Post by Adrienne Shaw, Temple University

Having recently published a book on representation in video games, several people have asked me about the “Rust controversy” (and a blog post is easier to manage than multiple email threads). One of the more surprising findings from my book and prior audience studies projects is just how little some people (take note internet: some people) say they care about representation in games. The actual core argument of the book, however, is that media scholars (among others) need to be more attentive to when and how people come to care about representation. Looking at when and how people care about representation helps us better interrogate the limits of the kinds of diversity we have seen in games. And fights over representation, moments when people really care or militantly don’t care about representation, illustrate that really well.

So Rust… The original story broke back in March, when the post-apocalyptic massively multiplayer online (MMO) game released an update that assigned a randomly raced avatar to all players, which could not be changed. Prior to this, all the avatars looked the same: a bald white guy. Responses to this change varied. Some welcomed the injection of aesthetic diversity in the game; others were pissed. Some of this anger was expressed as racist language, some felt the change was “social justice” activism through design, and many just wanted to know how to change what the avatar looked like.

A lot of other smart people have already written about these various player reactions: go read these great pieces by Megan Condis, Kishonna Gray, and Tauriq Moosa now! I want to focus on a slightly different issue than they do however: the role the design of Rust played in helping create those negative reactions.

First, I think it’s a mistake to say that Facepunch Studios experimented here. They took an existing game and changed it pretty dramatically and suddenly. There is a long history of gamers (terminology note) reacting poorly to changes in their favorite franchises (example). Most of the coverage of Rust’s change conflates the effect of making people play as a specific avatar with changing an existing game. MMO players, especially, become really attached to their avatars; there are decades of research on this (start here). Certainly, players of Rust before this update didn’t have choices for what their avatar looked like, but now that there are appearance options I suspect players think they should have more choice (bracketing out for a moment the fair critique that they were willing to accept a default white male option, because that’s what many games typically offer). Self-representation — that is having the chance to represent yourself how you wish, whether the thing on the screen looks like you or not — is a longstanding part of MMOs. That people took the Rust change so hard, and manifested those emotions as racist chat and play behavior is unsurprising (which is not to condone the racism expressed in those comments).

Second, in my book, I talk about the distinction between characters and avatars, and in online spaces especially people are known through their avatars. Rust lead developer and owner of Facepunch Studios, Garry Newman’s comments on the matter demonstrate a misunderstanding of the contextuality of how and when what the avatar/play character embodiment affects when and how people care: “People have a strange need to play someone similar to themselves in games,” he said. “That’s not something I understand. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed Half-Life more if Gordon Freeman didn’t have glasses or a beard.” From my own research, certainly those games (narrative-driven, solo player games) are the ones in which players do not always care much about playing as a character “like them” because there are other ways (narrative mostly) for them to connect to those characters (or not). People who feel emboldened to demand things of games, moreover, do wish that on a broad level there was more diversity within those narrative-driven assigned character games. Players do often care about how they are being represented in contexts in which they are being represented to others through an avatar, like an MMO. And they really care in games that imply they have a choice, which is among the many reasons people care strongly about what relationship options are available in games.

Finally, the way the race was introduced in the game actually helped make it feel arbitrary. Indeed, in the announcement of the change they call race arbitrary: “It’s quite pleasing to see different races working together in game, and makes you realise how arbitrary race is.” Race in the game is an aesthetic addition so people can tell each other apart visually. That isn’t what race is, which is why “color-blindness” has never been an actual anti-racist goal. Robert Yang discusses his own approach to this issue in designing Cobra Club. What would be even more interesting than randomized races is if someone created a game where you are born into a body that affects the way you interact with the world. Now that would be an interesting experiment in how people react to being thrust into an identity that may not be like their own. There is a model for this in fact, in Marsha Kinder’s Runaways, and if anyone has info on what happened to that game please leave a comment.

None of this is to say that Facepunch Studios should be condemned for trying something new. New players will come to the game expecting to be assigned a body. And that’s interesting, and might lead to some unique in-game interactions that change how we understand avatar-player relationships (I sense a dissertation being formed in the distance). The danger, though, is that more risk-averse studios will see the negative response as evidence that players aren’t ready for more diversity in games. There are plenty of games out there for those players who aren’t ready for more diversity; I think the rest of us are ready for something new.

A few weeks ago my friend Bruce asked me what I thought about the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (hereafter called IBC). I recounted many of the dominant critiques. He pushed me, “Yeah, but what do you think?” My response: “It feels like an America’s Funniest Home Video approach to raising money and awareness.” What I meant is that there is a schadenfreude involved in watching these videos. I certainly laughed when Gayle dumped ice water on Oprah. It feels ok to laugh, because no one really got hurt. And it’s for a charity, so it makes people feel good. The phrasing struck a chord with my friend and as coverage of the campaign and debates around it have proliferated it seems to be an increasingly good lens for explaining why the IBC became viral. Moreover, I think it offers a useful starting point for understanding some of the core problems with using this type of humor to raise money.

There are, of course, many critiques of the ALS IBC. The most obvious one: you do not need to dump icy water on your head to donate money to a cause. Also critiqued: the rules of the challenge were originally that if you dump water on your head you actually do not donate money, but as this article demonstrates many people did both. The campaign raised an astounding amount of money for the ALS Association, but some claim that the campaign results in “funding cannibalism,” pulling potential donations away from other causes. This critique assumes that people would indeed donate elsewhere were they not donating to the ALS charity. As with any high profile non-profit, there were concerns over where money sent to the campaign actually goes; though further research indicates it is spent largely as advertised. Related to this, Catholic organizations have protested the challenge, claiming that the ALS Association funds stem cell research (though not embryonic stem cells as was claimed). Other critics have decried animal testing involved in ALS research.

In addition to concerns over the money, the water in the buckets has been a major concern for critics of the campaign (one journalist even calculated how much water has been used so far). Many have critiqued the implications of wasting water in the fundraising campaign (see here for example). Water is a precious commodity and not universally accessible. Just focusing on the U.S., there is natural scarcity in the Western regions of the country (people in California are even being fined for participating in the IBC) and corporate-produced scarcity in Detroit. The challenge itself reportedly led to a water shortage on Colonsay Island in Scotland.

Moving from the utilitarian concerns of money and water, there is a group of reviews that focus on the effects of the IBC dominating mainstream discourse. The disconnect between online sharing of police brutality in Ferguson and Bucket challenge videos, for example, demonstrates the impact social network algorithms have on what information we see.  Harsh critiques have been levied by several commentators against celebrities, particularly Black celebrities, who took part in the IBC but made no statements about the attacks on protestors in Ferguson (see here and here). These pieces often cite the fact ALS is a disease that primarily affects older, white men.

Most, but certainly not all, of these condemnations tend to disparage those making bucket videos as dupes or slacktivists. I can’t help but think of these critiques as a Frankfurt School approach, treating participants as passive recipients of the campaign’s message and ignorant of the deeper implications of their participation. As with media studies, this shaming of participants does not get us very far in understanding how the campaign taps into bigger cultural logics; it also isn’t really fair because it refuses to understand participants’ own reasons for making and posting videos. I think there are more interesting things to be said about this campaign. We can do this in part by looking at how people have reworked the IBC.

Some adaptations have focused on the water itself. Some Iranians, for example, made modifications to the bucket challenge given the scarcity of water in the region. In a nuanced critique of IBC actor Orlando Jones replaced water with bullets, highlighting a cause of death that disproportionality affects Black men in the U.S. Similarly, soldiers in Gaza replaced the ice water in the challenge with rubble, to raise awareness of living conditions in the region. Tying together the resource and ideological concerns, there is a campaign circulating to “hack the ice bucket challenge.” It relies on many of the same conventions of the ALS challenge, but encourages people to use their water responsibly and raising awareness of racism in America.  The taco or beer challenge, started to raise awareness and funds for abortion-rights organizations, points out the absurdity of the connection between the challenge and the cause by offering a tastier alternative to dumping water on yourself.

The ways people have appropriated and redeployed the campaign tell us much more about how it “worked” than critiques of people who participated. In making more critically engaged videos, these hacks of the campaign have actually zeroed in on what it was that drew so many people to the campaigned in the first place: the prank. Buckets of bullets or rubble and standing in planters while outlining the global impact of structural racism aren’t funny (nor are they supposed to be). As the interviewee at the end of the BBC news segment on the bucket challenge in Iran says of the water-responsible approaches, “It’s not fun anymore.” The taco and beer challenge is funny, but not in the same way. It takes out the schadenfreude. This is why, while horrified, I was not that surprised by the attack on an autistic teen who thought he was going to be part of a IBC video. When altruism becomes enmeshed in laughing at the expense of others, we get a little more insight into what our culture values and promotes.

It might seem a little ironic that BP, or British Petroleum, has committed millions to sponsoring the US Olympic team, but its actually not that surprising in a world where most corporations have operations that span the globe. It’s also clearly part of long-term PR moves by the oil giant, started during the 2012 Olympics, to distance themselves from Deepwater Horizon spill. The commercials featuring Team BP, moreover, are a good entry point into seeing just how many corporate pies the multi-national oil company has its fingers in.

If you watch the “BP’s Team USA” commercial, it seems rather innocuous as Olympic commercials go: Athletes prepping for success that is somehow powered by fossil fuels (“American energy, wherever it comes from”). As members of Team BP are Top athletes in their fields, it is not surprising that they appear in several other commercials as well. Interestingly, however, though these other spots never once mention BP, many are from companies in which BP owns stock. Alpine Skier Heath Calhoun is in a touching AT&T ad; BP owns 715,000 shares of AT&T.[1] The shots of hockey player Julie Chu and cross-country skier Kikkan Randall in the Team BP ad actually appear to be lifted from their individual commercials for Bounty paper towels and Kashi cereal respectively. BP owns 425,000 shares of Procter and Gamble, the parent company of the Bounty brand. In fact, Procter and Gamble owns many of the brands featuring Olympic athletes in their commercials including CoverGirl who sponsors BP Team member Ashley Wagner and non-BP team members Gracie Gold (who is also sponsored by Visa in which BP has holdings), and NyQuil who sponsors Ted Ligety. Interestingly BP does not have holdings in Kellogg’s, the parent company of Kashi and competitor to Kraft (of which BP owns 204,000 shares) and General Mills (of which BP owns 46,000 shares). Kellogg however has long been an Olympic sponsor. Moreover, since members of Team Kellogg overlap with Team BP (Heath Calhoun and Kikkan Randall) and many of the companies for which Team Kellogg athletes appear in commercials are among those BP has holdings in, the cross-promotion is less surprising than a first glance would suggest.

Looking more broadly, BP owns shares of half (five out of ten) of the Worldwide Olympic Sponsors:

Coca-Cola: 317,000 shares

GE: 1,570,000 shares

McDonalds: 161,000 shares

P&G: 425,000 shares

Visa: 71,000 shares

They also hold 67,000 shares in Nike and 25,000 in Ralph Lauren, official outfitters of the US Olympic team and 470,000 shares in Comcast (parent company of NBC the official Olympic broadcasting partners).

There are many different reasons people are concerned over the commercialization of the Olympic games.  There is, for example, the argument that is ruins the spirit of the games, something people as different as author Mary Perryman and the Pope assert. In response to those allegations, long-time IOC member Richard Pound argues that sponsors are the reason there is such a thing as the Olympic games in the first place. It’s always worth considering the hypocrisy of rules that don’t allow athletes to talk about or display those corporate sponsorships at the games, however (although social media is allowing some a way around that). The biggest story in tracing the corporate investment trail hinted at by BP’s commercial, however, is that it’s not enough to talk about individual companies trading in on the media spectacle that is the Olympics. In contemporary capitalism many of the corporate sponsors are making money off of other companies making money off of the Olympics. That’s pretty meta. Transnational capital is the big winner of the Olympics regardless of which athletes end up on the medal podium.

Beyond aca-fandom, what do fan practices and academic labor contribute to our understanding of one another? Can these labors of love lead to coalition building across industries?

I have been engaged in a lot of discussions about participatory labor and new media lately (both in official and unofficial realms). Repeatedly, I am struck by how rarely those of us that study fans, resistance, and the free labor of online produsers (to use Axel Bruns’ neologism) see ourselves in our research participants outside of the realm of aca-fans. Recognizing the contestations surrounding the term “aca-fan,” I would argue that all scholars are fans of our research objects. If not, why would we bother? Film scholars have to be fans of film to subject themselves to hours upon hours of watching. Rare is the political communication scholar who is not, deep inside, a politics junky (the enactment of addiction language being common in many a fandom). As Jonathan Gray has pointed out, people can be fans of news though media audience studies rarely discuss the phenomena.

Certainly not all scholars are fans in the traditional sense, but they are expected to be media consumers if they want to speak with authority. This expectation, true of fan cultures as well, can be exclusionary. Studying industries or audiences do not necessarily have to consume the media at the center of their analysis (/tip o’ the hat to T.L. Taylor on that point). Analysis of texts requires familiarity with form, genre conventions, and acknowledging medium specificity, true. That is a far cry from assuming every game scholar owns the latest release or that every television scholar has watched (and liked) every acclaimed series on the air.

Even when scholars don’t claim to be fans of a medium, we are fans of research, theories, subjects, and fields. Fan, moreover, need not imply the uncritical love-fest of pure celebration. Critique,  at it’s most productive, involves the hope that that which we love could be so much better. Many digital production practices, from slash fiction to fan sites to hate watching, are acts of pleasure. As Lisa Henderson discusses in talks on her new book Love and Money, what would our research look like if it looked more like our acknowledgement sections? Can we love our research more?

When analyzing “fan practices,” by treating these as objects of study, researchers sometimes lose sight of how our experiences as scholars overlap with fandom. Beyond the love and pleasure connection, can we think about the struggles we share with the fans/audiences/industries that we study. I have heard many scholars rightly critique the exploitative if simultaneously resistive nature of “participatory culture.” Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, for example, argue that the contemporary games industry has been built upon the “playbor” of its audiences.

Research, in the best of situations, is a labor of love. We produce a massive amount of unpaid labor in pursuit of the ecstasy of the research breakthrough. So do fans. As I watched the new SyFy series Heroes of Cosplay, I was struck by the massive financial investment the cast undertook, from making their costumes to traveling around the country, for the chance to win awards that may or may not have big payouts. This was largely justified by claims that cosplay could lead to career advancement. It seems odd at first… until you consider how many of us pay to attend conferences (with or without institutional support) with the promise that it will advance our careers. We give talks, write articles, edit anthologies, advise students (in and out of our institutions), all in the hopes of “making it” and/or contributing to the field. At least that is what we tell ourselves. When we wonder why fans do similar labor, can we gain insights from why we engage in projects that many of us have trouble defending to friends and relative outside of academia?

Thinking more broadly of the implications of these similarities, I have been to several conferences in the past year that have brought together game scholars, industry representatives, and artists/designers. Talking across these industries sometimes feels difficult, because we are all (as humans) so invested in our point of view that we want others to understand what our side has to offer. Alternatively, we want others to tell us what to offer them. Building on decades of critiques of such colonizing approaches to political movements though, does coalition politics offer a better frame? For example, I think many of the problems of the mainstream AAA games industry, as it is often constructed, are the problems of academia as well. The mainstream games industry like mainstream academia is largely built upon exclusion and competition. Those of us who don’t fit comfortably with the class/gender/sexuality/race/embodiment/etc.,  norms acknowledged by our respective industries are often forced into a compromise if we stay within them or charged with an uphill battle if we want to change them. Both industries have to defend their own relevance, in a way that further promotes exclusivity and hard lines between insiders and outsiders. Both industries have been guilty of exploiting contingent labor, systematically excluding marginal voices, and fetishzing their own cannons. Both often have conferences that often price out contributors that could shake things up, and then complain that they don’t have anyone skilled in doing things differently. Both rely on certification systems that are tied into exclusionary and oppressive systems for access to employment.

When we are frustrated with another industry we sometimes simply dismiss it. I have heard scholars dismiss industry perspectives, industry representatives dismiss scholarship, indie designers dismiss both (in all cases sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly). When we are frustrated with our own industry, we try to figure out how to fix things, or leave. In acknowledging our similarities, however, perhaps the time has come to think more concretely about how we can help each other fix the systemic problems we all face.

In 2007, I conducted research on gay gamers (article here). Having gotten a sense of the audience side of the LGBT in game representation question, I decided to tackle the industry side. I complied a list of all the games I could find that had gay characters, queer themes, gender-bending, etc. (56 in all). I then went through and emailed all the publishers and developers still in operation. Most never responded. EA did respond to my email, nicely even, but essentially said “no, we don’t have any one you can talk to. Busy busy, etc.” I ultimately used back channels, forums, and snowballing to conduct interviews. Knowing from research on LGBT representation in other media that activist groups play a huge role in portrayals of marginalized groups, I also emailed GLAAD asking about their perspective. I was told that they just didn’t have the time or resources to address games pro-actively. The article from that research is available here.

Given how hard it was to get anyone in the games industry or major mainstream LGBT organizations to talk to me about gay content in games in 2007, the event last week demonstrated a huge shift to me in terms of who can and will have these conversations. That EA was willing to extend an invitation to me and many other researchers, journalists, activists, and designers to their invite-only conference was a nice change. Further, the HRC’s and the Ford Foundation’s co-sponsorship of the event indicates that mainstream political organizations see games as mattering in a way that I don’t think they did five years ago.

That said, having done research on issues of representation in games for the past eight years I was disappointed to hear the same problematic arguments being made over and over again.

First among these is the way LGBT representation is treated as a distinct issue from representations of race, gender, class, age, etc.. This is inherently problematic. When panelists said things like “women have come so far,” “racial minorities have come so far,” and now we can address “gay issues” it presumes that women and racial minorities are somehow never a part of “gay issues.” Discussions of representation also wind up presuming a static notion of how LGBT characters can and should be represented, and that inevitably is exclusionary. The LGBT umbrella was used in a way that assumes trans and bisexual politics have an easy relationship to mainstream gay politics. Indeed that same-sex relationships were almost always given as the example for how the industry has tried to be inclusive of the LGBT community (sic) indicates that trans politics are barely on their radar.

Second, throughout the conversation there was an assumption that the industry can only include representations of diversity “when it matters.” This discourse further marginalizes already marginalized groups. The industry implies that it matters only when the marginalized players make it matter themselves. The video played by EA of their attempts to include representation of same-sex relationships in games, were all examples of places where homosexuality is an option. I would argue, however, that sexuality is relevant in every FPS’s use of sexual banter or “bro” humor. The glimmers of backstory you get in Left 4 Dead could integrate “LGBT issues.” Heck even Portal makes references to the protagonist’s past and communicates narrative environmentally. It is not just in RPGs that diversity of sexuality and gender identity can be mentioned or explored.

Moreover, if there are places where representation “doesn’t matter” then why not include marginalized groups more often? This is not a demand that designers make a game specifically about and for a marginalized group. Indeed, Liz Bird’s Audience in Everyday Life demonstrates the dangers of such approaches (specifically chapter four). Rather, it requires designers be reflective of their own default choices (ex. male, while, hetero) and challenge themselves to think outside those norms. The comic book industry has worked hard to do this, and often in an (arguably) “authentic way” that game industry reps often claim is difficult for them. There are also many examples of integration of queer content into games on the part of indie game designers like Anna Anthrophy and Robert Yang. Todd Harper and MIT’s Closed World project is yet another example. If the industry wants to rethink representation, perhaps they should start by looking at work by people that have done so already. More than that, they should be more supportive of indie development and rethink the very structure of the industry, as Robert Yang argues in his impressions from the event.

Finally, while targeting the LGBT “market” (a problematic construction itself) may seem easier by including same-sex pairing options in games that already have big audiences like Sims, Fable, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, optional content does not address the social goals of representation. Luis A. Ubinas, president of the Ford Foundation, began the conference by making links between the popularity of Will and Grace and changing public opinion about gay marriage. Beyond the problems with both examples, it is worth pointing out that optional representation will never be the Will and Grace of gaming. If the industry is concerned about hate speech in online gaming, which dominated much of the conference discussion, inserting representation into games in a way that is integral to the game text is one avenue for change for which I think they should be held accountable.

Luckily, the Different Games conference is happening in April in NYC. The conversations there should work in moving the discussion started last week forward.

Before you hit the comment button in anger and chastise me for ignoring the scholars who have already incorporated queer theory into studies of digital gaming (I know them, I’ve read them, I like them, heck…I’m one of them), let me be clear about what I mean. There are studies of queer game content, production, and audiences. Many of these are more rightly described as studies of gay content, production, and audiences (though some do incorporate the L, B, and T’s of the LGBT acronym). These studies tend to address the lack of, potential of, or seek out what might be defined as queer content, production, and audiences. Folks have also suggested that there is an argument to be made for the inherent queerness of play and a queer critique to be made of how play in constructed (Ben Aslinger, for one, was kind enough to share his conference papers calling for queer game studies as I prepared this post).

What I am discussing here, however, is not just a study of queerness in games, queer readings made available by games, players who identify as queer, or even the inherent queerness at play (pun intended) in digital games.  Rather, what I think needs to be more clearly articulated is an incorporation of queer theory into the study of games. As Gayle Salamon describes in “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy”:

“Queer theory underscores the ways in which our identity choices are always to some extent circumscribed by powers beyond our control, while simultaneously arguing in favor of our capacities to enact gender or sexuality in other than normative ways, and one of its premises is that identities tend to codify that which they seek to describe, thereby instantiating new norms that can be just as oppressive as the norms they sought to counter.” (2009, p. 229)

I have argued elsewhere that game studies often draws on the language but not the conflicts of cultural studies. A similar problem exists in the use of queer theory. Noting, for example, that a player is somehow “queered” by playing as an avatar whose presented gender is different from that of the player is actually an inherently un-queer claim to make (one which re-inscribes the construction of binary gender it claims to dispel). Studies that focus on queerness only in relation to representations of non-heterosexuality, miss much of the potential of a queer games critique (just as studies which only discuss gender when they are doing projects “about gender” are missing the point made by feminist game studies).

What play is “good” and what play is “bad” is something I continually come back to in my own research, as well as my daily life. Rather than justify the study of games by disproving the lonely gamer stereotype, for example, the very basis of that being a delegitimizing factor could be questioned. As Salamon writes: “If justification is concerned with the ordering of beliefs, the reconciliation of one thing with another… then queerness as a method would proceed in the opposite way, by supposing a diversion or estrangement from the norm and using that divergence as a source of proliferation and multiplication with the aim of increasing the livability of those lives outside of the norm.” (p. 229)

There are similarities to how certain kinds of play (and indeed media consumption among other activities) are marked as “good” or “bad” and Gayle Rubin’s Charmed Circle of Sex. Playing with a group of people in the same room is, I would argue, often read as positive (at least if the game is of the family or party game variety and not a too serious game session). Playing alone or online with strangers is read as somehow sad and not a valid use of time. Drawing on Rubin’s circle we might read this as the difference between sex that is engaged of as part of a committed, heterosexual couple existing within the “charmed circle” versus sex is enjoyed alone or with a group being part of the “outer limits.” Granted, the value of certain forms of play from a particular gaming community will differ from those made by non-gamers. For example, casual gaming has negative connotations in “gaming culture,” just as obsessive gaming has negative connotations in “mainstream culture.” In either case, however, boundaries and limits are being drawn, justifying certain practices while de-legitimizing others.

In the interest of space, I will not elaborate the connections between manners of gaming and Rubin’s circle here (I am still developing the comparison), but I believe it points to the utility of a queer method: “[Q]ueerness is a methodology, one that gives us a way to articulate a queer ethics and a queer politics, where each of these insists on the generative capacities of claiming desire, and a fundamental openness to difference, located in the world and also in ourselves” (Salamon, 2009, p. 229-230). When game studies engages in a largely descriptive project, when researchers seek to define and bracket out certain kinds of gaming from others, and when games seek to create content for marginalized audiences—all of these are moments in which queer theory and method can (and should) be employed. The Charmed Circle can be used to demonstrate the very disciplinary power of the Magic Circle of play (an example I hope to elaborate in my next post).

___________________________________________________

Rubin, Galye. (1993).“Thinking Sex: Note for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader eds. H. Abelove, M.A. Barale and D.M. Halperin. New York: Routledge. P. 3-44.

Salamon, Gayle. (2009). “Justification and Queer Method, or Leaving Philosophy,” Hypatia 24(1). P. 225-230.