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In 2017, the American game designer Momo Pixel released the single-player, browser-based game Hair Nah. In this game, you play as Aeva, a Black woman taking trips to locations that include Osaka, Havana, and the Santa Monica Pier. As you move through levels on your journey—taking a taxi ride, traversing airport security, sitting on an airplane—you must slap away increasingly aggressive white hands that reach into the frame to touch your hair. Though Hair Nah taps into the genre of a casual button-mashing game, this interactive experience also explores the topic of microaggressions via unwanted hair touching. If you slap away enough hands on your travels, you reach a screen welcoming you to your destination with the message “YOU WIN!” but the caveat, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue that black women face daily. So a note to those who do it STOP THAT SHIT.”

This article discusses the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games, which follows Arthur Morgan, a white outlaw, during the decline of the “Wild West” in 1898 and 1899. Taking up conversations of fugitivity in critical ethnic studies, this article maintains that fugitivity operates as a rhetorical trope that stands in for racial identity where the logic of postracialism denies investments in race. Analyzing the narrative, spatial, and kinesthetic elements of the game, this article argues that Morgan, and by extension the player, is aligned with historically and geographically racialized others through a fugitive relationship to space. While Rockstar, as a video game studio, may not see itself explicitly intervening in a racialized and racializing political imaginary in its fictional worldbuilding, the kinesthetic, narrative, and cartographic strategies the studio employs respond to a set of cultural assumptions rooted in the rhetoric of postracialism. As such, Red Dead Redemption 2 serves as a multifaceted text through which to interrogate the dynamics of that rhetoric as it is mobilized in representations of fugitivity and identity.

This article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in game-development discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation—without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself.

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.

This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph’s “straight version” of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.”

This article examines North American (i.e., Canada and the United States) video game developers’ understanding of race, how they construct narratives when they include characters of different races, and some of the pressures that may shape that process. Discourse analyses of semistructured interview texts found that video game developers operate under an internalized pressure to create game narratives that are quickly understandable and, thus, sellable. This pressure is normatively internalized in the profession as an attempt to hedge against market uncertainty. Video game developers, therefore, depend on social beliefs from the “real world” to inform how video game players might receive their games as well as narratives and themes from past texts such as the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Therefore, this article argues that racism might be enabled because it is believed to be a hedge against market uncertainty.

Platformed racism offers a unique lens through which to investigate technological structures that enable racism. Online video games, such as EA Sports’ FIFA series — which dominates the soccer video game market share through its touted realism — feature these structures. Like many platforms, FIFA enables representations of real bodies (i.e., professional soccer players). But, unlike many games, FIFA enables game players to directly affect the creation/modification of these representation in the form of player character cards. Analyzing a census of six years of player cards, this study found that platformed racism was enabled because the game’s realism invited racism when players tried to maintain that realism. The study concludes that the catalyst for racism to emerge in FIFA was the drive towards realism.

In Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games author Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. Regardless of its historical significance however, this revolution has become less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history. Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the US, France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made. In addition to studying cinema, this book also breaks ground in examining video games, a pop-culture form long neglected by historians. Sepinwall scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series that have reached millions more players than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the revolution, Slave Revolt on Screen calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.

Peut-on envisager une autre histoire du jeu vidéo ?

Qualifié parfois de « dixième art », après que les jeux de rôles sur table (comme Donjons & Dragons) eurent commencé à céder du terrain dans les loisirs de la jeunesse à partir du mil…

Aucune étude n’a jamais démontré que les formes médiatiques disposeraient d’un pouvoir direct de transformation des réalités sociales. Une approche critique un peu sérieuse préférera ainsi appréhender le jeu vidéo comme le site d’un ensemble de rapports de pouvoir opérant au sein de la culture dominante, traversé, à l’instar d’autres formes culturelles, par des contradictions, des résistances et des réappropriations – autrement dit par des circulations dans la production de sens, les formes et les affects, qui viennent renforcer, nuancer ou déstabiliser les normes de l’hégémonie culturelle. Depuis le début des années 2010 et en particulier la polémique du #GamerGate en 2014, la communauté vidéoludique ne peut plus ignorer le sexisme. Les féministes n’ont pourtant pas attendu si longtemps pour se manifester. Mais c’est peut-être l’année 2012 qui marqua un réel tournant, lorsque Anita Sarkeesian lança une campagne de crowdfunding pour une série de vidéos sur sa chaîne YouTube feministfrequency. Sa démarche déclencha une vague de cyberharcèlement qui alla des insultes aux menaces de mort et jusqu’à la publication de données personnelles. Ce modèle de violence sexiste s’est reproduit à de multiples reprises, notamment en France en 2013 à l’encontre de la créatrice de jeu et féministe Mar_Lard, attaquée pour sa critique argumentée du sexisme dans la culture geek. Elle revenait en particulier sur des propos plus que complaisants d’un journaliste à propos d’une séquence où le personnage de Lara Croft, héroïne du mythique je…

The popularity and visibility of video games within American popular culture is prompted debates within from a spectrum of institutions, ranging from the media and the academy to Main Street and the political sphere. Erasing the complexity, much of the discourse focuses instead on questions of violence and the impact of gaming culture on (White) American youth. While focusing on Grand Theft: San Andreas specifically, this essay explores the culture wars surrounding American video game culture, arguing that the moral panics directed at video games and the defenses/celebrations of virtual reality operate through dominant discourses and hegemonic ideologies of race. Erasing their racial content and textual support for state violence directed at communities of color, the dominant discourse concerning youth and video games rationalizes the fear and policing of Black and Brown communities.

En 2007, le monde du jeu vidéo est secoué par une violente polémique au sujet du jeu vidéo Resident Evil 5. Ce dernier est accusé de faire commerce du racisme, en invitant à se glisser dans la peau d'un américain blanc body-buildé, missionné dans une région africaine anonyme, et tuant des dizaines d'hommes et de femmes noires présentées comme de dangereux zombies infectés du virus T. Depuis, la communauté des joueurs et joueuses de jeux vidéo interpelle régulièrement les créateurs et créatrices des jeux sur les questions du racisme et du sexisme.Dans son ouvrage, Mehdi Derfoufi analyse les rapports de force qui structurent l'industrie du jeu vidéo, dévoilant comment le racisme se niche parfois insidieusement au cœur de scénarios de jeux vidéo à succès. Il nous invite à nous questionner. Quels sont les pays qui pèsent sur les milliards d'euros du marché mondial du jeu vidéo ? Qui sont les game designers et auteurs des jeux ? Comment les représentations racistes sont-elles véhiculées à travers les personnageset les imaginaires vidéoludiques ? L'auteur nous dévoile avec brio les logiques racialisantes à l’œuvre au sein d’un marché économique très concurrentiel où des stéréotypes exotisants servent régulièrement à faire vendre un jeu. Il nous montre aussi comment la division internationale du travail et la hiérarchie économico-politique Nord/Sud pèse sur le marché du jeu vidéo et ralentit l’émergence de nouvelles représentations. Pourtant, de nombreux espoirs, notamment dans les pays du Sud participent au renouvellement de la culture geek : face aux violences racistes, la riposte s’organise.

"Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future."

Conçu comme un discours et non comme un simple référent géographique, le Nord se déploie dans des formes littéraires et culturelles qui en déterminent les particularités. Pluriculturel, variable selon les époques, les lieux et les points de vue, le Nord ouvre des problématiques sur les liens entre le référent et la représentation, entre le discours et l'imaginaire. Qu'il soit scandinave, québécois, finlandais, inuit ou européen, qu'il se manifeste dans les récits, les films, les romans, la poésie, la photographie ou les arts visuels, qu'il soit le lieu d'une dénonciation post-coloniale ou d'un discours impérialiste, d'une recherche formelle ou de l'expression de la culture populaire, le discours du Nord et sur le Nord converge en des paradigmes et des problématiques qui lui sont propres. Dans ce recueil, issu des travaux du Laboratoire international d'étude multidisciplinaire comparée des représentations du Nord et initié par la tenue d'un colloque organisé en décembre 2003 par Joël Bouchard et Amélie Nadeau, le lecteur trouvera quelques pistes d'analyse pour saisir la complexité du système discursif du Nord, réparties en trois sections intitulées: «Formes et intertextualité», «Territoires», ainsi que «Iconographie, voyages, et cinéma».

Digital games, with their capacity for expression and facilitating experience through code, design, art, and audio, offer spaces for Indigenous creatives to contribute to Gerald Vizenor’s characterization of survivance as an active sense of Native presence. Indigenous digital games can be acts of survivance both in the ways they are created as well as the resulting designs. We Sing for Healing is an experiment in developing an Indigenous digital game during limited Internet access that resulted in a musical choose-your-own adventure text game with design, art, and code by Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish game developer Elizabeth LaPensée alongside music by Peguis First Nation mix artist Exquisite Ghost. The non-linear gameplay expresses traditional storytelling patterns while enabling players to poetically travel in, through, and around traditional teachings. The design uses listening, choosing, and revisiting to reinforce what is best described as a non-linear loopular journey.

Digital games can uniquely express Indigenous teachings by merging design, code, art, and sound. Inspired by Anishinaabe grandmothers leading ceremonial walks known as Nibi Walks, Honour Water (http://www.honourwater.com/) is a singing game that aims to bring awareness to threats to the waters and offer pathways to healing through song. The game was developed with game company Pinnguaq and welcomes people from all over to sing with good intentions for the waters. The hope is to pass on songs through gameplay that encourages comfort with singing and learning Anishinaabemowin. Songs were gifted by Sharon M. Day and the Oshkii Giizhik Singers. Sharon M. Day, who is Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and one of the founders of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force, has been a leading voice using singing to revitalize the waters. The Oshkii Giizhik Singers, a community of Anishinaabekwe who gather at Fond du Lac reservation, contribute to the healing for singers, communities, and the waters. Water teachings are infused in art and writing by Anishinaabe and Métis game designer, artist, and writer Elizabeth LaPensée. From development to distribution, Honour Water draws on Indigenous ways of knowing to reinforce Anishinaabeg teachings with hope for healing the water.

Video games, which uniquely interweave design, code, art, and sound, can be an especially robust way to express Indigenous cultures. Such games should involve Indigenous people in meaningful roles throughout design and development from conceptualization to distribution with a focus on building capacity to encourage self-determination for Indigenous game developers. This call to action informs SPEAR (Sovereignty, Positionality, Equity, Advocacy, and Reciprocity), a framework for design and development informed by the Indigenous cultural game Thunderbird Strike.

The educational video game, When Rivers Were Trails, was launched in 2019. The purpose of the game is to teach players about Indigenous perspectives of history, US federal allotment policies affecting tribal nations, and some of the effects of these policies on Indigenous peoples. This article explores tribal college student experiences playing When Rivers Were Trails in hopes that it provides the basis for further research into how tribal college faculty may be able to teach the game within their own classrooms. Tribal colleges and universities were created by tribal nations to provide for the higher education needs of their citizens. Using phenomenological research methods, seven college students volunteered to participate in a brief study about their experiences playing the video game. Upon transcription and analysis of the interview data, three themes were developed that capture how these students define their experience with When Rivers Were Trails: feelings of representation, histories of land dispossession, and resilience of communities.

Video games can be dynamic sovereign spaces for Indigenous representation and expression when the self-determination of Indigenous people is supported. Where ga...