Professional Norms and Race in the North American Video Game Industry

Abstract

This article examines North American (i.e., Canada and the United States) video game developers’ understanding of race, how they construct narratives when they include characters of different races, and some of the pressures that may shape that process. Discourse analyses of semistructured interview texts found that video game developers operate under an internalized pressure to create game narratives that are quickly understandable and, thus, sellable. This pressure is normatively internalized in the profession as an attempt to hedge against market uncertainty. Video game developers, therefore, depend on social beliefs from the “real world” to inform how video game players might receive their games as well as narratives and themes from past texts such as the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Therefore, this article argues that racism might be enabled because it is believed to be a hedge against market uncertainty.

Keywords

race economics video game industry norms culture industry

[I]f I were making a game, I would say, from my own standpoint—If the story behind the character doesn’t require it to be a white male, then why is that the default?

Steve¹ (developer for a large independent game studio) The answer to Steve’s question lies in the way that Western societies still rely on the default assumption that a person/character/subject is White (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Bonilla-Silva’s (2006) work on a systemic structure of racism points out that despite bearing the harsh cost of this default whiteness, Blacks also adopt this view because it is a dominant discourse in society. One of the effects of this discourse is that we simply do not question it and accept it at face value. This is also true of the video game industry in North America, specifically the United States and Canada. After all, “the real world” in which these video game developers live is a culture where these discourses circulate, and many of them came of age in this environment.

Recent statistics point out that “four out of five US households own a device used to play video games” and “42% of Americans play video games…three or more hours a week” (Entertainment Software Association, 2015, p. 2). Men and women play video games at comparably similar rates (i.e., 44% of video game players are women; Entertainment Software Association, 2015). Different racial groups play video games in similar numbers too (Lenhart et al., 2008). In fact, some have argued that video games are a mainstream medium (e.g., Plunkett, 2012). This has prompted scholars to turn their attention to issues of identity and representation in the medium (see Consalvo, 2007; Leonard, 2003; Nakamura, 2008, 2009, 2012; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009). What has received less empirical and theoretical attention, however, is the normative practices that developers employ as they create video game content. Specifically, the process that video game developers employ as they create characters of differing races and the resulting narratives is still largely underexamined. This article aims to fill that gap.

This article examines the normative practices of Canadian and the United States (i.e., North American) video game developers as they craft narratives that include depictions of race. There are likely myriad reasons why racism appears in video games. Moreover, economic and institutional factors are also likely myriad. This article documents merely one factor that must be understood as part of a larger structure that enables racism. As such, this study sits among other works that investigate the video game development process, in general, from the perspective of developers (see Banks, 2009; Banks & Potts, 2010; Kerr, 2006, 2013; O’Donnell, 2009, 2012, 2014; Tschang, 2007). This article hopes to illuminate video game developers’ understanding of race, how they construct narratives when they include characters of different races, and some of the pressures that may shape that process. My finding suggests that one pressure that video game developers face is an internalized pressure to create texts that are quickly understandable and sellable. As a result, video game developers depend on beliefs from the “real world” to inform assumptions on how video game players might receive their games (Shaw, 2009). Past narratives and themes from past texts are adopted in order to quickly clue the player into the setting and rules of the game. This study contributes to the larger body of video game literature because it illustrates the need for a focus on casual racism—the invisible, normative kind such as color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2006)—within culture that affects the video game industry and the social and economic structures that maintain racism.

Color-blind racism is the idea that as Western societies—specifically the United States—increasingly started to reject explicit racist discourses, racist ideas mutated (because discourses, in general, circulate and mutate in response to the cultural climate) and became a part of a systemic, discursive structure which maintained racial discrimination while pretending to be “color-blind” to skin color (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). While Bonilla-Silva’s conception of color-blind racism may seem specific to the United States, it is applicable to this study because this study focuses on North America. And, according to an International Game Developers Association (IGDA) study, there are over 5 times more U.S. developers than developers from Canada (Weststar & Legault, 2015).

Video game development is still an overwhelmingly a White, male endeavor. IGDA’s study noted that 73% of the developers still identify as White (Weststar & Legault, 2015). Nevertheless, this study focuses on institutional norms, and institutional norms transcend personal views or identity because they draw their coercive power from the firm or the society at large (see Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Foucault, 2008). In North America, that cultural perspective is overwhelmingly more American by virtue of the outsized population of U.S.-based developers (Weststar & Legault, 2015).

This article, therefore, argues that racism appears in some video game narratives—among many reasons—because developers’ profession constitutes a normative space where market uncertainty and historical practices/beliefs create an internal pressure to adopt game narratives that are problematic. Adopting racially problematic narratives—what we might reasonably deem racist—is a rational response to economic uncertainty in the contemporary North American video game landscape. I define racial depictions as depictions of any character that can be considered “people” (e.g., humans, elves, dwarves, and space aliens). Video games, like all mass media, reflect aspects of the real world including our understanding of humans of all stripes and reflect it within a technical presentation (see Chang, 2008; Galloway, 2007; Nakamura, 2009, 2012; Vila, 2000, 2003, 2014). In this regard, this work is narrowly interested in the developers’ engagement with games that have a narrative.

The video game industry is best understood as a hybrid culture industry that consists of Japanese and American companies (Consalvo, 2006). Nevertheless, for practical reasons, this study examines North American (i.e., the United States and Canada) video game developers. These developers view video games as more than merely toys. My informants believe games are a medium where ideas about society can be explored. In that sense, video games serve the same function that television, cinema, and literature serve—fictional texts where decidedly real-world issues can be examined. I note that the following interviews center on fantasy games and not “realistic” games such as Grand Theft Auto. Undoubtedly, fantasy games are quite different than games that take place in contemporary settings. Nevertheless, I assert that the some of the factors that lead to adopting racially problematic discourses—economic pressure for understandability, normative pressures to adopt past successful narratives as models, and drawing from racial discourses from one’s culture—would likely play a role in the development of games that take place in contemporary settings because these factors are not dependent on the setting. Moreover, the respondents necessarily speak from a culturally specific standpoint—the United States and Canada in this case. Narratives and discourses that circulate within developers’ culture play a role in how race is depicted in games. While the basic interplay between economic imperatives and how racial discourses are enacted is likely similar across the industry, the racial depiction is always culturally specific.

Method

It is important to note that only six developers agreed to speak despite exhaustive recruiting for over a year. Despite my assurance of anonymity and my use of pseudonyms, video game developers repeatedly declined to speak with me. All of the participants who did agree to be interviewed identify as male. Two of them identify as people of color. Four identify as White. Two of them work for independent video game developers of various sizes. The others work for large development studios that work on triple A titles. One resides and works in Canada; the others reside and work in the United States. One informant, Jason, who tried to assist me in recruiting interviewees stated:

[My company’s] culture can be very interesting at times. Even though this is not a public interview [meaning a work of journalism]—this is a research interview—there’re a lot of people who don’t really like talking about their stuff. Whether it’s just the person they are or the perception that it causes.

This is understandable, given global histories of racial intolerance and inequality. This is what people suggested when they declined to be interviewed. They feared reputational repercussions or reprisals that might affect their careers if their identities were revealed. O’Donnell (2012) observes that game developers, for reasons that stem from social and professional pressures, are reluctant to speak about their jobs.

I snowball sampled video game developers through Twitter and direct e-mails. The interviews were qualitative and semistructured. While all participants were asked each question and they answered, they were asked in no specific order. For their comfort, I asked each of the questions through a free-flowing conversation that they directed. By allowing the participants to control the conversation, the interviews would be more fruitful by maintaining context and I was less likely to influence what they said by my presumptions. I wanted to allow them to “offer new meanings to the study focus” because a “key benefit of the semistructured interview is its attention to lived experience while also addressing theoretically driven variables of interests” (Galetta & Cross, 2013, p. 24). My participants were all interviewed over Skype and digitally recorded with their consent.

A discourse analysis was used to analyze the transcripts (Galetta & Cross, 2013; Graham, 2005; van Dijk, 1993). That meant that I analyzed how discourses could influence the industry’s professional practice by examining my participants’ responses for emergent themes and collapsed these themes into unique groups. I compared the groups with the existing literature on game development. I was particularly interested in instances where developers attributed differences among species (races) to stories by Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, or popular media. According to what scholars have previously mentioned (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2006; Fine, 1983) and popular belief, Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons are likely to be texts that my participants would reference. We spoke about the character creation process of humans of different races, races as differing species of people, or alien species. These species of virtual people “map” how we understand sentient people. I do not mean to suggest that Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons are solely responsible for racially problematic content in video games. Tolkien is used in these interviews because his work is an important text in the industry and, therefore, a useful example to discuss larger normative pressures. Again, this study focuses on industry norms and not texts.

My identity is a video game fan and a scholar of race and racism. I do not believe that video game developers, on balance, harbor racist attitudes any more than what we all complicity share as members of a Western, capitalist society. Therefore, I advocate rooting out institutional structures (i.e., institutional racism) that disadvantage people. It is in this sense that I hope my work is read.

Findings

One reason racism appears in video game texts is because there is a norm in the video game industry created by market uncertainty and historical practices/beliefs, which create an internal pressure to recreate game narratives that can be problematic. The findings indicated that video game developers are under a pressure to create texts that are quickly understandable and sellable. My participants stated that some (but not all) of the choices in video game design was an economic decision. Repeatedly, my informants suggested that race-based discourses were chosen because they fit a presumed economic model of the industry and preexisting assumptions about their players (Shaw, 2009). Thus, video game developers employ ideas and discourses from the real world to inform how video game players might receive their games. In doing so, developers depend on narratives and themes from past texts such as Lord of the Rings to quickly clue the player into the setting and rules of the game. The major themes that emerged from the interviews are detailed in the following sections.

More Than Play: Meaning Making in Video Games

My participants understand games as part of a larger media environment where race and other forms of difference are portrayed. They view games as having more social impact than “merely play.” For example, David, an indie developer who started his own small development company, states:

[Y]es, video games shape social views, albeit sometimes in an indirect way. That, in my mind, is the bottom-line what pop culture is. If we weren’t looking to be changed in some way—and maybe that change is merely to entrench existing frameworks—we wouldn’t be looking.

What David described is the notion of the culture industry, which video games constitute a modern form. The culture industry denotes how media industries create artifacts that supposedly reflect culture but instead churn out cultural artifacts as commodities (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1995). Yet the power of culture industries is not totalizing (Bottomore, 2002). Resistance is possible because, like all discourses, narratives must be continuously rearticulated (Butler, 1997). Through this rearticulation, discourses circulate meaning to novel spaces (Foucault, 1981). Meanings are then made “real” as practices, laws, and norms (Foucault, 1981).

Media products by the culture industry are never “merely a thing.” Likewise, video games, as the newest incarnation of culture industry products, function the same way. As David states, mass culture or “popular culture…shape social views.” Jason (a developer for triple A game company) states:

I think games are primed better than most media, because they can put you slap dab in the middle of it and make you interact with the broken systems that you want to comment on or have the player reflect on. They can use the interaction loop and feedback as commentary.

If we view video games as narrative products with multifaceted discourses as the literature suggests, then contestation takes place in the creation of other video games—a form of continuous borrowing, or rearticulation, from existing narratives (Butler, 1997). Moreover, video games are interactive, and these developers view this interactivity as the space where contestation by the player may be possible.

The Cycle of Viciousness: When Contestation Does Not or Is Not Allowed to Happen

Our cultural norms are difficult to critique without some conscientious effort. For video game developers, these discourses are also part of a normative pressure to use them to ensure understandability and profitability. For example, Chet (triple A game developer) described the effects of this succinctly.

So in terms, of racial depiction? I don’t know. Most of what I see is not—I don’t think people really engage with it that much, on a general level. I think the main question that comes up is like, “What race is our main character going to be?” Well, usually it’s a White male. Every once in a while, you get a Black male. Every once in a while, you get a White female.

This tells us that whiteness and maleness are chosen not necessarily because of maliciousness but because we—in Western societies—tend to be ignorant of how privileging whiteness and maleness create harm. We imagine White males as the default model of a person in our everyday lives (Bonilla-Silva, 2006), and this is also true in the video game world. Heterosexual maleness and whiteness serve as bedrock beliefs about what constitutes a profitable game and who “gamers” are (Shaw, 2009).

The perniciousness of this ignorance is partially due to how humans fill in the narrative gaps with ideas we have from the real world. What this also implicates is that we bring our existing understandings and beliefs into any narrative we encounter; it is not exclusive to video games. We fill in the gaps in any narrative (Bruner, 1997, 2004; Gubrium & Holstein, 1999; Holstein & Gubrium, 1999; Redman, 2005; Ricoeur, 1991; Vila, 2000, 2003, 2014). Some of the materials we use to fill in these gaps come from our experiences and existing culture industry narratives. Thus, when fantasy games conflate species as race (Srauy, 2014), the developers are likely drawing from tropes and ideas from other sources of media. Since there is no such thing as an elf or an orc, developers are not drawing from personal experiences. This human propensity for filling in the gaps in narratives means that any text, unless content creators explicitly state to the contrary, runs the risk of reifying racist ideas because these ideas circulate within our society.

Stereotypes and the flaw of evenhandedness

Understandability brings with it some technical challenges. In a sense, the question revolves around how difference can be coded into the text while still maintaining understandability (see Galloway, 2007). Thom (a triple A game developer) has worked on about 6 role-playing games and more than 40 games overall, stated:

[W]e’ll put things in to be even-handed. Oh if you’re going to put in that, then we need a slider for skin tone so that you’re even-handed and create yourself. But that’s all usually an afterthought to what we are doing and we don’t pay much attention to it. As far as—like I said, you can’t underestimate how much we use stereotypes, though. If you want some guy messed up in a hoodie in the corner—he could be Black, he could be White. It doesn’t matter. But some guy that’s all messed up in a hoodie that’s carrying a bat or whatever—that adds the feel that he might attack you or [is] more dangerous. And we’ll do that. Because you’re trying to build that environment. You’re trying to build that environment where they can associate with it. “Oh, I’m in somewhere more dangerous, now.”

Thom’s statement illustrates this cycle of viciousness in multiple ways. First, he acknowledged the use of stereotypes in game creation. The image he used to describe a dangerous man—the hoodie—commonly marks Black male bodies, so that the hoodie creates a bodily environment where dangerous blackness is automatically read (Cowin-Mensah, 2015; Mirakhor, 2015; Nguyen, 2015; Silva, 2015). Unless the audience sees a White face underneath the hoodie, audiences will read a Black body there because that is the dominant discourse behind the hoodie. Second, Thom’s example built a landscape with hoodie wearing bodies (implicitly read as Black). The presences of these bodies demarcate the geographic boundaries of the in-game environment as dangerous spaces of color.

Thom likely did not intend to talk about how bodies mark geography as dangerous spaces of color. Yet he lives in a cultural space with a history of marking spaces as dangerous (e.g., the practice of redlining Black communities or the imaginary of urban ghettos) because of the presence of bodies of color. This is the same point that Nakamura (2002) points out in the use of Asianness as a marker for a futuristic rhizomized corporate-dominated environment. It may not matter that a bat-wielding enemy may be White because the setting itself is already coded as dangerous through these racialized codes. Settings, too, can be used to mark spaces as non-White because of the historical context (Fluck, 2001; Lott, 1997; Murphet, 1998). In Thom’s example above, when they wanted to indicate that the player is in a “dangerous” place, a character with a hoodie was used. What this gestures to is what Galloway (2007) articulated as the function of coding difference into the text. In order to code a dangerous person, Thom needs to hail certain discourses of a dangerous individual or place. Thom taps into the discourses that circulate within his culture (e.g., the United States) about race in order to make his game associable (see Higgin, 2008).

Humans also draw ideas about the world from media that surround them, and this was evident in the developers’ approaches as well.

Movies and television are one of the biggest [sources of inspiration]. You get a lot of character archetypes from there. That’s probably the main one that we see. You also find people who pull from books. We look for people in terms of developers who can speak to a broad range of influences. Like who are widely read, who’ve seen lots of TV or lots of movies or lots of comic books and that kind of thing. That tends to be the primary source. (Chet)

Content from television, film, other games, and books are sources of ideas that developers use to design characters, so audiences can quickly grasp the game world, understand the game characters, and deduce the logic of the game mechanics.

All of us are very savvy game developers. We play a lot of games, and we make games. So we’re used to seeing a lot of things come over and over again. Whether we’re pulling our experience from movies or other games, there [are] a lot of things we see always. Like someone trying to get revenge for being wronged. The star-crossed lovers. The father that would do anything to protect his daughter. Some of the easy identifiable and common scenarios that we familiarize ourselves with in all forms of media so when presenting a new character so that you’d say, “Oh I know how this is going to come out.”…So there’s a lot of signs that we’re used to seeing within our culture that we play to. (Steve)

Yet, because we—as humans—orient ourselves by looking to past narratives (Bruner, 1997, 2004; Gubrium & Holstein, 1999; Holstein & Gubrium, 1999; Redman, 2005; Ricoeur, 1991; Vila, 2000, 2003, 2014), past racially problematic ideas become perverse markers used to ascribe meaning to novel texts. I do not argue that all past texts are racially problematic. But racially problematic ones do exist. And, it takes great effort to contest their dominant readings (Bottomore, 2002) because racism is often so well hidden (Bonilla-Silva, 2006).

Likewise, these developers’ statements indicate they understand that featuring only White protagonists is problematic, but they did not recognize that how characters interact and the roles characters play have implications for how race is understood in the context of the game. Because these roles and character interactions rearticulate real-world discourses, these game developers unintentionally imbricate racially problematic ideas even when they conscientiously try not to do so.

So, when I was working on [name of game redacted], it was much more rare for someone with a film degree to work on a game at all. Most people come from computer science or architecture having no formal knowledge of how to write or create a formal character. For instance, what you’re doing now in university programs studying this stuff.…I think it’s [representations of race] starting to improve dramatically already. This is very emblematic of the kinds of thinking that we’ll be pushing the next wave of what games become. (Paul)

What Paul’s statement suggests is that there was a naïveté in early games. The norms that developers used in the early days of video game development depended on essentialized and outdated discourses of race because those ideas were embedded in texts that developers grew up consuming. It was not until the inclusion of more liberal arts trained developers in the industry that there was enough of a critical lens for developers to recognize the role of media in society.

The stakes for this are higher when we consider that players are also a part of the very social structure that hides these racist discourses from developers. People as Wolfgang Iser (as cited in Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith, & Tosca, 2008) said, “fill in the blanks” with discourses from their culture. What this implies for video games is that racism appears because they are embedded in our cultural landscape. Moreover, while developers recognize racial inequity when asked, developers are likely to have a superficial understanding of race—which Bonilla-Silva (2006) argues is systemically structured as color-blind racism—because race is discussed superficially in popular settings. The need for creating understandable games creates an “imperative” to rely on racist texts in society that is difficult to withstand.

The Pressure to Quickly Sell Games and Mitigating (Some) Transaction Costs

Although the role of video games as a space for contesting existing discourses is an ideal, the main reason video games are made is to create sales. Regardless of my developers’ belief in the transformative potential of video games, they all recognize that the push from publishers is to create games that sell. They all expressed that they internalize this pressure. As a result, what kinds of games they decide to make, the narratives they choose to create, and the characters they choose to portray all reflect this pressure. As a result, what is likely to sell is often erroneously conflated with what is expediently understandable, which opens the door to borrowing from texts that have racially problematic ideas about race—ideas that are normalized in our social world.

For big companies that are not indie companies, what we would do is take the top selling lists, and then we’d take the top 10 from all the top selling lists. And, you break down how much numbers three through seven are making.…That means that’s the hot genre right now. That’s where the money is being spent.…So that’s a better target. And, in our industry, we tend to not avoid competition.…Because at the end of the day, you’ve got to pay the bills. There’s a lot of love in it; there’s a lot of passion for it. It’s not just money- grubbing-I’m-looking-for-money-and-that’s-it-be-darned-to-everyone-else. But, you want to maximize your potential and have some fun while you’re doing it. So to do that, you go where the money is. So, yes. We specifically build certain games. They’re the ones people buy. If you’re buying them, we’ll make them. (Thom)

Tschang (2007) found this same acknowledgment from publishers. In that sense, video games production is funded like the motion-picture industry. How games are created depend on what publisher will fund the development cost. That means that while there is “a lot of love” in the craft, there is still an economic constraint on what types of games get made.

In modern markets, these sorts of “transactional costs”—costs of bringing products (e.g., video games) to market and consumers—vex corporations because they cut into profit and can never fully be controlled (Williamson, 2005). To the extent these costs are reducible, theory suggests that firms will take actions to do so (Anderson & Gatignon, 2005; Williamson, 2005). In video game industries, part of these transaction costs come from the high production costs of creating video games, the time required to get a game to market, and the uncertainty of sales (Kerr, 2006; O’Donnell, 2012; Shaw, 2009; Tschang, 2007). One area that is within the publishers’ and developers’ control is the narrative and specifically how “readable” the characters are by audiences. By employing strategies such as readable characters, some of the uncertainty of sales can be reduced. The result is a turn toward institutional “mimetic isomorphism”—a tendency for firms to follow in each other’s footsteps, produce video games similar to past narratives, and similar firm-level practices to mitigate risk (Tschang, 2007, p. 1001). Indeed, Tschang (2007) found that video game companies tend to rely on incremental change rather than wholesale narrative innovations.

This is similar to motion-picture industry pressures where summer blockbusters with recycled narratives act as hedges against market uncertainty (Schatz, 2003). Like the motion-picture industry, some of these uncertainties are controllable by replicating content that attracted consumer attention (Schatz, 2003). Hence, Tolkien is one example that shows this narrative rearticulation. Regarding video game development, Thom stated this recycling of narratives:

brings you into the world that you’re dropping into. I mean you want to have this fantastic mystical unbelievable world so you can see that. But, if you can’t relate to the characters, you can’t relate to the characters. You can go out there and do an alien game where the aliens are from [the Alien franchise with Sigourney Weaver]. That series with the multiple mouths, right? And those are kind of—they’re still humanoid in shape, roughly. But, they’re less associable than other ones that have cultures and whatnot. But even then you had a mother, and she’s protecting her young. They’re still tying in to what’s associable. Because if you can’t associate, it’s foreign, and you lose it.

The prevailing belief in the industry is that content that players do not quickly “get” will not sell well. In the face of large up-front costs, extensive development time, and uncertainty in market performance, adopting recognizable discourses allows publishers and developers to control for some of that uncertainty.

Irrational Market Beliefs and Erasing Racial Diversity

Firms (e.g., game development studios) are not pure rational actors. Firms’ managers behave in quasi-rational ways because their perceptions of market forces are always seen through cultural norms (Kapp, 2011). In terms of video game companies, developers respond “rationally” given their assumptions (see Shaw, 2009) of their market. Foucault (2008) and Bonilla-Silva (2006) argued for an explanation of inequality (i.e., how populations are governed and valued) as a function of an abstract belief in markets. Markets, the belief goes, are rational places where supply and demand sweep away any social consideration (Foucault, 2008). Institutional economists argue that markets are anything but purely rational because culture always acts as a lens through which actions are viewed (Kapp, 2011). For video game developers, market decisions are always seen through a social lens which treats racial differences as biological—despite scientific understanding that race is socially constructed rather than biological fact (Duster, 2003, 2006; Omi & Winant, 1994). When those decisions involve creating narrative depictions of various racial groups, those decisions are troubling because they may enable unintentional racism rooted in cultural norms.

Perhaps, what is more troubling is the implication behind the growing assumption that “gamespace has been recast as a racially progressive movement that ejects race in favor of a default, universal whiteness” (Higgin, 2008, pp. 8–7). Higgin righty pillories this assumed “whiteness as raceless in gamespace” perspective as “a strategy of colorblindness, [which functions] as hegemonic fantasy by filtering the racial imagery that threatens the safety and political coherence of white dominance” (p. 6). Bonilla-Silva (2006) calls color blindness as a systemic structure of inequality because it allows the harm of racism to persist while pointing to a supposed world where skin color is immaterial. Constructs like race in games must be discernable; therefore, games must always “have an originary meaning that cannot be discarded without losing the decipherability of that product” (p. 11). When that decipherability presents whiteness as a default, it alludes to a normative assumption of whiteness in the abstract (Higgin, 2008; Shaw, 2012) and game consumers (i.e., those who would do the deciphering) as White in particular. Again, this runs contrary to who actually plays games; there is no significant difference in game playing among racial groups (Lenhart et al., 2008).

Erasing Race by Using Past Texts That Erased Race: An Example in Tolkien

Some of my participants suggest they have elected to create swords-and-sorcery inspired games because they feel the pressure to adopt a Tolkienesque model as a basis for their game development in order to ameliorate some of the market risk. All of my participants suggested that they are fans of fantasy works by Tolkien, suggesting it is a common past text for video game developers and players. In my interviews, Tolkienesque fantasy emerged as a key example of a strategy for mitigating transaction costs through the reinforcement of racist discourses in game narratives.

I note that by discussing Tolkien’s works, one might reasonably wonder why Tolkien occupies this role in game development culture and not another author. This is an important question that should be addressed. But, because this study is concerned with the economic and normative practices, this is outside the scope of this study. This study takes Tolkien as a text which developers may turn to for inspiration or risk mediation. Thus, my findings imply that other texts might also serve this function.

In what follows, Jason’s (and, to a lesser extent, Chet’s) words regarding Tolkien serve as an example of how past texts that happen to feature racially problematic ideas are used as hedges against market uncertainty because they are believed to be quickly understandable. In essence, Jason’s and Chet’s descriptions of Tolkien capture all of the themes identified above.

Given that my participants are all from Western countries, the texts they draw from are markedly Western because of their cultural space and thus reproduce the racialized codes of that culture. Tolkien’s works then can be understood normatively in the industry as an archetypical narrative that players are believed to quickly understand both in terms of gameplay and in terms of cultural discourse. That is, existing sources become a grounding for further narrative play.

I think we all know that there’s a certain types [sic] of stories. There’s the joke that all the stories that can be told have been written. But, I do think you use archetypes for a reason. For one reason, you use them because people grasp them and understand them better. So, it lets you play in that scope. So, again, in my [redacted description] game, I’m using an archetype for a reason because I know that could sell and people understand that. I’m just adding a little twist to it to make it more interesting to me instead of saying I’m going to come at this from a completely new angle, which can also work. I think it’s important to know when you should use an archetype and when you should change the thing a bit or challenge the expectation. Because, if the player knows the formula of what’s going to happen, then it’s not going to be interesting. If you change it for a moment—if you follow an archetype but the ending doesn’t go the way you’d expect, I think that can be really interesting.…So, I think archetypes are good when used; but, you have to know what you’re doing. You have to understand how this has been used in other media. You have to understand the preconceived notions people are going to have because of that. And, you’re going to have to know when to push and pull with it. (Jason)

It is important to note that Jason’s comment is in reference to Tolkienesque content, which he describes as archetypal. As I mentioned earlier in this article, there are no statistically significant difference among racial groups in rates of video gameplay (Lenhart et al., 2008). Rational economic logic would suggest that favoring White protagonists would risk alienating video game players of color. Yet video game protagonists still are overwhelmingly White and male (see Williams et al., 2009). What explains this discrepancy is not the actual makeup of the market, but rather what developers and producers perceive as the makeup of the market—a market that is believed to consist of White male gamers (Shaw, 2009). Jason’s comments suggest that Tolkien is a hedge by allowing developers to tap into the preconceived notions that players may have.

Jason continues his statements regarding Tolkien and Tolkienesque races as archetypes. What the following quote articulates is that part of the reason racially problematic narratives become texts used to reduce market uncertainty (despite the risk of offending the market) is the history of those texts.

As much as I love him, I think Tolkien is one of the worst things to happen for fantasy games because every fantasy game—OK, most. Most fantasy games—and I’m talking about “high fantasy” not sci-fi fantasy—end up using the same archetypes—the dark elves are the evil elves, there’s high elves [sic], and dwarves and they’re all Scottish. They have all these same archetypes. Everyone knows dwarves get drunk, [kill] things, and orcs are bad, right? And that same thing is done in every high fantasy game.

Jason’s momentary slip when he asserts “every fantasy game” use archetypes from Tolkien is also telling. His slip belies how ingrained Tolkien’s work is in the professional norms of video game developers. This view squares with Fimi (2009) assertion that how mythological creatures are understood fundamentally changed after Tolkien published the Lord of the Rings. However, I note that Tolkien never articulated dwarves as scots. Nevertheless, Jason assertion seems to match contemporary depiction of dwarves (e.g., Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or World of Warcraft). What Jason’s assertion emphasizes is the industry’s nod toward past texts for understandability. This industry norm of nodding toward past texts draws with it any potentially problematic ideas about race that the texts may have.

Of course, recognizable or associable content does not necessarily constrain narrative or character development. Sometimes, existing sources are adopted in order to create a setting, so the developers can play with the conventions.

[T]hey [the publishers] want a game that’s 95% Tolkien—right?—and 5% your basic stuff [the rest of the game]. They don’t want something that’s super risky and is going to try to tackle big questions or anything. They’re just looking for stuff that sells.…It’s giving the player something you know they can relate to. Um, I mean, you can see threads from Tolkien all the way to, like, Harry Potter. You know, it’s all kind of relatable stuff. You want that core there that says, “Hey I’m a fantasy game. If you like fantasy games, you’re going to like this.” And, around that core you put all your special sauce kind of stuff. So it’s really just a combination of that. (Chet)

Chet explains that this “5% basic stuff” is the space—the “special sauce”—that developers feel they can play with to create games that are their own. This does not suggest that publishers will only fund projects that are “Tolkienesque” nor that Tolkien is to be blamed for racism in video games. Rather, Chet’s statement echoes Jason’s assertions regarding the pressure that developers feel—the pressure of reducing uncertainty in the content by drawing on known past texts.

Yeah, so the publishers that exist like EA or Ubisoft—they exist to make blockbusters.…They don’t want to take a risk on it—it’s just too much of a risk. So they mitigate their risks by taking on licenses, so you’ve got Star Wars games; you’ve got Lord of the Rings games, stuff like that. Very low risk. You know what you’re going to get. (Chet)

Tolkien and other past texts from developers’ social space serve to mitigate that market risk. It is, therefore, not racism per se that sustains the presence of racially problematic ideas in video game texts. Rather, it is likely aversion toward market risks that compel the inclusion of problematic ideas from past texts in video games.

However, important Tolkien is to game developers’ understanding of mythical creatures, his understanding of what constitutes a race is even more influential for game development. In Tolkien’s era, the term race was colloquially used as a synonym for species—a usage that does bears neither scientific nor popular usage today (Fimi, 2009). Nevertheless, how modern role-playing video games use the term race still bears the discourse of Tolkien’s bygone era. Because of Tolkien’s fantasy world’s role and the pressure to model game narratives after past narratives, it seems that an idiosyncratic dual meaning emerged in which race is used as a synonym for species and race in the contemporary context (Fimi, 2009; Srauy, 2014). As Jason wryly states, “I think we need to see that dark elves are the Black people of every fantasy world.” This dual usage is also apparent in Jason’s reflection of some of his work.

I think one of the flaws in our game, and many games that have multiple races, is it becomes all the [members of one specific alien race] are barbaric. Well that’s probably not true. There’s probably a pacifist [“barbaric” alien] somewhere, and maybe I haven’t come across him, right? And so when you start painting races with these broad swaths, I think sometimes you do a disservice to the nuance. But, I think that’s all in respect of because you’re trying to reflect humanity, it’s necessary at times. And, it’s a delicate balancing act. So, I think that it’s a major part of the design to continuously check assumptions and maybe push the assumptions that the player has about a race with a character that might have a slightly different view or might slightly disagree with what you know about that race. And, we’ve certainly done that at times in our sequels. However, I think we can go further. (Jason)

These examples illustrate a normative usage of the word “race” by video game developers that permits a slippage between race in the contemporary context (i.e., different groups of people demarcated by skin color) and species to be conflated as race. In this case, Tolkien (and his use archaic use of race) was used because he is important to game developers and their culture—a culture that many players also occupy. Moreover, because this racial depiction is hidden behind fantastical creatures, it does not seemingly appear racially questionable (Robertson, 2013). These examples also show how fantastical creatures can stand in for human races. We can both speak about those characters and understand that our talk applies to human bodies too (Higgin, 2008; Robertson, 2013).

Conclusion

This article argues that North American video game developers occupy a professional space with normative pressures to create video game texts that are easily relatable and quickly understandable. When race is involved, the interviews demonstrated that North American video game developers (i.e., the United States and Canada) employed ideas from past texts such as J. R. R. Tolkien’s work or the dominant understanding of the concept of race—a concept evinced in what Bonilla-Silva (2006) calls a systemic structure of color-blind racism—because it is a normative response. It is not that Tolkien’s work is the source of racism in video game narratives. Tolkien’s work—among others—must be understood as a framework because his work is so influential to subsequent fantasy narratives that a norm developed to adopt his ideas in contemporary video game narratives. This norm exists, in part, because high development cost and competition induce developers to adopt development strategies that favor adopting narratives from past successful titles. This is nothing new as cultural products like blockbuster Hollywood films also adopt similar strategies (Schatz, 2003). What is problematic is when many of these past titles rely on outdated (and archaic) discourses about race or problematic beliefs about racial groups and economic pressures are able to supersede critical perspectives.

This strategy developed because, as the North American industry matured, more expensive games were regularly produced and the market for video games increased (along with market competitors). These forces exacerbated market uncertainty. This uncertainty takes two interrelated forms. One source of uncertainty is whether or not the video game will sell well enough to recoup initial development costs and make a profit. The second source is whether players will understand the game narrative enough to purchase the game or continue playing it. These two sources of uncertainty are interrelated because the prevailing belief is that games must be understandable in order to be sellable. Selecting past narratives regardless of racially problematic ideas is a rational economic decision because they are thought to act as hedges against those uncertainties.

The response from the interview participants alluded to Tolkien’s influential work. However, this does not imply that Tolkien is the source of racist discourses. Rather, Tolkien serves as one example of how influential texts from a bygone era imbricated with outdated notions of race may still serve as material that percolate into contemporary video games because of their cultural significance. It is possible that future scholars might find equally problematic and influential texts in other parts of the world or in other video game genres. When racist discourses are normalized and hidden in culture (Bonilla-Silva, 2006), media such as video games draw on that culture’s narratives, which may have racist discourses without necessarily realizing it. The stakes are not racist texts or racist actors. Rather, the stakes are normative racism in culture and the ways in which it is maintained. In this study, one of those ways is through the economic structures of the North American video game industry.

My conclusion also tells us something more malignant. Racism in North American video games may be at once invisible and economically rational. I do not mean rational in the sense that developers actively employ racist discourses to sell games—quite the contrary. As scholars have found in industries (and culture industries in this case), racism is often invisible and a part of a larger logic of capital. In the present discussion, racism is rational precisely because it is invisible and economically useful. Its invisibility is the justification needed for all of us—developers, players, and fans alike—to enjoy games (and indeed media) despite the painful threads drawn from our common history.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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