Tara Fickle, “The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities”

tara is an associate professor of english at the university of oregon and an affiliated faculty member the department of indigenous race and ethnic studies the center for the study of women in society in the center for asian and pacific studies uh she got her phd from the university of california los angeles and her ba from wesleyan and i should interject that i tried to recruit her to come to brown's phd program in english which when we failed to get her here but uh but obviously things worked out well for her um uh professor fickle's research and teaching interests include asian slash asian american culture game studies the digital humanities and comic studies and her first book which i'll be talking about today the race card from gaming technologies to model minorities which came out from nyu press in 2019 is the winner of the before columbus foundation's american book award um and this book ex i'll just say this it explores how games have been used to establish and combat asian and asian american racial stereotypes and she will be telling you more about that um and she's currently working on a digital archive and analysis of the canonical asian american anthology i.e with additional research projects in chinese gold farming and the racialized dimensions of esports her critical and creative work has appeared in modern fiction studies comparative literature studies mellis and various public humanities portals and if you go to tarafickel.com you can find more of her writings anyway tar that i read a good chunk of her book over the weekend and it is fascinating and i'm just so looking forward to hearing her talk please join me and join me in welcoming cara to brown okay can everyone hear me okay dan i'll look i think i can only see you so i'll just go for your nod um hi everyone i am tara pickle i'm speaking to you from unseated calculate territory on the land that we now call eugene oregon and i'm so excited to be here virtually um i wanted to uh thank the center uh thanks sophia dr leroux for inviting me to soraya and other staff for making all this possible and then of course thanks to dan for moderating um as he mentioned we kind of have a long history and i am so honored and delighted to be able to have him as an interlocutor um and then of course thanks to all of you in the audience for making the time um to come today so before i switch to the slides i thought i'd just kind of give you a really brief road map of today's talk so i'll kind of give an overview of the book's arguments say a little bit about what it's about and and talk about some of the inspiration for it and then the second half of the talk will be mostly dedicated to kind of showing you some applications and examples of it um to one particular game pokemon go but the book itself is not all about pokemon go for better or worse so i'm happy to expand on any of the areas or talk a little bit more about them during the q a so let me switch to the slides all right dan look good can you see it can you good all right thanks um so in the broadest sense this book really came out of my desire to contest a couple of widespread myths about games and first of those myths is the idea that they're you know what we might call post-racial utopias post-racial or you know quote-unquote colorblind in the sense that your particular identity your race your gender nationality class the notion that those don't matter in games that everyone is kind of equal behind the screen for video games or at the table and utopian in the sense that games are kind of free of the inequality found in real life the idea that it's kind of level playing field for all a meritocracy where the only thing that matters is how good you are your skill level as long as of course you follow the rules and second utopian in the sense that games are kind of safe magical space where you can do whatever you want and be whoever you want to be and that connects to that kind of post-racial be whoever you want to be identity level but also connecting to what we call this idea of the magic circle where games are functioning like a kind of border or membrane that's protecting you from the real world in which things that can happen in game um can happen precisely because they can't in the real world and over the last decade but especially over the last year or so you've seen a lot of this utopian logic kind of making its way through the media whether this idea that kind of reality is broken and games can save us or that games are educational and healthy um or especially over the last year because it's one of our primary sources of connection and pleasure during a global pandemic um if you play video games regularly of course you already know that this utopian post-racial idea is kind of an ill fit with the actual experience that many video games are in fact immensely toxic as they say spaces where racism sexism trans and homophobia xenophobia abound both in live interactions between players you know over voice or chat um but also around of course many in-game characters who are most often presented as racialized and sexual as caricatures and of course games are rarely safe havens in the sense that violence and domination tend to constitute core game mechanics um the whole purpose of the game is often to kind of hyper realistically simulate uh real world violence war military intervention um so what this book about is about is is first understanding why given how patently false it is we continue to cleave to this first myth about games as a kind of idealized utopic version of the real world and what i found in doing research is this myth as well as this issue of toxicity which seems to be very contemporary to the digital space actually really precedes video games by a significant degree so i got really curious about how games maybe have been from the beginning in their analog stages a place where race and inequality actually get perpetuated but also erased um utopianized which is why i begin in the book although i won't talk about it as much today in the late 19th century about how gambling was used really effectively to galvanize arguments um to end chinese immigration to the us in the late 19th century um and then also as i started to do some research into games as race making spaces i also encountered this kind of secondary myth which is the question of sort of why study games at all they are seen as kind of by definitions frivolous simplistic diversions that aren't really worthy of scholarly inquiry and in some ways that's arguably why they're allowed to have these kind of offensive retrograde representations because they're seen as not really mattering right this quote um it's just a game but what i show in the book and which this growing field of game studies has i think been showing is that really contrary to appearance games are in fact these highly complex and often quite subtle political technologies that directly participate in many cases in the construction of racial hierarchies and this happens not just within individual games but uh within this whole concept of gaming and i'll say more about what that means but just to say now that that whole idea of what we ascribe to games and is really tied up with these ideas of fairness meritocracy social mobility and of course national identity which are all of them themselves um highly racialized so this kind of brings me to a statement of the argument of the race card which is essentially that games can be used as a technology to racialize in the sense of rendering meaningful this whole social fiction that we call race but also to rationalize uh the material and social inequalities that are produced by race so in other words because of their form um games are really effective ways of naturalizing inequalities and by extension race by making them seem real justifiable um inevitable and so all this is likely sounding quite abstract so i wanted to anchor these points through a couple of concrete examples and this is also talking about the kind of inspiration for the project so although i think the connection between gaming and racialization has really broad resonances the inspiration for this book came um from thinking about asian and asian american culture and history specifically and that's not just because east asia especially japan but more recently south korea and china have been a really singular force in the history of the video game industry but also because asian american literature i found was kind of an unexpected place where authors and artists have used gaming to essentially illuminate what it means to be asian in america so my interest in games as a way to better understand race came explicitly out of the ways that authors and artists like maxine hung kingston yamamoto john okada jin yang and many many others have since the 1940s and 50s really been defining asian americans experience as a matter of say decoding the puzzle of conflicting cultures distinguishing the real from the fake learning to play by quote american rules as so-called model minorities or using mahjong scrabble chess pac-man game theory um to dramatize the kind of impossible choices and risks that are demanded by assimilation or by assertions of national loyalty in wartime or the way that they present gambling or baseball as alternate modes of national belonging when citizenship produce no match for racism or xenophobia so examples like these which i discuss in the book i think help us explain a really key overlooked way in which asian americans get racialized um including the seeming paradox of asians as both the hardest of workers but also the most kind of hardcore of players so for me that's one half of this dynamic that i mentioned earlier and which in the book i call little orientalism in other words the way excuse me the way that games function is a racializing discourse that renders asian as meaningful as a racial category by characterizing it in gaming terms so in other words asians are those who supposedly play cheap or don't play fair or are inscrutable uncreative robotic allergic to fun obsessed with work money all of those things and all of those are sort of ludic or what we'd call kind of game and play related stereotypes what i found really interesting though after looking at these individual texts is that so many of these asian racial stereotypes about individuals as you know quote unquote cheap players are also national stereotypes that really dominate the way that u.s relations with china specifically have been characterized um over the last century but especially now so the second half of the book is also talking about how gaming has been deployed for the purposes of nation building in an orientalist fashion building on edward syed's term by defining east and west in opposing relations to these abstract game ideas of fairness and freedom because just as these racialized images of individual game players haven't gone away but have been repackaged and continued to shape the racial imaginary about asians in america as those of you who have seen crazy rich asians or follow contemporary esports know and just for those of you who aren't familiar with those images that one on the left is an image from the film version of the joy luck club by amy tan which is all about mahjong dramatizing intergenerational conflict and then the most recent is a more infamous scene from crazy rich asians the mahjong scene um but we also see these kind of much older late 19th century little orientalist strokes getting revived in contemporary sinophobia so in the book for example i talk about how the 19th century american narrative of chinese workers as degenerate gamblers and cheaters most famously in the poem the heathen chinese by bret hart of which this is an image and essentially the story is of a chinese laborer asan he was represented on the right and the game of euchre a popular popular card game at that time is used to dramatize the fact that austin's cheap labor is also metaphorized to the fact that he's cheating at the card game of course the satire here is that the irish-american miners that he's playing against are also trying to cheat him at the same time it's satire that has was unfortunately taken at face value and used to argue for chinese exclusion but um that image you know and that trope of the game became a way to articulate the threat of cheap chinese labor to the kind of honest american working man and now of course we find it recycled in the dominant narrative where the u.s as a whole is standing for fairness right and china is this rule breaker counterfeiter cheat against whom no honest competition is possible so little orientalism for me on the one hand is a way of describing the kind of artistic and historical processes where this relationship between gaming race and nation gets established but i also find it really useful as a kind of reading method for games as a kind of analytical tool to think about how some of these ideas are being transmitted through games themselves so right now i want to kind of show you some applications of this idea by way of an example which i hope that many of you still remember it comes from the summer of 2016 when pokemon go on augmented reality mobile game based on the beloved 1990s japanese franchise took america by storm so initially though the game was praised for promoting exercise and fostering new friendships it's lava lamination of virtual and real spaces soon exposed more insidious forms of social mapping minority players describe being the target of suspicious glances while playing in predominantly white neighborhoods suburban children were cautioned against straying into so-called bad neighborhoods an asian-american grandfather the game's first casualty but not the last was shot for alleged trespassing while playing near virginia country club so many rightly saw these incidents um as evidence of the kind of de facto segregation that still defines how race and space are defined in the united are delimited in the united states um so game designers like omari akil in this much cited article pokemon go is the death sentence if you are a black man rude the fact that real life inequality shattered that ludic illusion that magic circle the idea that racism kind of spoiled the game by making it too real because in spite of its cast of adorably cartoonish pocket monsters that's what the pokemon stands for the game counter-intuitively provided a really disturbingly realistic approximation of the racial and economic schisms of everyday life but the question that the book starts with is was this unwanted intrusion of reality really just an unfortunate contamination a kind of glitch of the game didn't the game in fact by making distant travel and necessity uh in some sense actually force players into such boundary crossing enterprises um for those of you who haven't played it the game is basically a kind of like gps treasure hunt so you walk around with the game open um and creatures kind of appear on screen in certain locations and you capture them by kind of clicking aiming at them with a ball um but the key is that you have to sometimes travel to rather specific locations or quite far away in order to capture the more rare among them because the goal is to you know catch all of them to complete this kind of index um so akil's observation here that the very premise of the game quote asks me as a black man to put my life in danger if i choose to play it as is intended and with enthusiasm suggests that pokemon go was not simply a reflection of existing of white privilege but actually an active participant and augmenting what we call the reality of racial difference our sense of race as a socially meaningful sign of human difference by extending it into the realm of play so if as friedrich schiller famously remarked man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is man and he is only completely a man when he plays then in pokemon go non-white players encountered a kind of quote real-life pikachu it's as we'll talk about later kind of superimposed um through the camera and the fact of their own kind of incomplete virtual humanity in the very same moment because like the pokemon themselves who only appeared on the game map when the player is within sufficiently close range the social meaning of race activated was kind of put into play only once players traversed these spatial borders and became very aware of being out of place being made to feel at once threatened and threatening so and this is sort of the premise of the book that if even a kind of cute seemingly uh you know quote-unquote colorblind post-racial game like pokemon go could be said to play any role in the way that race acquires its meaning in everyday life then grasping the implications of that kinship requires um something that this book is trying to do a really radical revision of our current assumptions about games as these innocent apolitical escapes um and the question is kind of further complicated because in a game like pokemon and pokemon go there may seem to be no visible signs of race at least this is an image of the pikachu at least not in the limited way that we have come to think about that term through corporeal qualities like skin color hair body type accents so forth um and especially from within a black white binary and yet and this is an example of what it means to kind of look at gaming itself as a racializing technology pokemon goes use of gps and augmented reality um it's the augmented reality that's making it seem like the pikachu is you know standing on the grass through the camera from another perspective you could say it's really simply a digital version of a much older racial logic that has served the objectives of imperialism and exploitation for centuries and this similarity i think is is nicely illustrated and because it was the thrust behind pokemon go art like that created by the aleppo born photographer coletta kiel as a comment on the war in syria so what this work highlights i think is how the mechanics and dynamics of pokemon go in other words the game's rules and the kinds of behaviors that it rewards are like so many other games about violent conquest and innocent exploration not one or the other in other words not only does this art bring home how much a game like pokemon go resembles these older what we call world domination games that you may be familiar with like risk but it also renders visible the kind of continuity with contemporary wars um in fact us military personnel when the game came out played pokemon go so incessantly that they had to be banned from playing it on base beginning or else in pearl harbor so beyond the explicit parallels between the kind of imperialist aesthetic and military implications that it draws out to go back to akil's images what they really importantly drive home i think is this kind of deceptive logic that makes games like pokemon go so compelling so their force really comes from the dissonance created by superimposing these cute brightly colored you know harmless little cartoon characters against the kind of suffering and devastation that we would actively prefer not to visually apprehend often and the extremist violence too that goes hand in hand with histories of u.s imperialism in other words to take it a kind of step further akil's art like omari aquil's comments about playing while black is revealing what the game itself also already creates which is the illusion of that dissonance between the pleasure of the game world these little cartoon characters and the misery of the real world and that's how that magic circle that i mentioned earlier is really working by securing the perception that these two spheres the game world and the real world are antithetical rather than what they are mutually constitutive so we can talk about pokemon go and this is just kind of one application of the the little orientalist kind of reading method we can talk about it as an imperialist game in the historical sense um in terms of this war or in the literal sense given that the whole point of the game is that you the conqueror um you're encroaching on sovereign territory you're violently imprisoning the native inhabitants and these little hermetically spilled cages called pokeballs and then you're forcing them to fight for you um but what i propose in the book is also an additional layer which is going beyond seeing a game like this and there are many many games like this um i think most recently having something like animal crossing um come out and be recognized as a kind of lived metaphor for subtler colonialism is a really interesting one that you know i hope we can talk about more in the q a but um beyond seeing just a game like this as a kind of defang simulation of real-life colonization um to recognizing how the interface the game's location-based technology also relies on and reproduces forms of colonization so by location-based technology here i don't just mean the gps um that the phone gps that the game uses but as i've been saying that kind of longer analog history of the logic upon which that technology is based um and i think the logic behind pokemon go is really nicely exemplified by what charles mills um the jamaican philosopher called a central part of the racial contract so nils was describing this kind of circular reasoning through which non-white subjects get interpolated right get defined and made into these things called non-white subjects by colonizing forces and that reasoning is one which ties together race and space and it goes like this in moses words you are what you are in part because you originate from a certain kind of space and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like yourself so what i find really compelling and fascinating about this explanation about the way that racialization happens through spatialization and vice versa is that it's also a really uncannily apt description of the organization of the pokemon universe um so the 841 well at that time actually um 841 there are more now these pokemon are divided into what they call elemental types each of which in pokemon go tend to spawn in specific types of places right um what they call biomes so in other words one has a much higher chance of encountering a water type pokemon near lakes or oceans while an electric type pokemon can often be found on college campuses or large dry cities um so we can kind of think about pokemon go here essentially encoding the analog colonizing logic of racial spatialization into the digital technology of gps and augmented reality technology which drives the gain and this makes a lot of sense too when we consider the kind of development history of pokemon go and we realized that it began life actually as nothing but a google maps hoax so it started in 2014 as one of the april fool's day jokes that google had started annually embedding in its products and that's tradition that um started in 2000 with the release of mental plexus a service that supposedly allowed users to search the web telepathically and i tell the whole story of this pokemon challenge in the book but essentially using this kind of slickly produced promotional video and there's some screenshots at the bottom that showed people traveling to these exotically coded locales using their mobile devices to discover and capture pokemon the challenge was essentially a really clever ploy to get users to download the latest version of google maps app on their phones um what emerged two years later as the actual pokemon go was essentially the google maps marketing campaign made playable and it was a collaboration between the tokyo-based pokemon nintendo company and the san francisco-based niantic company niantic labs and the ceo of niantic john hanke had been a google maps employee at the time of that april fool's joke um in fact pokemon go was really an even more impressive showcase of google maps than the original challenge had been because it demonstrated how gps navigation technology could be used not just for the mundane purposes of obtaining driving directions or checking real-time traffic conditions in other words the kind of work of daily life in the age of smartphones but also for the purpose of play it was after all the very same smartphone and satellite technology being used to locate the nearest gas station in google maps on the one hand and the nearest cartoon quarry in pokemon go on the other the difference was simply that what had been laminated within a single interface in the pokemon challenge and the challenge was basically it was kind of crude static images you know just pictures of pokemon had been pasted essentially onto the google maps interface by game developers so when you updated them the google maps app for the challenge you would kind of scroll around and be able to see pokemon appear in places and you would capture them just by taking a screenshot but what had been apparently kind of laminated within a single interface had now been divided into two apparently distinct applications um so the functionality of google maps in other words was what authorized the kind of location-based fictions that made pokemon go so fun but i say that they were kind of apparently distinct apparently separated here because the implications of uh google maps as an authority what we might call the kind of punch line of the real april fool's joke were not apparent until several weeks into the game's release when concerns about privacy and data mining began to surface to make a long story short players geospatial data in other words information about where they'd been for how long what speed they were traveling at so forth were being actively harvested and monetized so pokemon go was certainly not the first app to use location data to monitor its users movements nor to make that information pay in one way by creating in-game incentives that directed players towards particular local businesses um as was the case with the 3000 mcdonald's restaurants in japan that were converted to pokemon gyms or kind of important battling sites um following the fast food chains national sponsorship of the game but pokemon go is doing more than simply jumping on the kind of lucrative data mining bandwagon alongside and the list grows but innumerable location-based mobile apps starting with things like fitbit foursquare waze uber um but in fact the game is doing something more than that um and in the book i'm talking about how it's effectively capitalizing on the kind of colonizing logic of capture that as we've seen is already inherent to the game itself in other words a kind of doubling is happening where game developers are using the very same gps technology to track and collect data about players even as the players themselves used it to track and collect nearby pokemon so the true victims of the april fool day joke in that sense were the players who in their own minds saw themselves as these pokemon masters commanding an army of hapless mercenaries while they themselves in fact performed hundreds of hours of uncompensated voluntary what we call micro labor in exchange for a quote free-to-play dose of nostalgic fun so i want to conclude then by kind of bringing back together these two seemingly very different concerns that manifested over pokemon go which replaced the go with the no as a way to in the minds of their authors unmask these otherwise hidden forms of surveillance extraction and risk in a seemingly innocent game the the concerns that were expressed over data mining and privacy gained a lot more traction in the media and by niantic was in part because of this colorblind universalizing rhetoric that we're already familiar with so that the idea of the privacy being breached was the privacy of this kind of abstracted player or user especially one coded as a child or young person indeed there's a really kind of vicious irony i think in recognizing as amari akeel and other non-white players did very early on that the greatest threat that the game posed to the racialized was that it put them in the position of being perceived as the privacy preachers the trespassers the rule breakers so while the fact of pokemon goes asian otherness in other words it's japanese origins receded to effective irrelevance the racial otherness of bodies like chen became hypervisible hyper surveilled hyper hyper-threatening um to the point that the security guard who murdered the 60 year old chen for suspected trespassing claimed that he did so out of fear for his own life so chen's tragic death his victimization as this threatening perpetual foreigner starkly illustrates i think how games far from the myths that we like to tell about them are really immensely serious sites that can reveal the social dynamics of the real world precisely because they promise to provide us relief from those inequalities and pokemon go to be clear is not the only game that does this in fact i hope that many more analyses and i've seen some coming out of this sort will emerge about all sorts of different games but the payoff of taking this particular game seriously though is i think being able to shine a light on one way that racialization today functions as a location-based augmented reality technology whose violence has been really seamlessly automated into the interface of everyday life and i'll end there thank you thank you so much tara um that was uh that was fascinating um i guess um so we're you would like to take questions i assume um and i guess i could get us started um it's an amazing book and um and i think one of the things i like about it is um and this refers to the part that you um you talked about first was how um this way of reading or interpreting um sort of extends the notion of orientalism as an imaginative geography you know that was one of the saeed's major claims about orientalism and that wonderfully rich phrase imaginative geography and sort of demonstrating how that that extends into um something that would seem as far from british colonialism as pokemon go um and and you know it's that's fantastic um and then the other part of it which actually speaks to parts of your book that you didn't refer to as much was the sort of economic um subtext of racial formation which always which also comes into um play in relation to how games and especially gambling are figured um as a kind of racialized formation and and i think the way that you bring those two dimensions of pluto orientalism together is just just amazing um i guess um so so one question i had um which is always a question i have about readings of orientalism um is the differences between different parts of the orient um because i know you're working a lot with out of uh colleen lai's work where you know and so which she sort of foregrounds is that the economic is always at the sort of bottom of american forms of orientalism um and um but she also distinguishes between japan which is uh and this is early 20th century stuff right so japan gets associated with the sort of technological might whereas china gets associated with just the sort of sheer size of the markets and productive force that it's you know i mean like there's there's so uh japan equals technology china equal size and so orientalism gets split right um and i was wondering if if you could think about if you could think through how if that's at play and in sort of contemporary versions of this ludic orientalism because it seems like um i mean just off the top of my head like you i think you're totally right like there's something about pokemon that seems non like doesn't seem racial but there does seem to be a kind of sentimental or uh orientation toward a lot of consumers toward that japanese version of gamification and technology like there's something cute about japanese versions of gamification like the whole nintendo thing um and somehow even though playstation is also uh japanese there's it's you know i mean like there's the cute version and there's this sort of military version which seems to have a different orientalist veneer for some reason to me and maybe i'm wrong on that but you know i mean like there's a cute japanese thing that happens um versus other versions of gamification that are like sort of more overtly militarized um and that i have a tendency to want to associate with um i don't know i don't know i don't know i'm not enough in the game culture to know how to think about that but it seems to not have that specifically japanesey cutesy anime manga thing that that sort of pokemon nintendo uh strain of ludic orientalism has you know what i'm saying um and and then all the stuff that you're talking about like with the sort of rhetoric around the south korean um it's like isn't it mostly the south koreans who die from oh like this idea of gamer death like playing yeah it certainly was um you know scandalized and dramatized around that yeah yeah and the pc bangs right like they're good so you know i mean that seems like a different strain or so anyway i guess i'm just asking you to think um about variegated strains of these of these various lunatic orientalisms within the context of gaining today yeah absolutely thanks so much there's a lot there um one thing i guess i would start with to talk about um pokemon go is what's and this is actually something that's been really interesting in um more recent uh discussions about animal crossing you know also nintendo also um a game in which you know maybe it's just the current moment but people are much more primed of course to recognize the extractive colonialism in it what's interesting is that many of those readings emphasize it as a moment of european or american empire as the base metaphor right fewer recognize and this is a reading i do a pokemon go in the book it as a metaphor for japanese empire right and japanese colonization and how in fact the game might be uh exportable and satisfying in that way precisely because it's working on both of these modes of imperialism right whether or not you think of japanese empires itself a kind of mythic imperialism of of other forces but one thing that you're talking about in terms of not just the kind of cuteness of that but also the smallness i think is really crucial and this goes back to what you're talking about in terms of scale right there's this way in which what is um cute about the pokemon is this idea of their tininess and their kind of harmlessness their cartoonishness in a way that diminishes the threat of empire itself um and also of course that um and i didn't talk about this as much today but something like pokemon and this goes back to the original franchise including the television show um and it's also familiar with things like sanrio and other um histories of japanese kind of cartoon consumer products were the result of a very intentional um and careful process of localization or glocalization in this sense where uh you know what someone like iwabuchi has talked about as removing the cultural odor of these things right removing a sense of the japaneseness so that they seem to be this kind of free-floating cosmopolitan signifiers um seems to be a really central part of the way that this is working in the japanese context what i think is interesting and you know i think you rightly point to um china as the other end of the spectrum in terms of not just a um not just a less elegant or less less innocent version of gamification but one that is also kind of crudely focused on efficiency and the market so in the book i talk about gold farming which is basically um virtually harvesting currency in-game and then selling it for um for real-world currency and it continues today um but that idea was very much vilified as a kind of chinese malady and one in which kind of brute forcing was ruining the pleasure of a game by turning it into a market but i think south korea as you point out is really interestingly positioned kind of in the middle but also moving towards the japanese side in the sense that the us finds it far more palatable right so following the 1997 financial crisis um something like esports which is basically you know competitive spectator sport video game playing took off in south korea partially because of the imposition of a broadband structure and an investment in the telecommunications industry that looks actually much more familiar to the japanese development of what we call techno-orientalism in the 80s and 90s so i think very much that there's a kind of um acuteness of smallness a cleanness associated with certain forms of east asian um but specifically japanese and south korean um and singaporean actually gaming that we see consistently sort of set up as an internal binary too i hope that kind of gets to some of what you were talking about that's great thank you are you moderating questions or i don't know if there are questions in the chat but so far there aren't but um but it's up to you would you like to just call on folks or do you want me to take care of that or it's up to you yeah yeah feel free to go ahead if there are any so we have a question in the chat from chris rose um can you see that tara i can it says the premise is not so much about game theory per se but about the fact that the fitness landscape is constructed according to game maker values um would chris feel comfortable expanding on that question a little i'd love to hear what they're thinking and i'm not sure if we can unmute people or how that works uh okay um so chris doesn't have um audio right now um i think that the question is sort of pertaining to how gamification in fitness in other words um the creation of these quantified goals right hitting 10 000 steps um or even gamifying fitness as you recall there were these things called like zombie run where uh there were apps that would sort of give you the sense that you were running away from zombies in order to get your you know daily steps or get your heart rate up um how those are constructed um according to the valuation of um of games and i mean i think that this is a really interesting topic about gamification because it's one in which yes exactly also peloton um the way in which gamification emphasizes the way in which game in real world if they were ever as cleanly distinguished as we might like to think in fact are very much interconnected in the name of a kind of um neoliberal and consumer capitalism mode and so it's been really interesting i think to follow these in all sorts of ways because you know the whole idea behind pokemon the idea that you would travel to a mcdonald's and be able to get a kind of virtual reward was in some sense not very new at all right there were these ideas of yelp badges and challenges and um all sorts of ways in which um we had already been kind of inculcated into that vote of interacting with technology and with space i think it's been interesting too from a teaching perspective to see how gamification has been experimented with in education as a way to motivate students to um and yet at the same time maybe to mitigate a reliance on grades and focus more on effort right because the idea behind games the positive way of looking at a lot of games is that failure doesn't mean the end right it's a new learning experience um so it's been really interesting to see the way that gamification has been kind of unevenly applied um in different in different realms oh i think i see another question here um i think this first one is from celine and it says can you talk more about animal crossing as another game parallel in colonialism it's posed to such a wholesome escape a cottage core aesthetic that many people use as a break from a capitalist world yeah thanks for that question you know it's interesting because one thing i talked about last year even though i talked about the cuteness is the kind of aesthetic of animal crossing and for some reason it's that aesthetic that has sort of put me off animal crossing so i can't speak about it in as much detail as maybe others can hear in terms of the specific things that you do but i think the idea is that the game is simulating the kind of um colonialist rhetoric in the sense that you're entering this quote-unquote deserted island right and this idea of uninhabited kind of virgin territory where you stake your your flag um and you begin your um your enterprise there is a very familiar one right and then you you know plant trees harvest those trees um get other resources sell those resources get more money use the money you know reinvest it into them so what i found really interesting i think is that um when i was looking online you find many ways as i've said in which people have already read animal crossing as colonialist but there are also some which try to think about how you can be anti-colonialist how can you can resist that through your game play and that's been really interesting to me because i think that that um echoes a larger discourse that's happening outside the game which is how can we change the game from within it right is there any way to do that so some of the anti-colonial suggestions for players are like um always pick up the trash you know the detritus and things that are on the ground give the things you know that you harvest to the museum instead of selling them to tom nook the you know the quote-unquote owner of these islands um for more uh for more resources um and i think it really does beg the question there of whether that's a break from the capitalist world as you know many people rightly feel you know soothed and relaxed by it i totally understand the appeal of those games and i continue to play them you know myself but um whether that's a break for them or whether it's just a more perfect simulation of it that makes you feel like you have some control either over it because you are the idealized capitalist or that you are able to resist it in more explicit ways i mean i think that's also why animal crossing has been a very interesting site to explore things like protests in games so especially during the hong kong protest they would have in game protests um you know where people would gather and then create sort of little funerals in games um and so yeah yeah i think the animal crossing is such a rich and interesting one um but also i'm i'm also been really curious thinking about things like the oregon trail right like why is that game one that was packaged as sort of educational and one that framed a lot of the probably first video game experience for a whole generation of 1980s school children you know myself included you know what does it mean when there are simulations of cellular colonialism that are just literal right like you're not playing an animal entering a deserted island you're quite literally recreating the historical travel uh in a wagon train um so i think that those are some really interesting questions it brings up um and then i see one a question here from jason lee that says i have a question about mechanism you talked about how the environment of pokemon go comes to reinforce the surrounding racial forces within the game can you elaborate on what you think might be the mechanism that allowed the game to reinforce the ideas in other words what work was um performed on the game that resulted in that reinforcement um so i think uh if i'm understanding jason's question correctly and feel free please to elaborate um by audio a lot of it has to do with this kind of external marketing right that is um being done that's invisible to the consumer and one of the ways in which um things that were changed you could see before the game go and again going back to the franchise is the um use of language so the changing of names to make them appear less foreign so all of the japanese names not not all of them many of the japanese names uh of these individual creatures was changed to make them still make sense within an american context to capture let's say um the feeling you know um of a particular character but also to erase any kind of threatening signs of foreignness and the ones that were left like something like pikachu is left according to the developers and the localizers precisely because there didn't seem to be anything japanese about them the idea is that to uh you know to an anglophone audience an english-speaking audience english reading audience those words would sound like nonsense um it actually means something like electric mouse or the sound that a mouse would make um and pikachu is is electric right um so one of the ways i think is in that very careful packaging and exporting um but then secondly as we were going back to saying one of the ways i think that may have made that game palatable and allowed the game to reinforce those ideas is this seeming erasure at the level of language at the level of body and at the level of japanese history this history of empire that is kind of embedded within it i hope that kind of addresses the question uh if i can very quickly elaborate oh please yeah yeah thank you uh i i realize actually your your answer is is still very valid um and i wasn't even thinking about it in that context i was actually thinking about the mapping element um which is what i probably should have clarified uh but yeah i like that that part to me i think was very very interesting to think about you know if there was some sort of like alternative mapping right like the way that we use i mean racialized maps as a whole are a big and complicated subject i'm curious if there like is some sort of imaginary for like a pokemon go map that would not have had those types of embedded ideas within them and if you had any thoughts about that yeah no this is a big and really interesting question um because one of the ways that you can think about you know as you said like racialized mapping and especially geography as a form of settling and silencing but also fixing things in place um is has such a long history right i mean in the same way that many of the early globes or maps that we encountered in childhood are ones in which north america just happened to be the center um of the world right so american exceptionalism realized in mapping and so it goes back i think to that same question of how alternative mapping um like anti-colonial actions within pokemon are possible and i think people have done really interesting things thinking about how not the mapping interface but the kinds of things that are considered landmarks or relevant on the map might be a way to kind of disrupt that hegemonic logic so a lot of the landmarks that are embedded into pokemon before the let's say like mcdonald's sponsorship etc were ones that actually pre-existed um the game and were part of this game called ingress which niantic had made and it was a kind of more um more sci-fi themed i suppose um kind of geocaching game and it was a similar idea that you would travel using um you know your phone and locate certain landmarks um and so the things of course there that were considered landmarks are those that fit also into that um that racialized geographic and colonial history right museums or certain um ideas of what is considered historical what is considered significant and so i think being able to uncover that secondary level of what is considered important what is considered serious as history is a is an interesting way of thinking about how you might reconsider that mapping element and then i see should i read it or do you want to yeah go ahead all right i'll read it um and this question is from christine and it says um calling up on dan's opening question your response um a comment i wonder if another way into pokemon go as a case study in the racialization of space and the player that frames colonia's capture of cuter kawaii creatures might be through wendy lee's reading of gremlins as asian american before they transform yeah this is great you know um this is for those of you who aren't as familiar with it and christine maybe you can clarify it too because it's been a little while since i read and saw wendy's piece on this um but is the way in which in the film gremlins these creatures are actually those that are bought at kind of what like a web market or like in chinatown this kind of like mysterious um you know highly orientalized space and yet the fact that they are asian american in the sense that they don't sort of manifest those bodily qualities is um is part of the conceit of it and and wendy's reading of it really brings that back in in a really central way but i you know christine can you remind me maybe about the the central argument there because i think i'm missing something important oh i think you're muted can i underneath people or can they meet them can you sorry i i ended up turning my video on sort of unmuted yes they are actually bought at this very stereotypical chinatown shop um and you know they're they're asking what this creature is they're like they're actually they're given a chinese word but um he ends up renaming it and i think part of it is before these gremlins then become like these like monstrous black caricatures um they are these like constantly replicating cute things and that wendy's argument is that in sort of reading these gremlins you know before they become monstrous black caricatures as asian american um that uh she in reading them that way she's able to sort of see the kind of ambivalence around asian americans as model minorities but there is this like intense sort of fungibility to these creatures that just sort of keep replicating in their cuteness um and and so i wonder if there isn't something um about the like cuteness of the pokemon creatures that um whether or not we can read that as i wonder if there's a way in which we can read that within a landscape of um u.s racialization which

while i think that you know you reference these incidents of like racist violence that pokemon go maps as like as not just in the u.s but i wonder if within the sort of or actually maybe even transnationally whether there is a way in which we might think about um racialization in that way that sort of while at the same time there is both like japanese empire and then there's also like u.s china relations that um what asian-american racialization might then do to these racial maps i mean i guess that's my question or if that's another way into this question of cuteness or objects that aren't um human uh representations that are nonetheless racial representations yeah absolutely thank you for that i mean i think that you know it's a really interesting question to think about how non or sub humanness in the relationship or in relation to asian racialization looks quite different maps quite differently onto bodies coded as asian compared to how that idea maps onto other racial groups and there's certainly something about this you know this racialized asian body or however we want to call it cutified body that is kind of constantly sliding between as you describe a kind of um idealized sterilized safe white space and a monstrous threatening um black space right and what i talk about in the book too and i think achilles talks about this a little bit in his article is that the experience of being kind of out of place being hyper visible and invisible at the same time is one of spatial dislocation that is of course very familiar to asian racialization i mean i think also thinking about the creatures themselves right even though they look many different ways um thinking about the creatures themselves as a kind of standing metaphor for the ways in which asian americans have been seen as both invisible and hypervisible according to particular lenses that are put onto them and in relation to particular kinds of racialized backdrops or those that are seen as a racialized is a really useful and interesting way to think about it i hope that kind of got it at what you were what you were referencing because i think it's a really useful lens she says yes thank you very much so much i think we have time for one last question so it looks like there's a question here yeah what role has the ongoing dialectic between law and race played um is that is that um am i am i reading your question correctly there i'd love to if you want to elaborate on it all right yeah this is i i i i'm portuguese i was writing in my handy foot process in portuguese but this is uh during your your speech you talked about game theory etc but did you think about uh about this relation this dialectic about the law the race because the law is the intention from the law is to bring justice to the society but this this controversy between praxis and the theory means that there is a vacuum and how do you think about this this dialectic because as we see especially united states with the afro-american how the law or or the jurisprudence from the law try to to put out the the afro-american from the common goods from the democracy to faith also how you how you see this dialect in your in your argument this year yeah absolutely i hope that i um well i think there's a number of different ways to to go about it what i think has been interesting in the book especially looking at earlier periods is thinking about how games and game rules especially for those who are excluded or disenfranchised by the law become a kind of alternate way of litigating unfairness right or litigating exclusion um so one of the chapters is especially thinking about how moving away from the kind of video game moment how um gambling right and las vegas as a sign of this but gambling games and relationships to chance generally might be a way to kind of achieve the equality or a sense of justice fairness um that cannot be achieved within the law and of course um one of the ways we see this is in terms of something like immigration law but in one of the chapters i talk about too how japanese mass incarceration during world war ii is one in which um so game theory here tries to anticipate and um respond to what the us government's expectations of japanese american loyalty is right so they gave them this infamous loyalty questionnaire in which they asked you know would you be willing to serve in the armed forces and would you be willing to uh you know kind of force wear all allegiance to uh the emperor and so in that in the face of those kind of impossible legal questions that would lead to becoming a stateless person right giving up your citizenship for those um japanese immigrants who were not and could not be american citizens by law um the logic of games the idea of a kind of prisoner's dilemma game in which you try to answer based on what you think they think you're going to answer became really central to narrating that experience and kind of making sense out of an uh kind of impossible choice um so that's one of the ways it's a couple of different ways in which um i had been thinking about law but you know one final comment on that is to say that the term the race card is one that really entered the um the more recent it's actually much older term but the more recent um kind of dialectic with doj simpson trial right and the idea that um oj's legal team was talking about kind of winning by playing the race card you know supposedly instrumentalizing race by putting it into play as an unfair advantage that would sentimentalize um the jurors to be able to act outside of the law right to uh to institute a totally different set of rules for evaluating the guilt of oj and one in which the legal team later expressed you know feelings of of guilt um in taking that route interestingly well thank you so much tara that was wonderful um could everybody join me in thanking tara for her wonderful talk um yeah thank you all for those wonderful questions too sorry do you want to say anything to uh say goodbye to everybody nope we're all set thank you for coming thank you yeah thank you you

2021-07-03 15:39

Other news