Forthcoming in the Intersectional Internet Edited by André Brock And

[FORTHCOMING IN THE INTERSECTIONAL INTERNET EDITED BY ANDRÉ BROCK AND PUBLISHED BY PETER LANG IN THE DIGITAL FORMATIONS SERIES.] The Technologics of Race in Videogames By: Tanner Higgin Bodies in cyberspace are also constituted by descriptive codes that "embody" expectations of appearance. Many of the engineers currently debating the form and nature of cyberspace are the young turks of computer engineering, men in their late teens and twenties, and they are preoccupied with the things with which postpubescent men have always been preoccupied. This rather steamy group will generate the codes and descriptors by which bodies in cyberspace are represented. Because of practical limitations, a certain amount of their discussion is concerned with data compression and tokenization. As with phone sex, cyberspace is a relatively narrow-bandwidth representational medium, visual and aural instead of purely aural to be sure, but how bodies are represented will involve how recognition works. —Allucquére Rosanne Stone (1991) W.E.B. Du Bois was a new media practitioner and theorist. His medium: photography (which, at the time, was about as old as videogames are now). His cause: anti-racism. Du Bois wanted to de-suture photography's connection to racist ideology by undermining its false objectivity, and filling the frame with new meaning. To this end, his portraits of middle class African Americans in the first decade of the 20th century showed America a drastically different picture of blackness, and assaulted the integrity of racial categories (Figure 1). As Evelyn Hammonds (2000) explains, Du Bois' portraits, which were “rendered in the style of turn-of-the-century ethnographic studies of race,” were used, along with sociological evidence, including subject reports of ancestry, to show that racial mixing was not a deviant and shameful pollution of racial purity, but the fact of every human being's ancestry (p. 307). The brilliance of Du Bois' new media critique was how, with relatively little manipulation, he was able to 1 take the supposed objective integrity of photography and show that, when placed in an intelligent and ethical political context, photographs reveal themselves as not an impartial medium, but deeply political, manipulable, and often discriminatory. Following Du Bois, we need to build an analytical framework for describing and analyzing the embedded politics and their associated ideologies of digital media technologies, specifically in videogame character selection and creation systems. My interest is in exposing how computational systems can be interpreted as simulations adhering to various types of raciological thinking; I call these technologically embedded ideologies the technologics of race. Hammonds' work on computer morphing programs titled “New Technologies of Race” serves as the principle influence for this direction of inquiry into the biases of technology. Hammonds analyzes a 1993 cover article in Time magazine called “The New Face of America,” an attempt by Time to address issues of immigration and racial mixing through the use of morph technology made famous by Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Michael Jackson's “Black or White” music video. Using statistical projections of the current and future ethnic breakdown of the US, engineers created computer generated photographic faces of the mixed race Americans of the future. Even though great pains were clearly taken to make the project politically correct, the results are deeply troubled. While Time appeals to contemporary notions of genetic differences, and acknowledges diversity beyond the black/white binary, Hammonds notes that the categories used to stage the mixing, and the experiment's results, are reliant on antiquated logics. In complete opposition to a socially constructed notion of race that would cast racial distinction as a dubious and impossible task, Americans in Time’s calculations are split into seven distinct groups: Middle Eastern, Italian, African, Vietnamese, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, and Hispanic. These groups are placed on a grid, reminiscent of a Punnett square, their photographs implying, Hammonds argues, that “race is embodied and, even with racial mixing, the existence of primary races is as obvious as the existence of primary colors in the Crayola crayon palette” (p. 118). The results of this morphological fantasy are all 2 surprisingly similar and quite obviously Caucasoid with light shades of brown. Hammonds reads this as a “strange logic of equivalence” that proposes an answer to problems of race, diversity, and inequality through a presentation of morphological sameness. It ignores the biological logics of race that are employed in the experiment and that undermine real racial inequalities, maintained by these very logics, through an appeal to a future where distinction is impossible. These results cannot be attributed to the random computation of a computer program but are the product of design. Hammonds reminds us that the engineers of the program made editorial decisions when creating the “morphies,” discarding anything that seemed unnatural. The result is a “preferred or filtered composite of mixed figures with no discussion of the assumptions or implications underlying the choices” (p. 118). To this end, the results of the project removed any corporealities that might undermine or disrupt dominant notions of race, gender, and sexual difference that do not adhere to the popular imaginary or raciological fantasy. As Hammonds explains, the morphies are a product of the operations of racializing desire which projects race yet erases its complexities in regards to historical reality. These same desires, the technologics of race, structure difference within videogames. You just have to notice. 3 Portraits from The Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906): Figure 1. 4 "Something racist is going on here": Glitches and Seams Justin.tv, one of a variety of websites that allow a person to stream audiovisual content to viewers live on the internet, originated as a platform for 24/7 mobile lifecasting by entrepreneur Justin Kan. Eventually, Kan franchised the wearable lifecasting tech he employed to a select few users, most notably Justine Ezarik of iJustine fame. By mid to late 2007, the site was opened up as a platform for streaming content. Most assumed that lifecasts (slice-of-life broadcasts by regular people) would be the most popular "shows." And this was the result, to some extent. One surprisingly popular brand of content, gamecasting, necessitated its own section and continues to garner significant interest. Broadcasters would point their webcams at TV screens or computer monitors, or feed the footage into the computer through capture cards, and play videogames live along with an audience of chatting viewers. By far the most popular of these gamecasts has been Justin.tv's 4 Player Podcast (4PP). As of December 2010 the 4PP Justin.tv site has over 31 millions views and 130 thousand subscribers. Gamecasting, and 4PP's entertaining and humorous commentary, recreate the familiar social experience of watching a friend play a game. While browsing 4PP's archives, I noticed a video of 4PP's Brad playing Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) titled "Brad discovers the truth about Internet Cafes.”1 In this video Brad, playing as GTA IV's main character Niko Bellic, enters an internet cafe populated entirely by "heavy set black men." Talking to his viewers, Brad recognizes how curious this situation is and that some kind of glitch must have occurred. Yet these familiar experiences are not just breaks in a pattern; these moments, and what they bare, can be politicized. In the case of "Brad discovers the truth about Internet Cafes," the hidden population algorithms that generate the denizens of Liberty City are exposed. Any player of GTA IV is familiar with how these algorithms operate in the act of gameplay, even though they most likely have not seen the code. 1 While Justin.tv does backup broadcasted video it is up to the users to choose moments they would like to isolate and archive permanently. These archives can be browsed and viewed after the actual broadcast occurred. View video here: http://www.justin.tv/fourplayerpodcast/b/259408907. 5 We know when we travel across the urban landscape, that each region we explore is undergoing a constant process of regeneration, repopulating the streets with cars and bodies. Brad recognizes this too. He questions whether the proliferation of heavy set black men in the internet cafe is equivalent to the well know mechanic in the GTA series that fills streets with cars similar to the one the player happens to be driving. Of course, there is not a true equivalence here; a player can only (in single player) play as Niko, thus who the player's character is does not affect who else is around. Still, Brad recognizes that the glitch has revealed some kind of similar code level operation. But what is it? The most striking moment of the video, and certainly its comic apex, is when Brad jokingly remarks (and I am paraphrasing a bit since the audio is garbled), "I am not quite sure but something racist is going on here." Significantly, this seemingly innocuous and funny internet video records a familiar experience to gamers that is often lost to the ephemeral qualities of gaming. When we play, game glitches and bugs happen; they're quite common, especially in an age of impossible development deadlines. But when they do happen, we see them as violating the integrity and unity of the experience. They're mistakes that tear the fabric of the Wizard's curtain. And since gaming is often characterized or understood as escapism, this kind of disjunction is unwelcome and disruptive. If you've played a game within the Grand Theft Auto series, you know that in GTA IV the computer- generated non-player characters come and go based on the geographic boundaries crossed. In previous incarnations of the franchise, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, this was even more pronounced because territories were partly defined by the gangs possessing them.

Load more