RACE
When we consider the matter of race in contemporary gaming culture, a few important contextual frameworks come to mind to situate our knowledge of the topic. First, there is the heightened racial framework of American civil society still adjusting to having elected the nation’s first bi-racial Commander-in-Chief, President Barack H. Obama who self-identifies, proudly, as black or African American. Second, there is the industry framework driven by the enlarged roles of global audiences and market shares to which game developers cater with strategies and tactics unparalleled even during the golden age of the industry’s expansion in the Bushnell and Miyamoto eras of the mid- to late 1970s through the mid-1980s. (Though it is important to add that Miyamoto still reigns as a gaming deity to this day.) Third, there is the digitized race and ethnicity framework promulgated by Rockstar Games’s Grand Theft Auto franchise that introduced mainstream gaming’s most high-profile, if not first-ever, central black protagonist Carl “CJ” Johnson as a must-play character (MPC). Fourth, there is the gender framework following the girl games movement that gave rise to the highly successful Lara Croft game brand at the end of the twentieth century. Fifth, and last for our purposes, there is gaming’s networked online framework that has taken the industry by storm and to new heights of social, cultural, global, and financial influence and significance. A through-line transecting each of these frameworks is the often disavowed problematic of racial otherness in gaming’s historic march to cultural relevance and power, particularly its masterful arbitration and commodification of contemporary identity politics as play. Put simply, we can ascertain key aspects of gamers’ and developers’ racial attitudes and assumptions via gaming journalism, blogs, social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr), and other online fora.
Race and Games in the Age of Obama?
Just as narratives, computer games are expressions that, among other things, play a function in the formation of our identity … [W]e could say that the (computer) games we play are nothing but a remote imitation of the infinite play of the world.
(De Mul, 2005, p. 260)
Without a doubt, much has changed even as too much remains the same in the years since journalist Michael Marriott’s 1999 clarion call in the New York Times for interrogating the limits of the video games industry’s treatment of race and ethnicity, and the need for doing something about it. Nothing signals the depth of change in our national mindset and political economy than the remarkable 2008 election and subsequent 2012 re-election of President Obama against formidable odds. Consequently, discourses of race and identity politics in the country frequently toggle back and forth between often naive, well-intentioned rhetorics of color-blindness or race neutrality and emboldened racist rhetorics trading on covert and overt logics of racial animus and entrenched white supremacy.
Clearly, it is not a radical move to situate this interrogation of the gaming industry’s meaningful play structures within the crucial sense-making frameworks of racial intelligibility and identification. However, it remains a radical act when game industry observers, critics, fans, designers, and developers resist, call out, and reject the tired, familiar, and damaging racist cultural scripts routinely cloaked in gaming’s newfangled technological wizardry and today’s powerfully immersive multicultural narrative-quests. More radical yet are those gamer/designer communities of practice who modify and recode our racist cultural scripts to effect antiracist sandbox experiences either in wildly successful game design or pleasurable gameplay, or both. I have in mind here technological innovations in character designs that promise infinitely customizable avatars and gameworlds more attuned to the lived realities and expectations of post-Civil Rights era Millennials, or “Generation C” (for connect) as trend watchers for the Nielsen corporation dubs today’s “most digitally connected” 18-to-34-year-olds (Fox, 2012). Moreover, these youths’ habitual digital connectivity is matched in intensity and ubiquity only by their willing attachments to so-called “addictive” mobile games on smartphones tablets and other toting technologies. Whether or not we are considering the Millennials or gamers more broadly, with respect to categories of epistemic games, serious games, casual games, retro games, and cute games, we understand that none is impervious to the sense-making contexts of volatile and shifting cultural frameworks. Again, these include the winds of historical and contemporary racism or conversely the countervailing winds of antiracist activist practices. For example, the decisive electoral victory of President Obama manifests a transformation of race relations and realpolitik in the US despite a palpable uptick in racist attacks prior to, during, and in the aftermath of the historic 2008 election. In his intelligence report for the Southern Poverty Law Center entitled “Racist Backlash Greets President Barack Obama,” Larry Keller (2009) recounts a number of chilling incidents across the country, ranging from official hate crimes to offensive pranks and protests, and most disappointing many involving youths, “students from grade school to college”:
A life-sized likeness of Obama was found hanging from a noose in a tree at the University of Kentucky. The co-owner of a Palm Beach, Fla., restaurant wrote “White Power” on staff memos taped to the eatery’s kitchen walls. She told her black employees they would be fired if they voted for Obama … A black Muslim teenager in Staten Island, N.Y., said he was assaulted by four white men who yelled “Obama.” That same restaurant owner in Palm Beach wrote “KKK” on employee timecards … In Snellville, Ga., a boy on a school bus told a 9-year-old girl that he hoped Obama would be assassinated. That night, also in Snellville, a vandalized Obama sign and two pizza boxes filled with human feces were left on a black family’s lawn. Small black effigies were found hanging from nooses in trees in two Maine towns. In Midland, Mich., a pistol-packing member of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan wore his Klan uniform and carried an American flag on a city sidewalk.
The point of quoting this stark reminder of persistent racism in US society and culture is to underscore the point that deeply problematic attitudes about race and identity politics continually surface with damaging and dangerous consequences even in the twenty-first century, in the age of President Obama, and in regions all across the nation. It is hardly surprising, then, that cultural narratives about race most familiarly transmitted via theater, print, film, radio, television, as gaming industry precursors of video games in arcade, console, and online formats, become nearly impossible to dislodge. And games, like these cultural modalities before them, help render and standardize historic racial myths as it does myths and discourses of the body, as “Judith Butler speaks of [with her term] ‘bodily intelligibility’” (quoted in Richard and Zaremba, 2005, p. 293).
Having emerged now as a media industry giant and a potent cultural force, the video/computer games industry and the narrative texts it creates, promote, sell, and profit from both racist and antiracist cultural values. The significance of gaming discourses of race is, as Jos de Mul points out (2005, p. 262), that
computer games are not “just games” but play a constitutive role in our cognitive development and in the construction of our identity … You have to do more than identify with a character on the screen. You must act for it.
“Identification through action,” de Mul continues, “has a special kind of hold” (2005, p. 262). This special hold is at the crux of our concern with race in games’ arguably heightened identification affect over traditional discursive forms such as print and film. Identification with games “might be more intense than in the case of narratives,” de Mul suggests (2005, p. 262). And if we accept gaming’s growing influence on identity formation and normative racial discourses in society, and especially on Generation C, our investigation into the twinning of gaming and race takes on a particular urgency.
Furthermore, confused public discourses about video games more broadly undergird contradictory logics about the medium’s newly embraced beneficial roles in society, including its ability to spur pre-science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning in youths, and to improve physical and cognitive skills in elderly populations (Castillo, 2013; Nauert, 2012). In addition, public discourses about video games also maintain a heightened scrutiny and condemnation of sexist and misogynist content in gaming narratives, play structures, and their “procedural rhetorics,” to use Ian Bogost’s (2008, p. 125) terms. Concern about the problematic nature of gaming’s gender dynamics is ongoing in academia and more so in the blogosphere. Now, the racial problematic in gaming is finally garnering some of the scholarly and popular attention or scrutiny it has long deserved.
A Proliferation of Racially Diverse MPCs
It is true that numerous successful game titles and franchises featuring racially diverse MPCs and optional-playable characters (OPCs) have become widely available. Some of the most racially-inclusive mainstream/popular games developed over the decades and in recent years are: Final Fantasy (Square Enix, 1987–2013), Prince of Persia (Brøderbund, TLC, Mattel, Ubisoft, SCEJ, 1989–2010), Madden NFL (Eletronic Arts, 1992–2013), FIFA International Soccer (EA Sports, 1993–2012), Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996–2012), Half-Life (Valve Corporation, 1998–2007), Tiger Woods PGA Tour (Electronic Arts, 1999–2013), Blade (Activision, 2000), Halo (Bungie, Ensemble Studios, 343 Entertainment, 2001–2012), Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games, 2002–2013), Battlefield (Electronic Arts, 2002–2013), Call of Duty (Activision, 2003–2012), Men of Valor (Vivendi Universal, 2004), NBA Ballers (Midway, 2004), NFL Street (Electronic Arts, 2004), Afro Samurai (Seven Seas Entertainiment, 2009), Prey (2K Games, 2006), Gears of War (Microsoft Game Studios, 2006–2011), Saints Row (THQ, 2006), Mass Effect (Bioware, 2007–2012), Left 4 Dead (Valve Corporation, 2008), Prototype (Activision, 2009–2012), and StarHawk (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2012).
Now, Assassins’ Creed 3: Liberation (Ubisoft, 2012) is a special title in the franchise produced exclusively for the PlayStation Vita handheld gaming device and it marks a unique offering that fuses both race and gender in one powerful action-adventure character design (more about this later).
For some time, as the abovementioned titles suggest, games companies have targeted African Americans, Latino/a Americans, Asians Americans, Native Americans, Arabs, and other Others (though not in equal measure) as a deliberate business model of product expansion. After all, as Erica Saylor (2012) observes in “Latinos Drive Video Game Sales,” the gaming industry is well aware that this gamer demographic considers video games as a primary source of entertainment by 32 percent more than others. “According to Microsoft Xbox sales,” she writes, “Hispanic gamers contributed to 23% [industry] growth while non-Hispanic gamers grew [by] a sheer 10%.” Referencing Call of Duty: Black Ops II (Activision, 2012), Saylor alerts us to the game’s Latino MPC named Raul Menendez, a political activist or narco-terrorist hailing from Nicaragua (“Latinos Drive”). Despite crafting a lead Latino playable character (PC) in one of the world’s most popular and lucrative franchises, Call of Duty: Black Ops II is not likely to spur an industry rush or avalanche of Latino/a themed games or heroic Latino/a protagonists to satisfy one of its largest and most loyal fan bases.
Frederick Luis Aldama (2012) posits a possible rationale. He contends that a plethora of Latino OPCs and MPCs can be found in successful genres, which serve to mollify if not fully satisfy this gamer clientele. Acceptable archetypes such as footballers, gangsters, matador-style warriors, and other underworld stereotypes dominate several games in the Grand Theft Auto, Tekken, Madden, FIFA, military combat, and first-person shooter game franchises. Furthermore, some niche and mainstream games provide dialogue/audio in Spanish (Aldama, 2012, p. 359). That said, Saylor and Aldama emphasize that gaming’s representation of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (especially Latinos) remains woefully incommensurate with their demographic percentages in society, and within the industry’s own market shares.
Still, a key part of gaming’s steady rise as a media industry powerhouse and formidable rival to motion pictures and other big entertainment media corporations is its ability to keep pace with changes in social and cultural norms. This means game narratives, genres, worlds, and characters necessarily have evolved. New and established game titles and franchises now feature MPCs and PCs that are racially and ethnically diverse.
I have argued elsewhere that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’s African-American character Carl “CJ” Johnson (the gang-member protagonist) and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s Italian American character Tommy Vercetti (the mafia protagonist) provided the preeminent racial MPCs outside of gaming’s privileged masculine archetypes of heroic whiteness (Everett, 2005). In fact, Rockstar Games’s creation of CJ and Tommy as bankable gaming stars foregrounding race, masculinity, and ethnicity was the precondition that made it possible for other racially and ethnically defined MPC and PC types. These include Mass Effect’s black soldier Commander John Shepard, Men of Valor’s black Vietnam veteran Dean Shephard, Starhawk’s black gunslinger Emmet Graves, and Resident Evil 5’s black African woman bioterrorism fighter Sheva Alomar, and many, many more.
At Last, Black Women Are PCs
I play, therefore I am.
(Jason Callina et al., 2011)
As we have been observing, there is an interesting and obvious shift occurring in gaming’s engagement with race. A striking case in point is the industry’s discovery of black heroines as badass action-adventure types on the order of Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) and D’arci Stern (Urban Chaos). Now, black women, as well as other women of color, are feasible as MPCs and PCs in popular game series and franchises unlike in previous eras, except for Zelda, the enduing fantasy-adventure genre character. Among the dominant game companies leading in this practice are Capcom with its 2008 release of Resident Evil 5 that features one kickass woman MPC of African descent, Sheva Alomar, and Ubisoft, most recently, with its 2012 release of Assassin’s Creed 3 (AC3): Liberation featuring kickass black heroine number 2, Aveline de Grandpre, an African-French avenging assassin rampaging through a historic antebellum gameworld set in eighteenth-century New Orleans.
And though these powerful characters foreground race less stereotypically in some respects, online debates about the confluence of race and gender in popular gaming underscore aspects of these character formulations that redeploy stereotypical racial tropes and persistent reifications of black and other women/girls of color as gaming’s ultimate outsiders, players, and characters alike. Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge Sheva Alomar’s and Aveline de Grandpré’s departures from black female characters largely overrepresented as non-playable victims of gaming violence. As recent narrative agents in action-adventure, open-world, and first-person and third-person-shooter genres in mainstream, casual, and online gaming spaces (including networked gaming such as Xbox Live), gaming’s women of color characters are redefining the gaming experience in general, and in terms of twenty-first-century multicultural, multiracial, heroic character ideals in particular.
Alerting us to one particular instance of black women redefining their gaming experience is Kishonna L. Gray (2013) who investigates sexist and homophobic taunts and other oppressive gameplay practices within Xbox Live’s various gaming communities. Centering on networked Gears of War I and II, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare games, she considers how black and Puerto Rican women clans and guilds intentionally harass, disrupt, and interrupt normal gameplay progression through an oppositional play strategy Gray calls “collective resistance griefing.” Their resistance occurs once male players in the session initiate racist and sexist social interactions, usually triggered by calling the women players “bitches,” “spics,” and “niggers” or by commenting derogatorily on their citizenship status.
Favored griefing tactics for the women are activating the hardcore play mode in Call of Duty, which permits the women to engage defensively in deliberate friendly-fire kills of as many of their own offending teammates as possible; to create lag and glitches; to enact virtual sit-ins, essentially doing nothing in-game beyond moving the cursor to avoid being booted off the network for inactivity (Gray, 2013). For these heterogeneous black women gamers (English and Spanish speaking, lesbian and straight), collective resistance griefing serves as a means of indulging their fangirl gaming pleasures while opposing oppressive interactions encountered on Xbox Live that Microsoft admins apparently failed to address, at least to their satisfaction. In fact, instead of the male perpetrators being suspended, they report that the complaining women were. Because the membership fees for Xbox Live are significant, the male majority gamers on the network were very upset with these women’s acts of “resistance griefing,” which was the point precisely. Offline, the women continued their protests and activism by creating websites and blogs to publicize the racial and sexual discrimination they routinely experienced on Xbox Live (Gray, 2013).
Another game engendering new modes of play with race and identity is Sims 2 (Electronic Arts, 2004). Whereas Sims games permit sophisticated racial identity experimentation and commodification or racial tourism, to use Lisa Nakamura’s (2000) terms, the game’s expansion packs help fuel new creative expressions involving race through the wildly popular practice of machinima. One interesting conflict develops when we consider Cassandra Jones’s critique of a 2008 Sims 2machinima text entitled “Run DMC King of Rock (Sims 2)” created by Rain Arenas. Produced in January 2008, it casts the African American rap artists Run DMC as white. Describing the text on YouTube (Figure 49.1), Arenas writes:
It’s hard to tell in the video, but all of the Sims are composed of Elvis Presley (which I had downloaded from www.modthesims2.com). King of Rock was and still is one of my favorite jams from RUN DMC, and the inspiration for this machinima music video.
(Arenas, 2008)
Figure 49.1 Whitening Run DMC: Rain Arenas’ The Sims 2 (2004) King of Rock (1985) machinima.
Neither Arenas nor any of her viewers or subscribers was troubled by the racial swap. On the contrary, most assertions were “Love it!!” or “Cool.” Returning to context, Cassandra Jones troubles this colorblind representational strategy by reminding us of an historical racial problematic attending this machinima modding approach and others of the ilk. It should not be forgotten that such representational economies participate in longstanding appropriations, subversions, and rip-offs of black artistry and cultural productions by white individuals and non-black business interests (Jones, 2011).
Race, as we have been considering, is a complex vector in contemporary gaming structures, narratives, and ludic practices. Coupled with the advent of new digital tools, racial affect engenders powerful participatory cultures of play and critique (Callina et al., 2011; Saylor, 2012; Midori237, n.d.). Leveraging the power of the web, gamers readily talk back to designers and programmers about their own takes on the phenomenon of new racial scripts in the gaming firmament. Most famous in this regard early on were the vociferous commentaries and condemnations that ensued when Capcom unveiled its Resident Evil 5 game trailer at the 2007 E3 convention. That Capcom was unprepared for the controversy and reaction against its latest iteration of the lucrative Resident Evil franchise is telling.
A self-styled “American Geek,” calling himself moviebob, like many others, rejected the company’s unconvincing rationale of pitting its scantily clad, one good black babe heroine as a sufficient counterbalance to the horde of bad black Majini (evil spirit) boyz in the jungle conflict-narrative driving this game (moviebob, 2009). Also of interest here is how contemporary game designers, as well as and fans, engage charges of endemic sexism intertwined with both virulent and genteel or “cloaked” racism, to borrow Jesse Daniels’s (2008) apt usage, in the gaming industry especially following the public relations debacle of Capcom’s Resident Evil 5 rollout.
Figure 49.2 Sheva Alomar of Resident Evil 5 (2009).
Screen shot courtesy of http://electricblueskies.com.
Although moviebob is not alone in taking his condemning assessment of Resident Evil 5 to the digital public sphere, not all commentary revolving around Capcom’s black bombshell, Sheva Alomar (Figure 49.2), was derisive. One young black woman found the character a welcome contribution. Writing under the pseudonym Midori (from a video game character of the old PSX game Evil Zone (Titus Software, 1999)), Midori, a self-identified 22-year-old African-American woman was ecstatic after learning of the character’s creation and narrative centrality to the game. She writes:
[I] decided to click on Resident Evil 5 … And omg one of the main characters is a BLACK WOMAN!!! I know this might not seem exciting to some but being a black woman myself, and a big fan of videogames I’m just stoked! We get no representation.
(Midori237, n.d.)
As stoked as Midori was, she had not abandoned all critical thinking regarding the representational economies at work in this character construct. She continues:
Anyway[,] her name is Sheva Alomar and she’s absolutely gorgeous. I believe she’s supposed to be from West Africa (she works for in an organization in West Africa) and she even has a tattoo on her arm that says “soldier” in Swahili. (Nevermind that Swahili is spoken in East Africa, not West) where she’s supposed to be from. lol It’s possible though and I guess we can’t expect too much. lol. The symbol part of the tattoo is from West Africa, one of my friends has that tattooed on his arm. See the tattoo in the last image … it means “soldier.” Isn’t she stunning? It’s about time a black woman is one of the leads in a videogame. First Obama, now Sheva … I don’t know what to do with myself!:☺ lol
(Midori237, n.d.)
What is useful about Midori’s 2009 post to her website (now defunct) that she calls “The Diary of Midori” is its tally of clearly-delineated black women PCs in video games that totaled approximately five to seven at that point. In addition to Sheva Alomar, the others she identifies are precursors including: Darci Stern from the Urban Chaos (Eidos Interactive, 1999) action game, with Stern imagined as a rival to Lara Croft in 1999 for the original PlayStation; Lisa Hamilton aka La Mariposa from the fighter game Dead or Alive (Tecmo, 1996); Fran, the non-human character, from Final Fantasy VII (Square, 1997); and Tanya from the Mortal Kombat brand. Like others online who interrogate the abysmal number of heroic black women characters in gaming, prolific vlogger, Essence of Truth is particularly compelling. Her YouTube channel is devoted to gaming, and she has produced upwards of 160 videos on her channel.
While Essence of Truth and Midori, among other black women social media creators, are serious about their online cultural activism and fan participation in gaming’s networked cultures, business practices, and influential cultural capital, they do not seem to take themselves too seriously as their affective labor, and pleasure in being part of a web of social media communities of practice (Wenger, 2006) expresses unequivocally. Moreover, they are not in lockstep, and it is not clear if their social networks and collectives are intertwined at all.
What is clear about gaming’s online participatory sectors is the emergence of savvy, passionate DIY citizen journalists who embrace new media’s digital toolkits and open-source programs to enact some code breaking and compelling code-shifting (in the linguistic sense) in a process I am calling “gaming race.” They clearly understand and master gaming’s meaningful play structures and proceduralities (Salen and Zimmerman, 2005; Bogost, 2008), while subverting or refusing some of the suspect racial and downright racist interpellations or identifications many games encode. Issuing public correctives of and challenges to erroneous character designs is one such instance, as Midori demonstrates above by calling out Sheva Alomar’s tattoo symbol in Resident Evil 5. Gaming race also occurs between gamers who face-off on Twitter and other fora when hotly contested views about race erupt and disrupt self-serving boasts of performance mastery usually concerned with cheat codes, disclosing secret powerups and Easter eggs, etc. in the no-longer homogeneous spaces comprising today’s digital sandbox.
As troubling as the often virulent racist rants and intolerant speech are that inundate videogame fora, websites, and other media outlets that dare address the persistence and unacceptability of misogynist and racist representations and cultures in gaming, interesting examples of resistance and pushback are occurring. Moreover, it is important to stress that some of the conversations around race in gaming fora have become more nuanced and thoughtful since 2008.
CJ’s Global Progeny: Assassin’s Creed’s Black Girl Avenger, Orientalism 2.0, and Grand Theft Auto V
The phenomenal success of the Grand Theft Auto franchise (Figure 49.3) across racial and ethnic demographics has tracked closely with changing societal attitudes about race and difference for better and worse especially post-9/11, among other seismic cultural changes. For one thing, the rise of networked gaming and its stratified communities of practice have generated the good, the bad, and the ugly of online interactivity and participatory cultures. Whereas the good sees the instantiation of powerful people of color MPCs as exemplified by AC3: Liberation’s Aveline de Grandpré, whose narrative power and agency is somewhat curtailed by her temporal displacement to antebellum, pre-Revolutionary New Orleans. And, when considered in tandem with Sheva’s strong playable buddy-role in Resident Evil 5, Aveline’s solo sheroic role marks a crucial turn in gaming’s address to race.
Still, Ubisoft has moved gaming’s multicultural, mixed-race, and transgender play options forward as evidenced in its guide to AC3: Liberation players. In its “Game Overview,” Ubisoft writes: “No matter the persona you choose, you are Aveline. Wielding a machete, poison-dart blowpipe, and dueling pistols, you’ll master all new ways to hunt down and eliminate your enemies-fighting for your beliefs, your people and your freedom.” Returning to our consideration of context, it is not unreasonable to situate Aveline’s mixed French and African heritage within a larger discursive ecology of socially-acceptable mixed-race populations in the US following President Obama’s public embrace of his own mixed-race lineage, and the burgeoning academic study of mixed-race identity politics. Now, males of all racial and ethnic groups confess online to enjoying gameplay as a powerful black female MPC.
Be that as it may, Ubisoft is not alone in its push beyond the racial boundaries of normative whiteness in building its gameworld temporalities. This brings us to the bad in gaming. We have discussed already, for instance, a potent example of bad gaming practices and cultures experienced by women gamers of color playing Call of Duty on Xbox Live’s online network (Gray, 2013). In our post-9/11 political environments, games companies are discovering Asian as well as Arab, Muslim, and other youths in the Middle East as new market and demographic shares and business opportunities to cultivate. Vit Sisler (2008) notes that digital Orientalism has long been a feature of fantasy and adventure games. But since 9/11 the complexity of Arab nations, the Islamic religion, and Muslim countries have been flattened out essentially into gaming’s favored terrorist and Islamic extremist caricatures.
Game developers in the Middle East, Sisler (2008) explains, have in recent years begun to resist and counter such anti-Arab games such as War in the Gulf (Empire, 1993), Delta Force (NovaLogic, 1998), Conflict: Desert Storm (SCi Games, 2002), Full Spectrum Warrior (THQ, 2004), Kuma/War (Kuma Reality Games, 2004), and Conflict: Global Terror (SCi Games, 2005). To re-capture the hearts and minds of young Arabic and Muslim gamers from western media influences, Syrian and Lebanese game developers created Special Force (Solution, 2003), Under Ash (Dar al-Fikr, 2002), and Under Siege (Afkar Media, 2005), military games from their own national and ideological points of view. As Sisler (2008) puts it, “Special Force and Under Ash can be considered as the first attempts to participate in video games’ construction of Arab and Muslim selfrepresentation [sic].”
Alternatively, games developer Mahmoud Khasawneh (2011) argues that Western game companies need to partner with Middle Eastern games companies to tap into this potentially highly lucrative market. With a region of more than 400 million people speaking a single language, Arabic, and with half of some populations under age 25, and highly tech-savvy, Khasawneh (2011) believes the
Middle Eastern gaming industry is likely worth somewhere between $1 billion and $2.6 billion in terms of revenue across software and hardware. Western developers and publishers have the chance to successfully enter and influence a very green and receptive market, ready to be engaged and monetized.
Figure 49.3 Grand Theft Auto V (2013).
Time will tell if gaming’s address to race will move beyond some of the promising steps it has taken to attract larger and more racially, ethnically, gendered, and other diverse populations in the West and across the globe, as discussed here. Any cursory look at online fora devoted to these new racially-inclusive games reveals enthusiastic gamers embracing novel approaches to race and difference, as well as, unfortunately, persistent racial stereotypes. With Rockstar Games’s long-awaited Grand Theft Auto V nearing release at the end of 2013, it will be interesting to see what CJ’s progeny will portend for race and games in digital times.
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