Professor Fox Harrell is a computer scientist and literary artist who recently showed up in an article on Boingboing.net. He talks specifically about fantasy worlds in computer and video games, wherein one builds an avatar or character in order to move around in this alternate reality. As he played around with different computer games, in trying to create avatars that he could actually identify with, there were dilemmas — social construction of races outside of the video game world are infiltrating and heavily influencing the structure of virtual character creation.
“In Elder Scrolls III and IV: I wanted to create a character I could identify as African-inspired (the ‘Redguard race’) but then was automatically made less intelligent,” Harrell says. Similar problems come up in instances like not being offered a clean-lined, sleek male character, as they were all bulky and overly-muscled, being forced into a female character, wherein your strength might decrease. In these video games, all of the abilities you accrue with your character, your weaknesses and power, along with your interactions with other players, and your value as performer in a game, stem directly from the race, socioeconomic class or profession, and gender of your character.
I find this extremely interesting. I know that most of the people who will be reading this blog might not be too interested in video games, but I think this is an important connection to a wide range of issues we’ve spoken about in class together. I’ve realized, that in reading about Harrell’s experiences, that I never payed close-enough attention to my own experiences within the virtual world, which applies to any alternate reality (including the internet in general, people), and how this stigmatization might affect one’s self-image.
In our recent discussion of media, visual pleasure, and also visual stress in terms of identifying with a person as oneself on the screen, and then also realizing that they are NOT you, I think this idea of virtual reality and identification within these realities becomes critical to our interpretation of identity politics. Omitting, or editing out, racialized, gendered, or sexualized options in games is a direct correlation to our omitting of “other” in the physical world we live in. I think Harrell sums it up nicely:
“Much more is at stake than just fun and games. Prejudice, bias, stereotyping, and stigma are built not only into many games, but other forms of identity representations in social networks, virtual worlds, and more.
These have real world effects on how we see ourselves and each other… one realizes that identity is social matter, because even if one can create the perfect avatar, it does not mean that others will respond to it in the desired way that the person sees himself or herself. This means that even in social networking software, we create profiles that ostensibly represent our real selves, but they are limited by many of the same constraints as characters in games.”
source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/19/chimerical-avatars-a.html
Sex, Culture, Politics 