting future research at the intersection of video games and
protest, describing games as a form of ‘tactical media’ for protests,
and inquiring how protestor identities link with gamer identities.

A P P L I C AT I O N P O I N T S

Ganzon’s examination of how Animal Crossing has been used for political
protest offers an example of the ways that games and other media can
become effective tools for civic engagement. Ganzon draws on the term
‘tactical media’ to describe this phenomenon, and there is a long history
of grassroots organizing and activism that leverages whatever media is
available to help create awareness and change, including culture jamming,
hacktivism, and social media campaigns, as well as alternate and self-
published media like zines, podcasts, and radio broadcasts. By drawing
attention to the ways that protestors use Animal Crossing, Ganzon shows
both alternate uses and alternate interpretations of its affordances. By
extension, her work raises important questions about how other
interactive media have similar (and perhaps unexpected) potential for
people to advocate for change.

For many years now, Rodrigo Duterte’s government in the Philippines has been
the focus of protests and criticism. Since 2016, Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’ has
operated on the premise that drug addicts need to be eliminated and used the
Philippine National Police to conduct mass arrests and commit acts of

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extrajudicial violence. According to Human Rights Watch, this ‘war on drugs’ “has
led to the deaths of over 12,000 Filipinos, mostly urban poor” (Conde, 2017).
These unlawful extensions of government force continued into the COVID-19
pandemic. The Duterte government used lockdowns and checkpoints to contain
individuals, ban gatherings, and conduct mass arrests (Amnesty International,
2021). Duterte’s ‘anti-terrorism bill’—what protesters called the ‘junk terror
bill’—shut down a major Philippine news network for criticizing his regime and
labelled activist protest as a form of terrorism (Human Rights Watch, 2020).
Ganzon explains that it is within this context, and in response to legislation
introduced by Duterte’s government, that people began using the video game
Animal Crossing: New Horizons to organize virtual protests. Animal Crossing is a
social simulation game released at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and
gained popularity for the ability to host small gatherings with friends for special
events: using the ‘invite’ feature, people would host small gatherings, celebrate
birthdays, holidays, and more (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Animal Crossing has been used as a way to meet with friends virtually.

The ability to gather in Animal Crossing enabled it to be used as a space for

protest, which is especially critical in light of the criminalization of activism.
When news broke that a chief of police had held a birthday party defying
government restrictions, the chief justified his actions by stating that his
gathering was ‘just a mañanita,’ i.e., a small birthday celebration consisting only of
immediate family members. With Animal Crossing’s eight-person island invite
limit, protestors began calling their own online gatherings mañanitas,
circumventing in-person gathering bans while simultaneously critiquing the
double standards applied to government regulations.
Ganzon shows that games have been used alongside and as activism in many
contexts; whether spreading a message, protesting, or making political satire.
This is also not the first time that Animal Crossing was used for activist purposes:
it was also used during the Hong Kong protests, Black Lives Matter protests, and
the Paris Strikes. Dr. Ganzon argues that this is an example of how culturally
specific forms of sociality and politics can extend into games, and how games can

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 go beyond their intended or original use to become a type of ‘tactical media’, a
form of media or practice that critiques power.
Ganzon suggests that there is a need for future research to continue examining
how games mediate and contribute to activist practices. In her own research, she
hopes to examine how protestor identities link with gamer identities, and how
in-game protests are used alongside activism across social networks like X
(formerly Twitter) and Facebook. She also hopes to explore what the game’s use
as a tool for protests globally shows about international forms of solidarity. For
Ganzon, the global use of Animal Crossing has wide-ranging implications for
activism, with the potential to connect local protestor communities with larger
diasporas across the globe.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How else have video games been used as tactical media?

2. How else might video games with social elements be used to facilitate culturally
specific social interactions?
3. How does your research account for the impact of local cultural practices in
ostensibly universal online spaces?

KEY TERMS

Tactical media: Described by Rita Raley as “interventionist media art

practices that engage and critique the dominant political and economic
order” (Raley, 2009). Dr. Ganzon’s deployment of the term highlights the
unintended or emergent character of user practices, as opposed to the designer’s
intentions.
Mañanita: In the Philippines, a mañanita is just a small birthday party. Or, a culturally
specific act of civic engagement that creatively repurposes a form of
entertainment media to critique institutional power.

REFERENCES
1. Anti-terror Act Remains Dangerous and Fundamentally Flawed. Amnesty
International. (2021, December 9). Anemsty International. https://
www.amnesty.org.ph/2021/12/anti-terror-act-remains-dangerous-and-
fundamentally-flawed/
2. Conde, C. (2017, March 2). Philippines’ “war on drugs.” Human Rights
Watch. https://www.hrw.org/tag/philippines-war-drugs

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3. Philippines: Duterte Seeks to Shut Network. Human Rights Watch.
(2020, February 10). https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/02/10/
philippines-duterte-seeks-shut-network
4. Raley, R. (2009). Tactical Media. University of Minnesota Press.

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CHAPTER 8.

BLACK VIRTUALITY

A.M. Darke

SUMMARY

Across digital media, Black people are portrayed in ways that are derogatory
and harmful–if depicted at all. The virtual representation of afro-textured hair
is noticeably limited, with options ranging from comically large afros, unstyled
dreadlocks, to misshapen cornrows. Through projects like the Open Source
Afro Hair Library and the game ‘Ye or Nay?, artist A.M. Darke explores the
consumption of Black bodies and the construction of a Black virtuality. In this
talk, Darke shares a critical and liberatory approach for engaging marginalized
communities in games and digital media.

APPLICATION POINTS

A.M. Darke’s chapter on Black Virtuality extends D. Fox Harrell’s theorization

of phantasms to explore how we can intervene in the ways that whiteness
constructs representations of Blackness across digital media. Darke’s work does
this at several levels, ranging from the theoretical to the practical, most
recently with the creation of the Open Source Afro Hair Library of 3D
assets for game developers. Consider how, in conjunction with other
stakeholders, you may be able to contribute to new and more positive forms of
Black Virtuality, whether as educators, scholars, players, game developers, etc.
Although Darke focuses on Blackness, gender is also at play, raising important
questions about how we might also challenge other negative phantasms of
underrepresented identities. As Darke explains, we are implicated in the
maintaining of phantasms, whether we believe the meaning behind the
abstraction or not. This suggests that it is also up to every one of us to find
ways to refocus our attention on media tools and representations that are
better aligned with what Darke calls the “constellation” of factors that make up
who we are.

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 I’d like you to meet my Black virtuality with your own. I’m a Black person meeting
you all virtually in this space. I wonder if I could ask that you—to the extent that
you can— become virtually Black. This isn’t about whether you’re a Black person
ethnically. Instead, I’m asking what does it mean to be situated in Blackness? For me,
it’s about feeling comfortable. When I’m in a Black space, a Black-centred space, I don’t
have to be the rigid academic performing expertise. I can just be with people. I can
relax. I hope you’ll meet me there, because that’s what this work is about.
As an artist, for a long time I was making work about Black culture focused on my
personal experience. Recently, I’ve shifted from the personal to thinking in terms of
community. How do I make work that doesn’t just speak to my individual experiences
of white-dominated spaces? Spaces where I rarely see other Black folks engaging with
Black art and expression? How do I move to thinking across the diaspora, in terms
of making and building with people, thinking about our collective stories, how, and
where they will be told?
To define Black Virtuality, I want to start with defining ‘Black’ and ‘virtual’.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, virtual is a) created by or accessed through
software, b) appearing to exist but not formally existing, and c) almost a particular thing.
Here are the definitions of black: a) without hope, very bad or sad, b) as a verb, to blacken
something, to make something black, and c) without any milk or cream added. I really love
this latter definition because in previous talks, I’ve described Mark Zuckerberg as the
human embodiment of milk. If you take that concept and apply it to platforms like
Facebook or Twitter, and digital technology in general, what could it look like to have
software that didn’t have any milk or cream added?
Oh, and, of course there’s another definition of ‘black’ d) of or belonging to a group
of people.
Let’s talk about how Black with a capital ‘B’ came to be. I’m situated in the United
States, I’m a Black American, and my experience, my worldview, isn’t informed by
most definitions of ‘black’. Maybe it’s because Black was invented and defined by white
Europeans–and imposed upon groups of people–to justify trading human beings as
commodities. I think about that in relation to my corporeality, how it is shaped and
perceived by others. My people were not always Black. We were Blackened. So, let’s
think about how Blackness gets constructed and consumed by white perception.

CONSTRUCTS OF BLACKNESS

Figure 1 is a photo of Viola Davis taken by renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz

for Vanity Fair. There are many images that I could share of Blackness, but I wanted
to share this portrait because I look at it and think, “It’s giving slavery.” The contorted,
defensive posture. The way the body feels naked, rather than nude. The furrowed
brow. Pained smile. I see an image drained of color; a Black woman’s radiance drained
by a white woman’s lens.
Now, this isn’t one of the worst images of Blackness that we can imagine. Since
anti-Blackness is something that we export globally from the United States, you
already know what those are. I feel like if I were to say certain terms or ask you to
think about different associations of Blackness, you could conjure dozens of terrible
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images. Remember those definitions: hopeless, bad, evil, sad. That kind of association,
those images that I don’t have to put on screen—those stereotypes—get into a concept
that D. Fox Harrell (2013) calls phantasms, which I’ll return to in a moment.

Figure 1. Annie Leibovitz has been criticized over her photographs of Black
people.

In examining constructions of corporeal Blackness determined by a European gaze,

it’s important to talk about whiteness. When I think about whiteness, when I consider
whiteness in my work, I think of it as technology that shapes our perceptions, our
worldviews, the way that we treat each other, the way that we receive images, the
way that we create images. All of that can function even in the absence of white
people. While these terms can relate to people and physical bodies, let’s also think
of these terms–Blackness and whiteness–conceptually, as technologies that have a
specific purpose and function.

BLACKNESS IN VIRTUAL SPACE

Let’s look at the virtual space. How ‘Blackness’ is imposed and created there, how
images are “blackened.” This goes back to some of my early work in 3D graphics when
I first started the Open Source Afro Hair Library (Darke, 2023), which is a 3D database
of Black hair textures and styles. As a digital artist, I was working on virtual reality
projects, making games, creating characters, and I was looking for Black hair assets
because there just weren’t any in the software that I was using.
Searching for Black hair on CG Trader, I’d get a variety of results that include
animals, people, and things that don’t look like Black hair to me (Figure 2). It’s not the
hair that grows out of my head and not the hair that I see in my family. It’s not just the
visual imagery, it’s also the search term here—the sense that Black does not have the
same meaning to the people who designed this site. So, there’s this process, even in the
vernacular of the search, to ask, how does whiteness see me? How can I find coily hair,
kinky hair, and afro-textured hair? What words do I use, and what will the results be?
In other talks, I go through the process of figuring out the key term; the brilliant term

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was Afro. I felt so amazing, and I thought “that’s it!” it means Black as people and it’s a
hairstyle, surely this will be it. It very much was not it.

Figures 2-5 (left-right). Searches for 3D models of ‘black hair’ include not only
inaccurate, but also offensive results.

I want to highlight the image in Figure 3 because this is an authentic Black hairstyle.
She’s got individual box braids. They look great, but you know, she’s spread eagle, and
her neck and her arms are bound by rope. While I don’t want to kink shame anyone,
I’m not trying to be anti-BDSM, but here, one of my few access points for authentic
Black hair being represented digitally is also paired with a naked, bound, Black body.
The model in Figure 4 falls into so many stereotypes about the ‘Black mammy’, and it’s
an offensive image on its own that hearkens back to the Jim Crow era. There’s another
model by the same artist that shares a body with this one. It’s a monstrous slug-
creature. The only difference between the two images is some fuller breasts, an Afro,
and slippers. It’s interesting to think that, in virtual space, these monstrous features
could just be repurposed into a depiction of Blackness. The images in Figures 5 are
about the most offensive ones that I have seen, with minstrels and mammies straight
out of Jim Crow. I find these images particularly striking because I found them in
2019. Older media forms have distanced themselves from this kind of imagery. Warner
Brothers has these kinds of cartoons locked in a vault. Disney knows those crows in
Dumbo were a bad look. So why is this being re-introduced in our most cutting-edge
media forms?

Figures 6-11 (clockwise from top left). Models of Blackness as envisioned by

non-Black people.

To focus on hair, some things may be more subtle. In Figure 6, I see somewhat decent
cornrows. There are issues with the scalp, but it’s also presented in this kind of
youthful, teenage, nude body. Who’s that for? Is that necessary? There seems to be a
misogynist bent to these structures and platforms. In Figure 7, you see what an afro is
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not. A victim of static electricity perhaps, but not an afro. And yet it’s explicitly listed
as “afro hair.” Figure 8 appears to portray a white woman with a nest of pick-up sticks
for hair. And Figure 9 does not look like any Black person I have ever seen in my life,
but it’s listed as “Black Male Afro Head Joe.” Finally, there’s the model titled “Bubba” in
Figure 10. He’s the stereotypical prisoner, a vision of an inmate in the yard, complete
with a single gold tooth. When I look at this one from a skill perspective, it’s clear
there’s so much care that went into the actual construction of it. It’s technically solid
work in terms of a 3D model. There’s this proficiency, technically speaking, but where
is the cultural literacy or cultural sensitivity? Similarly, in Figure 11 we have a cartoon
pregnant wife and husband in animal pelts. It’s certainly not presented with either
authenticity or dignity, or a modicum of loving, cultural care. These types of images
are typical of a Black virtuality constructed by whiteness.
I see similarities between the images we conjure of Blackness in the physical world
and the Blackness we create in virtual spaces. Even before we combine Black and
virtual to discuss the term Black Virtuality, Black already feels virtual. Blackness, as
constructed by white imaginaries, shares qualities with the virtual. To be Black is to
be virtually a person, which is to say–almost–but not quite a person. This is part of
my history as a Black American, where at one point we were legally determined to
constitute only 3/5ths of a person. I mean that’s virtually a person…but not quite.
Decades later and operating within the relatively privileged space of academia, as
a tenured professor no less, I still feel this sense of almost. I’m virtually the same
as everyone else. I should have access. I’m almost there, but I still go through this
dehumanization. I still experience that. When I think about Black Virtuality, the virtual
feels like a space that I already inhabit.
Out of those images that we saw that are offensive, and out of the experiences I’ve
had, I have to acknowledge that Black people construct Blackness differently. Black
experiences of Blackness and our associations with Blackness are more interesting,
more complex. You take a thing that is imposed upon you, and then you reclaim it. You
adopt it, you make it yours. Then you have all kinds of ideas emerge. Constellations
of art, culture, perspectives, worldviews, ways of seeing, making, and being together.
I love being Black. I love Blackness. All of the things that I love about being Black:
our adaptivity, our creativity, our generosity. The way that we respect our elders. How
we’ll call people out but hesitate to dispose of them. The way we call in. The way we
teach. How we advocate for each other, and everyone, really. These are adaptations
from something that’s been imposed–disrespect, disregard, distortion. Yet out of that
comes, arguably, the most influential culture in the world—something beautiful comes
of that.
Whether contending with a Black worldview or a non-Black worldview, Black
Virtuality describes the ways that Black bodies, Black cultures, and Black
identities—the sum of which being Black experiences or Black stories—are
constructed and consumed across virtual space. Since I’m talking about worldviews
and perspectives, I want to bring in D. Fox Harrell’s phantasms.

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PHANTASMS

Fox Harrell wrote an incredible book called Phantasmal Media (2013). To give a brief
explanation of what a phantasm is, I’m going to use an example from the book, which
is this icon in Figure 12.

Figures 12 and 13. Images that draw on phantasms.

When we look at this icon, what does it mean? I look at this and I say, “Well, it’s the
sign for women. This must be a women’s restroom, right?” But what tells me that this
is for women? It’s an abstract figure, but there’s this dress. I’m a genderchaotic person
who sometimes wears dresses. I know plenty of women who wouldn’t be caught dead
in a dress. Even though I don’t think that ‘dress’ = ‘woman’, I can look at this icon and
immediately understand its intended meaning. That’s a phantasm, an image imbued
with meaning through the projection of a situated worldview. The term ‘situated’ here
refers to the fact that this symbol for a women’s restroom in the US does not look
the same if we were to go to South Asia. It may not look the same if we were in
a completely different country or space, because that little triangle that represents
a dress and says “women wear dresses” is not universal. The abstraction changes.
The minimal information that we need to identify something changes based on the
communities that we’re in, based on the collective understanding that has formed.
Phantasms are recursive. It is meaning-making-image-making-meaning. When I
see this dress, even though I don’t subscribe to the idea that women necessarily wear
dresses—it still sets me on the intended path of seeking out an appropriate bathroom.
At one point my societal context decided that dresses were exclusively for women, so
now I see a human figure with a dress and I know it means “woman.” The utility of this
phantasm means I’m likely to perpetuate it. Imagine, if a woman in a pair of slacks asks
me where the bathroom is, I’m not going to pull out my soapbox and give a speech on
signage and outdated gender norms, I’m going to point her to the door with the dress
on it. In that small act of convenience, however courteous, I reinforce the phantasm.
We could say stereotypes, we could say biases. But that’s not how D. Fox Harrell
approaches the concept of phantasms. He uses the word phantasms specifically to
highlight that they are not based on any kind of objective reality. When we think of a
phantasm, it’s like an apparition. It’s there, but it’s not there. It’s not real.
I’m going to give you an example of another phantasm and I’m going to show

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you how phantasms can work as it relates to race. Figure 13 is an image from Claudia
Rankine’s Citizen, which was released in 2014; an incredible work that is beautiful and
poignant (Rankine, 2014). This image is of the tennis player who is opposing Serena
Williams at the championships. Just look at the image for a moment, without me saying
it, what do you think she’s doing? She is playing on a phantasm. She is playing on some
people’s idea of what a Black woman looks like. So in Figure 11, we have ‘woman’,
and in Figure 12, we have ‘Black woman’. Large bust, big butt. Of course, it’s racially
offensive. That was her intention, to cause harm. But why does it cause harm? Why
does it work? Why don’t we see this and go, “What is she doing? Oh my God, how silly.
How foolish.” It’s because this image has meaning. She’s playing on what we know or
what we’ve seen, what we know is believed, even if we don’t share the view. Whether
we look at this image and laugh, or whether it hurts our heart, both reactions come
from a shared phantasm that understands ‘Black woman’ through a lens of physical
distortion and sexual exaggeration. Someone who didn’t share this phantasm would
simply be confused, lacking context to understand neither the “joke” nor the offense.
I showed you that image of Viola Davis in Figure 1 and I said it’s not particularly
outrageous. There’s nothing outwardly offensive about it, really. I mean sure my family
would say it’s unmoisturized and “what they do to that baby’s hair?” But other people
might say, “Annie Leibowitz is a great photographer. What’s wrong with that image?”
Well, I want to show you a different image of Viola in Figure 14. Just take it in: the halo,
the crown, the gold, the simplicity, the smile, the skin. I mean, she’s literally glowing.
Compare the two images. Figure 14 is from the Black imagination. This is how I see
Viola Davis. This is how I want Viola Davis to be seen.

Figure 14. Viola Davis from the Black imagination.

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OPEN SOURCE AFRO HAIR LIBRARY

Another way to think about Black Virtuality is how it can be a way of approaching,
perceiving, and doing things with computational media, specifically informed by Black
culture and ways of being. The Open Source Afro Hair Library is one way that I try to
manifest Black Virtuality as a practice.

Figures 15 and 16 (left to right). Images of Blackness from the Open Source Afro Hair Library.

If you know anything about games and Black hair, there’s usually just three hairstyles.
There are messed-up cornrows, sometimes with shaved gaps of hair missing. There’s
the comically sized disco afro—which, like, the seventies were fifty years ago, there are
other ways to rock a ‘fro. Then locs, and the locs are always the same.
You’ve seen what exists in the digital space for Black characters and Blackness; let
me show you what happens when you get a group of Black artists together and you
give them time, space, and money to author their own representations. Figure 15 is
an Afrocentric take on the Scorpion King myth. You have this character who’s got this
beautiful bubble ponytail that ends in these scorpion tale tips by artist Evening Cicada.
Figure 16 shows some cool sci-fi influenced work from H.D. Harris, one of the artists
that we’ve been working with the longest. With this character, H.D. is looking at Black
hair as a form of technology. We’re literally putting the afro in Afrofuturism.
At Open Source Afro Hair Library, we’re creating images to change the existing
phantasms around Blackness. We want to imbue our images with associations that
originate from Black spaces, and we also want to change the relationships people have
to Blackness as a cultural object. For example, in many instances of Black character
design, especially in the digital marketplaces, there’s no love. Black hair is treated like
a cap, an accessory that’s separate from a person, or thrown onto some weird base
model with no colouring. That’s something that I think about when I think about how
Blackness exists in the virtual space, and the distinction between the virtual and the
corporeal. Remember when I was talking about Black identities, Black bodies, and
Black culture? In the physical space, I have all of those together in one person: it’s me,
I’m here. But when we move into these virtual spaces, these mediated spaces, then we
see this separation, this fragmentation of the whole person.
When creating The Library and working with artists, it was very important to
me that it was guided by what I’m calling ‘a Black intact’. First, we don’t sell our
models. I’m not interested in the buying and selling of virtual Black bodies. Unlike

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other marketplaces, we’re not going to offer a 5-pack collection of Black hands and
feet. You know you can do that? You can go online and buy packs of Black hands and
Black feet in 3D—it’s super creepy. I always want to show a full person, rather than
reduce Black people to body parts. You can see that the love and care that goes into
the hair we create at The Library, and that also extends into the way we portray Black
people and represent the Black body.

EXPLORING THE OPEN SOURCE AFRO HAIR LIBRARY

The way that the website is structured, and in the visual choices we’ve made, I’m
hoping there’s a familiarity and a kind of homeyness in the way that we make and
present things at The Library. There’s a reason why it’s not meant to look like a
marketplace—we’re going for community over commodity. We want to share our
talent. We want to hype our people. We want to showcase the artists we work with in
addition to showing off their work, which is very different than other asset databases.
We want to be culturally informed, sensitive, thoughtful, and present all shades of
Black.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the actual design of how to navigate The Library itself.
I was reflecting on Safiya Noble’s (2018) work in Algorithms of Oppression, where she
talked about her experience of using Google search and the takeaway is it’s essentially
a populist algorithm. The way Google worked at the time, when you typed in “Black
girls,” you wouldn’t see images of children playing. You would see pornographic
images, and this was the same if you typed in “Asian girls.” It was the same if you typed
in “Latina girls.” You’d see pornographic images, even though the term ‘girl’ is explicitly
meant to refer to a child. So that tells you a lot about the way that we view, infantilize,
and sexualize women of color. If you type in “white girls,” you would just see what you
would expect: frolicking children. This happens because, when it comes to people of
color, a significant number of users that search for the term “girl” are clicking through
to pornographic results. It’s that recursive relationship between what we seek, what we
find, what we choose, and how those choices create and perpetuate the meaning of an
image and the images themselves.
With the Open Source Afro Hair Library, we don’t have a search bar because I
don’t want people to go to The Library and find what they’re looking for. Maybe what
they’re looking for is racist. Maybe they’re chasing a phantasm that I don’t wish to
provide. So we avoid the search altogether and instead we have a tagging system. When
you enter The Library you’re presented with these images of Blackness that maybe
you didn’t imagine—they weren’t what you were looking for because you couldn’t
even conceive of them. Then, we have a tagging system based on hair texture and
hairstyles. So, you either know the language of Black hair, or by using The Library,
you’re learning it. It’s a very different approach and opposed to the more commercial
approach that says, “We want the user to get exactly what they’re looking for so they
can buy our stuff.” I don’t care if you find what you are looking for. I want to impose
our vision of Blackness on the viewer.

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‘YE OR NAY ?

Figure 17. A.M. Darke’s ‘Ye or Nay? (2020), a satirical take on the classic game Guess Who?

I made a game in 2020 called ‘Ye or Nay? (Figure 17). It’s a take on Guess Who?, a
childhood favorite of mine that’s a game of deduction. The original game is full of
binary identities: you get a card that says this is your mystery person, and the other
player is trying to guess who’s on your hidden card. We have this board, this row of
faces. Then, you ask yes or no questions. You’re asking, “Is your person wearing a hat?
No?” So now I have to hide all the people who have hats. “Does your person have blue
eyes? No?” Okay, let me get rid of that.
In my game, you don’t ask yes or no questions, you ask ye or nay questions. All
of the characters are Black men–Black cultural icons, celebrities, etc.–and half of them
are Kanye West. So, it’s exploring a few things: at a very surface level, it’s looking at
the way that we describe Blackness, and our relationship to Blackness when it’s not the
minority. You can’t say “the Black guy,” because they’re all Black, and they’re all Black
men. So, now what language do you have to use? You have to pay closer attention.
When I’m in the community, I’m describing someone and I say “the person with the
fade, the person with the Caesar cut, the person with the waves,” I’m using all these
other identifiers. If you’re Black, or in close community with Black people, then you
have an advantage in this game because you’re already familiar with the terms. You’re
at home with it. And if you’re not, you may have to look for another language because
you can no longer rely on the default terms of a dominant worldview.
‘Ye or Nay? also wrestles with the idea of a problematic fave, which is the idea that
when you come from a marginalized community, and you only have so many icons,
you have to use a lot more discretion in who you’ll throw away. It’s a complex topic.
In the game, you have these portrait cards, and you can just play straight through the
traditional way. But for every portrait, if you right-click, you get some Black Twitter
style commentary on who these people are and what they’ve given or taken from the

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culture. This is my favorite because it demonstrates the utility of Kanye as a focal point.
Why Kanye? Why not just discard him as an icon? Why make a game about this person
who’s wearing MAGA hats and has said Harriet Tubman didn’t free the slaves?
This is why: The text on one card reads, “When I say I miss the old Kanye, I mean
this Kanye in particular. What kind of society transforms a young man whose voice
once trembled at injustice into an egotistical narcissist?” See there are several Kanyes
in the game, each from a different era. The Kanye I just read from is called “George
Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” which references a live stream of a fundraising
event by the Red Cross during Hurricane Katrina. Kanye West went off-script. He was
very young and it was very early in his career and on live television he looked into the
camera, completely deadpan and said “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”
He went on to say how the President was going to check on all kinds of other things
instead of helping the people. And it was really amazing. In the midst of tragedy, it was
one of the most hilarious and powerful things I’d ever seen in my life.

FAIRLYINTELLIGENT.TECH

The last piece that I’ll talk about very briefly–because you can play it yourself–is
called fairlyintelligent.tech (pronounced “fairly intelligent dot tech”). It is a speculative
algorithm that exaggerates coded biases by taking the form of a game slash
questionnaire. The game is designed to educate users about algorithmic bias and
how automated decision makers have a real impact on our lives. The first part goes
something like this:
How do automated decision makers manifest in your everyday digital life? Let’s
say you’re applying for a “buy now, pay later” installment plan. It checks your credit
and, maybe based on your score, maybe based on some faulty data on your address
history, you get denied. Maybe you and a friend both pull out your phones to book a
car on a ridesharing app, except your battery’s almost dead–and the app knows this–so
you get charged a higher price for the same trip. Maybe you’re scrolling your favorite
social media feed, you linger a few seconds on a therapy app being advertised. Last
week you had a dozen tabs open in your browser–which knows your zip code by
the way–a mix of things like ‘how to improve resume’, ‘cheapest places to live’, ‘free
date ideas’, ‘how to tell if your ex wants you back’. Tonight, when you’re up late again
binging videos on YouTube, you see an advertisement for an online degree. “Change
your life in just a few months!” the ad promises. Based on your online behavior,
which is being tracked across platforms, and the town you live in, an algorithm has
decided you’re likely feeling hopeless about your situation, with little resources or
support. It starts serving you ads for a predatory, for-profit college. If you sign up,
they’ll help you set up the student loans and grants you’ll use to pay for school. You
won’t find out they’re unaccredited and that the degree is worthless until much later,
when you’ve already racked up thousands in student debt. This isn’t a glitch, it’s their
business model. An algorithm has placed you in the crosshairs of a predator. Fairly
Intelligent™ asserts that there should be an algorithm for the people by the people,
where you, the user can change things from within to create a system that’s fair and
just.
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 Algorithmic bias is a known issue. There have been a bunch of calls by tech
companies to address it, the problem is their solutions tend to–conveniently–involve
collecting more of our personal data. Their solution is to collect more diverse data, an
intersectional mass surveillance. Fairlyintelligent.tech satirizes these notions of tech
liberalism, where the assumption is that in order to change the system, you must gain
access to the system. And of course, the system itself decides who gets access in the
first place. So, under the pretense of weeding out racists and other undesirables, you
go through this screening, and that screening is the experience.
I really recommend you play it, because you can get your very own readout that
tells you two things. One, it tells you who you are, and why you were locked out of
the system. Then, it’ll give you a detailed reading and some of the coded lines that you
don’t get to see in most programs. It’s code that says, “You answered this way, and so
we made a determination about who you were and this is the box that it checked.”

CONCLUSION

These are some of my ways of asserting myself into Black Virtuality. I’m asking, “How
can I move away from this ‘neutral’ default?” Because nothing is neutral. Claims to
neutrality and universality are only afforded to hegemonic perspectives. So how can
I insert my own perspectives, not just in the work that I make, but in my process of
making, who I choose to work with, and the attitudes we bring to the work?

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Why is there such a difference in the technical knowledge needed to create 3D models of
Black people and the cultural knowledge needed to understand the stereotypes these
models are based on?
2. What other kinds of web applications and online libraries could apply tagging systems
rather than search algorithms to present different results to its users?
3. How could the The Library be used (for its models, or as a model itself) in your own
projects?

KEY TERMS

Phantasm: Drawing on the work of D. Fox Harrell, Darke talks about phantasms as
images imbued with meaning through the projection of a situated worldview. A women’s
restroom sign of an abstract figure with a skirt is an example of a phantasm. Regardless of

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 whether people agree with an association of women with skirts, people who recognize this
association because of the culture they live in can immediately intuit what the sign refers
to.
Black Virtuality: Darke argues that the concept of Blackness, as originally constructed by
white Europeans, is already akin to being virtually, or almost human. Instead of sharing
the same phantasms of Black people as created by whiteness, Darke argues that virtual
spaces create opportunities to make new, more positive phantasms of Black people. This
involves approaching, perceiving, and doing things with computational media in a way
that is informed by Black lifeways and worldviews rather than whiteness.
Open Source Afro Hair Library: A 3D database of Black hair textures and styles that
deliberately aims to create new expressions of Blackness online, giving Black artists the
time, space, and money to author their own representations in 3D modelling.

REFERENCES
1. Bero, T. (2022, August 23). Annie Leibovitz Proves Yet Again: She Can’t
Photograph Black Women. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2022/aug/23/annie-leibovitz-ketanji-brown-jackson-vogue-
photos
2. Darke, A.M. (2023). Open Source Afro Hair Library. https://afrohairlibrary.org/
3. Harrell, D. F. (2013). Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation,
and Expression. The MIT Press.
4. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce
Racism. New York University Press.
5. Rankine, C. (2014). Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press.

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SPOTLIGHT 10: THE RACIALIZED EXPERIENCES OF AVATAR
EMBODIMENT AMONG BLACK SOCIAL VIRTUAL REALITY USERS

Based on a talk by Cyan DeVeaux

SUMMARY

Cyan DeVeaux highlights how avatars are ingrained into the social fabric
of virtual reality (VR) and discusses how social virtual reality provides
spaces for Black gamers to explore self-identity. DeVeaux argues that for
Black gamers, self-identity is impacted by the difficulties of creating
authentic Black avatars in the virtual world. DeVeaux outlines a virtual
ethnographic study in which she explores the conscious identity choices
of Black participants who navigate a default, or standard, of whiteness
within avatar systems. Her findings detail how these racial discrepancies
in avatar customisation and use can impact a sense of presence and
immersion in VR, requiring Black users to adopt specific strategies to
address the shortcomings of the platform.

APPLICATION POINTS

DeVeaux’s talk points to a number of concrete lessons for designers

of social virtual reality systems, many of which can also be applied in
games generally. Dovetailing with A.M. Darke’s work, DeVeaux’s
research points to the importance of developing art assets that
represent Black bodies and experiences. For games researchers,
DeVeaux’s study suggests how we might rethink our understanding of
the relationship between avatars and player identities. For instance,
where Adrienne Shaw’s book Gaming at the Edge suggests that avatar
choice is not a salient factor for LGBTQ+ players, DeVeaux’s work
asks us to think about the specific relationships between players and
avatars in a) the context of different technologies (e.g., social virtual
reality vs digital games) and b) the needs and uses of different
marginalized communities (e.g., Black users vs LGBTQ+ players). As
DeVeaux’s study demonstrates, research into social VR is in great need of
further inquiry to better understand how race and racialized
experiences are shaped by the platform and the social
environments it creates. Overall, her work shows that documenting the

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 experiences and perspectives of Black users in social VR raises
opportunities to design more inclusive platforms.

Social virtual reality (VR) allows users to communicate and share experiences in
highly immersive environments with a variety of avenues for digital self-
representation. Notably, the sense of presence in VR, which is a psychological
phenomenon characterized by a feeling of being there, is enabled by head-
mounted displays (HMDs) that allow some of the individual’s movements to sync
up to that of their avatar in a virtual environment. With this technology, one can
feel a presence within their environment, a presence with other people, and also a
presence within their avatar. While not all VR environments have avatars, on
social VR platforms like VRChat, avatars are ingrained into the social fabric. As
DeVeaux describes, avatars in these environments “become the site for
connecting, play, community-building, as well as exploring identity.”

Figure 1. Creating Black avatars in the virtual world can come with a host of technical
issues that white avatars do not have.

However, DeVeaux argues that avatar selection and creation tools are affected
by biases that deeply shape the experiences of Black users. Despite the wide
variety of ways to create avatars in VRChat, creating Black avatars has proven
more difficult than creating white avatars (Figure 1). Moreover, while previous
research has uncovered how racial biases exist in traditional virtual worlds, less
attention has been given to how these biases manifest within the immersive

176
environments of social virtual reality. In a virtual ethnography of VRChat,
DeVeaux and her team found that whiteness was the default, or standard, within
avatar representation and customization systems. The predominant theme of
DeVeaux’s findings was that Black users had to consciously navigate VRChat’s
racial bias in a variety of ways in order to create their ‘authentic selves’ within the
virtual world.

RACIAL BIAS IN VIRTUAL REPRESENTATIONS

OF THE SELF

• There were few opportunities to customize avatars’ skin tones, and using
darker-skinned avatars often created technical issues that were not present
for lighter-skinned avatars (ex. Black characters having their hair turned
off by default)
• Some Black users opted to use non-Black avatars to avoid racist attacks
from other users; some even found it easier to be non-human than they
found it to be Black.
• Some Black users encountered racialized burdens working around non-
inclusive avatar cultures and systems on VRChat. Reflecting on instances
where Black users attempted to commission avatars, several noted
examples of resistance from creators when requesting avatars with non-
white appearances. Some Black users have turned to learning how to create
their own avatars to construct appearances that represented themselves
more accurately.

In sum, DeVeaux’s study showcased some of the conscious identity choices and
considerations being made by Black participants, especially compared to some of
the responses that were received from white and white-passing participants.
Some white participants acknowledged this privilege of not having to think about
the lack of racial diversity on the platform while some Black participants
described how using avatars that did not align with how they wanted to represent
themselves could bring them out of their sense of immersion in VR. This could
make it more difficult to experience presence, or the feeling of “being there” in
their environment and in their avatar. These immersive qualities of the platform
mean that differences between physical and virtual avatar attributes for Black
users are particularly noticeable. DeVeaux’s ongoing experimental studies seek to
uncover more about the psychological impacts of this discrepancy.

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 REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What can developers and community members of social VR platforms do to

reduce biases in avatar systems?
2. How might avatar discrepancies and a lack of customization options affect
racialized users in other immersive VR contexts?
3. How do the impacts of avatar bias show up in other digital platforms like games
or social media?

KEY TERMS

Racialized experiences in Social VR: While social VR allows for an especially

immersive exploration of digital self-representation, the avenues within social VR
platforms for this exploration are affected by racial biases that shape the experiences
of Black users. Black social VR users have to contend with a default of whiteness in
avatar creation tools and face struggles in acquiring darker-skinned avatars that users
with non-white avatars do not experience.
Avatars: From the Sanskrit avatara, to descend, referring to a celestial being’s
material embodiment, is used to describe a digital figure or persona that represents a
user in a digital or online space. In addition to longstanding concerns about
how avatars represent cultural difference (e.g., gender, race, ability, and etc.), as
DeVeaux argues, in social virtual reality, avatars are critical to the user’s sense of
presence and therefore inclusion in the digital environment,

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CHAPTER 9.

GAME DESIGN IN THE IMPERIAL MODE

Meghna Jayanth

Adapted from Meghna Jayanth’s opening keynote address for the Canadian Game Studies
Association annual conference in May 2022.

SUMMARY

How does working within an “imperial mode of living” shape what video games
are and what they mean? In this talk, Meghna Jayanth explores how capitalism,
colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, caste supremacy, and more are re-
created in the current processes of video game design. Jayanth begins by
arguing that the ideologies of the culture we live in shape what is expected by
players in a video game, discouraging experimentation within the industry.
This pushes forward the design of worlds that center around exploitation and
domination. Jayanth argues that just as the emphasis on the white protagonist
forms the basis for video games and pushes marginalized populations to the
sidelines, the privileging of the white designer rewards game design that
replicates the harms of the ‘imperial mode.’ Jayanth argues for the need to resist
these expressions of dominator culture, describing the role that games can play
in reshaping the oppressive foundations that underpin current trends in game
design.

APPLICATION POINTS

Jayanth argues that games reproduce underlying forms of oppression and that
we must reveal and resist the ways in which these forms of design feed into
‘dominator culture.’ As with some of the other chapters, we can look to the
ways that Jayanth’s analysis ranges from the games themselves to oppressive
ideologies that shape the past, present, and future of games. Her analysis shows
that games today rely on and reproduce these oppressive logics. Note, for
example, how she describes the addictive properties that are increasingly
embedded into games: pay-to-win, loot boxes, and more, all representing a
push for hobbies to be monetized instead of enjoyed, and for downtime to be
filled with a capitalist exchange instead of human connection. Similarly, we can
look to how she describes the “institutionalization and formalization of

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 whiteness” in video games: for Jayanth, these are structures that are not only
embedded but also valorized in all facets of video game design to the point that
other perspectives are excluded. Because Jayanth is a designer, she is also
actively intervening into these logics both in the games she creates and in her
theorization of game design. This, in turn, provides important insight into the
ways that our critical approaches also ask us to imagine alternative futures for
the media that we love.

IMPERIAL MODE, IDEOLOGY, AND INDUSTRY

How does living and working amidst the crises of capital and empire—in this imperial
mode of living—shape what video games are and what they mean? In our present
moment of accelerating crisis, how are the interlocking ideologies of capitalism,
colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and caste supremacy reproduced through
formal techniques and themes of game design? How might these ideological
conditions affect the contexts of games-making and play?
As players and designers, we all live in the imperial mode of spectacle and
alienation, geopolitical instability, global inequalities and accelerating ecological crisis.
As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen argue, the imperial mode of living is one in which
the imperialist world order is normalized, inscribed into everyday practices, and even
unconsciously reproduced (Brand and Wissen, 2021).
This is where we live, where our work meets our players, and where our work
is made or sometimes not made, whether we like it or not. And most often, we don’t.
The ideologies of dominant culture shape what players expect, what is considered
viable and valuable, which is to say what is funded, made, and distributed, and what
is expected of us as designers, workers, and humans. Deviations from the approved
scripts are difficult to enact, and are often harshly punished — ask any marginalized
person working in video games.
Why does our discipline bend so deeply towards designing worlds which tremble
at the passage of the player, agency as a sacrament available only to The Protagonist,
largely conceived in the modes of exploitation and domination, a protagonism that
sustains its vitality by making everything around it dead? What about the prevalence
of the NPC, which exists only to be victimized, rescued, and used by the player? This
is not “natural” design; it does not come into being spontaneously even if it is at times
normalized so deeply it is instinctively understood as a function of “what games are.”
These are the shapes that the imperial mode of living prunes video games into.
Game design sometimes falls into the tendencies of the imperial mode because of
the designers’ intent, but also, often, despite that intent. The material conditions of the
industry are not conducive to new frameworks and experimentation and become less
so with scale, which requires capital—which is why teams with greater resources are
not usually where alternative and subversive designs emerge.
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 Narrative design — which I’m talking about not because it deals uniquely with
any of what I’m discussing, but because that’s my area of experience in the games
industry — currently encompasses work which is difficult to discuss cogently much
less enact, because the vocabularies don’t exist, are too new, or are contingent on
particular types of expertise or because they require new types of collaborations. And
in those silences, normative approaches become default, particularly due to limitations
of time and resource or precedent, which is often how certain ways of thinking are
unintentionally reproduced.

WORKING IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY

Subversive and countercultural work in video games largely comes from places where
experimental work can thrive. The indie space, the non-commercial space, interactive
fiction, queer games, twine games, itch.io, game design at the interstices of theatre, art,
design, music. The dynamic sound design work happening right now in video games
is extraordinary. There is beautiful work in this spectacular, bombastic industry of
cheap thrills if you know where to look. And even the cheap thrills are cathedrals of
impossibly complex and difficult and fascinating work. As academic and developer
Frank Lantz (2014) memorably said, “Games are operas made out of bridges.”
Our industry is also a place of precarity, where we struggle to find sustaining
and sustainable work. Despite the intentions and desires of most of us working in
the games industry, as it is in so many other professions, it is difficult to do fulfilling,
stable, dignified and meaningful work which pays the rent. These human desires of
ours run counter to the imperatives of the imperial mode, which we all live in. What
games are now is also a result of all the games that didn’t get made, work which has
been suppressed and forgotten, and the shadow of all the potential work unmade by
people — particularly women & marginalized people — who have quite frankly been
persecuted out of the games industry.
Over these last couple of years, I’ve asked myself whether this is really the place
I want to be. Does it feel like my work here is meaningful and satisfying? Does what
I do make any sense in the face of everything that is wrong with the world, the crises
and horrors and systematic injustices that are so vast and so urgent, but that seem so
utterly beyond my ability to even reckon with much less touch or impact from my
own small and specific position? And even — is this a position I want to continue
inhabiting? Being here is accepting the cycles of online abuse and harassment faced
by many marginalized workers in the games industry. The tokenization. The necessity
of engaging with alt-right ideologies and language and spaces, if only to ascertain
my own level of risk and exposure with any clarity. I am not the only marginalized
person in the games industry to have a safety plan in case of doxxing, justified paranoia
about the leaking of private photos, an utterly absurd expectation of harassment and
threats if I accept certain professional opportunities or say or do certain things. There
are parts of this talk which might get me or my colleagues in trouble. Of course, we
expect to encounter critique, but harassment is an unpleasant reality, and most of
the networks of support are informal and ad-hoc. There are many parts of our work

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which game designers don’t talk about publicly, because they can become flashpoints
for harassment and abuse, which can threaten our employment.
To exist as a marginalized person in video games is to be cast in the role of
activist, which is not always comfortable. And I think about bell hooks’s insights about
marginality. That marginality should not be regarded as a place of pain, but a space of
possibility and resistance.
The problems which plague us in the games industry plague every industry —
if not in exactly the same form. The frustrations of working in video games are the
frustrations of work, and of working and living in this imperial mode. There is no
escape from it, the only way is through it. The only way out is liberation for all of us
— a monumental task, which is hard to even imagine how to approach. So, I suppose
we just begin, in whatever way that we can, where we are. Video games won’t save
the world, but as I’ve said before saving the world isn’t the only way for what we do
to matter. We all have to do what we can in the places that we can reach, and reach
for each other, organize and build community in the teeth of these vast interlocking
mechanisms of oppression and extraction.

PLAYERS AND PROTAGONISTS

C Thi Nguyen talks about games as a medium of agency (Nguyen, 2020). Game design
tells players who to be and what to do. I think we have to think about that nexus
between player/ protagonist/ designer to understand how agency in games works,
and how we can intervene in it as designers. In 2021 at DIGRA India, I talked about
bringing Umberto Eco’s idea of the “model reader” to game design. So, instead of the
model reader, we have the “model player” that is imagined by the game’s designers as
we encode meaning into the work. In the industry, the “model player” of the video
game is a white man. In my DIGRA India talk, I go on to talk about the “white
protagonist” as a set of assumptions that can be challenged about what it means to be
a protagonist (Jayanth, 2021). Here, I want to focus on the entity known as the “white
player,” which haunts our work.
I’m going to start us off with a quote:

Writers have long had a language for how whiteness warps the imagination. James Baldwin
used a vivid metaphor to describe the sensation: the “little white man” who hovers nearby
and passes judgment on everything you write. I prefer this to the more polite contemporary
euphemism, the “white gaze,” which sounds like it has an off-switch and ignores the way it
can get inside you. The “little white man,” by contrast, sounds like he climbs up your back
and breathes down your neck and farts in your ear. He demands that you explain yourself
and your people according to specific scripts; cries foul when you describe what it’s like to
live in your body; when you turn a nice phrase, probably hisses something like, “but you’re
so articulate. (Isen, 2022, para. 6)

This is from Tajja Isen’s brilliant piece in Time, titled “America Doesn’t Know How to
Read the Work of Black Writers.” I think it’s absolutely astute. The way I think about
the white player in video games builds upon the work of writers, particularly Black
writers, who have brought to light the perniciousness of whiteness.
The white player is a vortex that distorts our art and practice. It lives in each
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of our minds in the way that the white reader resides in the writer’s mind. But
beyond the white player inside our own minds is the white player’s institutionalization
and formalization of whiteness in our design structures and in the structures of our
industry. The white player’s imagined, assumed, and understood desires have been
enshrined as objective and sacrosanct by our market-driven, data-driven, player-
centric model of video game design. Funding is dispensed at his behest, he is invoked
whenever someone in the room dares to suggest deviation from the well-trodden
road, female protagonists are “unmarketable” or “financially risky”, whiteness and
masculinity are replicated over and over not out of any racial prejudice or bigotry, no,
but merely because of the practicalities of the market, which is an entity largely made
of fantasy and unconscious desire. As Isen (2022) says, “whiteness gets reproduced
through formal technique” (para. 26).
The white player is also a projection of the white designer’s anxieties, fears,
repressions, desires and instincts. The white player justifies the white designer’s own
preferences, which are then normalized and replicated. Other possibilities are shut
down. The white designer maintains their own power in the hierarchy of the studio
through this “special communion,” this “unique ability to understand” the white player.
From this, I hope it is easy to see why marginalized designers and particularly non-
white, non-male designers might find it difficult to be entrusted with this delicate task.
And, therefore, why white playerism is worth being made visible and rooting out, not
least because as a conceptual framework it occludes the true multifariousness of our
players and their needs and desires.
Narrative design as a craft is about what the player is feeling, desiring,
anticipating. “Player-centric design” is plagued by unexamined whiteness, and I believe
that our reluctance as an industry to believe that players can enjoy experiences of
unfairness, exclusion, limitation, powerlessness — or even types of power outside of
domination — is rooted in our internalization of the white player. The anxiousness
to “give the player what he wants,” in the sense of the ritual mantra “the customer
is always right”, often runs counter to a game’s ludonarrative intentions, causing
dissonance and distortion. Whiteness cannot be curtailed, it is understood to represent
the freedom to cross digital boundaries and borders as it traverses physical ones
without impediment.

Figure 1. The game This War of Mine focuses on civilian survival.

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Upending the white player and the white protagonist open up not only possibilities
beyond the gun and the war, but even ways of talking about and designing about war,
guns, and violence that isn’t glorified, propagandistic or bombastic. This War of Mine
(Figure 1) is a brilliant and important game precisely because it is a response to the
context of how our industry manufactures and presents narratives of war. Its narrative
design — by focusing on civilian survival in wartime rather than the protagonism of
soldiers or warriors — contains within it an implicit if not explicit critique of the
regressive perspectives and preoccupations of the mainstream industry, but also the
dominant geopolitical order which valorizes, prettifies and sells war as an exhilarating
way of being in the world.

Figure 2. Thirsty Suitors, a joyful game that contrasts the norm of a white
protagonist.

I want to touch on here the complexity of unpicking the white player for the
marginalized designer. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about as I write
and design the game I’m currently working on with Outerloop, called Thirsty Suitors
(Figure 2). It’s a joyful immigrant fantasy of battling with your exes, reconciling your
cultural differences and disappointing your parents through dance battles, cooking,
and skating. The protagonist is a young queer South Asian immigrant woman. I’m
working closely with brown colleagues for the first time in my career — I’ve been
in this industry since 2013. My team is remote and lots of us are queer, immigrants,
women, non-white. I contrast my approach as a narrative designer on this game to my
work on 80 Days — which is an anti-colonial retelling of Verne’s Victorian novel — and
though I’m proud of my work on 80 Days I do see it now as still an attempt to reach
the “white player.” Of course, I was also driven by a desire to seize back the histories
and fantasies of non-white and colonized people, but I think there is inside my work a
secret wish or hope to make whiteness in the form of the player recognize us, me, the
marginalized designer, as human, worthwhile, interesting, of value.
Even the ways I subvert the injunctions of the white protagonism in the game belie
my preoccupation with whiteness. Isen talks about this beautifully: “If you’re going
to build a creative practice out of denying somebody’s expectations, you still have to
spend a lot of time anticipating their desires. (Isen, 2022, para. 31)” Has there ever
been an art form more formally and mechanistically dedicated to the anticipation and
fulfilment of white desire?

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 By contrast — as I’m working on Thirsty Suitors my conception of the player is
“like me.” I’m writing and designing “for us,” which feels so utterly different and even
new in my practice. The white player is invited into the game as a guest, but they don’t
own the home. Of course, this freedom from the white player isn’t entirely a freedom
from the burdens of being a marginalized designer — the lack of representation in
the industry more broadly places an unfair weight of responsibility and expectation
on marginalized developers’ work. Our work is always read as representative, it must
act as a “moral corrective” to the distorted representations and stereotypes of broader
culture, it is bound to disappoint some marginalized players because a single work no
matter how thoughtful or insightful or compelling is only a band-aid over the deeper
wounds of cultural invisibility and media distortion. There’s also not much precedent
for how to handle these narratives and themes, which sometimes makes this work a bit
of an adventure. It’s hard to know whether we’ll pull it off, until it happens.
As marginalized designers, we have to consciously reject the roles of saviour,
educator, ambassador and gatekeeper of “otherness” to dominant culture. We are often
herded into these roles, which are then used to trap us. But we should attempt to
occupy the role of the artist, as something to hold on to when we’re pulled in these
directions by the industry’s undertow.
I’m going to conclude this section with a last quote from Isen’s article, which is
a question I return to again and again: “does what I’ve put on the page unsettle your
dominance the way it should?” (Isen, 2022, para. 33) — Does this work unsettle your
dominance the way it should?

WHITE PLAYERS AND THE MERITOCRACY MYTH

I’ve talked in the past about the “fairness fantasy” in terms of player expectations, or
at least, our idea as designers of player expectations. I’ve always argued that unfair
isn’t a bad thing for a game to be. Drama often comes out of unfairness. But there
is a phenomenon amongst our players that I’ve always struggled to understand, until
I looked at it through the lens of the “white player” — and that’s the backlash from
certain vocal segments of our players against easy mode, auto-play, and a whole host
of accommodations that serve to make games accessible for a broader range of players
without in any way impacting anyone who does not choose these modes or features.
Why, then, the anger, betrayal, upset that seems entirely out of proportion to the
impact? Clearly, the answer does not lie in the game’s systems, which still operate for
this player in the same way, but in the context and metanarratives of play.
I think we can understand this backlash in the context of a challenge to the idea of
meritocracy, which is part of the propaganda of whiteness. The gamer who is winning
in the game which presents itself as meritocratic, sees any accommodations made
for other players as unfairly advantaging them and devaluing their own achievement.
But the reality is the so-called meritocratic system was rigged for exactly the kind of
person who can succeed within it. Broadening a game’s ability to “read” and reward
a broader range of play styles, capabilities and players, is deeply threatening to the
myth of meritocracy which relies on the idea that only one type of play, or a certain
set of abilities — that just happen to accrue to a certain type of player, say young white
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middle class able-bodied Anglo-American men — are the only legitimate types of play
within the system. The objectivity of the rules cannot be questioned, because the white
player’s ego is enmeshed with the idea that they are objectively better and uniquely
deserving. The game is thus a forum for the white player to “prove” “objectively”
the innate superiority of whiteness, that is part of the metanarrative of play that the
white player brings with them. To challenge or broaden the definition of success is a
challenge to the idea that the white player is uniquely suited to protagonism, and so
is read as an unsettling challenge to deep-rooted ideas of white entitlement. As such,
I would say this is a worthwhile player entitlement for us to challenge and design
against, while accepting and anticipating regressive racist backlash disguised as player
critique.

THE WHITE DESIGNER

The “white (male) designer” as model designer of the video game is a powerful
imaginary. It shapes hiring practices, whose work and jobs are valued, who is protected
by and occupies the C-Suite, what games are funded, and whose preferences are
considered “good.” Our industry culture of a lack of accountability for rock stars
and auteurs, and a disproportionate focus on their contributions and importance to
what is fundamentally the work of teams, is at the root of so many of the harmful
labour practices that characterize our professional lives: toxic workplaces, abuse,
exploitation, bullying, sexual harassment, crunch. As the white protagonist makes
games hostile environments for non-white and marginalized players, the “white
designer” as the “model designer” makes the games industry hostile to non-white and
marginalized designers — and really, to everyone.
This conception holds a deep sway on active parts of our player base. The mere
visibility of non-white, queer, marginalized people or even cis straight white men who
do not conform to the specific expectations of the “white male designer” is often met
with harassment and anger. The types of slurs and conspiracies deployed are telling
to me — “blue-haired SJW,” transphobic slurs, “soyboy,” “white knight” — are all about
certain types of developers incorrectly performing gender, and somehow polluting
this sacred space. The sexuality of women working in the industry is somehow an
insidious threat to video games, which need to be protected from them through a
viciously imposed code of “ethics in game journalism.”
That brings me quite neatly to my next point. Let’s talk about DOMINATION!

DOMINATOR CULTURE

The imperial mode of living is living inside what bell hooks and other theorists
describe as “dominator culture,” where hierarchy and power are rigidly enforced
through fear and force, and domination is valorized and normalized. This plays out
in our families, interpersonal relationships, societies, structures — and I think hooks’
ideas about “dominator culture” are very resonant with video games.
Games where enemies are killed, subjugated, displaced, where we design juicy
feedback to enhance the sadistic thrill of maiming our opponents, god games, turn-

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based military simulations, even farming games where the player dominates and
brings to productive order the landscape, 4X games, many strategy games. On the
thematic level, games that are about conquest, war, overcoming enemies through
violence, overthrowing nations, becoming king/boss/tycoon, or even achieving
mastery over the game’s systems.
hooks also talks about the “acts of psychic self-mutilation” that males are called
on to perform in dominator culture, that they must “kill off the emotional parts of
themselves” and as a result many men live in a state of profound loneliness (hooks,
2004, p. 105). It’s telling how many male protagonists in games exist in a state of
profound loneliness, relieved only by hypermasculine brotherhoods of war, violence
and sport. How many video game plots are driven by the white male protagonist’s
struggle with guilt or shame ludonarratively sublimated in the form of violence?
The tendencies of dominator culture shape not only the stories and satisfactions
we offer to players but also our own positionality as designers whose work deals
deeply with player agency, and systematizing reward and punishment of our players
in the game world. It is easy to slip into the role of dominator-designer. This is not to
say that this is an illegitimate position for the designer to occupy at all — the designers
of many queer twine games take on this role as critique, or with purposeful intent
to explore ideas of power, hierarchy, obedience, often by subversively eroticizing
domination and playing with complicity. I think Porpentine’s work in this area is
unparalleled.
Games where players must submit to arbitrary and strict rules, where obedience is
rewarded and deviating from the designer’s expectations is not ignored, but punished.
Games which guilt us into staying with them, and shame or punish us for staying
away. Games which demand constant attention — for instance, games without a pause
button, which are absolutely hostile to anyone who has caring responsibilities. Games
which use punitive and coercive design techniques to enforce their regime onto
players.
A dominator mode of design is also one where players are subjected to traumatic
experiences carelessly or callously — this is particularly prevalent under the regime
of the white player, where non-white players are routinely subjected to racially
traumatizing or alienating experiences. The basic form of this is the non-white player
embodying the white protagonist who brutalizes non-white NPCs.
To even be able to recognize our design as traumatizing we need to get outside of
that closed circle of white designer — white protagonist — white player. That is not to
say that players who are white are not traumatized by the spectacle of subjugating the
other which is packaged as pleasurable fantasy. In fact, I’d suggest this fantasy would
not be compelling and so prevalent if whiteness was culturally and psychologically
resolved. The violence and brutality that is repressed under the veneer of civilization
bursts out in the space of play, and playing a shooter offers perhaps a kind of return to
the repressed trauma, an endless and futile attempt to re-enact and master this racial
and cultural trauma in the safety of the game world. I’ve watched many people play
beloved shooters over and over again, in a state which looks more like dissociation
than relaxation.

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 Think about the many open-world games that are about gleeful brutality taking
place in South American jungles, or Pacific islands, or war-torn Asian or African
landscapes. Real places disoriented by the Anglo-American imagination: the
inexplicable civil war in South India in Uncharted: Lost Legacy, the nearly-Nepal of
Far Cry’s Kyrat. The histories and geographies of the Global South, of many nations
scarred and wounded by Anglo-American imperialism, ungently remade by these
games for the consumption of the white player, an act of symbolic reconquest. (To
paraphrase comedian Frankie Boyle, “They’ll bomb your country, and they’ll make a
movie out of it.”)
Alice Miller, the brilliant psychologist of childhood, talks about unresolved
trauma as a deficit of knowledge (Miller, 1991). She asks a compelling question:
how can we treat others with dignity and respect if our own dignity was violated
in childhood? Given that games as a medium are all about manipulating agency, our
own ideas as designers about what agency is become resonant. Game designers tell
players who to be, what to do, what is good or bad. The moral universe of our
games is intricately designed for our players — much less by narrative content than
by what pathways, interactions, behaviours we incentivize and what we frictionalize.
Therefore, I think our own understanding of agency as designers is a deeply important
question in our profession, particularly living in cultures of normalized domination.
Many of us as a result will have deficits of knowledge or misconceptions around
agency, consent, respect, autonomy — facing and in some way resolving our own
deeply imprinted misconceptions, and developing a vocabulary to talk about agentic
effects, outcomes, and dynamics with each other may well be a necessary part of
our craft and practice as narrative designers. To enable us to design responsibly and
compassionately, we must explore possibilities of agency in games which are not
distorted by the imperial mode and our own taboos, anxieties, and repressions.
Perhaps in the attempt to understand and accept our own unmet needs we can
develop fuller understandings of the human needs and desires of our players? Those
of their truer selves, rather than repeating the suppressions and false promises of
dominant culture, and merely satisfying our own unmet undigested desires in our
designs rather than the player’s unmet desires?
If we have not come to terms with our own oppression and subjugation and even
suffering are we not more likely to repeat it through our players, designing them into
submission to our ludonarrative regime with a dominating hand?
I have to admit, maybe this is on my mind of late because I’m working on a game
about generational trauma, which has necessitated a certain amount of revisiting and
reckoning with my own. These processes have served each other.

DEHUMANIZATION / MECHANIZATION

The modes of categorization and bureaucracy which allowed colonial powers to

efficiently extract resources from the colonized gave rise to the technology which
powers video games. We design games in the afterlife of empire, with tools that have
been used to subjugate and annihilate. The pleasures of naming, categorization and
collecting are deeply embedded into the normative design frameworks of the video
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game. Management sims and Tycoon-style games are about the effective bureaucratic
deployment of resources. Even when games turn away from designs of violent
domination, they often replicate other imperialist pleasures: the museum, the explorer,
the merchant, the scientist, the bureaucrat. Assassins Creed: Origins demonstrates this
beautifully: the enemies can be turned off, and the gorgeously designed and imagined
spaces turned into a virtual museum, complete with tours (Figure 3). We can switch
between the battleground and the museum with an airy gesture, revealing them both
as connected imperial modes of play. Underneath the cobblestones, not the beach —
but the playground.

Figure 3. Games often replicate imperialism and colonization even when they are not fixated on violence and
domination.

Games and the tech industry are also fertile ground for new forms of scientific racism
and bureaucratized surveillance. Look at Activision’s recent Diversity & Inclusion
tool, built to produce a graph of each character’s axes of diversity to enable the team
internally to see at a glance the “diversity” of each of their characters and spot diversity
gaps in their games’ casts, assigning characters a number which corresponds to their
relative distance from “normative” categories such as race, gender, cognitive ability
(Activision Blizzard, 2023). I don’t want to heap more criticism onto this tool, which
was no doubt created in good faith and has already been heavily critiqued by designers,
developers, critics and thinkers. But I think it’s important to acknowledge here that
the colonialist underpinnings of these modes of categorization and bureaucracy are
antithetical to anti-racist, liberatory work. “Diversity and inclusion” when co-opted
can be merely a guise for the empire to weigh and measure, dissect and reconstitute us
into resources to be efficiently deployed in service to capitalism-colonialism.
Games studios — unsurprisingly, given our proximity to Silicon Valley—are also
laboratories for technocratic bureaucracies of workplace efficiency with most studios
using several different types of productivity software or applications. Progress must

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be tracked and measured, to allow management to secure approvals or funding, and an
unpredictable workflow made somehow orderly to mitigate capital risk. I sometimes
feel we are attempting to systematize the production of video games even while we
are at a tender and early stage of our development as a medium. And that there is also
something else, something immeasurable to what we do, when it really works — but
under the regime of bureaucratic efficiency whatever cannot be measured will be lost.

THE MYTH OF LINEAR PROGRESS

The very fact that we use “progress” as the fundamental term to describe the unfolding
of a game brings with it certain assumptions about what it means to progress in
dominant culture. Key to that concept is that things will get better, more orderly,
that progress in a game will mirror the colonialist idea of a linear progression from
savagery to civilization.
In my DIGRA talk I described how the white protagonist will be forgiven, that
whatever the protagonist must do in order for the game to progress will be forgiven
by the structure of the game itself. And I wondered whether this was in fact a feature
of protagonism rather than “white protagonism”, because I couldn’t really see any
ways of designing subversively that didn’t begin with accepting this premise and
designing with it in mind. I think that in fact the idea that “the protagonist will
be forgiven” is enmeshed with colonialist-capitalist conceptions of progress shaped
by future oriented ethics as encoded into game progression, rather than white
protagonism (Jayanth, 2021). Future oriented ethics have long been critiqued by anti-
colonial intellectuals and have animated imperialist conquest and currently animate
technocratic elites in the form of longtermism and Effective Altruism, and it’s a
complex subject which there’s too much to say about, really. This idea of what is to
come imagines a future justifying brutality, violence, oppression, horror in the present,
because it will all be somehow made worth it. The imagined future is both glorious and
inevitable, and the pursuit of it both noble and necessary. Therefore, whatever actions
are taken in the present are pre-emptively vindicated by the future which doesn’t exist.
Whatever the cost of progress is, it must be forgiven, in the game world and in the
material world. So, it’s progress that forgives the protagonist, rather than whiteness —
but it is a white and colonial idea of progress.
I think “progress” is such a useful design framework in video games partly because
of the need to give players a sense of scale or context, which games don’t intrinsically
have in the way that reading a physical book makes clear to the reader. Maps are often
used for this purpose, charting the player’s journey, to memorialize what they have
done and to give players a sense of how much more there is to do in the game world.
Another potential way of giving players a sense of scale or context is through pace
rather than “progress,” which is the structured pattern of ludonarrative satisfactions
designed for a player to experience within the overall metanarrative of play which of
course also includes their embodied contexts (playing on a phone, having children or
responsibilities, playing alone or with friends, etc.).

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THE WAR ON LEISURE

The imperial mode loathes leisure, which is a human need. The forces of capital are
arrayed against it. It is unproductive time — which is blasphemy in the religion of
capital. We live in “hustle culture”, where all our pleasures, hobbies, opinions, emotions
must be professionalized and monetized. Our interactions with each other must be
in some way corporatized: mined for data, bringing eyeballs to YouTube or SnapChat
or Instagram, through Facebook or Zoom or Slack. Any unmediated time we spend
with each other which escapes post-processing by social media, is fertile territory for
digital technology to occupy, even if it requires the displacement of the human bonds
or pleasures which previously thrived in that space.
We can see this in the ongoing enclosure of spaces for joy, play and community
in the material world, and the colonization of video games by capital as part of
the workification of games and the financialization of leisure. Lewis Gordon talks
about the capitalist pleasures of Animal Crossing: New Horizons in The Nation:

With millions unemployed due to the pandemic’s economic fallout, New Horizons might be
resonating all the more because of this — a means to keep working, even just figuratively, as
literal jobs are disappearing.
Except in New Horizons, work is obviously not like a regular job; it’s suffused into an
everyday existence where economic value is ascribed to even the most banal tasks. My
avatar has a cell phone that comes with an app called Nook Miles, which tracks and records
all my actions; for every fish I catch or weed I pull, I’m rewarded with points accompanied
by a bright melody and sharp endorphin kick. […] As the days unfold, everything on the
island, myself included, begins to feel like a stockpile of standing-reserve waiting to be
transformed into capital or tokens. (Gordon, 2022, paras. 2-3)

Game design in the imperial mode tends toward addictive, coercive and exploitative
pleasures — abusive design which does not respect the player’s human needs, and in
fact leverages those needs for its own purposes. Exploiting flaws in the human psyche
to leverage the player’s vulnerabilities to keep them playing while their time, attention
and money are extracted from them. We can see the recent rise in prevalence of
this type of design: loot-boxes, microtransactions, dual-currencies, pay-to-win, turn-
exhaustion, premium pathways, the corporate push towards games-as-service. Games
in which the experience is broken for the majority of players to extract value from the
few.
The work the industry produces in the near-future will also be shaped by the
increasing platformization and ongoing monopolization. A straightforward example:
the nature of Apple Arcade distorts the designs of the games which it funds; Apple
Arcade’s metrics of success determine what a successful game is, and the space for
iPhone games outside Arcade shrinks. What is good for Apple Arcade is not necessarily
what is good for the medium, though there is a lot of good work to be found on Apple
Arcade.
Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design (Schüll, 2014) is an incredibly depressing
and valuable book about digital and video technology-assisted machine gambling in
Las Vegas. I think it’s deeply useful for us as game designers to familiarize ourselves
with the types of addictive designs and frameworks refined and perfected in the casino
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so we can identify them and agitate against them as they increasingly infect video
games and the imaginations of management, executives, and VC funders. She talks
about what players call “the machine zone,” which is a trancelike state engendered
by the rhythms of design in which they play in order to keep playing, rather than
to win, ignoring bodily needs and physical and even economic exhaustion. I think
this is usefully read alongside Braxton Soderman’s (2021) Against Flow, in explicating
how the focus on immersion and designing players into states of pleasurable flow can
be harnessed towards capitalist exploitation, offering the false promise of individual
transformation and self-expression rather than serving the player’s real human needs,
the pleasurable/numb state of flow keeping the player trapped inside and veiled from
the mechanisms of their own exploitation.
There is, I think, a correspondence between the decreasing satisfaction and
compensation of work in the material world, and the playful pleasures corporations
and executives offer to us with crypto, play-to-earn, play-to-own: the workification
of games and the gamification of work. I deeply worry that the type of gamification
design which escaped from video games into the worlds of work and consumption
will come back to haunt us, pulling games design toward gamification in service of
the demands of value-extraction. As someone who worked in gamification in the
mid-2000s, I had hoped we had laid that ghost to rest.
This brings me to another feature of the imperial mode: it is one of false promises
and the scam economy, pulling game design into the shape of the casino and the Ponzi
scheme. Look at Axie Infinity and the rise of cryptocurrencies, blockchain gaming,
NFTs etc. They can be seen, as Katherine Cross (2022) puts it, as “part of the grim
harvest of capitalism’s newfound lust for the intangible.”

FALSE PROMISES AND IMAGINED FUTURES

What is the future of video games? If the VC-funded corporate myth-making is to

be believed it is cryptocurrency and the metaverse. Leaving aside the many problems
of feasibility and necessity, there is such a deep push from capital to make these
things real that I am resigned to their infiltration into video games. However, there
is something deeply delusional about the fact that both of these future paradigms for
digital entertainment come with an enormous environmental cost at a time of ruinous
ecological crisis. Mining bitcoin right now uses more electricity than the country of
Ireland, and we imagine a future of widespread adoption of crypto and NFTs? The
metaverse, similarly, relies on the widespread adoption of VR and the environmental
cost of manufacturing more and more VR headsets so that player-consumers can be
subsumed into this space of corporate fantasy.
These do not seem like rational responses to our present circumstances, and are
deeply enmeshed in the technocratic elite’s anxieties about the faltering fantasy of
endless exploitation and growth. As we approach the finite planetary boundaries of the
material world, instead of giving up the dream, it is projected into increasingly digital,
virtual, and intangible spaces.
The aspirational fantasy offered to people in the material world is converted into
one of roleplaying in the virtual world. I think we can see one of the appeals for
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cryptobros as roleplaying — pretending to be a rich person, speculating on a fantasy
currency market, serving the individualist fantasies of capitalism-colonialism where
success is determined by your wits and skill. The NFT’s invention of artificial scarcity
of digital goods speaking to the fantasy as being one of endless exploitation rather than
endlessness.
In some ways, heaven is the metaverse. An externality which cannot be exhausted.
A spiritual promise of pleasure, satisfaction, fulfilment which can be manipulatively
offered in the place of pleasure, satisfaction, fulfilment in the material world. I’m sure
we will see in the future metaversal escapes to beautiful locations which have been
ravaged by capitalist-colonialist exploitation in the real world or are only accessible
to the super-rich, virtual worlds full of species which we have driven to extinction,
work-ified video games which offer a relief or replacement for materially unsatisfying
or non-existent work, the opportunity to role-play elite pleasures of domination,
subjugation, overconsumption, individualist/libertarian freedom, gambling and
speculation.
I want to make it clear why I think the misenchantments of technocracy and the
delusions of venture capitalists and tech billionaires are useful to talk about when we
talk about game design. The technology industry, of which we are a part, is shaped by
the preferences, ideologies and instincts of a very small elite, and our work as game
designers will be harnessed to their purposes if we don’t find ways to collectively resist
these pulls.
Video games are technocracy’s cultural medium, one of the avenues through
which it attempts to invent new desires and bring new consumers within the
extractive grasp of capitalism-colonialism to fulfil the dogma of endless growth which
the entire system relies upon. But the technocratic elite has withered imaginations
and so therefore outsources its imaginative work to us — this is a type of labour
that I fear will become increasingly hard to divest from or resist as video games
are increasingly financialized and replaced by scam economies and platformization
and monopolization further narrows the range of tastemakers who control the
chokepoints between players and designers.

CONCLUSION

I hope it’s clear by now that I don’t think video games will save the world. I’m not even
sure we can save ourselves. But maybe that’s okay. The truth is that all the futures I
imagine in which video games exist are dystopian.
So what do we do in this twilight space, practitioners of a decadent art form whose
very existence is perhaps contingent on the same ideologies which are accelerating us
towards ecological collapse and mass suffering and death. Did the band really keep
playing as the Titanic sank? Maybe they did. What else is there to do, especially if the
only thing you know how to do, and love to do, is to play the saxophone?
We can do our best to channel people’s energies to the collective rather than
disperse them, we can resist designs of addiction and the financialization of games. We
can try to serve our players real human needs as much as possible. And in truth, as T. S.

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Eliot (1943) said, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” We need fantasy and
stories to be able to bear what we have made of the world.
Game design in the imperial mode makes games spaces of comfortable re-
enactment of safe pleasures for white players, white protagonists and white designers.
But as bell hooks tells us, “the practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss,
hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control” (hooks, 2000, p.
99). To design from a place of love is to unsettle the imperial mode of game design, its
conventions and truisms, its supposedly universal pleasures and objective delights, it’s
assumptions of agency and power, it’s regressive safeties and aversions to risk, and its
hypermasculine antipathy towards vulnerability.
And for me, to design from a place of love is also to admit: I would rather make
a bad video game rather than harm someone in pursuit of some self-serving artistic
vision. I think a lot of my colleagues would agree. I would also rather make trouble
than “be a bricklayer,” which is a piece of extraordinarily sensible and unspeakably
grim advice someone I was once with on a panel gave to young designers. Please don’t
be bricklayers. Smash the whole house up. Don’t keep your heads down. Bring all the
things you care about in the world into your practice as game designers, and keep some
parts of yourself outside of video games. Find and build community within it. None of
us are going to escape the traps that lie ahead of us alone.
There’s a wonderful moment in The Great British Bake-Off, seasons and seasons
ago, back when it was on the BBC with Mel and Sue. One of the contestant’s cakes, that
they’ve spent hours and hours making and decorating, topples over and the contestant
starts to cry. Mel and Sue — the hosts — come over and give her a hug, and say, “It’s
only a cake!” Which is entirely true but antithetical to the entire premise of a baking
competition show. It’s only a cake! But that’s why the show exists, why they’re making
it, why we’re all watching it. The cake is why we’re all here. We’ve spent hours and
hours on it. It’s okay to cry when it topples over. But it is, also, only a cake.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. When designing games, who are you designing for? Why? When evaluating user
experience, who’s experience is the baseline? How does designing or testing for the ‘model
player’ limit creativity and diversity in game design?
2. What role does agency play in video games? What kinds of agency are considered?
How does the imperial mode affect these forms of agency?
3. What are some examples of games that resist a dominator culture? What are some
techniques that help us resist design for the “white player”?

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KEY TERMS

Imperial Mode: the cultural sensibility or condition wherein imperialism is a normal and
often unaccounted for part of the practice of everyday living. It is characterized by the
banality of various overlapping crises (geopolitical, social justice, ecological, etc.)
produced by capitalism and empire.
Narrative Design: Where game design and storytelling meet. Narrative design includes
the creation of a game’s story structure, themes, plot, and characters as well as interfacing
between gameplay/mechanics design and system design to facilitate the player’s
experience of the story and its emotional beats through gameplay.
Model Player: The person imagined to play a video game during the design process.
Similar to a ‘model reader,’ an idea proposed by Umberto Eco. As Jayanth explains, even
play-centric design assumes a model player.
Dominator Culture: bell hooks’ term for the social milieu of the imperial mode of living,
where hierarchy and power are rigidly enforced through fear and force, and domination is
valorized and normalized. hooks argues that dominator culture harms those who enact
and perpetuate it, though differently than those who are oppressed by it.
Longtermism: An ideology focused on long-term outcomes and guided by the principle
that positively influencing the future should be a priority. Longtermists are often
critiqued for justifying exploitative or oppressive conditions as necessary for an outcome
that is eventually good for humanity.

REFERENCES
1. Activision Blizzard. (2023). Activision Blizzard Releases Inaugural Diversity,
Equity, and Inclusion Look-Back. (2023). Activision Blizzard, Inc.
https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/
activision-blizzard-releases-inaugural-diversity-equity-and
2. Brand, U. and Wissen, M. (2021). The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and
the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (B. Jungwirth, Ed.; Z. Murphy King, Trans.).
Verso.
3. Cross, K. (2022). Why is the Internet so Exhausting? Blame your
Crowdsourced Bosses. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/story/labor-
surveillance-internet-culture/
4. Eliot, T.S. 1943. Four Quartets. New York: Hardcourt.
5. Gordon, L. (2022). Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection is Not
What we Need. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/animal-
crossing-video-game-essay/
6. hooks, b. (2018). All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow.

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 7. hooks, b. (2005). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York:
Washington Square Press. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/
library-research-services/collections/diversity-inclusion-belonging/will-
change
8. Isen, T. (2022). Some of my Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service. Atria/One Signal
Publishers.
9. Jayanth, M. (2021). White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game
Design. Talk at DIAGRA 2021, India. https://digraindia.com/2022/01/12/
meghna-jayanths-digra-india-2021-keynote-white-protagonism-and-
imperial-pleasures-in-game-design/
10. Lantz, F. (2014). Hearts and Minds. Talk at the Game Developers Conference
2014, San Francisco. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020788/Hearts-and
11. Miller, A. (1991). Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries (L. Vennewitz,
Trans.). Anchor Books, Doubleday.
12. Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as Art. Oxford University Press.
13. Schüll, N. D. (2014). Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas.
Princeton University Press.
14. Soderman, B. (2021). Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject. MIT
Press.

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SPOTLIGHT 11: AN INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVE ON THE DIGITAL
DIVIDE

Based on a talk by Kahentawaks Tiewishaw

SUMMARY

Kahentawaks Tiewishaw begins by dismantling the idea that Indigenous

individuals want nothing to do with technology. Tracing these
misconceptions to Western photographic representations of Indigenous
people, Tiewishaw argues that these colonial histories shape present-day
technological access for Indigenous communities. She shares the story of
her childhood growing up in Kanehsatake, where high-speed internet
wasn’t available until 2018 (a service that is still unavailable to many
Indigenous communities). Tiewishaw describes her education and the
development of Karihonniennihtshera, the game that led her to co-found
Revital Software in 2020. Revital Software makes Indigenous language
learning games, which are being used in a Mohawk immersion school in
Quebec. Current work includes the development of a free Indigenous
Language Video Game Library to help teach Mohawk stories and
language.

APPLICATION POINTS

Tiewishaw’s discussion of Revital illustrates how video games can

contribute to the continuation and survivance of languages and cultures.
Importantly, it shows that Indigenous creators have the will and capacity
to lead these efforts themselves without relying on creators from
privileged social locations. Tiewishaw’s experiences with video games
and other digital technologies, particularly in the broader context of the
digital divide, should raise questions about what technological norms and
values are presumed in games, user experience research, or market-
driven game development. Her work also highlights the impact of
effective education with digital tools: Tiewishaw draws a clear line from
what she learned in the Skins Workshops to her co-founding of Revital
Software, demonstrating the positive social and cultural impacts of
equitable access to digital technologies.

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 INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY AND CULTURE: INVENTORS AND
TECHNOLOGISTS

There’s a misconception that Indigenous people are inherently opposed to or

uninterested in technology. This is related to the way Indigenous people are
portrayed in popular media, which has historically been controlled by settlers. In
the 1800s and 1900s, American photographer Edward S. Curtis misrepresented
Indigenous people in widely circulated photos: his photos were carefully
composed and often featured Indigenous individuals who had been told it was
mandatory to wear traditional clothing (Figure 1). Tuscarora artist and scholar
Waylon Wilson discusses how Curtis would edit out objects he considered ‘too
modern’—like a clock— portraying Indigenous individuals from his own
imagining of what he considered to be an authentic Indian (Tiewishaw and
Wilson, 2023). Images like these created romanticized figures from the past,
ignoring the present-day reality and the ongoing repression of Indigenous
cultures and rights. These images contributed to the myth of the “vanishing
Indian,” a concept that objectified Indigenous peoples as a vanishing race, fuelling
a colonial gaze that expected Indigenous peoples’ imminent extinction while
providing ideological justification for American Westward expansion.

Figure 1. In a Piegan Lodge, 1911, Edward S. Curtis. In later versions of the photo, the
clock between the two men was removed for being ‘too modern.’

However, Indigenous people have always been inventors and technologists. As

interdisciplinary artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle (2016) describes, data collection and
documentary technologies have always been an important part of Indigenous
communities and cultures. One example is the wampum belt, which is a memory
aid used to keep track of agreements between nations. The Hiawatha wampum
belt, for example, contains shapes representing the five nations that originally
joined the confederacy of peace, and symbolically documents each nation’s
participation.

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THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: INDIGENOUS LAND IN CANADA

In 2021, 90.9% of Canada had high-speed internet coverage; however, this figure
is far lower for remote areas (59%) and even lower for First Nations territories
(only 42%).1
Tiewishaw notes that for the 20 years that she lived in Kanehsatake, a territory
in Quebec thirty miles east of Montreal, most of the territory did not have access
to high-speed internet. The high-speed connection ended about a kilometre
south of her home—where the municipality of Oka begins. Kanehsatake would
only gain access to high-speed internet in 2018.

INITIATIVES WORKING TO IMPROVE DIGITAL ACCESS

IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

• The Arrow Technology Group is working on connecting Indigenous

communities to high-speed internet and has connected 11 communities since
January 2023.
• The Pathways to Technology project is working on connecting all 203 First
Nations in British Columbia to high-speed internet.
• The Nukik Corporation in Nunavut is building 12,000 kilometres of
hydroelectrical and fibre optic cables. ( John, 2023)

If the Canadian government hopes to meet its goal of 100% internet coverage by
2030, current initiatives to improve digital access in Indigenous communities
must continue to expand. Given that the government has not yet been able to
ensure clean drinking water for Indigenous communities, Tiewishaw notes that
these efforts raise a provocative question: which will come first, 100% access to
high-speed internet or 100% access to clean drinking water?

LEARNING WITH INDIGENOUS MEDIA

In 2008, Tiewishaw, a 10th grader at the time, was introduced to the Skins
Workshop2 in her Graphic Arts class. The program encouraged students to
integrate stories from their community into video games and virtual
environments by teaching Indigenous youth how to create games. They were in
the first group to take part in the workshop and learned level design, 3D
modelling and animation, video editing, 2D animation, and character design.
Tiewishaw and her classmates made a game called Otsi: Rise of the Kanien’keha:ka
Legends about the Legend of the Flying Head. In 2011, they submitted the game to
the Imaginative Film and Media Arts Festival, where it won Best New Media. Otsi
exemplifies how Indigenous stories can be told in new ways, demonstrating how
Indigenous youth can be actively engaged in the making of these stories.

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 Figure 2. Tiewishaw’s first game, Karihonniennihtshera, follows the story of a young girl learning why we must
take care of Mother Earth.

After high school, Tiewishaw earned a degree from Dawson College, worked at
Mega Bloks, and then returned to school to earn a Computation Arts degree at
Concordia University. While attending Concordia, she collaborated on a video
game with her sister Wennekerakon and their friend Frederyk Kowalczyk. At the
time, creating the game seemed like a monumental task—but after the game
was completed, it felt as though a door had opened and that video games could
be a career. The game was Karihonniennihtshera, which translates to ‘teachings,’
and follows the story of a young girl who is asking her grandmother why we
must take care of Mother Earth.

REVITAL SOFTWARE AND THE FUTURE OF INDIGENOUS

LANGUAGE GAMES

Recounting her early experiences with video games, Tiewishaw described how
she and her siblings would play the instant they got home from school, and all day
on weekends. “When my siblings and I got our first game console, we were
obsessed with it,” she said. Tiewishaw shared how her parents frequently
commented that if they practised their Mohawk as hard as they played video
games, they’d be fluent by now. That was the first time she truly thought about the
media she was consuming: there were no Mohawk video games.
In 2020, following the successful creation of Karihonniennihtshera, the Tiewishaw
sisters and Kowalcyzk founded Revital Software. Kahentawaks and
Wennekerakon create game assets, design UI, and handle written story elements,
while Frederyk handles the programming. They specialize in making
Indigenous language learning games, which are currently being used in a
Mohawk immersion school in Quebec.
These games help to address the barriers to learning Mohawk and the survival
of the language and culture. There are relatively few who speak the language

200
fluently, and fewer still who are available to teach the language. Out of 2,600
people living in Kanehsatake, there are only 60 first-language speakers (Deer,
2019). The majority of these individuals are elders, far past the age at which one
would normally retire. Further, there are also emotional and mental barriers that
might prevent individuals from learning their language. Elders battle
intergenerational trauma, while young people grapple with shame from not being
able to speak the language. Games provide a safe space for people to learn where
they feel the most comfortable, and circumvent some of the biggest learning and
teaching barriers.
Revital Software is currently working on a free Indigenous Language Video
Game Library. The first four games funded by the grants are based on Mohawk
legends: The Flying Head, The Little People, The Medicine Keepers, and The
Seven Dancers. The games are being developed with the help of a Mohawk
language specialist and will be told in a visual novel style, with a practice mode
for language learning that teaches vocabulary and conjugation to assist players
through the story mode. They will be completely playable in Mohawk with the
ability to toggle back to English to support second-language learning.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How does your research-creation contribute to the continuation of language and

culture? How might it contribute to the survival of languages and cultures?
2. How does your research account for the level or quality of technological access?
How does this technological (in)accessibility impact the participant’s experience and/
or ability to participate?
3. How does your research challenge prevailing stereotypes or myths about how
certain communities or groups relate to videogames and digital technologies?

KEY TERMS

Digital Divide: The digital divide often refers to ways that existing inequalities
are reflected in—and compounded by—a lack of access to digital technologies. This
divide encompasses factors like high-speed internet, access to mobile telephones,
and the technological literacy of communities, which ultimately reinforces
unequal participation in society.

Vanishing Indian: The vanishing Indian is a myth originating

from stereotypes depicting Indigenous individuals in media and white settler
culture. Specifically in the Americas, Indigenous cultures were regarded as doomed
by settlers documenting their histories or cultures. When these cultures were

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 presented to the general population through media, they were labelled as nearing
extinction to justify settler expansion and ongoing acts of colonial displacement.

REFERENCES
1. Deer, K. (2019). Revitalizing Kanien’kéha: Immersion Program Seeks to
Protect Mohawk Language. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/
kanesatake-mohawk-language-immersion-1.5359348
2. L’Hirondelle, C. (2016). Codetalkers Recounting Signals of Survival. In K.
Swanson & S. Loft (Eds.), Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in
New Media Art: 147–168. Calgary University Press.
3. John, G. (2023). Tackling the Digital Divide. Aboriginal Business
Report. https://www.mediaedgemagazines.com/the-canadian-council-for-
aboriginal-business-ccab/cb232/
4. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Edward S. Curtis
Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-90145]
5. Tieweshaw, K. and Wilson, W. (2023). Indigenous Representation in Video
Games: Media History, Settler Imagination, Indigenous Futures. [Roundtable
Presentation]. Indigenous Video Games Day. Brock University.

Notes
1. https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/parl_oag_202303_02_e_44205.html#IG
2. https://indigenousfutures.net/workshops/

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CHAPTER 10.

DOING NATIVE IN GAME DESIGN

Wendi Sierra

This chapter is based on talk originally given at Rhetoric Society of America, 2022.

SUMMARY

In this talk, Dr. Wendi Sierra applies Cushman’s (2008) framework to consider
the distinction between “seeming Native,” which centers on the authenticity
of representation and “being/doing Native,” which centers on survivance and
how Indigenous perspectives and values are communicated through story
and gameplay. Sierra then offers case studies to elucidate this difference:
Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition as a game that seems Native but doesn’t “do”
Native, contrasted with Hill Agency: Purity/Decay as a game that both seems
and does. Sierra concludes by emphasizing that even as it continues to be
important for big-budget studios to improve the ways that their games “seem”
Native, work by Indigenous designers and collaborators as well as improved
access to game design tools and resources show exciting opportunities for
games to also “do” Native.

APPLICATION POINTS

Sierra’s talk asks us to think about Native or Indigenous presence in games

beyond visual representation. The talk introduces the distinction between
“seeming Native” and “being/doing Native,” which calls for games researchers
to look beyond what’s on the surface and study how games are played and
developed as well as how they impact the communities involved. This is a
challenge to traditional game design methods, but also methods of analysis,
requiring a multi-perspectival approach integrating the study of the media, its
production, and reception. Moreover, note how the differences between
“seeming” and “doing” also require different levels of consultation and
collaboration throughout the design process. Reading this work alongside other
chapters that discuss the negative representation of racialized and marginalized
groups and individuals is also an opportunity to consider how these practices
relating to “seeming” and “doing” might be applied in other contexts.

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 Shekoli Swakweku

Wakatshanu:ní tsi’ weswake:tóhte̲

Dr. Wendi Sierra ní yukyáts
Onʌyotaˀa·ká· niˀi·. Ano:wal niwaki’taló:tʌ̲
Shirley ne: yutatyats aksotha
Cheri ne: yutatyats aknulha
Kheya’takenhas ukwe:hu:we̲

Hello everyone.
I am glad you have all come here today.
My name is Dr. Wendi Sierra
I am a member of the Oneida Nation, Turtle is my clan.
Shirley is my grandmother’s name.
Cheri is my mother’s name.
I am helping the Oneida people.

In today’s talk I’d like to first introduce the concept of “seeming Indian” versus “doing
Indian,” referred to hereafter as seeming and doing Native1. This model, which draws
on Cushman’s (2008) original definitions and Arola’s (2017) extension of these
concepts, provides a critical frame that helps move conversations about representation
of Native culture in gaming away from a good/bad dichotomy and moves us closer
to something better approaching the concept of reciprocity. Having defined the frame
for analysis, I’ll move on to exploring a few examples of games that seem Native and
compare them to games that do Native. I should note at the outset, however, that this
is not meant as a slight or criticism for those games that “only” seem. Indeed, with the
striking under-representation of Native characters in gaming even when compared to
U.S. census population numbers (Williams et al, 2009), games that respectfully engage
with Native communities in order to seem Native can still play an important role in
representation.

DEFINING TERMS

Before turning toward the games, it’s important to clarify some key terms in this
discussion. Authenticity, accountability, and reciprocity are all important and
complicated terms to think through. This section lays these terms out and presents
a framework that will ground the game analysis to come. Cushman’s 2008 article,
“Toward a Rhetoric of Self-Representation: Identity Politics in Indian Country and
Rhetoric and Composition,” addresses the complexities of Native identity, and in
particular Native scholarly identity, by exploring distinctions between self-
identification and self-representation. Self-identification, Cushman explains, is one’s
own claim to an identity without additional evidence. Cushman shares the story of
a “pretendian” scholar, someone who claimed a Native identity but was ultimately
found not to be part of any Native community, as an example of the challenges that
unverified self-identification can lead to. This scholar, who both spoke for Native
communities and called into question other scholars’ claims of Indigeneity, ultimately
was unable to provide any information about their own kinship, connections, or
community belonging. In their wake, this scholar and others like them have created
204
a culture of suspicion. This demonstrates a piece of the damage that a system of self-
identification, relying on an individual’s own attestation, can cause.
One might think then that demanding a logic of self-representation, where Native
people are asked to produce legal evidence of their ancestry and heritage would be
an answer to this issue. However, these kinds of evidence rely on historical
documentation that can be problematic. Cushman discusses how the Dawes Roll, a
US federal census of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole peoples
from 1887-1907, demonstrates these challenges. The Dawes roll contains both
inappropriate additions (people who had no Native ancestry but felt there would be
monetary benefit to inclusion) and self-chosen omissions (actual Native people who
were eligible to enroll but, justifiably, felt it was safer for their family not to appear
on the list). Likewise, Lamsam (2014) notes that the concept of blood quantum is a
colonial one that is meant to slowly lead to the “extinction” of Native peoples.
With these complexities in mind, Cushman proposes a two-pronged approach
to thinking about Native scholarly identity, one that is based both on “being” and
on “doing.” Being, which Cushman associates with authenticity, can be demonstrated
tribally, by showing that one “hold[s], practice[s], and preserve[s] the cultural traditions,
languages, medicines, clans, and sacred artifacts that are the legacies” of a particular
people. Or being can be demonstrated nationally, by showing they meet the
requirements of the “institutional, governmental, and legal structures that sovereign
Native American states use to interface with the federal and state governments and
to define, serve, and govern their citizens” (2008, p. 339). Tribal identification
acknowledges those who, through whatever coincidence of family history, cannot
be legally enrolled in their nations but are nonetheless part of their communities
and accepted culturally as members. National identification recognizes those who
meet legal definitions of Native citizenship and makes space for those who may be
reconnecting with their communities. Both kinds of identification depend on
reciprocity, on a community of people affirming that the scholar in question is
engaged, culturally, legally, or both, with their community.
However, being a Native scholar is but a first step. Cushman suggests that, while
authenticity is absolutely essential, it is part and parcel with accountability, Cushman’s
definition of doing the work of a Native scholar that is deeply grounded in a profound
sense of reciprocity. For Cushman, a Cherokee scholar, this concept of accountability
is rooted in gadugi, the ethic of “the individual serving the family and community
and working together for the common good” (2008, p. 344). Doing the work of a
Native scholar requires one to be deeply embedded in community engagement and
participation. As she notes, many Native academics end up far from their traditional
homelands, and so this doing may involve more work with their local communities and
other tribal Nations, but it nonetheless provides a way to demonstrate reciprocity and
kinship.
Cushman’s framework is an interesting take on what it means to occupy a
particular identity as a scholar, but how does that get us to video games? Kristin
Arola (2017) brings Cushman’s framework of being/doing into the realm of design.
She surveyed her local community at a pow wow, asking attendees “what would

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Facebook look like if it were designed for and by Native Americans?” (2017, p. 209).
In their responses, she found many of her participants wanted the interface to seem
Native, meaning they wanted to see visual elements that would convey a sense of
Native identity and authenticity. For this particular group, these elements included
medicine wheel colors (black, red, yellow, and white) and eagle feathers (2017, p.
213). Like Cushman, Arola notes the challenges visual representation poses. After all,
there are over 570 federally recognized nations in the United States and over 600
Native communities in Canada. While many of these nations do share some common
iconography, there is also a great deal of difference across such a vast group of cultures.
Moreover, while certainly it seemed important to her participants that the
aesthetic be welcoming, Arola notes that many participants quickly moved from
discussing how the site should look, to talking about what they would want the site to
do. Arola describes her participants’ desires as a design that “affords and encourages
American Indians to compose and relate in a self-determined way, one that supports
and sustains one’s culture, seems an important way of doing Indianness” (2017, p. 216).
Participants wanted to see more, and more interesting, ways of interacting with and
supporting each other, ways that both acknowledged their cultural beliefs but also
frequently ways that included humor and joy. In short, Arola’s participants wanted a
design that did Native, not just one that seemed Native. As with Cushman’s definition
of doing the work of a Native scholar, Arola’s interpretation of her participants’
comments is that they want a design that demonstrates accountability and reciprocity,
one that is infused with cultural values and responsive to the communities it
represents.

SEEMING AND DOING IN GAME DESIGN

Arola brings Cushman’s definition of embodiment, which involves being and doing,
into consideration of a design ethos consisting of seeming and doing. In some ways,
these are loosely related to concepts of authenticity and accountability/
reciprocity, which provide a solid way for us to consider what these concepts might
look like in game design and to explore examples of games that do and do not meet
these criteria.
Cushman’s concept of being was a heuristic that focused on being identifiable
as part of a particular community, whether that be culturally (tribal identification) or
legally (national identification). Arola defines seeming in design as “the use of a specific
design elements recognizable as Native” (2017, p. 212). Synthesizing these elements,
I argue that for games (or elements within games) to seem Native, they must have a
culturally authentic representation of a specific Native nation. This includes, but is not
limited to:

• Naming a specific nation

• Time-period appropriate visual aesthetic, including authenticity in clothing
and personal style of characters, housing, imagery/decor, etc.
• Time-period appropriate soundscapes, including music and language

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At the most basic level, this list is concerned with accuracy in representational
elements. To have accuracy, a game generally must name a specific nation; there must
be something for the game to be accurate to. However, I would argue that seeming
Native involves some engagement with contextuality as well, something perhaps
implied by the inclusion of the phrase “time-period appropriate.” In short, to seem
Native a game must consider the particulars of a culture. Doing so guards against
falling into visual tropes and stereotypes imported from other media that do not
engage meaningfully with actual Native cultures. This might appear to be setting a
fairly low bar, but a substantial number of video games do not meet even these simple
guidelines to seem Native. Indeed, one of the first games with a Native protagonist,
Whomp ‘Em, does not meet any of these criteria. The main character, Soaring Eagle, is
clearly meant to be connected with Native culture via a series of generic visual tropes:
his clothing includes a tan vest, shoes that appear to be moccasins, and a headband
with a single feather. No Native nation is named and the visual signifiers of Native-
ness are a hodgepodge that collectively point to no specific nations. The name Whomp
‘Em is a play on the word wampum, beads made from the shell of the quahog clam
and used by Eastern Woodlands tribes. This might imply Soaring Eagle is meant to
be a member of any number of Nations along the Atlantic coast that used and valued
wampum. However, the game also includes imagery of totem poles with art that seems
to reference Pacific Northwestern Nations including the Haida, Tlingit, and Coastal
Salish, to name a few. One of the enemies in the game is a grizzly bear, again pointing
to the North and generally to the Pacific Northwest as more likely. The instruction
manual offers no clarification, simply stating “Whomp ‘Em is the story of Soaring
Eagle, a young Indian Brave who ventures into the world seeking totems for his magic
pouch.”
Ultimately, in this game there is no attempt made to actually seem Native. The
game is a direct port of another game, Saiyuuki World 2, with a few minor visual
changes to “localize” the game for American audiences. The imagery in the game
and even the name itself are there to try to signify Native-ness in some way without
any desire to engage culturally with actual Native people. The soundtrack is entirely
imported from the original game and thus does not represent a period-appropriate
soundscape.
While seeming is generally about aesthetics, doing is about relationality. Thus, for
a game to do Native we must look at both the game itself and the design process.
Games that do Native should:

• Have a story and mechanics that are informed by the tribal values
• Engage Native people in the development process beyond a “consultant” mode
• Accomplish something with the game that community wants accomplished

As this list might suggest, it is entirely possible to include a Native character in a game
that hits the requirements to seem Native, but nonetheless fails to do Native. This
isn’t meant to be a backhanded compliment or sly criticism of games that seem. Given
the general lack of Native characters in all contemporary media, including aesthetic

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elements (the HUD, the character design, the sound choices) brings more visibility to
Native cultures and can begin to chip away at some of the common visual language
people outside of Native cultures associate with Nativeness. Thus, these games have
the potential to highlight and uplift the diversity of Native cultures in a way that can
have profound impacts for those inside and outside of Native cultures, and break the
impression that all Native people share one “mono-culture.” Further, seeming Native
can lend a stronger sense of authenticity to games that feature Native characters. In
short, seeming is important and valid in game design.
Of course, ideally we would get to experience more games that both seem and do.
Doing Native in video games goes beyond creating a respectful end product, requiring
developers to begin their work with a reciprocal design process that respects Native
knowledge, values, and cultures. While games that seem can often achieve these goals
simply by following a consultant model (as we will see in the following examples), doing
Native takes these ideals a step further. It requires engaging with tribal communities,
not just individual consultants. When well done, doing Native has the opportunity
to share not just our image and music, but our narratives and world views with a
broader audience. Finally, doing Native has the ability to affect meaningful change for
communities, by creating opportunities in the industry for Native people.

SEEMING CASE STUDY: AGE OF EMPIRES III DEFINITIVE EDITION

With the release of Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition in 2020, developers Tantalus
Media and Forgotten Empires attempted to do a better job of representation than
the game’s first release. The original Age of Empires III (AoE3), released in 2005, and
particularly the Warchiefs expansion (2006), has been criticized for its failure “to
properly represent the [Indigenous] peoples and culture due to its inherent
Western design that originates from the development history of the RTS [real
time strategy] genre and simulation wargames overall” (LaPensée, 2008, p. 142). The
initial release of AoE3 contains 12 Native nations, all of whom are unplayable (though
players can form alliances with these nations to access culture-specific units). The
Warchiefs expansion, released a year later, makes three of these civilizations playable
(Haudenosaunee under the name Iroquois, Lakota under the name Sioux, and Aztecs)
and added three new non-playable nations to replace the ones made playable (Huron,
Cheyenne, and Zapotec). While both AoE3 and The Warchiefs in their initial releases did
name specific Native nations, there are several important missteps in their attempt to
represent the cultures they were depicting, and thus I would argue that they did not
succeed in their attempt to seem Native.
The AoE franchise generally makes attempts at authenticity with all of its
civilizations. All AoE factions have voice lines in the faction’s appropriate language and
the developers included this for the three Native civilizations as well. However, already
we run into a problem with authenticity, as the Haudenosaunee are a confederacy
and not a single nation. In the game, the Haudenosaunee units are actually speaking
Kanienʼkehá:ka, or Mohawk, the language of one of the six nations of the
Haudenosaunee Confederacy. While this does track with the in-game home city of
Caughnawaga, a Mohawk settlement, it is nonetheless incredibly misleading to imply
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that this is the language of the Haudenosaunee. Each of the six member
nations—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora—have their
own language.
A more pointed example of how the game fails at seeming Native is the inclusion
of the firepit as a game mechanic. All three playable nations include the firepit as a
building structure and players are able to assign villagers to dance around the firepit to
receive certain “buffs” or additional units. The Alarm Dance summons Warrior units,
while the War Chief Dance increases the War Chief’s hit points and returns him to
the home base if he falls in battle. It is true that dance is very important to many
Native cultures and can be a central part of our ceremonies. However, the dances
depicted by the in-game animations are closer to the decades-old caricature of Native
dance ceremonies seen in western films and TV shows than they are any accurate
or appropriate dance. Further, having several dances shared by Nations stretching
from the Northeastern US and Canada, across the Great Plains, and down to Central
America is a blatant example of flattening Native cultures into one giant “mono-
culture.” This is even more concerning when it is compared to other civilizations in
the game. Anthony Brave notes “The Fire Pit works magically in that having people
dance around a fire somehow gives warriors on the battlefield more power. On the
other hand, the Western people get power through logical means: like the development
of technology or increasing their capacity for war by developing their forts” (Age DE
Team, 2022). Brave argues that this distinction falls into classic caricatures of Native
cultures that describe Native people as savage and uncivilized (getting their strength
through ritualistic, magical means) while more “civilized” societies are rational and
logical, getting their strength through technological evolution.
If the game does not seem Native, and indeed falls into some common missteps
regarding representing Native nations, then it is perhaps unsurprising that it does not
do Native either. Indeed, not only does the game NOT embody tribal values, making
Native civilizations playable in a real-time strategy game gives the implication that
Native cultures would have colonized if only they had gotten the technology in time.
As LaPensée notes, one of the places this is seen most clearly is in how the game treats
land: “the design of environment in The WarChiefs suggests that space is defined by
territory and that unmapped territory is non-existent” (2008, p. 133). There are two
important values here to tease out. The first is that the game and its mechanics are
grounded in colonialist understandings that divide land into territory to be conquered
and exploited for resources. This is already antithetical to Indigenous viewpoints,
which often see themselves as co-participants with the land and as agents with both
benefits and responsibilities for being in any particular place. The second is that land is
distinct and only important for the value it provides to those on it; unmapped territory
does not matter in this framework because it cannot be used.
Recognizing these criticisms leveled at its treatment of Native civilizations, the
developers decided to hire Native consultants to work on their update of the game for
the Definitive Edition release. Anthony Brave, one of these consultants hired to assist
the development team, recalls that his first suggestion was to entirely remove these
civilizations from the game. Reflecting LaPensée’s concerns, Brave argued that there

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was no way to make the civilizations do Native in ways that are truly reflective of the
respective culture’s values and worldviews. The real time strategy genre, or at least the
way it was implemented in this franchise, seemed completely incompatible with tribal
values and Brave saw no way within the scope of updates planned to remediate it. The
developers, perhaps unsurprisingly, rejected this idea.
However, Brave was able to encourage developers to make several changes, which
include:

• Changing the names Iroquois and Sioux to Haudenosaunee and Lakota,

respectively
• Removing the “Nature Friendship” ability
• Changing the Firepit and the Mines to the Community Plaza and Tribal
Marketplace, respectively
• Re-writing the “Shadow” storyline to change some characters and make the
main character more authentically Lakota
• Changes to the in-game flags to better represent the civilizations
• Changes to names and words to more appropriately reflect actual language use

These changes are important. They help those represented by these depictions perhaps
feel more comfortable seeing their culture onscreen. They help those outside the
culture perhaps have a more accurate image of what certain elements of the culture
are like. Ultimately, however, in a game whose main mechanic is colonization, it
seems unlikely that it will ever be possible to do Native. Is this enough? It’s hard to
say. I think in this particular case some people might feel, as Brave and LaPensée
likely do, that games in this particular franchise may always include some level of
misrepresentation based on the way the franchise depicts colonization. However,
with input from consultants and communities, it is possible for these games to at a
minimum do a better job of seeming Native. Moreover, it’s worth noting that the
changes Brave initiated, while not removing the problematic issue of approaches
toward the land, nonetheless go beyond simple accuracy corrections and are able to
substantially impact value-based choices.

DOING NATIVE: NEVER ALONE CASE STUDY

While real time strategy games, or at least those heavily involved in colonization and
expansion as a game mechanic, may always struggle to do Native, this is certainly not
the case for all games or game genres. Recognizing which games do Native involves
both analyzing the game itself and looking at the design process. The first criterion,
using tribal values to inform story and mechanics, is something that can be best
understood by looking closely at game mechanics. Never Alone is a fine example of this.
However, because this game is one of the most written about Indigenously determined
games, I will provide only a brief analysis of how this particular game design embodies
the principles of doing Native. The game was made by Upper One Games, a company
owned by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, and E-line Media.
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 Deborah Madsen (2017) provides an extensive analysis of the game and its
mechanics, arguing that one of the fundamental aims for the game was “the
dissemination of Iñupiaq values of resiliency and survival, cooperation,
intergenerational wisdom, and the interdependence of land, people, and animals” (p.
93). As Madsen explores, this is done through both the narrative elements and the
game mechanics. Throughout the game, Nuna, the young female main character, relies
not only on her white fox companion, but also on learning to interpret and work
with her natural environment: “cooperative behavior is coded into the mechanic”
(Madsen, 2017, p. 96). Madsen’s article explores the game mechanics of Never Alone
as an example of survivance in game design and clearly demonstrates how these
game mechanics fully embody tribal values and honor the teachings of this particular
culture. Amy Freedan, Lead Cultural Advisor on the game, notes their team was
constantly engaging with their community, asking questions like “what if we wanted
to portray certain gameplay and if that wasn’t ok with elders what were the next steps?
It couldn’t be just a check in at the beginning and a check in at the end” (IGN, 2014).
Freedan’s comments about the development begin to address the second criterion
of doing native, engaging Native people in the development process beyond a
“consultant” mode. Ishmael Hope, one of the game writers and a member of the
Cook Inlet Tribal Council reflects that the depth of collaboration between the two
organizations (E-Line Media and Upper One Games) was central from the beginning
of the project:

This project needed an equal collaboration with Native people, not only because it was
ethically responsible, but to make a better video game. There were too many details, too
many facets of our worldview, too much dialogue to navigate to even know where to begin,
that it couldn’t have successfully been created without equal Native collaboration on every
level.

(Never Alone Interview Series: Ishmael Hope, 2014)

This collaboration began from the earliest stages of the project. Alan Gershenfeld,
president of E-Line Media, reflects that initially an adventure style game seemed like
a more natural choice as a vehicle to convey the story of the game. However, in their
communication with elders and cultural advisors they realized that to truly convey the
values of interdependence and collaboration, a puzzle platformer felt most appropriate
to all involved. The game design team included formal collaboration with twenty-four
cultural advisors, many of whom appear in the Cultural Insights, short documentary-
style videos that can be unlocked during gameplay.
Gloria O’Neil, President and CEO of the Cook Inlet Tribal Council, directly
addresses the third criterion for doing Native, stating “CITC is all about working with
Alaskan Native people to connect them to their potential” (CITC Alaska, 2016). The
Tribal nonprofit provides a variety of services to the communities it serves, but always
centers itself on understanding the community and responding to the needs of the
community. Freedan notes that, as an organization, they felt that gaming gave them
an opportunity to both provide positive representation for their community and re-
engage their young people in the beauty of their culture. Thus, there can be no doubt

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that Never Alone is authentically accomplishing something that the community wants
acknowledged.

DOING NATIVE: HILL AGENCY: PURITY/DECAY CASE STUDY

As I have previously mentioned, Never Alone is one of the most written about games
that meet these criteria for doing Native, but it is far from the only game. Indeed,
with the opening up of game design tools, the accessibility of learning resources, and
a community of supporters and colleagues, the past several years have seen the release
of a number of games that do Native. When Rivers Were Trails and Mikiwam: Solar
Punk Herbalism are examples of two released games, and Biskaabiiyaang: The Indigenous
Metaverse is currently being developed. In these games we see a variety of genres,
aesthetics, and goals. In this section, I’d like to discuss a game that looks and plays
wildly different from Never Alone, but nonetheless both seems Native and does Native:
Hill Agency: Purity/Decay.
Hill Agency is a pointed choice, as it allows me to address more fully the question
of “time-period appropriate” as part of seeming Native. Many games envision Native
cultures as hopelessly frozen at the moment of contact, and tend to visually and aurally
depict Native people as if they have not changed in the last several centuries. Elvira II:
Jaws of Cerberus is an example of this. The unnamed Native character in the game, a
“holy man” of his people apparently moonlighting as a janitor in Elvira’s movie studio,
speaks in broken English, using a “Tonto-speak” dialect. This is an incredibly odd
choice, as the game is set contemporaneously to its release (1990’s). The game relies
on stock tropes and a player unfamiliar with Native cultures who will not question the
likelihood that all three of the following are simultaneously true about this man: 1) he
is a first language speaker whose English is not fluent; 2) he is a holy man of his people;
and 3) he is a janitor working in Elvira’s film studio. This character, from his attire,
speech, and characterization, would not seem out of place in a game set a century or
more prior, something that should immediately suggest to players that his depiction is
not what we might call “time-period appropriate.”
Hill Agency, on the other hand, is set hundreds of years in the future. Meagan
Byrne, the studio founder and game director, describes the setting as “almost at the
end of colonization” (Dreamspeakers, 2023). Being set in the future, interpreting how
the game seems Native means thinking about Indigenous Futurisms and imagining
how contemporary Native cultures will exist and persist into the future. The main
character, Meygeen Hill (who goes almost exclusively by Hill in the game), is a
Néhinaw (Cree) private detective. Thus, the game identifies a specific Nation for
its main character. Additionally, neon signs containing words and phrases in Cree
are found throughout the city. The game highlights many visual elements of Native
culture, both broad and specific, while also considering how these characters make
sense in their contemporary world. Characters wear hats with beaded brims, have
traditional tattoos, but also are shown as modern, working in a variety of jobs and
occupying different places in the social structure of this futuristic world. In short, Hill
and those around her are both Native and futuristic. They have clearly maintained
elements of their traditional style, language, and arts, while also fully existing in a
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futuristic world. Unlike the nameless, nationless janitor of Elvira II, the characters
in Hill Agency show a continuity that stretches seven generations back and forward
and respects both the past and the future. In short, the futuristic game achieves the
objective of seeming Native by using contemporary culture as a springboard to
creatively envision a vibrant future.
The game also succeeds in doing Native, under a very different model from Never
Alone. As a neo-noir point-and-click detective game, the primary mechanic in the
game is understanding and navigating dialog trees. To do so successfully, the players
controlling Hill must learn to interact respectfully within kinship communities and
to respect their relationships. Thus, the main game mechanics models traditional
values of kinship, reciprocity, and respect. As for involving Native people beyond
a consultant model, Achimostawinan Games is an independent Indigenous-owened
business. Byrne reflects on the studio’s motto, stating “During the development of our
game, it was really important for us to have as many Indigenous people as possible
in key positions, and even in some non-key positions, to have their voices and
perspectives reflected in the game” (Chong, 2023). Because the game is not created
in connection with a specific community, as Never Alone was, it might seem difficult
to assess whether or not Hill Agency in fact is able to accomplish something the
community wants. However, in their discussions about the game, both Byrne and
Sa’dekaronhes Esquivel (Lead Artist for the game), reflect on wanting to do better in
terms of representation and wanting to create space to imagine not just a more hopeful
present for Native people, but a vibrant and dynamic future. I feel confident that both
of these are goals that many Native people would resonate with.

SEEMING AND DOING AS DESIGNERS

In 1982, Taito released Indian Battle, an arcade cabinet that features a nameless cowboy
fighting against an “Indian raid.” The flyer for the arcade cabinet provides a barebones
story: “Tomahawks and arrows are flying toward you from all sides. Snakes, scorpions,
and condors are coming after you, too. Your only protection is your rifle. How long can
you defend your ranch?” The Native characters in the game are only recognizable as
such by the weapon they hold (a club, tomahawk, or bow) and by a feathered headband
on their head. Thus begins the history of Native representation in video games. The
Native characters in this game are never identified as part of any particular Native
nation or culture and are entirely deindividualized. In the forty years of gaming since
then, this story has been repeated time and time again, with games that take very little
interest in making any attempt to seem Native. Indeed, 2021 saw the release of This
Land is My Land, a game that pitches itself as a Native revenge story but involved
consultation with no Native nations. In a Reddit post, the developer claims that their
goal is to “provide [the player] with a Native American experience, unlike any other”
but affirms that they did not feel the need to name any specific Nation or culture to
do so or, by extension, to work with any Native peoples, Nations, or organizations
(Giroux, 2021). Sadly, many games continue to be made by developers that make no
effort to have their games seem Native, but instead trade in stereotypical media tropes
and Google searches to define our diverse cultures as one monolith.
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 However, while these games certainly still are made, and may always be made, a
number of studios are trying to more deeply consider what it might mean to try to
seem Native. Assassin’s Creed 3, by Ubisoft Montreal, comes to mind as an example of
a developer making a solid effort to seem Native by involving consultants from the
Nation they wished to represent and sincerely listening to those consultants when told
not to do things. Similarly, the team creating the third installment of Killer Instinct
worked with the Nez Perce nation to update their depiction of Chief Thunder, a
character meant to be a part of that nation. Moreover, with the increasing accessibility
of tools and distribution platforms, a number of Native people are doing the important
work of doing Native in game design.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How can/should settler scholars study games and media in the context of “seeming
Native?”
2. How do dominant frameworks and norms complicate action towards “doing Native”
across the contexts of game development and community collaboration?
3. Given the demographics and cultural norms of mainstream gaming communities, why
is it important for games to both “seem Native” and “do Native”? What are other
examples of games that “seem Native” or “do Native”?

KEY TERMS

Seeming Native: Related to the concept of authenticity, media that seems Native must
identify the specific tribe or nation represented, depict accurate visual aesthetics for
clothing, housing, and other iconography, and include appropriate language and
soundscapes.
Being/Doing Native: Related to concept of accountability, media that does Native must
have story and gameplay that reflect Native values, be developed in close consultation and
with meaningful input from Indigenous communities, and contribute to the aims of the
Indigenous community.
Indigenous futurism: Describes the movement in arts, culture, and society to imagine
alternative futures where Indigenous peoples exercise agency and sovereignty. It is also an
aesthetic form combining traditional Indigenous iconography with futuristic elements. It
is, in some ways, a response to the trope of the “vanishing Indian” which insists on
depicting Indigenous peoples as refusing technology as part of their rigid adherence to the
past.

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American Indian Identity Negotiations in Academia.. Journal of Cultural
Diversity, 21(1), 29-35.
10. LaPensée, E. (2014). Survivance as an Indigenously Determined Game.
AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 10(3), 263-275.
11. Madsen, D. L. (2017). The Mechanics of Survivance in Indigenously-directed
Video-games: Invaders and Never Alone. Transmotion, 3(2), 79-110.
12. Meloche, K. (2017). Playing in the Digital Qargi: Iñupiat Gaming and Online
Competition in Kisima Inŋitchuŋa. Transmotion, 3(1), 1-1.
13. Never Alone Interview Series: Ishmael Hope. (2014, October 30). Never
Alone. http://neveralonegame.com/interview-never-alone-writer-ishmael-
hope/
14. Williams, D., Martins, N., Consalvo, M., & Ivory, J. D. (2009). The Virtual

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 Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games. New Media
& Society, 11(5), 815-834.

GAMEOGRAPHY
1. Age of Empires III. Ensemble Studios, 2005. Microsoft Windows Game.
2. Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition. Tantalus Media and Forgotten Empires,
2020. Microsoft Windows game.
3. Age of Empires III: The Warchiefs. Ensemble Studios, 2006. Microsoft Windows
game.
4. Assassin’s Creed 3. Ubisoft Montreal, 2012. Xbox 360 game. *
5. Custer’s Revenge. JHM Ltd., 1982. Atari 2600 game.
6. Elvira II: Jaws of Cerberus. Horrorsoft, 1992. MS-DOS game.
7. Hill Agency: Purity/Decay. Achimostawinan Games, 2023. Microsoft Windows
game.
8. Indian Battle. Taito, 1982. Arcade cabinet game.
9. Killer Instinct. Double Helix Games, 2013. Xbox One game.
10. Mikiwam: Solar Punk Herbalism. Studio Ekosi, 2023. Microsoft Windows game
demo.
11. Never Alone. Upper One Games, 2014. Microsoft Windows game.
12. Prey. Human Head Studios, 2006. Xbox 360 game.
13. Saiyūki World 2: Tenjōkai no Majin. Jaleco, 1988. Famicom game.
14. This Land is My Land. Game-Labs LLC, 2021. Microsoft Windows game.
15. When Rivers Were Trails. Indian Land Tenure, 2019. Microsoft Windows game.
16. Whomp ‘Em. Jaleco, 1991. Nintendo Entertainment System game.

Notes
1. Cushman’s original terms and Arola’s modification both use the term “Indian”. In my own writing,
however, I prefer the term Native.

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SPOTLIGHT 12: INDIGENOUS RESEARCH AND EPISTEMOLOGIES

Based on a discussion with Kelly Laurila and Hector Perez

SUMMARY

Can Indigenous research paradigms exist within Western academia?Dr.

Kelly Laurila and Dr. Hector Perez begin their conversation on this
question by telling stories of how they’ve been able to do just that, and
emphasizing how both the form and content of research can honour
Indigenous knowledge and experience. The speakers chose to have this
conversation with the seating arranged in a circle, to help all participants
feel connected. After Dr. Laurila led the thanksgiving, in which everyone
present gave thanks to the many living creatures and non-living things all
around us, she led a smudging ceremony, encouraging the in-person
attendees to participate. She also encouraged participants to connect
through song. Dr. Laurila’s research specializes in using song as a
pathway to building relationships. For one of her major projects, she
facilitated meetings between an Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit
drum circle and the Waterloo Regional Police Chorus. Given the history
of power imbalances and abuse, looking at forms of reconciliation
between the police and Indigenous groups is key to creating a better,
safer future. Acknowledging and understanding this history was crucial
for the groups to connect. These meetings involved teaching and singing
songs, eating together, and sharing knowledge. Each activity was critical
to allow for healing and understanding. To conduct this research, Dr.
Laurila used Indigenous paradigms emphasizing relationality to create a
trustful, healing environment so that the participants gain the most
benefits from their involvement in the research. The following
summarizes some of the key concepts, themes, and questions from the
paradigm that she described.

APPLICATION POINTS

Dr. Laurila’s description of her research practices shows both the careful
considerations that she took in her application of ethical imperatives for
engaging with Indigenous participants, and the ways that
these considerations are often outside Western academic norms. In many

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 ways, games studies and games user research have inherited the same
Western disciplinary norms that prevent a more widespread acceptance
and/or application of the research practices that Dr. Laurila describes.
These disciplinary conventions raise important questions for our
research practices. As we strive to engage in ethical research, note the
recurring questions about how we involve participants beyond data
collection, questions about the researcher’s relationship to structures of
power, and questions about the underlying theories and beliefs
structuring academic work.

PARTICIPANT TRUST

One of the most significant aspects of participant-based research is consent.

Given historical and ongoing colonial harms, research with Indigenous
individuals must be done as a partnership. Before the research process begins, an
important investment of time and energy is needed to build trust and establish an
understanding between the researcher and the participants.
Dr. Laurila’s dissertation, “Reconciliation: Facilitating Ethical Space between
Indigenous Women and Girls of a Drum Circle and White, Settler Men of a Police
Chorus,” examines the partnership between the Waterloo Regional Police Chorus
and an Indigenous women and girls drum circle within the broader context of
historical and ongoing systemic colonial violence and efforts towards
reconciliation. Before the research began, she learned that the Police Chorus had
already been doing outreach at community events, but they had not yet developed
a relationship with Indigenous communities, and they wanted to find a way to
build a partnership.
As an initial step, and because she had worked with them previously, Dr. Laurila
agreed to bring the proposition of a partnership to an Indigenous women and
girls drum circle. As she discussed the possibility with them, she noted that they
were very aware of the power differences between Indigenous communities and
the police, represented here by the white men in the chorus. Building trust
between everyone involved was crucial, and it was integral to ask the drum circle
what they hoped to gain from this research and the proposed partnership. When
she asked how the research might help them, they said, “We wish for a future
where our children and grandchildren, if they’re in need, they can go to the
police.”

KNOWLEDGE OWNERSHIP

The harm that has been done to Indigenous peoples at the hands of researchers is
well documented. Too often, Western researchers enter communities to do their
research and leave without sharing the results or inquiring as to whether the

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results align with the lived experience of the individuals they are researching.
Because of this, Dr. Laurila drew upon the principles of OCAP: ownership,
control, access, and possession. OCAP principles outline ownership of data and
information related to Indigenous populations, as well as complete control for
Indigenous communities as to how that information is used.
As Dr. Laurila explains, “Indigenous people and communities have a vulnerability
when it comes to anyone doing research with them,” because often researchers
have told them one motivation for the research while actually pursuing another.
She continues, “And so ethically, I have to go beyond. Indigenous peoples must
have ownership of the data in any information related to them and their self-
determination. Sovereignty over that information as well as control of how the
information is used or stored [must be considered].”
When interpreting Indigenous data through a Western lens, researchers interpret
data according to how they understand the world to be, but not necessarily how
participants see it. Thus, Dr. Laurila connected with the participants to find out
what the data meant to them, what they identified as important, and what they
interpreted as meaningful.

RECONCILING INDIGENOUS ETHICS WITH WESTERN ACADEMIC

ETHICS

This research straddled the worlds of Indigenous ethics and ethics requirements
within Western academic practices. There were ethical considerations for the
research itself, but also in submitting an ethics review to the university’s ethics
board. Often, Dr. Laurila found that the two forms of ethics were difficult to
reconcile. For instance, although Indigenous ethics value having relationships
with the Indigenous participants before starting the research to gain trust, this is
something that Western academia does not traditionally consider a ‘good’
practice.
Within the university and Western academic context, it is typically expected that
the researcher is neutral, objective, and outside of their participant’s community.
When submitting her research protocol to the research board, Dr. Laurila called
upon ethical teachings made outside of academia. “It’s completely unethical that I
would do any research if I didn’t know the people,” she said.
“Because I know them all, I’m up to a higher level of ethics because I have to do
right by them through the research.”
Colonial structures and narratives often exclude Indigenous perspectives within
research and academia. Dr. Laurila described being challenged throughout her
research as she tried to have Indigenous practices recognized as knowledge. She
said, “One of the areas that I was challenged on in my research with the ethics
[board], is that knowledge would be coming through dreams, through smudging,
through ceremony, through fasting on the land.” Dr. Laurila described having to
“talk the language of an institution for them to understand,” which is especially
challenging because they hold power over whether to fund and/or approve
research projects.

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 INDIGENOUS RESEARCH PARADIGMS

When making research connections and designing studies, Dr. Laurila uses an
Indigenous research paradigm based on wholism, interconnectedness and
relationships. Dr. Laurila shared that she cannot understand anything without
seeing how it’s connected to other things; whether designing a research study, a
course, or a workshop, she looks to see how it will be viewed wholistically, and
how all the pieces are related to one another. In her own practice, she describes
this paradigm as a circle divided into four relational quadrants (east, south, west,
north), as well as a central quadrant that focuses on the researcher.

RESEARCH: WHOLISM, INTERCONNECTEDNESS,

AND RELATIONSHIPS

The Centre: Who are you?

The researcher is positioned at the centre of the circle. Who you are, your roots,
identity, and motivations affect all your decisions and parts of the research. One key
factor is understanding how you fit in with the community you are researching,
whether you are an insider or an outsider. This then helps you evaluate what you need
to do to gain the community’s trust to conduct the research.

The East: Spiritual and Vision Knowledge

Ethical research practices involve developing considerations for the spirit of
relationships, reciprocity, respect, responsibility, and accountability. Understanding
each of these in relation to the project will allow for a better understanding of why the
research is relevant. Dr. Laurila suggests that one way to start is by recognizing and
understanding the effects of colonization on research ethics.
The South: Emotional and Relational Knowledge
Relational development must happen before what is typically considered research and
must continue afterward. Especially when conducting research with participants, it is
key to think about how the participants exist and live in relation to the greater
community. You also must look at the history of oppression or generational harm that
might affect the participants’ ability to participate and their ability to trust you as a
researcher.
The West: Mental and Cognitive Knowledge
A key factor of Indigenizing research is seeing the research questions through a
wholistic lens. This wholistic perspective encourages you to think critically about how
the different parts of the research—the conception, participants, interpretation of data,
and mobilization of it—are connected.
The North: Physical and Action Knowledge
Physical knowledge describes both the actual actions you take as the researcher to get
the results and how those results are communicated. This is something that informs
how you engage with participants in interviews, sharing circles, focus groups, and

220
other interactions. It also pertains to how the knowledge you produce is mobilized
and what use you put it to in the world beyond academic publishing.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What is your positionality vis-a-vis Indigenous peoples? What are your

motivations for conducting this research? How are these motivations connected to
your identity in ways that are not immediately apparent?
2. How are colonial structures impacting your research? How do they shape
your intentions and how you communicate your intentions? How do they
determine the forms of knowledge you will look to uncover and/or produce?
3. What are the typical institutional ethics approvals required for your research?
How are these institutional imperatives in conflict with Indigenous ethics of
relationality? What steps can you take to overcome these conflicts?
4. How can you mobilize your research to benefit the communities that participated
in it? What form would the knowledge take in those venues or contexts? What
supports would you require to accomplish this kind of knowledge translation? How
might you measure the impact of this kind of knowledge mobilization?

KEY TERMS

OCAP principles: Stands for ownership, control, access, and possession. A set of
guidelines outlining ownership of data and information related to Indigenous
populations, as well as complete control for Indigenous communities as to how that
information is used.
Colonial structures: The assemblage of institutional requirements and ways of
knowing that undergird the accepted practices of Western research.

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SPOTLIGHT 13: HISTORY AND CULTURE THROUGH
TRADITIONAL GAMES

Based on a workshop by Dallas Squire

SUMMARY

Onkwehonwe Games offers programs and workshops that use

traditional games to learn about First Nations culture. In this hands-on
workshop, Dallas Squire presented three games: lacrosse, bone and
toggle, and the peach pit game, showing how each game has connections
to the history and culture of the Six Nations of the Grand River. For
Dallas, each game offers an opportunity to reflect on our values and
practices, and each is an opportunity for storytelling and sharing.
Ultimately, Dallas shows how these games—and our experiences in this
workshop—foster deeper relationships, acting as good medicine by
contributing to enjoyment and healing.

APPLICATION POINTS

Dallas Squire shows us that games mean so much to the communities

that play them and that we cannot understand that meaning without also
understanding the histories and cultures of players. Whether our work
involves collecting perceptions of players through surveys to understand
the uses and gratifications of play, or close reading and textual analysis to
discern what makes them fun, these historical and cultural contexts are
critical. Squire shows that for First Nations communities, Indigenous
knowledge is embedded into traditional games, with teachings that point
to connections between humans, land, spirituality, and culture.
Extending the factors that we include in our analysis is a recognition of
the broader significance of games. The ways that Squire layers these
dimensions into his descriptions of traditional games can also suggest
more transformative considerations to mainstream approaches to game
research and design. Indigenous practitioners and scholars bring
Indigenous ways of knowing to their work with games, with
methodologies that emphasize relational frameworks. For settler scholars
and game designers, recognizing and respecting the stories and
cultures of these games can offer a reminder that there is much more at

222
 stake when we study and/or make games: if games represent our history
and culture, what stories do they tell of our relational contexts?

In this workshop, Dallas Squire of Onkwehonwe Games (which translates to

Original People Games) shows that traditional games are an opportunity to learn
about the practices, values, and beliefs of First Nations cultures. Squire argues
that media portrayals of First Nations people are often negative and/or focus
solely on struggles for justice. For Squire, although everyone should develop a
better awareness of these issues, including the ongoing trauma of residential
schools, murdered and missing women, or the reasons behind ongoing blockades
and protests, this is not culture. An education and understanding of First Nations
communities must go further.
The programming and workshops of Onkwehonwe Games use traditional games
to extend this conversation, but Squire emphasizes that there is much more at
play: “It’s not just games,” Squire says, “It’s storytelling, it’s sharing, it’s education,
it’s history, it’s math, it’s geography.” Students and participants of these
workshops are reminded of the context for these games within the broader
diversity of Indigenous people in Canada: the Six Nations of the Grand River
each represent different histories and practices within a country that has over 630
First Nations communities.
For the Six Nations of the Grand River (which includes Seneca, Cayuga,
Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora peoples), one object that holds
special significance is the Hiawatha wampum belt. Wampum belts are made of
shell beads and used by Six Nations people as a way of tracking time and history
using pictures and symbols. The word wampum comes from the Wampanoag
people of the East Coast; who taught the Six Nations people about water and its
ability to retain memory. The belt represents how a great leader, Hiawatha,
created a confederacy system to ensure peace among five competing nations
(later joined by a sixth). Squire explains how the belt’s four white squares and a
tree show that the five nations buried their weapons under a tree and vowed
never to turn them on one another again.
Like historically significant and symbolic objects, games also contribute to and
reflect Six Nations culture. Lacrosse is a game that has been played since “the
beginning of time,” Squire explains. The game is integral throughout a person’s
life, as Haudenosaunee infants are traditionally gifted a miniature lacrosse stick at
birth and eventually buried with their full-sized stick. The game was historically
used to settle disputes between clans and within nations and was also played
ceremonially to honour new cycles of life in the Spring. In this context, Dallas
introduces the concept of ‘good medicine’, an activity that holds beauty and brings
a sense of balance to one’s life. For him, lacrosse has fulfilled that role.

ADE FOR GAMES 223

 Workshop participants were then invited to play games as Squire described the
lessons that the games offer. In the bone and toggle game, a length of string
connects a stick to a circular bone with a hole through the centre. In the game,
players aim to land the stick, or toggle, through the hole in the bone. The game
teaches patience and gentleness, encouraging focus and clarity. By contrast, the
peach pit game reflects a Haudenosaunee creation story in which two competitive
siblings play the game to resolve their differences. Traditionally, the game uses
dried-out peach pits that are burned on one side. The players shake the pits in a
wooden bowl and toss them onto the ground, trying to get all the pits to come up
on the light or dark side. “In that story, nobody wins that game,” Squire says. “So
they went on to play lacrosse, because they heard the stories about this game
being played in the sky world.”
Squire notes that when we play these games, the lessons that they offer do not
always come immediately, but they create opportunities to engage with
Indigenous history and culture. The games are an opportunity for people to share
stories, listen to each other, and create lasting personal connections.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. How might a cultural awareness of traditional objects and games reorient media
representations of Indigenous people?
2. How do your views of national borders shape your understanding of history, and
how might a consideration of the traditional territories of First Nations people
change those views of history?
3. What steps can we take to better acknowledge the diversity of Indigenous cultures
across the social, historical, and geographical contexts of games?

KEY TERMS

Wampum belt: Traditional belts used by First Nations peoples to track historical
events, using shell beads to create symbols. The Hiawatha wampum belt specifically
tells the story of the uniting of the Six Nations into a Confederacy by a man named
Hiawatha. Dallas notes that the Hiawatha wampum belt also functions as a map
demonstrating the traditional territory, from east to west, of the Mohawks, Oneidas,
Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, with Tuscarora people being the sixth nation to
join the Confederacy.
Good medicine: Personal activities that bring joy, beauty, and balance to a person’s
life. Dallas explains that having been a lifelong lacrosse player, lacrosse has been his
good medicine, bringing him enjoyment throughout his life.

224
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS AND SPEAKERS

André Brock, PhD, is an associate professor at George State University who has expertise
on racial representation in video games. His research focuses on the representations of
black women and weblogs, whiteness, Blackness, and digital technoculture. He is also
well-known for his recent work on Black Twitter and has challenged social science and
communication research to confront the ways in which the field has preserved a colour-blind
perspective. His book, “Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures,”
highlights issues of race and ethnicity from contemporary digital culture, and
discusses how Blackness gets worked out in various technological domains. By creating
important discourse on Black relationships alongside technology, Dr. Brock brings about a
sense of community in being Black online in today’s age of social media and technology.
Jordan Clapper, PhD, is a queer, unregistered Ponca of Oklahoma game developer,
game theorist, and narrative theory practitioner. Their writings and games seek to
challenge underlying normativities that exist in both games and theories. Their present
work examines the intersections between queer game studies, Indigenous games and
literature, and narrative theories of play. They are an Assistant Professor of Video Game
Development and Design at Washington State University.
A.M. Darke, MFA, is an artist experimenting with media in the form of games,
performance, software, and social practice. An Associate Professor of Digital Arts and New
Media, and Performance, Play & Design at UC Santa Cruz, Darke also directs the Open Source
Afro Hair Library , a free 3D resource of Black hair textures and styles. Darke’s practice
is informed by her expansive identities and interests, particularly as a neurodivergent,
genderchaotic Black woman in search of collective freedom and healing. Her work has
been shown internationally and featured in publications such as VICE, The New York Times,
and NPR.
Steven Dashiell, PhD, is a visiting affiliate researcher in the Game Center of American
University, and holds a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture. Steven’s work focuses on
the sociology of language and the nature of discourse in male-dominated spaces, notably
gaming, military, and other subcultures. He has published research regarding online discourse,
gaming, and masculinity in the Journal of Men’s Studies, Sexuality & Culture, and Games &
Culture , among other places.
Triskal DeHaven is currently on hiatus from pursuing a PhD in Systems Design Engineering
at the University of Waterloo. He holds an MSc in Human Centered Interactive
Technologies from the University of York in the UK, and a BSc in Pre-graduate Psychology
from Middle Tennessee State University in TN, USA. He is formerly a User Experience
Research for the AbleGamers Charity and currently working with Oculus VR for Meta. His main
interests include making games more accessible for player with disabilities, virtual reality, and Games
User Research. He is also interested in branching the gap between academia and the industry through
networking efforts.

ADE FOR GAMES 225

Cyan DeVeaux is a PhD Candidate at Stanford University. As a member of the Virtual
Human Interaction Lab and Human-Computer Interaction Group, she researches the
psychological, behavioral, and sociocultural implications of augmented reality (AR) and virtual
reality (VR). Her current work explores identity, culture, and embodiment in social AR/VR.
DeVeaux is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Stanford Graduate
Fellowship in Science & Engineering, and Stanford Technology & Racial Equity Graduate
Fellowship.
Itoro Emembolu, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta. Her research
focuses on digital upskilling, capacity building, digital innovations, entrepreneurship, and
bridging the unemployment gap. She is exploring graduates’ career pathways in the video
games industry.
Tara Fickle, PhD, is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and an
Affiliated Faculty member in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, the
Center for the Study of Women in Society, and the Center for Asian & Pacific Studies. She
received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and her B.A.
from Wesleyan University. Dr Fickle’s research interests include Asian/Asian American
literature, Game Studies, the Digital Humanities, and Comics Studies. Her first book,“The
Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities ,”(NYU Press , 2019, winner
of Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award), explores how games have been
used to establish and combat Asian and Asian American racial stereotypes. Dr Fickle’s critical and
creative work has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Literature Studies,
MELUS, and various public humanities portals.
Akil Fletcher, PhD, is an award-winning anthropologist and a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in
the Society of Fellows at Princeton University. Utilizing his research which intersects between
Anthropology, African American Studies, and Game studies, Fletcher explores and
teaches about the lived experiences of Black individuals in online gaming spaces. Fletcher
earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California Irvine, where he wrote his
dissertation “Playing in Color: An Exploration of Black Gaming Communities and
Practices ,” which discussed how Black communities use digital platforms to form
selfhood and relationships in gaming spaces while circumventing forms of racism and anti-
Blackness in games like Final Fantasy XIV and communication platforms like Discord. In
doing so, his work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of
California.
Sarah Christina Ganzon, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Gaming, Media and
Communication at Simon Fraser University. Her research revolves mostly around the
areas of game studies and digital fandoms. Recently, she finished her thesis on otome
games in English, and otome game players. She holds a PhD in Communication
Studies at Concordia University and an MA in English Literature from Cardiff
University. Prior to starting her doctorate, she taught courses in literature and the
humanities at the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas and Far Eastern
University. She has published in Games and Culture, Critical Studies in Media Communication,
Human Technology, and the journal of Transformative Works and Culture.

226
Elaine Gómez-Sanchez, MA, is a prominent figure within the digital works community, and
co-founder of Latinx in Gaming . As a Latina, she has lived experience within the games
industry, is an independent Unity developer and games educator. Through her presentation,
she plans to connect cultural appreciation and representation in games and other digital
works. In her presentation, she will speak about how gaming has the power to destroy the
perpetuation of stereotypical perceptions and will explain how games can be designed in a
powerful and uplifting way. By understanding one another’s experiences, histories, cultural
experiences and backgrounds, we can shape creative decision making in games development
to be a more inclusive, mindful and authentic place.
Kenzie Gordon is a PhD Candidate in Digital Humanities and Media & Cultural Studies at
the University of Alberta. Her work examines gender and violence in video games and equity
issues in the game industry.
Kishonna Gray, PhD, is a Professor at the University of Michigan in the School of
Information. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard
University. Dr Gray is the author or co-editor of numerous books and articles
including her foundational 2014 work Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live:
Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins, 2018’s edited collections Woke Gaming
and Feminism in Play (from our very own University of Washington press)
and most recently Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming . She also has a book
currently under contract with NYU Press entitled Black Game Studies . She’s a highly sought
after speaker and regularly addresses both academic and industry audiences such as at the
Game Developers Conference. She is the winner of a number of awards over the years
including The Evelyn Gilbert Unsung Hero Award and the Black in Gaming Foundation’s
Educator Award.
Sean Gouglas, PhD, is a Professor in Digital Humanities and Co-Director of the Certificate
in Computer Game Development at the University of Alberta. He conducts research
on university curriculum related to video game design and study, as well as the relationship
between postsecondary institutions and the video game industry. He has consulted with
government on tax and investment policy as it relates to video game production and has
published reports for SSHRC and HEVGA on the state of the video game industry and higher
education game programs.
Rhona Hanning, PhD, FDC, is a Professor in the School of Public Health Sciences,
Faculty of Health, University of Waterloo (UW) and Fellow of Dietitians of Canada. Rhona’s
research involves evaluation of school, community and policy-based interventions
that support healthy eating for Canadian youth, especially those living in First Nation
communities. Her current teaching and research activity explores decolonizing education
and healthcare practices. A recipient of a UW Award of Excellence in Graduate
Supervision and former Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Rhona counts mentorship as her
career highlight.
Daniel Harley, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford School of
Interaction Design and Business. His research offers critical and design-based approaches to
interactive technologies and multimedia storytelling, with a focus on the XR (or, Extended
Realities) sector, including virtual, mixed, and augmented reality.

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Alison Harvey, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Communications program at Glendon
College, York University. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and
accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labour in digital games. She
is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (2015,
Routledge ) and Feminist Media Studies (2019, Polity ). Her work has also appeared in a
range of interdisciplinary journals, including New Media & Society, Games & Culture,
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Information,
Communication & Society, Social Media & Society , and Studies in Social Justice .
Huan He, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Recently,
he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Digital Studies Institute.
His research engages Asian/American literature and culture, digital studies, and critical
game studies. Currently titled The Racial Interface, his book project examines the
racial associations linking Asian Americans and information technologies. His
research appears / is forthcoming in Configurations, College Literature: A
Journal of Critical Literary Studies, Media-N and an anthology on Asian American game
studies. He also writes poetry, which can be found in Poetry, Sewanee Review, A Public Space,
Beloit Poetry Journal , and elsewhere.
Meghna Jayanth is a narrative designer. 80 Days , her anti-colonial retelling of Verne’s
classic novel won the Independent Games Festival’s Narrative award, earned four BAFTA
nominations and was named TIME’s Game of the Year. She won a Writer’s Guild UK
award in 2015 for 80 Days , and a 2018 Writer’s Guild of America award as part of Horizon:
Zero Dawn’s writing team . She has contributed to world-building and narrative design
for Sunless Sea , This War of Mine, Falcon Age and Sable . Her latest project is Thirsty
Suitors , a game of disappointing your immigrant parents, battling your exes and finding
yourself.
Matthew Jungsuk Howard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Loyola University,
Chicago’s School of Communication. He writes “gyopo media histories” that explore the
intertwinement of the “Korean Wave” of globalized circulation of South Korean popular
culture and peninsular diasporas, particularly in North America. He is particularly
interested in the media-cultural histories of race, ethnicity, and nationality. He has
published in the Journal of Games Criticism, ROM Chip: Journal of Games History , and
the eSports Yearbook . When he is not spoiling all of our favorite entertainment forms,
Matt can be found chasing his step-pug Morty around the house, sneaking treats to his
baby conure, Jennie, and withering under Goober the Cat’s disdainful gaze.
Rilla Khaled, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia
University in Montréal. She directs the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research
Centre. Her work focuses on how playful media can improve daily life, and spans designing
award-winning games, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, working with
BIPOC communities to materialise inclusive futures, establishing foundations for recoverable,
materials-based game design research, and articulating boundaries for experimental uses of AI.
Aster Penney is a queer, transgender, and neurodivergent student studying Health Sciences at the
University of Waterloo, with a focus on emerging health research. His passion for health research
fuels his desire for inclusivity and representation within literature and academia, particularly for
queer communities. His writing journey began with personal projects and grew into a tool for
amplifying marginalized voices, including their own. As he evolves as a writer and advocate, Aster
remains dedicated to fostering a more inclusive literary landscape.

228
Kelly Laurila, PhD, is an Indigenous Sámi and Irish woman with close to 30 years of Anishinaabe
knowledges and experiences; songcarrier of an Indigenous women and girls’ drum circle in
community and in a federal penitentiary; social worker, and educator. She is also an
advocate for ideological and social policy change pertaining to systemic social and justice
practices impacting Indigenous peoples. Dialogue, decolonization, and movement towards
action is at the forefront of her work with reconciliation initiatives.
Cayley MacArthur, PhD, specializes in human-computer interaction (HCI) research, with a focus
on inclusive technologies and inclusion in technology. The implications of this work are broad:
working on inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility in HCI requires interrogating the
perspectives, assumptions, methods, and artifacts encountered in our approaches to
research, design, and the development of new and existing technologies. She has published
and presented interactive demos at top venues in her field. Cayley is also actively engaged in
the research community and has served on the organizing or program committees of CHI 2022,
DIS 2021, CHI 2019, CHI 2018, CHIPLAY 2020, and ISS 2018.
Jess Rowan Marcotte, PhD, is a queer, mixed Mi’kmaw and white European settler game
designer, writer, maker and Doctor of Philosophy (Critical Interaction Design, Individualized
Program) who was born and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Their work focuses on
interactive experiences of all sorts, including hybrid games and alternative interfaces, video
games, larps, tabletop games, and more. They are the lead co-organizer of the Queerness and
Games Conference (QGCon) and one-third of Soft Chaos, a worker’s co-op
that designs intimate, vulnerable interactive experiences.
Jackson McLaren is a PhD Candidate in the Media & Communication program at Temple
University. Hailing from Canada, he received his BA in Psychology and Media,
Communication and Film and MA in Communication and Social Justice from the University
of Windsor. His research interests sit at the intersection of game studies, cultural
studies, and transgender studies. He utilizes qualitative research methods to pursue
questions focused on LGBTQ and specifically transgender representation. Other
research interests include LGBTQ representation in video games and popular
culture, gender and live streaming, and virtual ethnography and other qualitative methods.
Liz Nilsen, PhD, is the Assistant Vice-President of Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs
(GSPA, Interim) at the University of Waterloo. In this role, Dr. Nilsen is a part of the academic
leadership team in GSPA that supports graduate education and community, as well as grad-
related initiatives that align with the University’s strategic planning (e.g., building work-
integrated opportunities). She collaborates with, and provide consult to, Faculties and
other academic support units, promoting fair application of University guidelines. As
well, she is involved in ongoing processes within GSP A, such as coordinating the graduate
petition process, adjudicating graduate scholarships, and enhancing graduate students’ experiences.
Outside this administrative role, Dr. Nilsen is a Professor within the Department of Psychology
and, with a team of graduate students, conduct research on children and adolescents’ socio-
cognitive development (Cognitive Development Lab). As a registered clinical psychologist, Dr.
Nilsen is a clinical supervisor for graduate students’ assessment and treatment activities through
the Centre for Mental Health Research and Treatment.

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Hector Perez, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Health at the University of Waterloo.
He works under the supervision of Lili Liu and Antonio Miguel-Cruz. Supported by the
Games Institute, Hector is co-developing gamified training materials for Indigenous
First Responders in collaboration with two First Nations Communities. Hector’s current
research explores data from police and search and rescue organizations across Canada to
determine risk factors associated with missing incidents involving persons living with
dementia. His research employs Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to determine
models to predict risk and inform prevention. Hector’s interests include exploring the
acceptance and adoption of innovations and digital health technologies for older adults and
caregivers.
E Oropeza earned a MA in English – Rhetoric and Communication Design from the University
of Waterloo in 2023 and BA in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and BS in Family Social
Science at the University of Minnesota in 2019. Their research interests include living dead/
undead figures such as zombies, affect in speculative fictions, and how fear is created and
consumed in visual media.
Vishal Sooknanan is a PhD student at Western University in Industrial
Organizational Psychology. Vishal studies issues of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the
workplace with a focus on the lived experiences of marginalized and minoritized groups and
subtle discrimination. This work has been focused on various workplace settings including the
games industry as part of the First Three Years project. His work can be found on
Scholarship@Western and https://igda.org/dss/.
D. Squinkifer, aka Squinky, is a transgender and neurodivergent new media artist based in
Montreal, with a background in game development and performance. They hold an MFA in
Digital Arts and New Media from UC Santa Cruz and were recognized as part of
Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Games in 2015. They are one of three cofounders of Soft Chaos,
a worker-owned cooperative studio that designs experimental videogames, tabletop
games, larps, art installations, and interactive performances.
Dallas Squire, Kahnyen’kehàka (Mohawk), Turtle Clan from Six Nations of the Grand
River, is the owner and operator of Onkwehonwe Games and the main program facilitator. A
former professional Lacrosse player, Dallas has been sharing culture and games for over a decade.
Creating a safe and positive environment for learning, Dallas encourages participants to experience
the culture through traditional games and storytelling. Over the past several years Onkwehonwe
Games has been able to expand its reach across Ontario and beyond.
Katta Spiel, PhD, is an FWF Hertha-Firnberg scholar at the HCI Group of TU Wien (Vienna
University of Technology), where they work on the intersection of Computer Science, Design and
Cultural Studies. Katta researches marginalised perspectives on technologies to inform interaction
design and engineering in critical ways so they may account for the diverse realities they operate in.
Drawing on methods from (Critical) Participatory Design and Action Research on a background
heavily shaped by Queer Theories and Disability Studies, they collaborate with neurodivergent and/
or nonbinary peers in conducting explorations of novel potentials for designs, methodological
contributions to Human-Computer Interaction and innovative technological artefacts.

230
Kahentawaks Tiewishaw is Bear Clan Kanienʼkehá:ka from Kanehsatake. She earned degrees from
Dawson College and Concordia University. She is a former Research Assistant for Aboriginal
Territories in Cyberspace and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Tiewishaw is a founding
member of Revital Software, a company that is creating video games to revitalize
Indigenous languages in Canada.

Gerald Voorhees, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at

the University of Waterloo. He researches games and new media as sites for the construction and
contestation of identity and culture and has edited books on masculinities in games, feminism in
play, role-playing games, and first-person shooter games. Gerald co-edits Bloomsbury’s Approaches
to Game Studies book series and was managing editor of the Gender in Play trilogy in Palgrave’s
Games in Context book series.

Johanna Weststar, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the DAN Department of Management and
Organizational Studies at Western University and cross-appointed to Industrial/Organizational
Psychology and the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Johanna specializes in
labour and employment relations with a focus on the video game industry where she is interested
in issues of workplace citizenship, representation and unionization, working conditions and the
labour process, project management and occupational identity. You can find her work at
Scholarship@Western, igda.org/dss and GameQoL.

Jennifer Whitson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Sociology and Legal Studies and at the
Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business. She studies the “squishy” side of software
development and has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with game developers since 2012.
You can find her work at: IndieInterfaces.com, first3yearsproject.com, and jenniferwhitson.com.

ADE FOR GAMES 231

INDEX

80 Days, 184 “America Doesn’t Know How to Read the

Work of Black Writers,” 182
AAA games, 5, 46, 50 American rules, 110, 112
Able Gamers, 5 America’s Army, 28
Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace Animal Crossing, 35, 116, 158–60, 191
(AbTeC), 34 anti-Blackness, 104–5, 163
accents, 28, 99, 115 anti-racism
accessibility, 34, 50, 67–68, 133, 136–38 defining, 70–71, 78
accountability, 204–6, 214 as design choice, 70–72, 75, 81–82,
Achimostawinan Games, 213 85–86
action knowledge, 220 features of, 73
Activision Blizzard, 2, 5, 189 measuring, 73–75
Addiction by Design, 191 particularist, 73
adultification, 108–9 Apex Legends, 97
Africa, as location in games, 28 APIs (application programming interfaces),
African diaspora, 33 150
Afro. See Black hairstyles Apple Arcade, 191
Afro Hair Library, 26, 169–70 AR. See augmented reality
Against Flow, 192 Ardse, Kent, 6
agency Ares (character), 99–100
defining, 87, 188 Arola, Kristin, 204–6
over player characters, 83, 180 Arrow Technology Group, 199
as positive effect of gaming, 79, 182 Asia, depictions in games, 128, 187
Age of Empires III (original edition), 203, Asian-American communities
208–9 and ‘American rules,’ 110, 112
Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, 203, 208 and esports, 126
Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs, 208–9 racialized in games, 110, 112–13, 128
Ahmed, Sara, 2–3 Asian characters, 29
Akil Asian communities
Khaled, 115–16, 119 in America, 112–13
Omari, 114, 116, 119 and identity, 123, 125
algorithms and Orientalism, 113
and biases, 4, 172 women, 122–23
and Google, 170 Asian gamers
and racism, 172–73 and esports, 127
Algorithms of Oppression, 170 and stereotypes, 113, 123, 126–27
alibi, 154–56. See also LARP Asianness
Alomar, Sheva (character), 97– as other, 119, 127
98

232
 as racial category, 113, 119–20, 124–25 designing, 98, 162, 166, 169–70, 175,
Asiatic style, as construct, 24, 29, 122, 125 177
ASMR, 122–23 and hair textures. See Black hair
Assassin’s Creed, 189, 214 and representation, 76, 91, 162
audio tooth implants, 146 and white players, 22
Auger, James, 146 Black communities
augmented reality (AR), 114–15, 117 adultification of youth, 108–9
Aunties and Algorithms, 150–52 and approaches to technology, 24, 104
authenticity dehumanization, 166
as cultural capital, 108–9 lesbian, 31–32, 34
and Indigenous representation, 203, and masculinity, 108–9
205–6, 208, 214 and technology, 92
avatars Black Desert Online, 93
and Black users, 177 Black feminist thought, 6, 101
darker-skinned, 177–78 Black Game Devs, 5
defining, 178 Black game makers, 25–26
normative models, 22, 177 Black gamers
relationship to player identities, 175 and digital practices, 92–93
in virtual reality, 175–77 importance of community, 104
in VRChat, 176 and masculinity, 107–8
Awsem, Yas, 75 and representation, 97–98, 104
Axie Infinity, 192 and toxicity, 31–32, 91, 105
Axios, 1 and VR, 175–78
Black hair
Bachelor Party, 71 designing, 165, 171
Baker, Troy, 100 styles, 26, 98, 162, 165–66, 169–70
Baldwin, James, 182 textures, 164, 174
Barr Black identities, in digital spaces, 24, 91,
Matthew, 79 104–5, 167, 170
Pippin, 146–47 Black Intermediality, 104–5
Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em, 71 Black masculinity, 91, 101, 107–9
‘being/doing Native,’ 203–4, 207–14 Blackmon, Samantha, 6
biodata, 150–52 Blackness
biracial characters, 98–99 and colonialist thought, 33
Bird, Ashlee, 25–27, 29–30 defining, 93
Biskaabiiyaang: The Indigenous Metaverse, 212 and identity, 77, 91–92, 105, 163
Bitcoin, 192 representing, 28, 162, 164–66, 169–71,
Black bodies 174
absence in digital spaces, 24, 99 stereotypes of, 31, 163
and Black Virtuality, 167 and voice actors, 100–101
objectification, 28, 77 Black Skin, White Masks, 93
and player identity, 175 Black Twitter, 91
stereotypes, 162, 165 Black Virtuality, 162–63, 166–67, 169–70,
Black characters 173–74

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Black women constrained masculinity, 108–9
characters, 98–99, 168 Cook Inlet Tribal Council (CITC), 210–11
gamers, 31 Cook Your Way, 145
Black youth, adultification of, 108–9 Copeland-Stewart, Alicia, 79
Bleecker, Julian, 145 cornrows, 98, 162, 166, 169. See also Black
Blizzard. See Activision Blizzard hair
bodies Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 3
and disability, 131–34, 136 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 79, 111, 159, 191
and race, 93, 96, 98, 119, 165 Crazy Rich Asians, 113
and Surrogate Body Theory, 131–32 critical design, 143–45, 155
Bogost, Ian, 29, 35 Critical Distance, 5
Bojadžijev, Manuela, 74–75 Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis
Bonnett, Alastair, 72, 74–75 (CTDA), 91, 101–2, 110
Boyle, Frankie, 188 Cross, Katherine, 192
Brand, Ulrich, 180 cryptocurrencies, 192
Brass Lion Entertainment, 49–50 Curtis, Edward S., 198
Brave, Anthony, 209 Cushman, Ellen, 203–6
Brey, Elizabeth, 22–23, 34 Custer’s Revenge, 70–71
Brock, André, 22–24, 28, 91, 104
Bulut, Ergin, 26 Daly, Kyle, 1
Bush, George, 172 Dames Making Games, 5
Butler, Octavia, 104 Daniels, Jessie, 23
Byrne, Meagan, 27, 212–13 Dashiell, Steven, 107–8
data mining, 110, 119
Callahan, David, 30 Data Tomb, 145–46
Camp Kiki, 34 Davis, Viola, 163, 168
Capcom, 98 Dawes Roll, 205
Cards Against Humanity, 70, 75–81 Deaf users, 133
CG Trader, 165 deficit model, 92, 102
Chabot, 149–50 DeHaven, Triskal, 137
Chan, Dean, 22–23, 25, 28–29 dehumanization, 35, 188
ChatGPT, 149 design
Chauvirey, Théo, 144 and accessibility, 50, 132–34, 137–38
Chen, Jiansheng, 119–20 anti-racist, 71–72, 75, 80–81, 85
China, 112–14, 127 colonialist legacies in, 4
Chinese Exclusion Act, 127 consumer-oriented, 145, 155
Citizen, 168 dominator modes of, 179, 187–88, 191,
Civilization series, 22 194
Clubhouse, 95 dystopian, 143, 148–49, 155–56, 193
Coco, 55 and gambling, 192
Code Coven, 34, 51 imperial, 179, 188, 191, 194
cognitive knowledge, 220 narrative, 184, 188
Communicating Masculinity, 101 paratopian, 143–44, 148–49
#communication-so-white, 33, 92 participatory, 155

234
 utopian, 156 Everett, Anna, 24–25, 27, 30
DeVeaux, Cyan, 175–77 exploitation
Dickey, Megan Rose, 2 in game design, 179–80, 192–93
Dietrich, David R., 22 in workplaces, 61, 186
digital divide, 24, 201
digital identity, 92, 102 Facebook, 160, 163, 191, 206
disability Fairly Intelligent Tech, 172
in characters, 34 Fan, Lai-Tze, 81, 83–84
and game design, 129, 132, 134, 137 Fanon, Frantz, 93
identity model, 134, 136, 139 Far Cry, 188
and justice, 134, 136 Feminist Frequency, 6
medical model, 129, 134, 136, 138–39 Fickle, Tara, 24–25
models of, 130, 134–36, 139 Final Fantasy series, 30
and play, 129–33 First Nations communities, 63, 199, 222–24.
social model, 134, 136, 139 See also Indigenous communities
and Surrogate Body Theory, 131–32 The First Three Years, 42–43
Distributive Blackness, 92–93 Fleming, Crystal M., 72
‘doing Native,’ 203–4, 207–14 Fletcher, Akil, 31–32, 104–5
domination, as basis of game design, “The Flying Head,” 199, 201
179–80, 183 Forgotten Empires, 208
dominator culture, 179, 186–87, 195 Frazier, Chloe (character), 98
Douglas, Christopher, 25, 30 Freedan, Amy, 211
Drake, Nathan (character), 96, 98, 100 fridging, 96, 102
dramaturgical self, 94, 102 Fron, Janine, 23
Drucker, Johanna, 147 Full Spectrum Warrior, 28
Dungeons & Dragons, 74, 84, 123
Dunn, Anthony, 145 gadugi, 205
Duterte, Rodrigo, 158–59 gambling, 112, 191
dystopian design, 143, 148–49, 155–56, 193 gameplay
and accessibility, 50, 134
Eco, Umberto, 182, 195 and ‘American rules,’ 110, 112
Effective Altruism, 190 characteristics of, 29
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), 148 and narrative design, 195
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, 34 and player racialization, 29, 33
E-Line Media, 210–11 workification of, 191–92
Eliot, T.S., 193 gamer doxa, 107–8
Elvira II: Jaws of Cerberus, 212–13 gamer exceptionalism, 108
emotional knowledge, 220 Gamergate, 6, 72
Entertainment Software Association (ESA), gamers
32, 43 and myth of meritocracy, 185
esports, 31, 34, 113, 126–28 self-identification, 94–95
Esquivel, Sa’dekaronhes, 213 stereotyping, 91, 107–8, 132
Essed, Philomena, 78–79 games industry
Evening Cicada, 170

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 discrimination and harrassment, 1, 5, 46, Harte, Bret, 113
48, 95, 181, 186 Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 208–10,
labour conditions, 2, 5, 20, 47–48 223–24
need for diversity in, 33, 42–46 Hawreliak, Jason, 6
and racialization, 21, 25–26, 29, 32 HCI (human-computer interaction), 4, 130
games programs, 42–43, 46–48 He, Huan, 122
#GameStudiesSoWhite, 33 head-mounted displays. See HMDs
Gaming at the Edge, 175 The Heathen Chinee, 113
#gaming-so-white, 92 Hiawatha, 198, 223–24
Ganzon, Sarah Christina, 158–60 Higgin, Tanner, 22, 28
Gay Spaceship Games, 81 Higher Education Video Game Alliance
Gerbner, George, 35 (HEPGA), 43
Gerling, Kathrin, 130–31 ‘high-tech Black face,’ 22
Gershenfeld, Alan, 211 Hill, Meygeen (character), 212–13
GitHub, 149 Hill Agency, 203, 212–13
God of War, 91, 99–100 HMDs (head-mounted displays), 176
Goffman, Erving, 94 Höglund, Johan, 25, 28
good medicine, 222–24 hooks, bell, 148, 186–87, 194–95
Google, 2, 117, 170 Hope, Ishmael, 211
Google Maps, 117–19 House Flipper, 147
Gordon, Lewis, 46, 93, 191 Howard, Matthew Jungsuk, 126–28
GPS, 94, 114–15, 117–19 Huizinga, Johan, 24
Grace, Lindsay, 26 human-computer interaction. See HCI
Grand River First Nations, 222–23 Hutchinson, Rachael, 34
Grand Theft Auto series, 22, 27–28, 34, 101
Gray, Kishonna L., 26, 31–32, 34, 61, 63–64, Imaginative Film and Media Arts Festival,
83–85 200
The Great British Bake-Off, 194 imperial mode, 179–82, 186, 188, 191–95
Guess Who?, 171 Indian Battle, 213
gyopo-gam, 126–28 Indigenous communities
and citizenship, 205
Hage, Ghassan, 72–73, 85 ethics, 219
Hair Nah, 26 as game consultants, 207, 209
Hancock, Michael, 6 honoring knowledge, 26–27, 217, 222
Hanke, John, 118 importance of storytelling, 26, 200
Hanning, Rhona, 62–63 and mono-culture, 208–9
harassment and OCAP, 219, 221
in-game, 31, 91 and reconciliation, 218
sexual, 5, 186 and tribal identification, 205
workplace, 48, 181–82, 186 women, 217–18
harm reparation, 64 youth, 34, 199–200
Harrell, D. Fox, 162–63, 167–68, 173 Indigenous creators, 26–27, 32, 197, 200,
Harrer, Sabine, 132 203
Harris, H.D., 170 Indigenous futurism, 212, 214

236
Indigenous Game Devs, 27 Kowalczyk, Frederyk, 200
Indigenous games research, 21, 30, 204–6, Kratos (character), 99–101
217, 220 Kuhn, Thomas, 149
Indigenous Interactive Digital Media and
Video Game Database, 27 lacrosse, 222–24
Indigenous language learning games, 197, Lagace, Naithan, 29
200 LaLone, Nicolas, 23
Indigenous Language Video Game Library, Lamar, Kendrick, 55
197, 201 Lamsam, Teresa T., 205
Indigenous Metaverse, 212 Lantz, Frank, 181
Indigenous representation LaPensée, Elizabeth, 26–27, 208–10
authenticity, 208 LARP (live action role-playing), 153–56
‘being/doing Native,’ 203–4, 207–14 LatinX characters, 25, 27, 29
characters, 27, 29, 206–9, 213 LatinX game studies, 25
cultures, 198, 202, 204, 207–9, 212 LatinXinGaming, 51, 57
stereotypes, 207, 212 Latour, Bruno, 73
‘vanishing Indian,’ 198, 202, 214 Laurila, Kelly, 217–20
Infinity Ward, 2 Layne, Alex, 6
International Game Developer Association League of Legends, 126–28
(IDGA), 43 Leibovitz, Annie, 163
International Game Developers Association Leonard, David, 22, 25–28
(IDGA), 5, 32, 43 LGBTQ+ gamers, 81, 95, 175
Isen, Taija, 182–85 LGBTQ Video Game Archive, 5
It Is as if You Were Doing Work, 147 L’Hirondelle, Cheryl, 198
Linkin Park, 55
Jackson, Ronald, 101 “The Little People,” 201
Jim Crow era, 165 Living Single, 100
Joy Luck Club, 113 Llagostera, Enric, 145
Judge, Christopher, 100 longtermism, 190, 195
Jungk, Robert, 150 Lost Legacy, 98–99, 188
Ludo-Orientalism, 110, 113–14, 116, 120
Kadir, Aynur, 81, 83–86 Lymburner, Chip, 152
Kanehsatake, 197, 199, 201
Karihonniennihtshera, 197, 200 MacArthur, Cayley, 137–38
Kelley, Robin, 80 MacMullan, Terrance, 76
Kelly, Carlos, 25, 29 Madsen, Deborah, 211
Killer Instinct, 214 magic circle, 111, 114, 116, 120, 154
Kinect, 148 Malkowski, Jennifer, 24
Kingston, Maxine Hong, 112 manchild, 109
Korean diaspora, 126–28 manchild panic, 108
Korean Exclusion Act, 127 Marcotte, Jess Rowan, 66
‘Korean Exodus’ (2014), 127 masculinity
Korean gamers, 127–28 Black, 91, 101, 107–9
‘Korean Problem,’ 126–28 constrained, 108–9

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 and racism, 31–32 Nilsen, Liz, 60, 62–63
and whiteness, 26, 183 Nintendo, 2
Mass Effect series, 30 Noble, Safiya, 170
The Media Equation, 149 non-player characters. See NPCs
“The Medicine Keepers,” 201 Nordic Larp Wiki, 154
Mega Bloks, 200 North, Nolan, 100
mental health, among students, 60–62 Not Your Mama’s Gamer, 6
mental knowledge, 220 NPCs (non-player characters), 122–25, 180
Mental Plex, 117 NPC streaming, 122–23
meritocracy, 111–12, 185 NuChallenger, 26
metanarratives, 185–86, 190 Nukik Corporation, 199
metaverse, 192–93 Nunavut, 199
micro-interactions, 94
Middle East and North African (MENA) OCAP principles, 63, 219, 221
representation, 21, 25, 28 Okada, John, 112
Mikiwam: Solar Punk Herbalism, 212 O’Neil, Gloria, 211
military games, 28 Onkwehonwe Games, 222–23
Miller, Alice, 188 Open Source Afro Hair Library, 162, 164,
Mills, Charles, 117 170–71, 174
Minecraft, 30 Orientalism, 24, 99
minstrelsy, 22–23, 29–30 Ortiz, Stephanie M., 25, 31–32
MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online O’Shea, James, 145
role-playing games), 28, 31 Otsi: Rise of the Kanien’keha:ka Legends,
MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas), 199–200
97 Outerloop Games, 26, 184
mobile gaming, 118
model minorities, 112 Parable of the Sower, 104
Mohawk culture, 197, 200–201, 208 Paradies, Yin, 71, 88
Momo Pixel, 26 participatory design, 155
Murray, Soraya, 24–25 particularist anti-racism, 73
Mystique, 70–71 Path of Exile, 93
Patterson, Chris, 5, 24–25, 29–30
Nakamura, Lisa, 22, 25, 31 Perez, Hector, 217
narrative design, 181, 183–84, 195 Phantasmal Media, 167
Nass, Clifford, 149 phantasms, 162, 167–68, 170, 173–74
Nativeness, 207–8 phones. See mobile gaming
Natuecoco, 122–24 physical knowledge, 220
Naughty Dog, 98–99 Pocket Net, 153
Neo//Qab, 148, 150, 152–53 Pokémon GO, 110, 114–20
neurodivergence, 67, 129–31, 134–35 Porpentine, 187
Nez Perce nation, 214 positionality, 66–69, 81, 139, 187
NFTs, 192–93 post-racial utopias, 110–11, 120
Nguyen, C. Thi, 182 procedural representation, 22, 29, 35
Niantic Labs, 118–19 protest, games as space for, 158–60

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 Russworm, TreaAndrea, 6, 21, 23–25, 28, 34
Quebec, 148, 197, 199, 201
queer play, 34, 77, 81, 85, 135 safety tools, 31, 84
Said, Edward, 113
Raby, Fiona, 145 Saiyuuki World 2, 207
The Race Card, 24, 111–13, 116–17 Sami Gam Jam, 27
Race Rebels, 80 Sanchez, Joe, 54–55
racial empath, 29–30 Sarkeesian, Anita, 6
racialization SCDs (speculative and critical designs)
of characters, 22, 27, 29, 91 bleed and alibi as design tools for, 154
defining, 35 and dystopia, 148
in game design, 117 functions, 146
and gaming communities, 19–23, 26, and games, 147
29–33, 110, 112–13, 120, 127 history of, 145
and whiteness, 21 and paratopia, 149–50
racism premise of, 144
and algorithms, 172–73 and uncanny valleys, 145, 156
vs. anti-racism, 72–75, 78, 86 Schiller, Friedrich, 115
casual, 26 Schön, Donald, 150
as episteme, 74 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 191
in game design, 23, 70–72 ‘seeming Native,’ 203–4, 214
in gaming spaces, 23, 31, 72, 75, 110–11 self-determination theory, 130–31
in voice chat, 95, 111 self-identification, 139, 204–5
Radical Play Lab, 34 self-representation, 204–5
Radical Queer Witches, 70, 75, 77–81, 85 The Seven Dancers, 201
Raley, Rita, 160 sex work, and streaming, 122–23
Rankine, Claudia, 168 Shaw, Adrienne, 175
“Reconciliation: Facilitating Ethical Shklovsky, Viktor, 145
Space…” (dissertation), 218 The Sims, 94
Redfield, Chris (game character), 97 Šisler, Vit, 28
Reeves, Byron, 149 Six Nations people, 223
Reinhardt, Milo, 145–46 Skins Workshops, 27, 34, 197, 199
relational knowledge, 220 Skyrim, 34
Repairing Play, 24 Smith, Noah, 2
reparations, 64 Soaring Eagle (character), 207
Resident Evil series, 22, 28, 91–92, 96–98 social VR, 175–76, 178
residential schools, 223 Soderman, Braxton, 192
Revital Software, 197, 200–201 Soft Chaos, 61, 66, 68
Revolutionary Girl Utena, 82 Sony Santa Monica, 99, 101
Riot Games, 5, 126–28 South Korean League, 127
Robinson, Dylan, 78 Speculative Play, 144
Rock, Chris, 93 spiritual knowledge, 220
Ross, Nadine (character), 98–99 sports games, 22, 27–28
RTS (real-time strategy), 208 Squinkifer, Dietrich, 66–67

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Squire, Dallas, 222–24 Uncharted series, 91, 95, 98–100, 188
Srauy, Sam, 25–27 Unity software, 34
standpoint, 139 utopian design, 111, 143, 149, 156
Stardew Valley, 94 UX (user experience), 150–51, 153
Stargate, 100
streaming, 122–23 Vanillaware Ltd., 96
Strmic-Pawl, Hephzibah V., 76 ‘vanishing Indian’ myth, 198, 202, 214
structures of care, 61, 65–66, 68–69 Verne, Jules, 184
Summer, Cree, 99 violence
Surrogate Body Theory, 131–32, 136 in games, 108, 111, 184, 187, 190
in games industry, 23
tabletop role-playing games. See TTRPGs virtual, defining, 163
tactical media, games as, 158–60 virtual reality. See VR
tagging systems, 171 virtual spaces, 108, 162–67, 170, 174
Taito, 213 vision knowledge, 220
Tan, Amy, 113 voice actors, 91, 98–101
Tantalus Media, 208 voice chat, 95, 111
technocracies, 193 Voss, Christiane, 131
techno-Orientalism, 29, 127 VR (virtual reality), 130, 133, 175–78, 192
Temkin, Max, 77–78 social, 175–76, 178
Thirsty Suitors, 26, 184 VRChat, 176–77
Thirsty Sword Lesbians, 70, 81–85
This War of Mine, 184 Walsh, April, 85
Tiewishaw, Kahentawaks, 197–200 Wampanoag people, 223
TikTok, 123 wampum belts, 198, 223–24
“Toward a Rhetoric of Self-Representation,” war, depiction in games, 28, 111, 115–16,
204 184, 187–88, 209
toxicity, in digital spaces, 91, 105, 111 war games, 27–28
Trammell, Aaron, 5, 24, 33 Waterloo Regional Police Chorus, 217–18
Treachery in Beatdown City, 26 West, Kanye, 171–72
tribal values, 207, 209–11 Western academia, 61, 217, 219
TTRPGs (Tabletop role-playing games), 74, When Rivers Were Trails, 26, 212
76, 81–85 whiteness
TTRPG Safety Toolkit, 84 as default for game characters, 95,
Tuchman, Gaye, 35 177–78, 180, 182–84
Tuscarora peoples, 198, 209, 223–24 in game design, 19, 21, 25
Twine, 46 in games studies, 33
Twitter, 93, 160, 163 and myth of meritocracy, 185–87
Twitter Spaces, 95, 105 and perception, 164–66, 174
Two-Spirit drum circle, 217 ubiquity in games, 22–23, 27, 76, 96, 99,
175
Ubisoft, 2, 5, 214 white players, 22–23, 182–88, 194
UI (user interface), 147, 150, 153 white privilege, 22, 75–76, 78–79, 115
uncanny valley, 145, 147, 154–56

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white supremacy, 1, 4, 22–23, 34, 76, 78, 86, workplaces
179–80 and bylaws, 67–69
wholism, 220 and degrowth, 67–68
Whomp ‘Em, 207 and discrimination, 44–46, 48, 67–68,
Wick, John (character), 96 71
Wilcox, Steve, 6 and exploitation, 61, 186
Williams, Dmitri, 22 and inclusivity, 46
Williams, Serena, 168 labour conditions, 47–48
Wilson, Deborah, 76, 99, 198 and organizational structure, 68–69
Wilson, Rai-ya, 76 worldbuilding, 105
Wilson, Waylon, 198 World Championship (Riot Games), 127
Wissen, Markus, 180 World of Warcraft, 30
Wolf, Michael P., 77
women X. See Twitter
and fridging, 96, 102 Xbox Live, 31–32
as gamers, 94
in games industry, 20, 186 Yamamoto, Hisaye, 112
and gender identity, 167–68 Yang, Gene, 112
and harm reparation, 64 Ye or Nay?, 162, 171–72
portrayal in games, 81, 96, 98–99, 148
racial stereotypes, 96, 122–23, 168
Zuckerberg, Mark, 163
workification, 191–92

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