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Images of Women 12: The Final Bout

I am nearing the end of this semester. In the beginning, I said this:

Part of this course is keeping a journal of reactions to the articles we are supposed to read. The resulting entries related to this course will be slightly more personal than I typically write about but will most likely still relate to videogames in some way shape or form.

In looking at my entries from the past, they look something like this:

1. Covering – The act of hiding one’s sexuality when that sexuality doesn’t agree with the norm

2. Cult of True Womanhood – Entry for women in games as a historical analysis

3. The Virgin Mary and faulting pop culture for “missing” some things while getting others (Avatar: The Last Airbender)

4. Powerful women, Eve, Lilith, and purity in games

5. STS, STEM, Females and Technology

6. More on the cult of true womanhood

7. Diversity in technology creation, games

8. Annotated discourse on race in technology

9. A blog entry detailing my presentation on the interaction of Moe and War (american and japanese games)

10. A statement on comic books loosely tying in gender as an example

11. More detail about comic books and race, Aunt May as a stereotype

Images of Women 10 – Spider-man and Spider-girl are both White

I need some help remembering some ideas so I am going to try and reason my way through something and head back to names.

So I recently decided to expand a little in what I usually write about. A while back I was a bit amazed at the hashtag #donald4spiderman. The hashtag was created by one Donald Glover who declared that he would like to be considered for the part of Spider-man in the upcoming Disney Reboot. The initial post is here:

http://www.iamdonald.com/post/647884473/donald4spiderman

The reaction sort of startled me. It has an effect on other people too. I think my favorite reaction was from a mentor who just sort of looked off in the distance and said, “imagine if James Bond was cast as a black man.”

I will be presenting this at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Association in San Antonio next April. The abstract I submitted is below:

I’m Not Racist But Peter Parker Was White, People. Spiderman, Race, and Donald Glover

Initially created for teens in 1962, Peter Parker, aka Spider-man, was one of many ways white middle-class ideas were communicated and promoted after World War II. Peter Parker has traditionally been portrayed as a white teen male. He symbolizes the up and coming teen everyman as they learn to cope with the “great responsibility” that comes with “great power.” Since the mid-1960s because of the culture surrounding the Equal Rights Movement, the concept of the everyman has been transitioning to more than white males. This transition comes in spurts through challenges to the stereotype – typically through popular culture. This presentation is an analysis of one such challenge. On May 5th, 2010, an African American actor named Donald Glover declared that he was, “putting [himself] in the running for the Spiderman reboot.” Through the twitter hashtag #donald4spiderman as well as numerous blogs and message boards around the Internet, the public reaction was one of two opposites. On one side, people said, “It is a downright sin to cast a black man as Spider-man.” while others said, “This is about giving a talented guy a chance…” Spiderman creator Stan Lee responded to Glover’s announcement saying that a change in Peter Parker could risk confusing audiences but that he deserved a chance like anyone else. I examine reactions to this announcement and place it in the literature about color-blind racism as well as research that examines the shift from cowboy to superhero. In this way, I will show how comics challenge society as superheroes transition to new media and new audiences.

I wanted to relate this to my images of women class. In particular, I want to try and make a Marxian dataflow.

The logic I think I want to use here goes a little like this (I am embarrassed by how juvenile this will be):

  1. Within culture at large we communicate ideas that represent things
  2. Those ideas become embodied in figures
  3. What ideas are communicated are controlled by purchasing power
  4. This is a symptom of American culture that the Japanese have called Moe
  5. As purchasing power occurs, the idea of what that idea is is solidified
  6. When that idea begins to stale, new ways to repackage that idea are tried
  7. The success of the idea depends more on consumer culture than it does on quality
  8. The majority culture in consumer society represents the shape and flow of that idea
  9. Challenges from non-majority consumer groups will be met with extreme prejudice

So, if I were to put it in words, I would say that the popularity of an idea, represented by an object or figure made into an object results in the gradual loss of that ideal through over-marketing thus forcing a re-establishment of that idea. If that idea goes too far into the realm of minority culture, the reaction from majority typically results in a re-establishment of that idea without minority input.

Juvenile though it may be, I think finding a methodology for the project above is important. I keep going through the Frankfurt school stuff I have and thinking that maybe it is what I should use. No doubt, the things I would pull from there would be useful as I have stayed away from media studies thinking more about the culture surrounding media than the media themselves.
Things seem to break down quickly when you think about products meant for minority groups. But it is a difficult thing. All products, whether they like to admit it or not, need to be in alignment with the core. What I mean is that, for example, different versions of the dominant group’s stuff is reproduced to be slightly more targeted toward a different group. Take the super but mostly “girls”
This factors in to video games as well. Harvest Moon for Girls comes to mind.
I haven’t named a single theorist yet but I think I remember what it was I was thinking about.
I’ll sleep on this and write more tomorrow.

I Think There is a Mercedes Divide, I’d Like to Have One

Following up on the entry I wrote in response to Brandon Boyer‘s talk at Indiecade, I thought I would put a very broad and general post on why diversity is important, how it is being hindered even by the well-meaning white person (myself included), and the impact diversification of games could have on society.
Getting Started

The quote that names of this entry comes from Lisa Nakamura’s book Digitizing Race. It is from Colin Powell’s son Michael Powell when he was appointed head of the FCC. The quote signifies a general malaise toward government help with various social problems because those social problems are seen as the problem of individual effort (laziness) rather than one of institutional trends. Here is where I will begin.
Discomfort and Defensiveness

Race and racism is uncomfortable to discuss. This discomfort is based on historical development of trying to get past race through white groups forcibly forgetting about it; gender falls in to this as well. Put simply and generally, it begins during the aftermath of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and culminates in the Barack Obama election.

We are all currently on a precipice of race discussion that needs to be pushed into the public light.

First, a generalization. We, white society in America, have lost the ability to seriously discuss race without being defensive and it is this lack of discussion that perpetuates race based problems.

The most basic way to describe this effect is that the Civil Rights Act was a collective effort of many groups that culminated in a major majority shift to wait for minority groups to reflect majority norms and values. In essence, the white reaction to the incredible ’60s Civil Rights Movement was one of passive waiting for normalization. Normal, in this case, is whiteness.

An example:

Imagine discussing a political belief with someone who is violently opposite to you but is your boss. Your boss is passive aggressive. While he or she is your boss, they are, in reality, just another person, they just feel differently than you. Somehow, this person has been designated as above you and culturally, this means more successful than you and success is a culturally favored goal.

Perhaps your job skills are actually better than your boss. It doesn’t matter.

How often would you bring this subject up? What would happen if each time it was brought up, he or she would simply brush it off. If pressed, they would ask why you had to play this political card. In the end, if you were just more hard working, you could be the boss.

Only, your boss would still be above you. Would the stress of that get to you?

Could you keep up a fight against your boss if you knew that that they could simply end your job at any time? That your organization would simply believe your boss because of how much trouble your political beliefs caused.

Being Passive

This discomfort is normal life for a large amount of people; this discomfort should be fought against; this discomfort should be relieved. I do not mean by running down to your local minority based nonprofit group or anyone nearby who looks different from you, I mean by actively discussing it with friends, family, and everyone you know. By not letting someone tell a racist joke, by recognizing certain aspects of humor as racist, by recognizing that all of us are in some way racially motivated and hold racially localized beliefs. In essence, be active about race and gender.

Passivity within discussions about race, gender, and diversity is the very thing that causes that discomfort. It does this through removing it from public discourse.

I am going to pull from as many sources as possible. This is not because I want to say things with other peoples words or take shortcuts through vast disciplinary structures within academia, it is because so many of these sources say the same thing about a huge variety of subjects.

It may be a bit of an overload but if I have a goal in making this post, it is to give readers the ability to recognize the problems within American society about the subjects this blog is interested in: Video Games and Internet Technology.

The term and concept that sits at the crux of this post is multi-faceted but singular in its function. Color-blind, or institutional racism, is typically defined in two different ways, a violent dialectic that is impossible to debate.

The dialectic forms through two different interpretations of the term color-blind. Through explaining one end of the pole, the other end will make itself known.

I Don’t Even See Color

We live in a society that tells itself it is post-race. Race neutral (gender neutral as well) terminology is everywhere. Phrases like, “I don’t even see what color they are.” or other similar sentiments are kin to this definition of color-blind.

From Lisa Nakamura, a quote from another scholar, Vijay Prashad:

“Color-blindness is a symptom of racism.” Vijay Prashad identifies this gentler form of racism as the greatest problem of the twenty-first century – the “color-blind” replaces the color line as the prevailing practice that permits resources to be unevenly allocated based on racial identities. – 3 Nakamura

Blindness to color doesn’t work because there are cultural differences between races/ethnicities in society. From motherhood or parenting to pay gaps, even type of industry (source) or media representation, the difference can be seen rather blatantly if we actually looked at the data. and this definition serves as a means through which this difference can be ignored by the dominant group (White People). Further, because the dominant group can ignore these differences, those whom are affected by them can only serve to rock the boat. The origin of “The Race Card” or “The Gender Card” resides in this blindness.

The opposite end of this dialect then, recognizes the impact of this passivity. Please note that liberals as well as conservatives fall into this discussion. It is not a political topic but a universal ignoring of race that perpetuates these issues.

This series of ideas is from a book by Barbara Trepagnier called Silent Racism: How Well Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide:

  • Race awareness in well-meaning white people—including racial progressives—is both sorely lacking and a crucial piece of the racism puzzle.
  • Well-meaning white people who are passive around others’ racism encourage it, whether or not they intend to.
  • Slavery and segregation have been transformed into a less obvious structure: institutional racism.
  • Race awareness entails understanding three facets of racism: the history of racism in the U.S., how institutional racism operates, and insight into one’s own silent racism and passivity.
  • Both silent racism and passivity in well-meaning white people are instrumental in producing institutional racism.
  • Throughout U.S. history a small group of white Americans has stood against the racist institutions of their day.

Each one of these items represents an extremely defensive conversation. Time and time again, college students in multi-cultural classes around the country read this book or others like it: Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, White Lies by Jessie Daniels, White Like Me by Tim Wise, and dozens more. During class, students often listen to endless lectures about racial problems. However, once outside of class, a common phrase or sentence outside that classroom might be, ‘I’m not racist, I have black friends, but I wonder why…..”

These statements are acknowledgements of a racialized belief but are masked by passive defense against understanding that belief. The term social distance here designates a distance between the speakers understanding of a group. In this case, the understanding is very little but the speaker is positioning themselves as extremely close to that group. That no one would question it is how these racialized beliefs continue, uncountered and unchanging. This is based on the idea of privilege. Whites can do all of these things because they are the dominant group.

If the training students receive in these classes doesn’t create active participants in discussions of race, how can we begin to discuss these things.

Video Games

From this quote, I will enter into video games and video gaming. Video games are often used in education debates as a means through which arithmitic and computer use is taught.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a random sample of 12-17 year old children in the U.S. found that 73.9% of all white children play video games while only 26.1% of all non-white children play.

The skills learned through computer use at school and home are used later in life and is represented through different data collection efforts. Recently (2009 report using 2007 data), a report of unskilled workers was released. This study looked at what job skills unskilled laborers used during their time at work. From that study comes this quote:

Only 39 percent of Hispanic workers hold jobs that require daily use of computers, compared with 67 percent of white workers. The daily job tasks required on noncollege jobs held by black workers are more similar to those held by white workers, with two notable exceptions—arithmetic and computer use. Only 41 percent of black workers use computers daily, compared with 67 percent of white workers. And nearly half of whites in noncollege jobs use arithmetic daily, compared with one-quarter of blacks.

The interesting thing about this study is that it looks at 3 particular groups: whites, blacks, hispanics. Asian cultures are often left out of studies like this because of a particular function Asian groups serve in diversity discussions. In color-blind discussions Asian groups are often used as tokens of success, distracting from larger problems, especially in technology sectors. From Lisa Nakamura:

The discourse of color-blindness is relatively new in American racial politics and Robert Lee identifies it as a key feature of Colr War liberal ideology…[An example] Asian Americans were posed as models of this type of “ethnic” poliical subject because their low usage of welfare and political docility, along with their successes in the education sysem, made them prime examples of racialized subjects who had overcome the barrier of color, or race-as-biology, to become model consumers of commodities as well as creators of economic value: as Lisa Lowe would put it, they were positioned as both labor and capital. They were also seen as ideal liberal subjects in that they were figured as not needed intervention of the state, particularly in reference to education and technology.” 4

Race and Gender Safe – White Privilege
Video games are almost all white and all male. Within the industry, there are what I would call “safe” individuals. Non-white individuals who act white enough to allow for a false inclusivity and false diversity. This is not meant to belittle or make less of accomplishments so much as it is to point out that there are significant gaps between white males who make video games, and nonwhite males and females who make games. The need to be mindful of this difference should not be confused by a visible but tiny minority of minorities.

As I posted last time, less than 7% of most “tech” industries are nonwhite. Tokenism is an old practice and in the video game industry, it can be difficult to see. The issue becomes more visible when we examine how the term video games is operationalized.

There are typically 3 different ways games are operationalized:

  • Do you play console games? (Male Dominated, Females around 1/4 of all gamers)
  • Do you play games on a computer? (Female Dominated, Females age 54 dominate)
  • Do you play games on a computer or console? (Males dominate, Females 40% of gamers)

The differences in these numbers are vast. Without Computer games, females constitute almost 30% of all gamers. When including computer games, females comprise as much as 43% of all gamers.

Getting a little further in to some data, Nielson reports that, 12-17 year old males living in homes making $75k or more make up the most active group of gamers. This statistics refers to console gaming, a type of gaming that dominates most sales categories and is commonly referred to as “the game industry.”

If we go into the “Essential Facts about the Gaming Industry” from NPD group, the average age of video gamers is 34 years of age and male but Adult women represent a more significant portion of the game playing population (33%) than boys 17 or younger (20%).” However, this study combines the console an PC markets and includes games like Hearts. Solitaire, and games like it and is funded by the game industry itself.


Finishing Up – Problems with Diversity and Criticism

I have tried to say that discussions of race are uncomfortable. What is more troublesome is how we have come to passively allow (covertly) more aggressive styles of racism (overt) to continue. My main point here is that allowing it to “work itself out” is more damaging than being out and out overt about race.

When race discussions happen, the normal response is typically that of defensive “I’m not racist” posturing as well as more blatant and hyper-energized discussions of how something “isn’t white” (See Donald4Spiderman for an example or discussions of female Shepard in Mass Effect).

Video games matter because of what they mean to life for people later, they are an introduction to computer use, to interaction with a digital environment. As we have seen, this has translated to more computer use for white groups even in the unskilled labor force.

The need to diversify video game development, given these facts, represents a significant and important step in solving a wide array of problems, not just more minority groups within video gaming itself but more technological socialization for a wider portion of society that it manages currently.

Focusing on technology use by making a more intimate experience of video games while aiming to gain a greater audience will have a tremendous impact in the home life of a huge variety of individuals whose parents could never have dreamed of what their children will be able to do.

Simply using computer technology in a classroom everyday has already proven to have a significant affect on children’s learning outcomes and possibility spaces later in life.

This effect can be multiplied and furthered through emphasis on diversification of games through the diversification of game developers. Equity and Equality are within reach during our lifetime but must be actively pursued. Let us not sit idly by and let another opportunity pass us by.

Diversity in Games Will Work Itself Out and other Indiecade Thoughts

A long winded wind up to a blog entry on diversity:
At Indiecade this past weekend, I had a chance to meet a lot of people. As a gamer and as someone interested in games, I have been continually challenged to figure out what, if anything, I wanted to do with my education and eventual PhD direction that somehow involved videogames. A couple of weeks ago, I was approached to co-author a book chapter in a collection of video games and power. It was during this time that I began to realize that because I have been in Sociology for so long, I was no longer interested in design or the functional aspects of design, but the power present throughout an entire series of designs. I headed to Indiecade with this realization and because of that realization, entered a talk on how All Play is Personal. This talk, given by Austin’s Brandon Boyer, was pretty good but left me a little frustrated by the very thing that was driving me in to more sociological training: power.
So, I begin this entry by saying that the rate at which white majority power, particularly male power is ignored in video game design continually frustrates me. It is not to say that it should be the only discourse for games, but that it should be part of discourse by default.
Overview of the Session
So as far as I could tell, this session was about how we all play up in our head and that each head is supposed to be different. The approach to this session went a little like this: He wasn’t in to videogames after elementary because a girl embarrassed him enough to make him stop playing. Years pass, he gets in to the music stuff he did in Austin and gets back into video games through those musicians.
Then the talk shifts to what indie is. He brings what I felt was the best point of his talk here: indie games are awesome because of the personal touch indie game makers. A single voice isn’t drowned out by the massive focused roar of “mainstream.” He calls for more work on who indie makers are and what their situations are.
More work on what and who a game maker is is an excellent idea because, aside from an occasional nod here and there on the internet, the larger gaming population probably has a stereotypical image in their head about what a game maker is and what they look like. The problem begins here. Video games are not music in industry or makeup and that thread could use a whole other discussion but I am a bit more worried about a couple different, but related ideas.
None of what he says is necessarily bad for gaming, the talk itself was just unnecessarily shallow in scope given the way it handled diversity and that is what left me with a bit of a bitter taste.
Diversity
Diversity here is loosely defined as a combination of many different types of voices. Given that definition, there are two premises that came around. One came out during the Q+A while the other was sort of an omni-present idea:
1. Once society works itself out in the diversity thing, video games will too.
2. This was more of an overarching thread: Japan is not America is not Japan.
Diversity will never simply work itself out
This is perhaps the most terrible feeling I took out of Indiecade and really spoke to a gigantic problem a bunch of us were talking about before Indiecade began: caucasian dominance of video games is not in dispute, discussed seriously, or actively fought against. Sadly, this lack of action can be seen as one goes from Mainstream to Indie and is linked to a much larger problem that begins with race and gender gaps seen in early (elementary school) pushes toward human-computer interaction.
In any case, this discussion is about videogames. Here is one of the most fascinating mini-activities I can use to display the diversity issues in games. Find pictures of the big gaming events, e.g. GDC, PAX, ComicCon, Gencon, Origins, and a wider range of events like Internet technology conferences. Find someone who is nonwhite. Can you?
It is difficult; even finding nonwhite or female playable characters in digital environments is typically futile. I have been playing with an idea over the past year that generally states: videogames rely or I believe they rely, on Japanese representing minority status in games because, after all, Japanese were told that they were not white by the supreme court.
In numbers, and if videogame industry jobs are anything like the other tech industries, less than 7% of all employees at American housed companies are nonwhite. This extends to gender as well. There is a well known contrast between games made for girls and games made for boys. The impact of this general fact is so vast that we are only beginning to really understand how it is influencing society as a whole.
The Gaze – a helpful term to use to discuss the impact of a lack of diversity
In social science, we often discuss (sometimes with dismay), the male gaze. I will post this overview from wikipedia in lieu of the academic work (Donna Haraway, Laura Mulvey) it appeared in:

In feminist theory, the Male Gaze expresses an asymmetric (unequal) power relationship, between viewer and viewed, gazer and gazed, i.e. man imposes his unwanted (objectifying) gaze upon woman. Second Wave feminists argue that whether or not women welcome the gaze, they might merely be conforming to the hegemonic norms established to benefit the interests of men — thus underscoring the power of the male gaze to reduce a person (man or woman) to an object (see also exhibitionism).

From the male perspective, man possesses a gaze because he is a man, whereas, a woman has a gaze only when she assumes the male gazer role, when she objectifies others by gazing at them like a man. Eva-Maria Jacobsson supports Paul’s description of the “female gaze” as “a mere cross-identification with masculinity”, yet evidence of women’s objectification of men — the discrete existence of a Female Gaze — is in the “boy toy” adverts published in teen magazines, despite Mulvey’s contention that The Gaze is property of one gender. Moreover, in power relationships, the gazer can direct his or her gaze to members of his or her gender, for asexual reasons, such as comparing the gazer’s body image andclothing to those of the gazed at man or woman.

This gaze extends to race and ethnicity.

The gist of this argument is simple.
If there is a noticeable imbalance of ethnicity or gender in the construction of a cultural object, then that object contains the majority’s gaze. In video games the dominant gaze is younger (50 or under), white, and overwhelming male.
Conclusion and Content
Because video games contain cultural messages through programmatic expressions of systems and are because those systems are useful in socializing youth to the actual systems, video games allow for white male dominance of technology to continue. An example here, and perhaps the most blatant is the PS3 and the Xbox360. Japanese games primarily appear on the PS3 while American games primarily appear on the Xbox. There are always exceptions to generalizations, these exceptions do not mean the generalization is incorrect.
Throughout Brandon’s talk, he continually pointed to Japanese examples of indie games. In fact, aside from a couple mentions of Steph Thirion’s talk that occurred just before him, he almost totally used Japanese examples. Even in his “I want you to do this type of thing” music sections he used Japanese artists to illustrate his point. Japan makes games for Japanese and those games sometimes are intended to be for wider audiences but remain primarily Japanese. This does not make them the indie scene in America or video games in general. Nor does it make the indie scene diverse.
In contrast to this is the company Nerjyzed, a privately held African American video game maker. Their flagship game, Black College Football Experience has sold 133,000 copies since its release. However, I have yet to really see Nerjyzed listed in conference presentations or as sponsors. They have been on national tv (BET). I do not know if they have been invited and declined. These game makers should be celebrated, consulted, and asked to collaborate on other projects and here is a controversial statement, a statement I wish someone like Brandon Boyer would have made:
Even if the games created by indie or mainstream studios like Nerjyzed are not up to the white majority (read: standard) of videogaming, games made by these studios should be at least discussed and consciously critiqued to the same levels as any popular independent developer does. If what Boyer wants is a more public image of game makers, then interviews and discussions of these (nonwhite) game makers needs to be one of the first attempts at at this, not a celebration of more white game makers as video game versions of rock stars.