Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games ed. by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, and: Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice ed. by Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard

2020; Volume: 59; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2020.0052

2578-4919

Whitney Pow,

Cinema and Media Studies

Reviewed by: Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games ed. by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm, and: Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice ed. by Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard Whitney Pow (bio) Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games edited by Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm. Indiana University Press. 2017. $90.00 hardcover. $38.00 paper. Also available in e-book. 280 pages. Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice edited by Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard. University of Washington Press. 2018. $95.00 hardcover. $30.00 paper. 320 pages. Gaming Representation and Woke Gaming are necessary books. These edited collections trace the violence of a seemingly arbitrary line that has been drawn within game studies—dividing our understanding of technology from race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other aspects of marginalized identity; insisting that the systems of power inherent to whiteness and domination are unrelated to the use, consumption, and practices embedded in technology and games.1 Both collections insightfully examine and deconstruct this rift in the field of game studies. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm foreground this issue in Gaming Representation: "For most [End Page 205] of game studies' history, conversations about identity have only ever happened on the margins."2 Both Gaming Representation and Woke Gaming examine the ways in which issues of citizenship, personhood, nationhood, and identity are essential to understanding the practices of representation in video games, the dynamics and game mechanics inherent to interactive media, and the communities of players, consumers, and producers that surround these technologies. Gaming Representation and Woke Gaming, when read together, trace the historical landscape of the emerging fields of feminist and queer game studies, locating race, identity, power, and technology as irrevocably intertwined. Both books make a point of framing their collections of essays through the ongoing issues raised by Gamergate and political movements such as Black Lives Matter. Beginning in 2014, the Gamergate movement openly mobilized harassment and threats of physical violence (including mass shootings, doxxing, and bombings) against marginalized critics and game designers including Brianna Wu, Zoë Quinn, and Anita Sarkeesian. Its effects continue to reverberate in both game studies and gaming communities today, with open threats and harassment still directed at game studies scholars, game designers, and activists who invoke the word "Gamergate" online.3 To be clear, Gamergate did not signal the "beginning" of these sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic sentiments in the United States. Historically, we might situate Gamergate as an explosive moment in the long historical trajectory of public systems of violent domination, oppression, and power in America's political landscape. Both Gaming Representation and Woke Gaming were organized with Gamergate and Black Lives Matter in mind, with their essays, forewords, and introductions framing the silence about and disregard for identity in game studies in the context of contemporary identity politics in the United States. In Woke Gaming, Kishonna L. Gray and David J. Leonard write: "This collection grew from the ashes of Gamergate. . . . It moves forward in memory of #TrayvonMartin and #SandraBland, in this moment where Black Death is a source of white pleasure, and Black bodies have been a part of the entertainment structure for white audiences."4 In Gaming Representation, Malkowski and Russworm observe, "The social, political, and cultural context of the #Gamergate era, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and fan-created campaigns like #INeedDiverseGames make this a unique and urgent time for game studies to develop better critical proficiencies for representation and identity-based analysis."5 As the editors assert, we cannot separate our discussions of games and technology from race, and in particular, Blackness and movements like Black Lives Matter. In the disciplinary cleaving of race and identity from game studies and technology at large, we suffer a great loss. We lose the ability to fully comprehend, map, and teach the ways in which the violence of gaming culture and the violence perpetuated by social media are intimately connected [End Page 206] to urgent contemporary American issues of Black life, immigration, citizenship, and the material circumstances and necropolitics that predispose certain people for futurity and life and other people for death in America. In...