Rather than being timeless and transcendent, Stuart Hall argues for cultural identity as being full of disruptions, transformations, constraints, and differences. Identity is always in a process of becoming, rather than a static ‘state of being.’ Using the backdrop of Afro-Caribbean identities, he traces the differences and disturbances that produce an identity of the ‘little c’ culture of culture studies rather than the older form of ‘big C’ Culture of anthropology and related disciplines. But his essay does not start here, it starts instead with representation, with the “new cinema of the Caribbean.” Culture is not essential, and media products are both a representation of practice and a guide for informing future practices.
A number of video games, particularly role-playing games (RPGs) allow for the physical customization of the player’s avatar. The avatar is used to navigate the virtual world and interact either with other players (as is the case in multiplayer games) or non-playable characters (NPCs, as is the case in single player games). Two interlocking projects I’ve been working on in the last year address single player RPGs where the player can customize the physical appearance and gender of the avatar and engage in romantic/sexual relationships with NPCs. These games (Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) come primarily from two developers (Bethesda Softworks and BioWare) and allow for both heterosexual and homosexual romance options. It has long been remarked about RPGs that the gamer need not match their physical selves to their digital selves and McDonald (2012) argues that such games can be a site of ‘safer identity tourism’ where players can take on alternative sexualities and experiment without deceiving other humans, as the interactions are all produced by the game code. The game allows gamers to play with difference; “be” a man when I’m a woman, “be” a homosexual when I’m a heterosexual. Hall sees the new Caribbean cinema as trying to suture together the rupture and loss caused by separation in the Caribbean experience. It presents comforting fictions for a torn set of identities. These games delight in the possible fracturing and remaking of sexuality, even if it’s only when the console is on.
My first project is a content analysis that codes what form these sexualities take on when enacted on screen. What bodies are looked at? (answer: female, lesbian options outnumber gay male ones). How are bodies looked at? (answer: in close up, soft lighting, think Laura Mulvey’s critique of cinema). But it is my second project that Hall illuminates. These games, like many video games, movies, television shows, have associated online fandoms which include the production of fan fiction and fan art. Here the boundaries of the game code and canon storyline can be set aside and the characters endlessly remixed and reconstructed to suit the fans’ tastes. In their practice, they have the option of a culture of coherence or one of difference, and it seems coherence wins out. In the fictions they shape out of fictions, dominant stories get retold in scenarios where there could have been a drive for “complexity [that] exceeds this binary structure of representation” (Hall, p. 396). Gender relations seem more traditional than in the game. But this may, in its own way, be a form of resistance and remixing.
Mass Effect is a three game (currently) series that follows the adventures of Commander Shepard, a decorated space marine who sets out on a journey to save the galaxy. Shepard may be either male or female, and his/her facial features and skin tone can be customized. Shepard also has the option in each game to initiate romantic/sexual interest in his/her crewmates, which includes both humans and various aliens of both/other genders. Shepard ends the game a hero, though it is left somewhat ambiguous if he/she dies at the end of the third game, depending on the player’s skill, completion percentage, and updates to the game code. A number of popular stories in the Mass Effect fandom involving female-Shepard revolve around her life after the third game with a love interest (LI). These stories include the LI nursing Shepard back to health, marriage, children, taking up a diplomatic post, leaving war behind. Sometimes she goes back on-ship to face a new threat, tots in tow. Is this an enactment of dominant performances that emphasize gender coherence on a representation of woman that deviates from norms? Sometimes I think so, but sometimes I think it’s more complicated than that. There is something incoherent, fractured about smashing Shepard-as-soldier and Shepard-as-wife and mother together. And, after all, it’s not as if the same thing doesn’t happen to male-Shepard, though often times he’ll be cast with another male LI rather than a female LI. RPG success is built, at least partially, on the ability of the gamer to relate to his/her avatar. If there is a radical separation of identity present in many of us, a veneer of coherence may actually be indicative of the symbolic self none of us are able to achieve.
McDonald, H. (2012). NPC romance as a safe space: Bioware and healthier identity tourism. Well Played on Romance a special issue on the theme of romance in games, 1(4), 23-39. Retrieved from http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/volume-1-number-4-romance
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