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Current Book Project
Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies (writing in-progress)
Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies uses the concepts of repetition and recursion to develop a formalist methodology for analyzing videogames as racial-cultural projects. It offers racial recursivity as a method to explore the underlying racial ideology within videogames, surfaces how these ideologies are manifested in game aesthetics, describes how these aesthetics connect to historical ideas of and around race, and argues that this process creates a self-referential feedback loop by its repetitious reoccurrence. The first part of the book examines how various ludic-textual structures of videogames—mechanics, UI, enemy design, visual design, architecture, and intertextuality—draw upon racial logics in culture and recursively reinforce them through self-naturalizing repetition. Each chapter examines a specific dimension of video games and reveals how racial aesthetics can be surfaced. These chapters explore the racial foundations of meta-procedural mechanics, the whiteness embedded in character creation UI design, racialization as a justification for enemy design, the widespread use of the so-called “Mexican filter” in videogames set in the global south, the inheritance of “the street” as racial architectural archetype, and the networks of privilege that went into producing video game genre and the intertextual reference that they rely upon. Part II of the book uses the racial recursivity methodology to explore three sustained case studies: the aestheticization of racial protest in a trio of games (Detroit: Become Human, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Fallout 4), the bullshit racial landscape of Cyberpunk 2077, and the use of anti-immigrant racialization in the Halo series, each showing the viability of the racial recursivity methodology for sustained analysis of game texts. Drawing together race studies, literary studies, and game studies, the book offers a formalist critical race studies methodology for game studies.
Edited Collections
Beyond the Border of Japanese Video Games with DA Hall (proposal under review)
Beyond the Border of Japanese Video Games is an edited collection that explores how many of the most successful and influential video games produced in Japan are interested in contesting borders, whether those of national identity, those sustained by visual culture, or those that subtend dominant ontological frameworks. Somewhat paradoxically, we take “the Japanese video game” as a discrete category of analysis precisely to reveal the process through which such national categories are constructed and can be contested by art. Building on the emergent field of Japanese Game Studies, this volume argues that major Japanese game series—from The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing to Dark Souls and Metal Gear Solid—present sophisticated critiques of bordering and the larger worlding project. Contributions surface how these video games explore the affordance and limits of categories such as “the West,” “America,” and “Japan,” and our contributors reveal how the games under consideration contest the various dimensions of these bordering projects. The introduction historicizes the development of the Japanese video game industry by tracing a continuity of aesthetic practices of exchange, emulation, and transformation from the Meiji through the Reiwa periods. The collection then proceeds in three sections. Section 1 explores how “Japanese video games” contend with the border of the nation state and national identity. Tracing the ruptures and continuities in “Japanese” national identity across historical disruptions such as the Meiji Restoration, World War II, “American” occupation, the Cold War, and the 3.11 disaster, contributors reveal how major titles like Elden Ring, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, the Yakuza series, and the Metal Gear Solid series each probe the production of the “Japanese” subject through the shifting borders and meanings of a “Japanese” national identity and its relationship to “the West.” Section 2 turns attention to how visual aesthetics and popular culture have sustained and contested the bordering projects of imagining and imaging a post-War “Japan.” Contributors explore how series like The Legend of Zelda, Animal Crossing, and Kingdom Hearts position themselves within a tradition of contemporary “Japanese” aesthetics in order to phrase themselves against comparable “Western” visual design projects like that of Disney or of major “American” produced video games. Rather than positioning these games as reactionary against so-called “Western visual culture,” our contributors show that these video games represent and transform these globalized aesthetic projects. The borders of visual culture, then, are deliberately blurred by the video games under consideration. Section 3 concludes by exploring how “Japanese” video games contend with the bordering function of dominant ontologies, especially with regard to the category of the human. In mobilizing Shinto, Buddhist, and folkloric traditions, games such as Dark Souls, Tengai Makyō, Final Fantasy, and Pokémon unsettle binaristic borders such as the human vs. the non-human, man vs. the environment, and the self vs. the other. By revealing how these allegedly “natural” categories are constructed as bordering projects, the games under consideration attempt to break from the bordering and worlding project altogether.
Future Projects
Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature (research in-progress)
Black Ludology: Play in African American Literature charts how Black American writers have represented play while simultaneously charting the history and interconnected nature of play and American racial ideology. This project hopes to create a racial historiography of play and race in both American social-political history and across Black American literature across 6 proposed chapters. “Ludus as Impossibility: Play in the Slave Narrative” looks at how Slave narratives often present play as something impossible yet realized for the enslaved, especially the slave child in texts by William Grimes, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs. “Ludus as a Losing Game” follows Eva’s claim in Toni Morrison’s Sula that “Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895” (68) to explore how Black writers have articulated the “rigged game” that Black people participate in called the American project and how writers have confronted the “games white folks play.” “Breaking the Rules” begins with that viral Twitter moment from 2020 when Black users rejected the official Uno Twitter account because Uno plays “their own damn game wrong “ as this entry point allows us to explore how Black gamers have historically broke rules and regulations around card games while navigating regimes of ludic control such as the anti-gambling laws of the Antebellum period that were then later used as legal precedent for prohibition-era bans on card houses and eventually anti-loitering laws. “(Dis)Ordered Ludic” argues the ephemeral nature of the Negro League Baseball clubs exemplifies a playful reading of Cedric Robinson’s theory of disorder—a breaking of the “ordered play” prioritized in Eurocentric Play Theory. “Gaming the System and Playing the Race Card” explores how 1980s conservative rhetoric framed the Welfare Queen as someone who allegedly “cheats” the system, aka “the game,” and argues that 90s and 2000s hip hop confronts and embraces the “cheat” with the rise of the “playa” image who uses criminality to win the game. The final chapter “Black Ludic and Genre Play” turns to contemporary speculative fiction with writers like NK Jemisin, Colson Whitehead, and Victor Lavelle playing with literary form and genre to articulate an alternative imaginary in speculative fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy while simultaneously navigating the game that is market expectations that the contemporary publishing apparatus has of Black writers to write a particular type of fiction.
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