part0015

At this relatively early point in the evolution of the medium, would it be possible to play every video game ever set in Latin America? That is a question I posed to myself a few years ago, probably knowing somewhere within that I was opening up a much larger Pandora’s box. Indeed, that question quickly led to others. Would it be possible to play every video game ever made in Latin America? Would it be possible to play every video game with a Latin American character, setting (such as a race track, fighting locale, or sports arena), or national/regional team or identity (in sports games and Civilization -type games)? To tell the truth, I am no longer interested in answering those questions. This is in part because I now realize that the deeper one goes down the rabbit hole of game design and development, the harder it is to believe in totalizing concepts like playing every game of a specific kind. While I used to think of video games in terms of the relatively small number of titles published for major home consoles and computer platforms on cartridge or disc, I have come to recognize a much more expansive world of games that not only includes downloadable software but also web games, mobile applications, art games, and software modifications. Likewise, I have moved on from those initial questions because of the fact that the journey they initiated has been so unpredictably and remarkably rewarding on so many levels.

At the same time as I began to perceive an ever-greater number of unturned stones and critical possibilities for future developments in cultural ludology, a variety of intersecting paths and passageways were leading me toward what would eventually become Cultural Code . One of these trajectories was my relationship with Latin American culture, which began when I arrived in Costa Rica as a sixteen-year-old ready to work on a summer public health project. That experience led to an enduring personal relationship and intellectual fascination with Latin America and its cultural production, inspiring me to pursue studies in the Spanish language and Latin American history and culture first at the undergraduate level, and eventually for my Ph.D. In the meantime, I had opportunities to live, work, study, or pursue research in countries including Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, diversifying and deepening my relationship with Latin American culture on a personal level while my academic interests advanced simultaneously. Looking back, I can see how certain episodes contributed to a path that has led to this book. I can remember specific times playing games with friends in arcades, cybercafés, and living rooms in locations across Latin America, without realizing that those games might become part of my academic interests as well. The first academic talk I ever presented at a major conference was on Ricardo Dominguez, whose work I also discuss in this book, though I didn’t think of it as a game studies project at the time. And back in my first year of graduate school, as my academic trajectory was really just beginning to take shape, when one of my more experienced peers, Justin Crumbaugh, advised me that it was important to let my personal and academic interests bleed over into one another, I could not have imagined then just how meaningful that advice would be for me. Over the course of my graduate studies, my intellectual pursuits expanded from Latin American literature and poetry into the broader realm of cultural production including film, the visual arts, and new media, sowing the seeds that would eventually lead to my research on video games and Latin America.

In fact, the entire time I have been developing my personal and intellectual relationship with Latin American culture, there has been another relationship active in the background, a simultaneous but only occasionally intersecting trajectory: my development as a gamer and video game enthusiast. When I was not traveling throughout Latin America (and sometimes when I was), I was also obsessively playing games like Driver 2 , Goldeneye , Call of Duty , and Grand Theft Auto , increasing my experiences inhabiting Latin America as a gamespace at the same time that I was getting to know and appreciate real places throughout the region. For a long time, I was interacting with Latin American culture on a ludic level as well as a personal level, but without stopping to think of video games in terms of their crossover with my real-life cultural experiences.

By the time I began teaching at the University of Delaware in 2010, I had begun to pursue research on subjects including cultural representation in film and new media. Shortly thereafter, my old friend and gaming buddy Matt Harrington wrote to tell me about a new game he had played, Red Dead Redemption , which he thought I might like because he knew I had lived in Mexico and that I had an enduring interest in Mexican culture. That provocative suggestion, along with the financial constraints faced in the first semester of my first long-term job out of grad school, led me to wonder whether I might be able to use some of my startup research funds to purchase not just books but other forms of cultural production … like video games. When I checked with the administrators in my department, I was surprised and pleased to hear that one of my new colleagues, Japanese professor Rachael Hutchinson, did research on video games and had used research funds for their purchase. When I talked to Rachael, I discovered that she taught classes on Japanese language and culture including manga, anime, and video games, but that her research focused entirely on games. This was a revelation to me, and as I quickly purchased then played RDR , I was also beginning to devour the substantial body of high-quality game studies research in academic journals and research publications. This highly stimulating archive added wind to my sails. At the 2012 International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association in Toronto, I excitedly announced to my colleague and friend Nicolas Poppe that I was positioning myself as the “video games guy” within our shared field of contemporary Latin American cultural studies. He told me it was either the stupidest thing or the coolest thing that he had ever heard. It was around this time that I realized I really had a new book project on my hands.

As I began the research process for what would eventually become Cultural Code several years ago, I came to a final realization that would shape the trajectory of my research. I had begun thinking of my analysis in terms of the ways game developers in North America, Europe, and Asia depict Latin American culture in their games. But I quickly began to discover games from Latin American designers like Gonzalo Frasca and Daniel Benmergui, as well as the makers of commercial games such as Lucha Libre AAA: Héroes del Ring . Eventually, I dug deeper and became aware of the rich history of game design in the region, examining cases like TEG’s software modification practices in 1990s Peru and Enrique and Ariel Arbiser’s wonderful game Truco , first released on the Argentine market in 1982. These discoveries eventually led to the first half of this book, as I became familiar with not only the history of game design in the region, but also the growing and expanding trajectories that have led to the current boom in regional game development. As I have contacted and gradually come to know so many game designers and developers from throughout Latin America, I have become increasingly aware of both my debt and my responsibility to this community. It is my greatest hope that this book does justice to the incredibly diverse body of game production that has come out of Latin America and that continues to be produced throughout the region today.

With all that said, I am now asking myself a new set of questions. What does it mean to decode culture in video games? And how can we continue to decode games’ relationship to daily life in human society? Today it is ever clearer that games impact cultural spheres including economics, politics, aesthetics, education, entertainment, and cultural production in other types of media. This is true the world over, but each cultural environment and microenvironment has its own ways of consuming, producing, politicizing, and otherwise putting games to use. Therefore I see a great need for innovative work on the intersections between games and culture, particularly from perspectives looking beyond the much-discussed mainstream game markets like Western Europe, the United States, and Japan. This is why I perceive an ever-increasing urgency to cultural ludology, to broaden and deepen our understanding of how video games can be useful for human culture, and how cultures are put to use in games in different contexts across the globe. For my part, there is much more that I would have liked to have done in Cultural Code , and there are surely elements within that will draw criticism from some readers—if so, I will be grateful that this work has found an audience and generated enough interest to provoke a response. As I look forward into a hopeful future for my own and others’ research on the relationship between video games and Latin America in particular, and on cultural aspects of ludology more generally, I hope that the groundwork I have laid in Cultural Code at the very least provides the basis for discussions that will expand and grow in years to come. There is much work to be done; let us continue to decode culture together.