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Though research examining violence in video games (VGs) and its potential real-world effects has been a target of academic attention, content analysis of demographical marginalization in VGs has not been as prolific. What little research there is reveals a pronounced absence and stereotyping of women and racial or ethnic minorities but ignores queer content altogether. This work explores video game demographics through quantitative analysis of the demographic composition and stereotyping of characters from 30 popular VG titles. Findings of this study support that of past analyses, evidencing that the representation of women and racial minorities is both rare and stereotyped. Queer characters are also shown to be sparse and stereotyped. While past research has largely treated race and gender separately, this study shows that multiply marginalized groups, including queers, are even more underrepresented and stereotyped. The sociocultural implications of these findings are discussed and suggestions are made for future analysis and marketing.

Many games touch upon issues that are related to the postcolonial culture we live in. Be it in the shape of referring to how it has generated ethnic differences, subscribing to (post) capitalist values of winning and gaining, or by employing militarist strategies that have been partly shaped our colonial histories, cultural notions that are related to our colonial past are often resonant in games. However, one particular strand of strategy games takes the notions of colonialism as its most central focus. Games like Age Of Empires (AOE), Civilization and Rise of Nations, may differ greatly in certain ludological aspects, but all share a strong fascination with colonial history. Through employing colonial techniques of domination like exploring, trading, map-making and military manoeuvring, players create their personal colonial pasts and futures. Even though it is evident that such games share an explicit fascination with colonial history, it remains less clear in what way they may be called postcolonial. In this article I will shed light on why and how such games can be called postcolonial and should even be conceived as one of the most significant arenas to express the tensions and frictions that are part of the postcolonial culture we live in. As postcolonial playgrounds they offer the perfect means to play with and make sense of how colonial spatial practices have shaped contemporary culture. I will argue that the very character of digital games as well as the specific game mechanisms of historical strategy games makes them postcolonial playgrounds par excellence.

The western media has been eager to construct an apparent link between the so-called moral desensitization of soldiers in the 2003 Iraq War and their expe-rience of video game combat. Commentators assert that ‘games have avoided engaging the real-life issues to which they are responding’ (Zacny 2008), includ-ing the issue of combat trauma. Contrary to such positions, many video games already simulate the trauma in their gameplay experience; this article explores this concept from Brown’s definition of trauma as ‘outside the range of human experience’ (1995: 101). This evokes recent work in games studies on in-game involvement and identity-formation and raises questions about the role of moral-ity in gameplay, especially in multi-player combat games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty 4 and America’s Army. Working from these hitherto overlooked aspects of trauma in gameplay experiences, this article challenges the oversim-plified association of video games with the desensitization of US troops in recent conflicts.

Traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace.Deftly interweaving history, culture, and critical theory, Anna Everett traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace, particularly during the early years of the Internet. She challenges the problematic historical view of black people as quintessential information-age outsiders or poster children for the digital divide by uncovering their early technolust and repositioning them as eager technology adopters and consumers, and thus as coconstituent elements in the information technology revolution. She offers several case studies that include lessons learned from early adoption of the Internet by the Association of Nigerians Living Abroad and their Niajanet virtual community, the grassroots organizing efforts that led to the phenomenally successful Million Woman March, the migration of several historic black presses online, and an interventionist critique of race in contemporary video games. Ultimately, Digital Diaspora shows how African Americans and African diasporic peoples developed the necessary technomastery to ride in the front of the bus on the information superhighway.Anna Everett is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; and Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949.

Games and gaming have always been an important part of society and culture. Within the last 35 years, due to numerous technology innovations, electronic games in many formats have not only become ubiquitous in everyday recreational life but have also permeated many professional fields and disciplines for multiple purposes including teaching and learning.The Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education presents a framework for understanding games for educational purposes while providing a broader sense of current related research. Compiling over 50 groundbreaking research studies from leading international authorities in the field, this advanced and uniquely comprehensive reference is a must-have for academic and research libraries and for all those interested in expanding their theoretical and practical knowledge of the exciting field of electronic gaming.

This first volume of the DIGAREC Series holds the proceedings of the conference The Philosophy of Computer Gamesʺ, held at the University of Potsdam from May 8-10, 2008. The contributions of the conference address three fields of computer game research that are philosophically relevant and, likewise, to which philosophical reflection is crucial. These are: ethics and politics, the action-space of games, and the magic circle. All three topics are interlinked and constitute the paradigmatic object of computer games: Whereas the first describes computer games on the outside, looking at the cultural effects of games as well as on moral practices acted out with them, the second describes computer games on the inside, i.e. how they are constituted as a medium. The latter finally discusses the way in which a border between these two realms, games and non-games, persists or is already transgressed in respect to a general performativity.

This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations proliferate while productive and politically disruptive racial differences are ejected or neutralized through fantastical proxies.

This collection explores the relationship between digital gaming and its cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Encompassing key locations for global gaming production and consumption such as Japan, China, and South Korea, as well as increasingly significant sites including Australia and Singapore, the region provides divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies of specific games and gaming locales to macro political economy analyses of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows, this collection provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation, and consumption in the region.

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.

This chapter examines and responds to the silencing, resistance to any intrusion of questions about race and racism, and overall erasure of race from the debates and broader discourse concerning video game culture. It not only provides insight into the nature and logics guiding claims of colorblindness, but also connects the ideologies and culture of denial to the broader racial discourse of post-civil rights America. Hoping to inspire debate and transformative knowledge sharing, this chapter additionally offers a textually-based racial analysis of Outlaw Volleyball as an example of the type of critical examination required to move beyond a culture that often reduces bodies and voices of people of color to objects of gaze, ridicule, and consumption while denying any sorts of criticism and questions regarding the racial meaning and texts evident within much of today’s gaming.

In the wake of 9/11, US popular culture has played an important role in the manufacture of consent and the mediation of contradictions. In particular, video games have aff orded the production of interactive, narrative spaces for the reassertion of race, nation, and gender. Through a close reading of two video games, Gun and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, we unpack the insecurities of empire and how racialized violence, colonial categories, and territorial claims work to resecure Whiteness, masculinity, and Americanness. Special attention is given to the militarization of video games and rhetorical struggles over the meaning of race and culture amid the ‘War on Terror’.

This paper approaches the debate over the notion of “magic circ-le” through an exploratory analysis of the unfolding of identities/differences in gameplay through Derrida’s différance. Initially, différance is related to the notion of play and identity/difference in Derrida’s perspective. Next, the notion of magic circle through Derrida’s play is analyzed, emphasizing the dynamics of diffé-rance to understand gameplay as process; questioning its boun-daries. Finally, the focus shifts toward the implications of the interplay of identities and differences during gameplay.

While the violent content of video games has caused wide concern among scholars, gender, and racial stereotypes in video games are still an understudied area. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a better understanding of the stereotypical phenomenon in video games. The book chapter first provides a comprehensive review of previous studies conducted upon gender-role and racial portrayals in video games. Then a small-scale content analysis on a sample of official trailers, introductory sequences and covers of 19 of the most popular video games is introduced. Finally, the implications of stereotype in video games and the possible social and psychological impacts on players, especially adolescent players, are discussed.

Extending Alexander Galloway’s analysis of the action-image in videogames, this essay explores the concept in relation to its source: the analysis of cinema by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The applicability of the concept to videogames will, therefore, be considered through a comparison between the First Person Shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. This analysis will compellingly explore the nature of videogame-action, its relation to player-perceptions and its loca-tion within the machinic and ludic schema.

This article examines the racialization of informational labor in machinima about Chinese player workers in the massively multiplayer online role playing game World ofWarcraft. Such fan-produced video content extends the representational space of thegame and produces overtly racist narrative space to attach to a narrative that, whilecarefully avoiding explicit references to racism or racial conflict in our world, is premised upon a racial war in an imaginary world*the World of Azeroth. This profiling activityis part of a larger biometric turn initiated by digital culture’s informationalization of thebody and illustrates the problematics of informationalized capitalism. If late capitalism ischaracterized by the requirement for subjects to be possessive individuals, to make claims to citizenship based on ownership of property, then player workers are unnatural subjects in that they are unable to obtain avatarial self-possession. The painful paradox of this dynamic lies in the ways that it mirrors the dispossession of information workers in the Fourth Worlds engendered by ongoing processes of globalization. As long as Asian ‘‘farmers’’ are figured as unwanted guest workers within the culture of MMOs, user-produced extensions of MMO-space like machinima will most likely continue to depict Asian culture as threatening to the beauty and desirability of shared virtual space in the World of Warcraft.

Even video games by Asian creators tend to depict primarily white characters or reference Asian stereotypes such as kung fu fighters or yakuza thugs. Games depicting the Vietnam war are particularly troubling for Asian players expected to identify with white characters. As the game industry continues to expand, its representation of Asians and Asian Americans must change.

This chapter examines the relationship between culture, economics and policy within the creative industries (which for the purposes of this paper, are assumed to be equivalent to the cultural industries), and their manifestation in Asia. Addressing any one of these three issues is a challenge in itself, but addressing all three of them together raises the complexity even further. Early writers on the “creative economy” have noted how it works differently from the traditional economy (Florida 2002; Howkins 2001).1 Culture is vitally important to understanding how creative industries develop, but the role of culture in shaping national competitive advantage is not that clear. The same can be said for policy, and a discussion of the triad can be quite convoluted. Having said that, all three levels are still very relevant to the proper description of a creative industry — as I will show in this chapter.This paper attempts to address this triad of issues primarily with a production-and-innovation-oriented view of industrial organisation, bringing in creativity, culture and policy where possible. I shall do this primarily through the lens of one sector in particular — the video games industry — in which Asia has been investing heavily lately, and in which Japan has been an early leader. I will also provide a limited focus on the animation sector for comparative purposes. I will first provide a summary of how creative production in video games occurs in the US, followed by an examination of how Asian patterns compare. In particular, I am interested in whether individual and industrial level creativity differs in Asia. Within Asia, more detailed cases of the Chinese online games industry and the Philippine animation industry will be discussed, but relevant observations are also drawn from general knowledge and a literature review of Japan, Korea and Singapore, as well as interviews which corroborate those observations.

A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. This innovation enabled the results to be analyzed in proportion to the games that were actually played by the public, and thus allowed the first statements able to be generalized about the content of popular video games. The results show a systematic over-representation of males, white and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly. Overall, the results are similar to those found in television research. The implications for identity, cognitive models, cultivation and game research are discussed.

An exploration of how issues of race and ethnicity play out in a digital media landscape that includes MySpace, post-9/11 politics, MMOGs, Internet music distribution, and the digital divide.