Trolls and Torches

Ten years ago I was hanging around World of Warcraft and a lesser-known game called Habbo, studying racism, white supremacy, and trolling in online games. I was interested in how these games were trolled through something called “raids,” spur-of-the-moment events involving dozens of internet trolls (mostly young white men in their teens and twenties). Raids would begin with a call to action on a message board, then spill into a game world, overwhelming the space and its players with racist imagery (including digital blackface) and speech, meant to confuse, entertain (behind a flimsy shield of irony), and infuriate.

Looking back, I now realize that that community and those demonstrations were a laboratory for the alt-right demonstrations of white nationalism and supremacy we’ve seen across the country. The difference is that while their tactics remain the same (creating memes, inciting anger, manipulating the media, using irony as obfuscation), the playing field — national politics — is now deadly serious. I can’t help but suspect some of the same trolls I saw at raids also held torches at Charlottesville.

This whole time I’ve worked in education — first at the college level and now in K-12 — I’ve held hard to the belief that one of the keys to dismantling white supremacy is anti-racist education. I still believe that, but now that I’m helping K-12 teachers, I realize that it’s in those classrooms specifically — where teachers shape the core of kids — that we must focus most intently. While there are many teachers already doing this work, there are many more for whom discussions of race remain taboo. This is a feeling particularly prevalent among white teachers who feel ill-equipped to discuss race or at risk of stirring up controversy when they do. It’s also a product of whiteness, a culture that either out-right avoids discussions of race, or practices a toothless colorblind discourse. We must acknowledge, however, that being able to ignore, escape, and not address race is a position of privilege only white people have. It’s time to use that same privilege to stare white supremacy in the eye, speak its name in classrooms, and equip students to dismantle it. There’s too much at risk. And to those who’d claim anti-racist education is an out-of-bounds politicization of education: you’re right, and that’s part of the problem.

We must acknowledge, however, that being able to ignore, escape, and not address race is a position of privilege only white people have. It’s time to use that same privilege to stare white supremacy in the eye, speak its name in classrooms, and equip students to dismantle it. There’s too much at risk.

Filling the Void

The alt-right is the latest formation of white supremacy, a system that’s inextricable from American history. White supremacy, and the concept of whiteness that it relies on, is fueled by silence and complicity. It grows when it goes unnamed and unchallenged. In the absence of anti-racist education, it festers like a wound. In her extraordinary article on the white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah argues, “Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race…. It is possible [he] is not an outlier at all … but rather emblematic of an approaching storm.”

When we don’t discuss race or excavate the history of white supremacy, we create a void. In this void, white nationalist groups (neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederates) see opportunity. They weave a false narrative and weaponize moments of crisis and strife to manipulate young white people, blaming their social and economic ills on people of color and Jews.

Sparked by a deeply divisive 2016 election, white nationalist groups have taken to the web, social media, and college campuses to stoke the fires of discontent among white people, especially those in their teens and twenties and “feeling powerless.” Whether this recruitment drive is working is tough to discern, but there are indications of growing interest, including a poll that found 9 percent (~30 million) of Americans consider white supremacist views acceptable. Regardless of their numbers, white nationalists have become more brazen, taking to the streets — often under the guise of “free speech” rallies — to spew hatred, incite violence, and even murder a young woman. They’ve also adeptly manipulated the media to seed conspiracies and influence the national dialogue in the interest of recruitment.

To starve this recruitment strategy, we must all move from silence to action. K-12 classrooms, however, have a particularly important role to play. Teachers can intervene early and often in the lives of young people and give them the tools to understand the insidious history of white supremacy, to excavate its toxic influence on many U.S. institutions, and to build students’ exposure to and empathy for people from different backgrounds.

White supremacy, and the concept of whiteness that it relies on, is fueled by silence and complicity. It grows when it goes unnamed and unchallenged. In the absence of anti-racist education, it festers like a wound.

The Role of White Teachers

The struggle, however, is that many teachers — white teachers in particular — feel underprepared to address race in the classroom, especially racial violence. In an ideal world, all educators would receive training in anti-racist education, social justice education, and culturally responsive teaching. Unfortunately, our world is less than ideal. Thankfully, there’s no profession better suited to digging in and doing the work themselves than the teaching profession. Teachers are nothing if not resilient. They’re the world’s best learners.

This is an especially important task for white teachers, who make up over 80 percent of K-12 educators and possess the privilege and institutional positioning to make change. As Tirhakah Love explains, “For this country to be anything greater than what it is today, the people in power — from white layfolk to political leaders — must realize how they got there.” By owning up to this history and their own privileges, white teachers can model for their students (especially white students) an antidote to white supremacy: reflection, responsibility, and action. The alternative — staying mostly silent or offering thoughts and prayers — isn’t enough. In fact, it’s dangerous. As Jenna Chandler-Ward of Teaching While White argues, “too many of us allow ourselves to believe racism, racial oppression, institutional segregation, and a host of racial inequities are things of the past. In doing so, we who are white remain complicit in these ongoing injustices.”

So where to start? Xian Franzinger Barrett offers some steps any teacher can take to confront white supremacy directly in their classrooms. (Barrett is a part of EduColor. For Twitter users, the #educolor hashtag will connect you with supportive folks who’ve been doing this work.) Inspired by Barrett, I offer similar steps below with helpful resources, including lesson plans, articles, and tools that can form the foundation of activities, lessons, and discussions. You’ll need to make adjustments based on your student population and school community, but it’s important for these conversations to occur in all classrooms no matter the grade or subject focus (math and science have just as much to discuss as social studies and ELA). Finally, let’s be real: It’s going to feel scary to take this plunge, but the thought of you and your students discussing these issues and histories is much scarier to white supremacists. That’s because frank and open classroom conversations about race — grounded in understanding and aimed toward equity and justice — are dangerous only to those who fear difference.

Frank and open classroom conversations about race — grounded in understanding and aimed toward equity and justice — are dangerous only to those who fear difference.

Review the Research on Reducing Bias and Prejudice

The first two articles offer concise summaries of the proven strategies for reducing kids’ racial predispositions. These strategies are effective from kindergarten to high school.

Five Ways to Reduce Racial Bias in Your Children (article)

Research-Based Advice on Teaching Children Not to Be Racist (article)

Teach the History of Race, Racism, and Prejudice

Every teacher needs to familiarize themselves with these essential resources for social justice education. Each has ready-to-go lessons spanning all grade bands, as well as professional development. Most importantly, they’ll place today’s events in context that’ll show students how material change ca happen.

Facing History

Teaching Tolerance

Zinn Education Project

Rethinking Schools

Pull from Crowdsourced Syllabi

Activists and educators have co-curated illuminating and incredibly useful syllabi in response to recent events. Pull from these to put together your own action plan.

Anti-Racist Resources: #CharlottesvilleCurriculum (resource list)

The Charlottesville Syllabus (resource list)

After Charlottesville: Teaching About Racism, Anti-Semitism, and White Supremacy (resource list)

Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves (resource list)

Unpack “Color Blind” Ideology and Whiteness

It’s critical for white teachers to productively acknowledge difference in the classroom and understand whiteness as its own privileged, racial construct.

Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive (article)

What “White Folks Who Teach in the Hood” Get Wrong About Education (article)

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (article)

Color Blindness (resource list)

The Do’s and Don’ts of Talking to Kids of Color About White Supremacy (article)

Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools (book)

Study the Rise of the Alt-Right

The alt-right, while firmly situated in the history of white supremacy, is something new. Teachers must understand where it came from, to help students dismantle it’s ideology.

What Is the “Alt-Right?” and “But What About Antifa?” (article)

Kill All Normies (book)

Create a Classroom Community and Cultivate Empathy

To counter bias and prejudice, students need to form relationships with people from different backgrounds and perspectives and learn to take the perspectives of others — acknowledging their histories, experiences, and feelings. Part of this also means not alienating students who may enter classrooms with prejudices. It’s important not to shut them down, but listen to them and broaden their perspectives.

Let’s Talk! (resource list)

Dangerous Discussions: Voice and Power in My Classroom (article)

How One School Builds Empathy Through Public Confessions (article)

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Ya’ll Too (book)

Give Students Media Literacy Skills Relevant to Social Media and the Web

White supremacists use propaganda, specifically on social media, to recruit young people to the cause. Give your students the critical skills to counter these messages.

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers (PDF)

Hapgood: Mike Caulfield’s Blog (blog)

Support Students’ Interest in Activism

While teachers can’t explicitly advocate for any political movement in their classrooms, it’s important to support students when they find a cause they care about and want to fight for social change and justice. 

10 Ways Youth Can Engage in Activism (article)

Black Lives Matter: From Hashtag to Movement (high school lesson plan)

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“/b/lackup” collects a lot of imagery I captured during a period of 4chan lurking. During this time I stumbled upon raids of racially charged raids of World of Warcraft that were a lot like their infamous Habbo Hotel raids, but engaged a bit more with racial histories in particular slavery. The natural reaction, and the one I most often see/read academics espousing, is that these raids are racist and awful and representative of a kind of post-racial racism. This article thinks through that — and agrees in part — but offers an additional lens that tries to understand the potential of raids (and trolling more generally) to be performances or interventions that might actually do some interesting and perhaps even productive work around representation and difference in virtual worlds.

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Measured Representation

We’ve seen the fight for diversity in videogame culture gain ground in recent years. Women, people of color, and LGBTIQ identifying individuals and communities have productively re-framed and countered the prevailing racist, sexist, and homophobic design and discourse that’s dominated videogame culture for fifty years. But as we move forward, I want to provide a word of caution and a tactical suggestion.

While she wasn’t the first or only person to make the claim, Robyn Wiegman’s articulation of the perils of multiculturalism stands as one of the touchstones for me of critical race critique in late twentieth and early twenty-first century media culture. Looking at television, Wiegman explains how “in the frantic move toward representational integration, in both popular culture and the literary canon, the question of political power has been routinely displaced as a vapid fetishization of the visible has emerged to take its place.” As a result “political equity” has been understood as “coterminus with representational presence, thereby undermining political analyses that pivot on the exclusion, silence, or invisibility of various groups and their histories.” Wiegman reminds us of one of the key bait and switch tactics of hegemonic media enterprise: measured representation that appropriates rhetorics of equity and diversity while maintaining structural and institutional support of white, masculine, and heteronormative privilege. Videogame developers and publishers are avid practitioners. 

In fact it’s such a powerful corporate logic that we see it at play in the Japanese developed Resident Evil 5 (RE5), one of the most heavily debated representations of race in videogame history. After an initial trailer for the game received backlash for its representation of African zombies, it was revealed that the game would feature a black woman, Sheva, as its secondary character next to the prototypical white hero of Chris Redfield. It’s unclear whether the decision to include Sheva was a response to political controversy, but nonetheless it’s timing appeared as such. Capcom, the game’s developer, was perceived as attempting to diversify and by many accounts this was a positive gesture even though the game maintained its prototypical white masculine hero. But when the game was released, the corrupt representational core of the game resurfaced when it was revealed that one of Sheva’s alternate costumes was an exoticizing and sexualizing leopard skin bikini.

We need to fight for a diversity that exceeds visibility. We need to introduce forms of inclusive representation, vernacular, and expression that go beyond the epidermal to the linguistic, stylistic, experiential, performative, aural, and philosophical. Each drawing on the experiences, perspectives, and histories of a wider group of people, and doing so in ways that do not fit comfortably within biased representational systems that relegate representation to a “vapid fetishization of the visible”  like with RE5, or just flat out privileged whiteness like most mass market games with muscle-bound white male heroes.

There’s two primary fronts in this struggle. The first is in game production which remains disproportionately white and male. This battle is being fought by groups like Black Girls Code which helps girls of color forge positive connections with media production, game design, engineering, art, and the creative industries. Hopefully some of these girls will break into the industry and provide voices of dissent and diversification.

The second front, and the one I am focusing on here, is in design. We need games that rework representation and do so in ways that harness the expressive bandwidth of the medium. Perhaps the one productive outcome of the overblown ludology vs. narratology debate was that it was clear there wasn’t much to debate. In the best games it’s tough to drawn clear lines between story and mechanics, because the two are interwoven. Mechanics can tell stories and stories can find expression in mechanics. In bad games, the two clash. This all too common occurrence was given the name “ludo-narrative dissonance” by Clint Hocking.

Making Games Mean Something  to People that Aren’t White Guys

The games that tend to receive a lot of critical attention and provoke conversation are less dissonant, and often wrestle with big ideas, metaphors, and political provocations through story and code. I’m thinking here in particular of Braid, Portal, Red Dead Redemption, and most recently Spec Ops: The Line. Each weaves together its environment, characters, mechanics, and story to communicate a central idea: a struggle between agency and control. But as Mattie Brice has brilliantly illuminated, these stories, while compelling and technically proficient, are the stories of white men. Brice uses the word “obey,” the title and conceit of a mission in Spec Ops: The Line, as the central thematic nexus of these games. She argues that this theme stages the bourgeois anxieties of white men who lament that they must work within a manipulative system to achieve success. This controlled yet financially secure and privileged bourgeois drudgery, she argues, is not an option for those outside of the white cisgendered/sexed norm. For those in the margins, there’s no choice to obey; rather, they must “break out of the system.”

Thus the challenge, as I have framed it here, is for progressive game designers to design experiences that effectively harmonize narrative and mechanics, but to do so with the aim of busting up the gamic logics of white masculine heteronormative hegemony while also disrupting systems of visual fetishism and integration.

It might sound simple, but it’s not. It’s not only supremely difficult to use mechanics artfully to communicate social, cultural, and philosophical perspectives that combat dominant narratives, but it also requires an understanding of what it’s like to be outside of what’s deemed normative.

Anna Anthropy’s design work is thrilling in this regard. Working at the vanguard of game design, her critically acclaimed game Dys4ia is a collection of raw gamic vignettes that provide a glimpse into the anxiety, insecurity, hope, emotional and physical pain, and tenderness of her six month journey through hormone treatment. Along with her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, a manifesto for home-brew game creation, Anthropy offers a field manual for interventionist design that does not just diversify game discourse but shifts our notion of what games are for and can be. It actively works toward a new system of expression. Similarly, Merritt Kopas’ Lim reconfigures our notions of what violence looks and feels like and means in videogames, offering a simple but powerful mechanic that speaks to the physical and psycho-social violences experienced by marked bodies in socially policed spaces.

Neither work is explicitly about race, yet it’s not difficult to draw connections and issues of gender and sexuality are inextricably linked to issues of race especially within the often abstract and allegorical worlds of videogames. That being said, there’s a need to explore issues of race more directly, especially given the invisibility of racial and ethnic difference in games.

From Black Film to Black Games

African American (and Afro-diasporic) vernacular tradition offers a generative model for counter-discursive work that’s deeply tied to culture and history. For centuries African Americans have radically rethought relationships between form and content in a variety of artistic mediums creating aesthetic archives of historical and cultural data including jazz, blue, oral folk history, dance, hip-hop, and film. As scholars have noted, what’s remarkable about black cultural production is how it’s served as a critical and philosophical apparatus offering sophisticated intellectual counters to dominant narratives. For instance, Tricia Rose insists that the distinguishing “features” of hip-hop are not “stylistic effects” but “aural manifestations of philosophical approaches to social environments.”

Black film is similarly encoded with rich philosophical meaning narratively, technically, and stylistically, and is a particularly ripe point of comparison to videogames not simply because videogames are so often measured against or interpreted in light of film, but because the videogame industry draws significantly from cinematic tradition for its grammar of blackness and non-white difference.

At this point it’s important to distinguish the notion of black film that I’m using here from black representation in film more generally, and the idea of black film as a “genre.” I defer to Gladstone Yearwood’s definition of black film: “Using a semiological framework, a definition of black film would be cinema whose signifying practices are derived from a black cultural tradition and whose mechanisms for image production use these traditions as a means through which artistic languages are mediated and expressed.” Thus for critics like Yearwood, black film is a distinct (although often hard to define) “mode of expression” (to use Keith Harris’ phrasing) that views blackness through the lens of black cultural tradition and signifying practices which “cannot be isolated from other pressing issues of black existence.” This commitment to the politics of black culture is distinct from black representation by the Hollywood system which developed an oppressive and stereotypical semiotic system which Donald Bogle charts as moving from the minstrel archetypes of early film, “jester” blackness of the 20s, token servants and entertainers of the 30s and 40s, the emergence of back stars and black militancy in the 50s and 60s, 70s blaxpolitation, and ending with 80s black superstars and 90s “new African cinema.” It’s also distinct from the notion of a Black Film genre, because to formalize it would be to remove the power of its mobility: the way it can weave in and signify on other films, or resist categorization.

Present throughout much of this history were examples of black expression of the sort that Yearwood describes, providing a current of non-stereotypical or satirical representation more attuned to black culture and daily existence. Free from the constraints of mass market demand, white dominated production, and institutionalized racisms of Hollywood, independent black films were free to tell more authentic and expressive stories wrapped in radical forms of signifying practice connected to African American tradition. But unfortunately while videogames often pull representational archetypes from the cinematic imaginary, most draw from the well of stereotype.

But what if videogames took their inspiration from Killer of Sheep rather than Birth of a Nation?

Pasts and Futures: Games that Signify 

Killer of Sheep is Charles Burnett’s 1977 film about black working class life; it’s one of the most oft-referenced examples of black film and a good examples of how black film presents a challenge to the mainstream in form and content, technique and narrative. It’s an extraordinary blend of poeticism and realism that melds mysterious, lyrical, and rich figurative imagery with the precarity of working class life and the dust and crags of urban space. Contrary to the narrative driven linearity of studio films and their token stereotypical characters, Killer of Sheep dips in and out of a fragmented and almost cyclical allegory where de-essentialized African Americans move from margin to center. In this way, it both broadens the affective and experiential spectrums of film while also deploying filmic techniques that resist conventional narrative progression connected to western philosophical tradition and capitalistic ethics.

I think we’re seeing equally skillful work in the indie games scene, but I haven’t encountered anything that digs into issues of race with the same attentiveness to expression tradition, aesthetics, and narrativized experiences. I do, however, think we see seeds of this type of work in Erik Loyer’s iOS apps.

Loyer’s “playable instruments,” which I have written about previously, attempt to design a new paradigm of interaction that’s akin to musical improvisation. Ruben & Lullaby even deploys jazz as the language of negotiation between the eponymous quarrelling lovers. It’s an experience – a call and response exchange – not defined by race, but deeply connected to difference through jazz. Steeped in black signifying practices and history, jazz embodies a philosophy of community, collaboration and mutability aligned against raciological thinking. With these connections in mind, Ruben & Lullaby, like Killer of Sheep, can be interpreted as a poetic allegory not just for the ebb and flow of romantic relationships but of the struggles of racial conflict and understanding. More importantly, it’s a glimpse of a possible inclusive future of videogames that does not deal out equity in doses of skin color, but is invigorated by difference and characterized by sophisticated technical and aesthetic systems with stories and mechanics untenable to the logics of white supremacy. And while Ruben & Lullaby might not exactly be the Killer of Sheep of videogames, I’m fine with that. It can’t be, and shouldn’t be. It’s a new verse, a gesture forward and back, carrying on with difference.

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When the time finally comes to explore Mexico, our hero, John Marston, procures a ferry and battles with dozens of Mexicans before arriving safely ashore. The game falls silent except for a song: José González’s stripped down “Far Away.” There’s something different about this song though; it’s a song you just don’t hear in videogames. Subtle and textural finger-picked guitar flows beneath delicate vocals packed in reverb. Ask most players about the game and this is the moment they’ll mention. And what function does it serve? The song punctuates the first and most significant border crossing of the game, a journey into foreign territory.

Along with this song and the game’s final twist, much of the larger discussion surrounding RDR focused on the beautiful landscape and the sublime sense of exploration it imbibed. But I want to take this sentiment even further. I think of RDR as a meditation on the American politics of space and territory. With keen attentiveness to what the U.S. and Mexico border region landscape signifies historically and culturally, RDR reveals itself to be not only about exploration and the achievement of a pastoral individualistic ideal, but the human cost required to maintain that myth. The narrative and mechanics of the game work harmoniously to create a deeply spatial experience that engages with the genocidal foundations of frontier expansion in early 20th century United States.

Read the full article on Unwinnable.

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Non-fantasy roleplaying games don’t often allow the player to choose a race.  However, Fallout 3, Bethesda’s open world roleplaying game set in post-apocalyptic Washington DC, allows players to select from four races: African American, Asian, Caucasian, and Hispanic, with Caucasian—unfortunately but not unsurprisingly—the default choice.

An explicit breakdown of races in this way, along lines similar to the U.S. Census, is exceptional in its own right, but also curious given how inconsequential these races are to Fallout 3’s fiction. Unlike Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim which attributes histories, skill attributes, cultures, and geographies to each race, Fallout 3’s races have no impact on the game beyond providing familiar stylistic variety.

Yet I don’t want to stop here and simply reduce this design decision to a familiar critique of racially insensitive representation. Since meaning within procedural systems is both limited by and dependent on restrictions, I see Fallout 3 as open to a far more complex reading that can be redemptive of the limitations of its character creation system. 

One of Fallout 3’s most pronounced character restrictions has to do with the range of skin colors available for each race. For instance, Asian and Caucasian characters cannot have the darker skin tones available to African American characters. The legibility of these racial categories are thus dependent on color differences, similar to a 20th century color line divide. This ideology mimics the 1940s/50s American nostalgia of the game world, and effectively constricts the true range of physical difference present in people who self-identify as each of the four races in the “real world.” To put it succinctly, by forcing the player to identify with one of four rigid and institutionalized racial identities inside of a retro-futurist pre-Civil Rights world associated with segregation and nuclear annihilation, Fallout 3 affords a rare and bold consistency between setting and character (and let me note that whether this is conscious or not is of no interest to me). The player is uncomfortably hailed into mid 20th century American racial ideology.

Importantly this schema also effectively elides difference, folding the myriad ethnic identifications people might claim into monolithic and reductive notions of identity such as “Hispanic.” Many races are wholly negated, including several often featured in U.S. Census breakdowns such as Native American, or Pacific Islander. Creating a character in Fallout 3 initiates the player into  the violences of a system of raciological thinking similar to 1940s America, but the continued familiar violences of racial categorization seen today in the Census as well as job and school applications, advertisement, and so on.

Ghouls as Racial Proxies

These issues disappear in the gameworld, limiting them to character creation and squandering what could’ve been an interesting exploration, both procedurally and narratively, of racial politics and issues like nationalism and xenophobia which caused the destruction of DC. But that’s not to say that racial tensions completely disappear. Instead the game’s anxiety over race is displaced onto the “ghouls,” whose irradiated and disfigured bodies separate them from the rest of the human population, and who, as figures of zombie fantasy, allow for a safe and comfortable canvas  for the issues of race announced by the process of character creation. It’s a classic design cop out: instead of tackling race head-on, we use fantastical proxies.

Ghouls are a ghostly often underground presence that are easily distinguished from the rest of the population, and predominantly discriminated against. Their scarred bodies bear the violences of both nuclear warfare and the burden of racial conflict they carry within the de-politicized gameworld. (Sidenote: In Fallout 3’s sequel, Fallout: New Vegas, one of the more memorable missions finds the player collaborating with (or undermining) Zionist ghouls whose ultimate dream is launching a spaceship and colonizing another planet. It’s not difficult to see parallels here to Marcus Garvey or Afrofuturism.)

It’s no surprise that the racialized ghouls within Fallout 3 are ultimately the products of technological meddling. Humans are nothing if not technological; in turn, technology as a constitutive and mediating presence is also used as a differentiating mechanism, infinitely fracturing or reconfiguring what it means to be, or who gets counted as, human. Machinic and digital technologies in particular, and the real and imagined posthuman and cyborg beings they create, bear similarities to the racialized condition. For example, Thomas Foster has argued that the supposed malleability of race in digital interactions is prefigured by minstrel shows which didn’t require black bodies for a performance of blackness but a technology of blackness (e.g. burnt cork applied to the face).  Fallout 3’s ghouls are just one instance in a long line racialized bodies manufactured and marked through technology, effectively destabilizing the integrity of any notion of humanness.

Gene Projection

Fallout 3’s modeling of the technological configuration of identity functions at the level of metaphor as evidenced by the ghouls, it permeates the logics of character creation, but it’s perhaps best embodied in the fictional technology used in character creation, the Gene Projector. Rather than making character creation an unexplained event prior to the game’s narrative, Fallout 3 embeds the process diegetically. The player begins the game as a newborn baby. The doctor, the main character’s father, first asks, “Let’s see. Are you a boy or a girl?” prompting the opening of a dialogue box presenting the two choices to the character for selection. The socio-medical gendering and sexing of children is modeled in this moment, forcing the indeterminacy of the newborn and all of its possibility into the politicized rhetorical structure of boy or girl, which, quite fittingly, is conflated with a sexual distinction.

Immediately afterward, the doctor opens up the Gene Projector, a device that allows him to imagine what the baby will look like as an adult. The player finds herself within the character creation interface which is made to look like she is the doctor staring into the monitor of the Gene Projector. The player assumes the medicalized gaze of power, forcing the player character’s body into an established frame of meaning. She’s framed in the projector’s screen, locked within the boundaries of the code, and fixed within the ideological perspective of the game’s setting. The informatic and ideological layer upon each other infinitely, like a video camera pointed at a TV. We participate in the forced insertion of a body into a schema of cultural intelligibility divided up into clear racial categories and their expected phenotypes. We, the institutional force, assert our influence in projecting the player character’s future. In light of this diegetic frame, the use of racial categories to orient character creation makes more sense: we’re born into an ideological grid. Both the sex/gender and physiognomic differences are revealed in this process as supposed inner biological truths which, through the clever diegesis of the game, function more as deterministic choices shaped by the logics of the game and the player’s desire.

Postscript

Many years after my birth, I emerge from the vault, a sealed communal bomb shelter of sorts, or a crypt containing the anxieties and fears of the human remnants who found refuge there. It’s a matter of perspective. The sunlight adjusts just as it did when the harsh fluorescent light first entered my eyes in the vault’s hospital room. It’s a second emergence, and one that fills my chest with the euphoria of possibility. This time there’s nothing to choose but a direction. The open-air landscape sprawls before me destroyed and sublime, and I realize that my choices and freedoms are exercised upon a landscape scarred by violence and division. I’m confronted by this in the first town whose center is an undetonated bomb. Do I detonate it or disarm it? This is just the first of many dilemmas along my branching path as I scar the sand with my footsteps, experiencing the horror and redemption of this digital diaspora.

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