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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.

You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet -- hackers, #gamergate, anonymous mobs attacking an unlucky victim, and revenge porn -- but they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. Zoe Quinn used to feel the same way. She is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. They answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate--they hacked her accounts; stole nude photos of her; harassed her family, friends, and colleagues; and threatened to rape and murder her. But instead of shrinking into silence as the online mobs wanted her to, she raised her voice and spoke out against this vicious online culture and for making the internet a safer place for everyone. In the years since #gamergate, Quinn has helped thousands of people with her advocacy and online-abuse crisis resource Crash Override Network. From locking down victims' personal accounts to working with tech companies and lawmakers to inform policy, she has firsthand knowledge about every angle of online abuse, what powerful institutions are (and aren't) doing about it, and how we can protect our digital spaces and selves.Crash Override offers an up-close look inside the controversy, threats, and social and cultural battles that started in the far corners of the internet and have since permeated our online lives. Through her story -- as target and as activist -- Quinn provides a human look at the ways the internet impacts our lives and culture, along with practical advice for keeping yourself and others safe online.

The popularity of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has created a unique, heavily populated virtual reality wherein player characters are explicitly differentiated by the physical characteristics of their avatars. To investigate the way real-life race perceptions influence these adopted player-character identities, we invited MMO players to participate in an online survey. In this study, we are particularly interested in overlap, or deviation, between real-life racial perceptions and the perception of fictional fantastic races (elves, dwarves). On the basis of the data collected, we found that whether players consciously associate themselves with their avatars or consciously dissociate themselves from their avatars, real-life racial tendencies unconsciously manifest through players' choices of their avatars and in their interactions with other players within the game environment.

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.

"Featuring Females analyzes the portrayals of women in a variety of outlets, including reality television shows, films, print and electronic news programming, magazines, video games, and commercial advertising. A highly esteemed group of scholars and researchers provides informed, original psychological study, and their thought-provoking findings address the ways in which aging, race/ethnicity, body image, gender roles, sexual orientation and relationships, and violence are treated in the media. Featuring Females is a diverse volume, exploring images and characterizations of women young and old and inspiring discussion of the effects that these representations have on girls, women, and society at large"--

The issues that are raised by ethnic status are not exclusive to ethnicity but represent circumstances much wider in occurrence that appear more often among ethnic minorities.

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.

This article explores the ways game adaptations engage with existing popular culture constructions of race within the framework of commercial franchises. Its focus is on games which are part of the so-called “Frodo Franchise” based on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. It considers the role played by licensing agreements, the conventions, and ludic elements of different game genres, the need for new characters and narratives to keep audiences engaged with an existing world, and the opportunity games offer for interactive exploration of a digital world, to illuminate both the challenges to and the opportunities for disrupting conventional representations of race and difference.

This essay examines the representation and consumption of Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2 as a site of catharsis, pleasure, and empowerment. Through not only its repre-sentation of white supremacy but its rendering of intervention and transformation as violence, Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2 offer a powerful inscription of gratification. In other words, offering both a space of oppositional gaze and a virtual reality invested in challenging gaze based in violence,Mafia IIIandWatch Dogs 2 reimagine the conventions of both video games and violence.

Notwithstanding the presence of extreme racialized tropes within the world of videogames, public discourses continue to focus on questions of violence, denying the impor-tance of games in maintaining the hegemonic racial order. Efforts to exclude race (andintersections with gender, nation, and sexuality) from public discussions through its era-sure and the acceptance of larger discourses of colorblindness contribute to a problematicunderstanding of video games and their significant role in contemporary social, political,economic, and cultural organization. How can one truly understand fantasy, violence,gender roles, plot, narrative, game playability, virtual realities, and the like without ex-amining race, racism, and/or racial stratification—one cannot. This article challengesgame studies scholars to move beyond simply studying games to begin to offer insightand analysis into the importance of race and racialized tropes within virtual reality andthe larger implications of racist pedagogies of video games in the advancement of Whitesupremacy.

Beyond Hate offers a critical ethnography of the virtual communities established and discursive networks activated through the online engagements of white separatists, white nationalists, and white supremacists with various popular cultural texts, including movies, music, television, sport, video games, and kitsch. Outlining the ways in which advocates of white power interpret popular cultural forms, and probing the emergent spaces of white power popular culture, it examines the paradoxical relationship that advocates of white supremacy have with popular culture, as they finding it to be an irresistible and repugnant reflection of social decay rooted in multiculturalism. Drawing on a range of new media sources, including websites, chat rooms, blogs and forums, this book explores the concerns expressed by advocates of white power, with regard to racial hierarchy and social order, the crisis of traditional American values, the perpetuation of liberal, feminist, elitist ideas, the degradation of the family and the fetishization of black men. What emerges is an understanding of the instruments of power in white supremacist discourses, in which a series of connections are drawn between popular culture, multiculturalism, sexual politics and state functions, all of which are seen to be working against white men. A richly illustrated study of the intersections of white power and popular culture in the contemporary U.S., and the use of use cyberspace by white supremacists as an imagined site of resistance, Beyond Hate will appeal to scholars of sociology and cultural studies with interests in race and ethnicity, popular culture and the discourses of the extreme right.

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’.

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

How have video games evolved to now create meaningful stories about race and sports? This essay examines how Spike Lee's film-within-a-game, Livin' Da Dream (2015), reproduces some existing procedural and racial logics that reflect the desire to constantly manage and contain the centrality of black athletic greatness in mainstream sports and video game culture. While Lee's long-form cinematic model for turning sports video games into narrative games has been emulated across the medium as a whole, fans and gamers continually discuss the film as an evidently "broken" part of the popular NBA 2K video game series. As I argue here, however, the film-within-a-game productively insists on a default blackness when it functions as what I call "procedural cinema" (a rules and process based narrative). Ultimately, in functioning procedurally, Lee's otherwise conservative melodramatic story serves as a particularly instructive example of how computational blackness may, in systematically subverting the rules of the game, signify disruptively both within and against the machine.

Profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and "gamify" slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave's choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. This work questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin's Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery's victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance.

Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero's The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie's ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties--ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism--has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other.

Our most modern monster and perhaps our most American, the zombie that is so prevalent in popular culture today has its roots in African soul capture mythologies. The Transatlantic Zombie provides a more complete history of the zombie than has ever been told, explaining how the myth's migration to the New World was facilitated by the transatlantic slave trade, and reveals the real-world import of storytelling, reminding us of the power of myths and mythmaking, and the high stakes of appropriation and homage. Beginning with an account of a probable ancestor of the zombie found in the Kongolese and Angolan regions of seventeenth-century Africa and ending with a description of the way, in contemporary culture, new media are used to facilitate zombie-themed events, Sarah Juliet Lauro plots the zombie's cultural significance through Caribbean literature, Haitian folklore, and American literature, film, and the visual arts. The zombie entered US consciousness through the American occupation of Haiti, the site of an eighteenth-century slave rebellion that became a war for independence, thus making the figuration of living death inseparable from its resonances with both slavery and rebellion. Lauro bridges African mythology and US mainstream culture by articulating the ethical complications of the zombie's invocation as a cultural conquest that was rebranded for the American cinema. As The Transatlantic Zombie shows, the zombie is not merely a bogeyman representing the ills of modern society, but a battleground over which a cultural war has been fought between the imperial urge to absorb exotic, threatening elements, and the originary, Afro-disaporic culture's preservation through a strategy of mythic combat

Today over half of all American households own a dedicated game console and gaming industry profits trump those of the film industry worldwide. In this book, Soraya Murray moves past the technical discussions of games and offers a fresh and incisive look at their cultural dimensions. She critically explores blockbusters likeThe Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed to show how they are deeply entangled with American ideological positions and contemporary political, cultural and economic conflicts.As quintessential forms of visual material in the twenty-first century, mainstream games both mirror and spur larger societal fears, hopes and dreams, and even address complex struggles for recognition. This book examines both their elaborately constructed characters and densely layered worlds, whose social and environmental landscapes reflect ideas about gender, race, globalisation and urban life. In this emerging field of study, Murray provides novel theoretical approaches to discussing games and playable media as culture. Demonstrating that games are at the frontline of power relations, she reimagines how we see them - and more importantly how we understand them.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: introduction While digital games hold promise for learning and socialization, emerging research and popular debates have critiqued inclusive access to these practices and literacies. This essay examines digital games for their potential to integrate diverse individuals and communities for learning and socialization, especially in online play and broadcasting of gameplay. For example, a level of cultural competency can be attained in well-developed games to overcome essentialist notions and assumptions about women and people of color. Using Black Cyberfeminism as a theoretical lens to make sense of players’ experiences, and Racialized Pedagogical Zones (RPZs) as an analytical frame to situate digital games’ entrenched ideologies of race and racism, we contend that games offer highly unproblematized depictions but have extreme potential for cultural competency. We further utilize Communities of Practice (CoP) as a frame for understanding and interrogating equitable access to community-supported collaborative learning and mastery within game culture, more broadly, and interest-driven guilds, clans, and affinity spaces, more specifically. In our extension of CoP, we integrate inclusive to highlight the resistive and resilient strategies employed by supportive communities for diverse women in addressing the systematic nature of oppression and power relations that undergird communities of practice, particularly in marked gendered spaces such as gaming. Marginalizing practices in game culture have become more widely publicized and understood in recent years, most notably because of high profile incidents of harassment. However, representations of women and racial or ethnic minorities by the gaming industry have also been problematic historically. For instance, since the 1980s video games have been critiqued for the hypersexualization of women and women are often the victims of misogynistic [End Page 112] vitriol, as the incidents around Gamergate have exposed. People of color are featured in largely stereotypical ways and are all but absent from the gaming industry. Queer gamers and gamers with dis/abilities are almost entirely absent and, when present, are not depicted fairly. This differential treatment appears to have a symbiotic relationship with the exclusion of marginalized players. As researchers have noted, Internet technologies and virtual communities operate in a manner that benefits privileged identities. These unequal power relations are accepted as legitimate and are embedded in the cultural practices of digital technology. Nevertheless, many gamers—most notably women—have resisted this perpetual state of inequity and the dominant narrative of power, control, and exclusion. Although some in gaming contend that these are not overt practices of exclusion, many players and scholars acknowledge the existence of symbolic exclusion, where those who are valued have the privilege to define legitimate practice and participation within gaming culture. The unequal power relations operating within the gaming community influence not only what gamers consume but also what they learn about themselves and others. Further, the racialized and gendered consumptive practices through gaming are often taken for granted. Commercial gaming culture is, with few exceptions, complicit in these exclusionary practices by continuing to design at a deficit, despite these increasingly apparent realities. But many gamers have begun to resist and challenge not only the imagery but also the practices that sustain white, masculine privilege within gaming and technology in general. While these practices have yet to reach a critical mass to disrupt the power structure operating within game culture as a whole, they exist counter to the mainstream and empower the marginalized operating within them. While the literature will provide an overview of these practices, our purpose is to privilege the resistance and resilience strategies of the marginalized to disrupt the traditional narrative while they empower themselves. We utilize Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality to reflect on identity, recognizing that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.” We also want to caution that while we focus on players who have historically been the marginalized in gaming culture and game research, we recognize that men...