Racing toward Representation: An Understanding of Racial Representation in Video Games

Abstract

I have been a gamer for approximately 20 years; for me gaming started when my mother brought home our first PC. I soon discovered that there was something called King’s Quest on this machine. I started the program and was delighted to see that this was an honest-to-goodness computer game. Back then my little knight was neither black nor white … he just was. This was nothing new to me. For years I had been playing Pong football, and baseball on video-game consoles and handheld machines. There were no little avatars that needed racing. The players on the screen were tiny dashes that moved when I told them to (most of the time) and entertained me for hours. When video games evolved to include avatars and allowed “real” color, I remember being excited by the fact that I could choose an African American boxer when I was beating up on my cousin’s little Caucasian boxer. That was my first memory of race in video games. Ten years later when I turned back to video games with a vengeance in order to relieve some graduate school stress, I played mostly fantasy games done in Japanese anime style. I explained away the lack of racial diversity based on the games’ origins. Then one day I branched out and decided to return to one of my favorite genres of old, the boxing game. We bought a Sega Dreamcast and the new and popular game Ready to Rumble. I noticed that on the cover of the game there is as an African American man with a large afro. Stereotypical, yes, but nothing too disturbing … yet. We popped in the disc and started to play the game. I pushed the buttons and my fighter (the African American boxer just like the old days) fought, but between the action I watched my fighter “pimp” around, talk “smack,” and head roll all over the ring. This was not my little brown boxer from the good old days. This was something different, something disturbing. I wondered if I was just getting old and overreacting.

The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up via embodied experiences.

(James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy)

You see those images so much. I don’t even know, you see’em so much. I don’t like’em, but they show black people like that, like with the guns and … I guess like I said before it’s just what the … I don’t even know how they came up … I guess it’s just like I think they get all the information from like music video and stuff like they see on there and what they hear in music and stuff like that. That’s what I think.

(Daniel Terrell)