Lesson 10-Race and Games Flashcards
Violence and sex blow up in games, yet there is little race that is talked about.(not the race like racing games, but like people of colour).
Race features prominently in many games. It also features prominently by not being featured at all. What is the one genre which uses race to frame its stories, to guide mechanics, and to develop dynamics?
Strategy games. (Think of how in real life when Cortez wanted to take over Aztec land, he had to create strategies to beat the other race).
Additionally, strategy games were also one of the first to make the jump to home computing. The strategy genre also has similar roots to the adventure genre. In which the strategy genre was created in table top was simulation games(except most of these were simulated on the computer).
The realization taht the computer could be a meaningful opponent was eye opening. What (Sean Gouglas when he was 10) might not have noticed in the text based strategy game, Star Trek, is that though the motive of the game is to kill all Klingons, it meant to kill a race. (the race frame the game’s story: kill all the klingons)
What was an important strategy game in 1983?
M.U.L.E.
You play as an industrialist competing and cooperating with other players to maximize your wealth and build a sustainable colony.
MULE’s legacy in modern (real time strategy) RTS games comes from its gameplay which is focused on resource management and economics.
What are real time strategy games?
The strategy game is played in real time as opposed to turn based play(like chess). It added the pressure of the ticking clock, which made a huge difference in game play.
What was the earliest RTS game in the 1984?
The Ancient Art of War.
The Ancient Art of War took a lot of its cues from the tactical war games that dominated the early strategy scene. You're on a battlefield. And your job is to win skirmishes against your enemies using knights, archers, spies, and barbarians. It's a single player game that pits you against the computer. Unlike many strategy games, there was no single specific historical setting. Some scenarios were set during the Napoleonic Wars. Some came from the Roman Civil Wars. And others were set in the Great Sioux War of the 19th century. It made little sense, but the game was a lot of fun. The Ancient Art of War also came with a construction set, so you could design your own maps and battles.
An example similar to Archon in terms of how after the player moved to an opponents square, the gameplay switches to an action game?
Mario Party. When you step on Bowser’s block on the map, your character’s box outline turns red and when everyone has had their turn on the board, it’s game time(action) and the red player either gets an advantage or disadvantage
There are many kinds of strategy games, some are turn based. And some involve real-time action. But in general, in strategy games, players compete for A, natural resources, land and power. B, the affections of a damsel in distress. C, tactical superiority in deep space. Or D, the highest score.
The vast majority of strategy games involve domination and supremacy through warfare. Sometimes, though, domination comes through the acquisition of capital and land, as we see in M.U.L.E.. So that makes the correct answer, A.
Strategy games are a good jumping off point for a conversation about race because these games often depend on race to frame the conflict and develop the various interactions.
Is race explicit or implicit in games?
It is more often less obvious and therefore is implicit. In games, race serves more as an abstraction for other concepts. Sometimes it indicates a character’s ethnicity or homeland. Other times it indicates biological differences between creatures.
So here is a question about race.
When we think about race, the distinctions
we are making are based on
A, physical and intellectual characteristics
that are scientifically proven,
B, cultural practices that can be explained
by underlying biological differences,
C, cultural theories and
ideologies that have no scientific basis.
And, or, D, genetic differences
that explain social status.
end of 10-1-Race and Strategy Games
Correct answer is C. Race is a concept that became popular amongst Western scientists of the 19th century. The answer is not A because distinctions made on the basis of intellect, have been disproven, and are dismissed as stereotypes. Nor is the answer B or D. For over a century, people tried to explain cultural differences by genetic inheritance and biology. In the end, racial distinctions emerge from a culture's theories and beliefs about itself and other groups. This might remind you of our conversation about gender, which is also a concept that is culturally constructed.
Who is the game scholar who can explain these questions?
Many of these games require you to choose a race that represents your character. Elves, orcs, Klingons, Kilrathi, Mandaloreans, githzerai, pandaren, toran. All of them represent different species in various video games. Some look human while others have human like features, but almost all of these games ask you to choose your character's race. Why race? They clearly seem like different species. Why not use the word, species?
Nathaniel Poor. Poor argues that the word, race is used in videio games because species in a game stands for a race outside of the game.
A character’s race is used to symbolize the real world differences in appearance, culture, and geographical origin.
Poor says that many games use race as a means for depicting the other.
Refresher from lesson 6: what is othering?
It refers to the process of including some people while excluding others.
In the case of race, othering is determined purely by racial stereotypes. Race in the 19th century was a scientific taxonomy that was used for distinguishing between humans beings based on superficial differences like skin colour, hair type, and it is a term that carries a ton of cultural baggage
What are some other terms that replace the term race?
Ethnic group, and more generally, community.
If there are terms with less cultural baggae that can be used like community or ethnic group, why is the understanding video games course using race explicitly?
One, people still use the term to understand the relationship between cultural groups.
Racial discrimination, hatred and slurs are all unfortuneately real experiences for many people. so we have to understand the term in an everyday sense.
So where do racial
stereotypes come from anyway?
Why do some believe in game races
represent real ethnicities.
For Poor, defining a culture or race as the other, we really project our own values and social taboos on that character. Then, we generalize stereotypes in to racial classifications.
Think about it, high elves are pure melancholy magical creatures of a bygone era. Dwarves are strong, loyal, and greedy. Orcs are a corruption of all that is good and human. And so on. Racial differences in games become analogies for racial distinctions people make in everyday life. Take the dark elves as an example. Dark elves are a species of elves in many fantasy settings. Sometimes called black elves or drow. Dark elves are frequently considered corruptions of their high elf brethren. There is no confusion here. Dark elves are evil through and through. It isn't a huge leap to think of racial perceptions of skin color in a fantasy world as projections of racial perceptions in our world.
So to summarize when Nathaniel Poor attempted to answer the question of why people define race, he said when people define other races, it is a projection of our values as well as what we think are social taboos of that character or race.
So when we use race in games, we are projecting our own social values onto these fictional races as we do on real races. “We use perceptions in our world”
So in summary: Racial stereotypes are crude and
unsophisticated in the real world, and so
games are no exception when
they do the some thing.
>> A lot of the discussion so far involves language. We talked a lot about language in the sections on post-structuralism. A post-structuralist approach might explain race in video games as, A) An abstraction of race based in common structural patterns across societies. We are able to make generalizations, about other things with the same name. B) Something we can only understand when we observe it directly. Generalizations and abstractions based on race are simply our mind's way of categorizing the things we see. C) Something that seems like accepted knowledge, such conceptions about race, however, are based on signs and symbols that are reinforced by existing power structures in society, Or D) The dominant ideas in society that are reinforced by sound scientific research.
By nature this research is unbiased,
so abstractions and
generalizations are based in fact.
The answer is c.
Many racial stereotypes were a product of
historical scientific studies that
had no real basis in evidence.
So that makes D incorrect. A sounds impressive, but it implies a structuralist interpretation. Which isn't what we are looking for. It also happens to be very wrong. B touches on a philosophical theory known as empiricism. But this theory does not help us understand something as complex as race.
