Most of the social dynamics in our everyday lives are
governed by a nebulous but pervasive subtextual quality: agency. Agency is a fancy way of saying "ability
to act," a neutral way of referring to an individual's capacity for
self-determination in a physical, emotional, material, and intellectual sense. Agency can exist in a literal sense,
determining the limitations of a given person or group of people in the real
world, or in a textual sense, wherein new hierarchies of agency are established
in a work of narrative or non-narrative art.
A person with agency, textual or social, can eat whatever they like for
breakfast, move to another city if they choose to do so, or travel outside of
their immediate community with relative ease.
When we talk about social power, in a very general sense, we're talking
about agency, and how agency is a highly relative concept, and varies dramatically
depending on who you're talking to at a given moment.
When we tweed-jacket types talk about "Othering,"
they're talking about the social invention of division between groups of
people. "Othering" is an old
holdover from our tribal social roots, a function through which we figured out
a way to differentiate our immediate social connections from the rest of the
world around us. It's also the base root
of most forms of intolerance: we consider a group of people as fundamentally
different from us, strange in a way that influences our perception of their
every aspect, often based on little or no information, or a handful of
anecdotal experiences. People in New
York consider people from the Midwest to be "less than" them, because
they know relatively few people who live
and work in the Midwest, and have little or no idea of what life out there is
like. People who grow up in racially or
culturally homogenous communities often emerge with dramatic misconceptions of
what different cultures or groups are like: if you only grow up around Amish
people, everyone who isn't Amish is going to seem terrifying, and you'll think
of them as fundamentally different from other Amish people. If we aren't familiar with people, we
"Other" them, and in doing so, remove a little bit of their humanity.
Sometimes, "Othering" isn't
necessarily negative, but it always involves building stereotypes and
generalizations: it might seem fair to say that "Mexicans are
hardworking" because every person you've met from Mexico (all five of
them) did their job with professionalism and aplomb, but the reality is that an
entire cultural group (who themselves contain hundreds of subgroups) can't be
so easily labeled or described: Mexicans are from Mexico. To ascribe descriptors to them in general
beyond that is to generate an "Othering" label, and implies the
generation of various judgments, positive or negative, that remove notions of
personhood from that cultural group or subgroup, and impose upon them instead a
notion of "The Other" that then dictates who or what they are.
These two aspects of our daily lives, our relative social or
physical agency and the manner in which we Other other people or are ourselves
Othered by other people, relate to the construction of prejudice, racism and
the systemic hierarchical systems that underlie these broader patterns of
thought or worldview. If a person is
never Othered, or never knows the experience of being Othered, than they might
not think much of making a systemic judgment about a given group of people, and
then they'll have created a cultural label about that group of people. Someone who grows up in an isolated cultural
setting, where they experience a widely accepted normative cultural default, is
more likely to perceive their worldview as correct without considering other
possibilities, and is very likely to consider other viewpoints strange or
aberrant. For example, a person from
Ireland might think of a person from Trinidad as quite strange, despite a number
of shared cultural and religious values.
Ireland exists in, at least in a global context, a state of relative
cultural homogeneity. Despite rising
trends of foreign investment, and a recent influx of immigrants (from Eastern
Europe in particular), centuries of poverty and a consistent diasporic movement
spanning the last half-millennia have made Ireland a relatively unpopular place
to move to. Someone from Trinidad, which
exists as a highly multicultural framework, might be less inclined to prejudge
someone from Ireland. Trinidad, after
all, is famed for changing hands frequently during the era of colonization, and
while doing so it attracted a mélange of various cultures, bringing British,
East Indian, West African, and Chinese people together on one tiny landmass (to
name just a few).
This isn't meant to serve as an indictment of Irish people,
or a stirring declaration that "we should all learn something from
Trinidadian people." It's simply an
attempt to explain, or give reason, to that most unreasonable of frameworks,
the notion of how we prejudge others based on physical or cultural markers
we're unaccustomed to, or unfamiliar with.
Both places have wonderful cultural heritages and histories that are
worth learning about, and there are plenty of great people from both islands as
well. There are also plenty of assholes,
and that's kind of the point: one's frame of reference seems to be what
encourages this habit of Othering. It
has fuckall to do with any fundamental aspect of a person's humanity, and
everything to do with their experiences.
It's also important to recognize that these opinions, in and
of themselves, about how "Other" people act, aren't necessarily
problematic. Some of them might be
offensive, or cast various groups of people in a dehumanizing light, and that's
unfortunate. No one wants to deal with
that, and no one should have to deal with that on a daily basis. But what shifts the act of Othering from one
of benign inexperience to one of hostile subjugation is the agency of the
Othering group relative to the group they've Othered. Since moving to predominantly African
American and West Indian areas in New York, I've had people scream "Get
the fuck out of my neighborhood, white boy" at me while I'm walking to the
grocery store, or scream or spit in my face while I'm on my way to get a
roti. That's annoying, but it's never
been threatening to my physical well being the way that, say, one of my
Bronx-native students being arrested in front of his children while asking a police
officer why a restaurant was being cleared out was threatening. My agency isn't significantly impacted by the
Othering of the people who see me as fundamentally less than them: my agency
allows me to escape it with relative ease.
I can keep walking down the street, or walk out of a restaurant to avoid
harassment. My student would have had to
exercise a heroic amount of agency to defy the forces that have been arrayed
against him. These frameworks emerge
from the same kind of Othering, but speak to how important it is to consider
agency when one considers how destructive Othering frameworks can be.
When people discuss "White Privilege," there's a
misapprehension that people are saying "you got something for being born
pale." That's not to say that no
one is saying that: there are people who do genuinely believe that, but these
people are outliers, mostly people who are engaging in a form of Othering,
usually in response to a relative lack of agency. What most people mean is quite different. What most people mean is that if you're pale,
you are, at least initially, not going to be Othered by the social authority
structure we exist inside of. Lil'
Dicky's song, "White Dude," actually does a great job of satirizing
the concept in one of its closing lines, wherein Dicky declares, with tongue
firmly in cheek, that "I get a fair shot at the life I deserve" as a
result of being born the way he was. If
you're male and pale, most people, at least in the cultural frameworks of North
America, will operate on the base assumption that you're not a gibbering
shitheel. When you do get Othered, it's
usually by people outside of an established framework of agency and cultural
normativity, and as a result the devastating impact of Otherhood is often lost
on most people who exist as a part of a normative cultural framework. Most people don't get a gun waved in their
face and then endure an hour of questioning by the police after trying to give
a woman a ride home. Most people don't
get shaken down for bribes at the side of the road, or threatened with rape
after blowing through a stop sign. To
people who have never been Othered, these experiences are alien. To anyone who's ever lived as the Other,
these losses of agency are all too real, and can often be life threatening. Many high profile examples of Othering have
emerged in recent months in the United States, prompting a much needed national
discourse that had been delayed for decades, not because these incidents
previously did not occur, but because they occurred in a space of relative
invisibility, and de facto cultural acceptance.
The underlying meaning of the cry "Black Lives matter" (to
which the only acceptable response is, of course, "fuck yes they do")
is to say that "Other lives matter."
It doesn't matter if a person looks like you or doesn't, they're still a
human being, and to dispossess them of that humanity, either through a personal
interaction or the reinforcement of a institutional framework, is an act of
aggression. It needs to stop, and while I
understand, however recalcitrantly, that addressing the personal layer of
acceptable Othering is going to take a while, the institutional layer of
acceptable Othering needs to stop yesterday.
So, why is this up here?
What the fuck does any of this have to do with video games?
Let me try to explain.
Whether or not you agree with the prevailing notion that
video games represent power fantasies at their most fundamental level (I
personally do not) there's no denying that a significant element of any video
game is the framing of agency within the structure of the game itself. Agency can take on a broader meaning in the
medium of video games than it does in other cultural and literary contexts
because it's referring not only to notions of visibility and representation,
but also to a set of interactions with the systemic textual framework of the
game's structures, and the freedom a player is given while navigating those
structures. We're given two layers of
agency in video games: the mechanical
layer of agency, wherein players are given the capacity to determine the course
of action they wish to take, and the familiar (at least in a critical context)
cultural layer of agency, wherein players are given the freedom to carve out
and establish their own identity within a given framework.
Many older games built themselves on universal frameworks of
agency, presenting their protagonists as disembodied avatars of power who
navigated spaces with absolute authority.
In early first person shooters, like Doom
and Wolfenstein, you exist as a
disembodied weapon (ostensibly attached to the body of a white dude, who
remains conveniently off-camera) who can overcome any obstacle thrown at
you. There's never a challenge you're
given in Doom that you can't overcome
with the tools at hand, and, as such, you're never left feeling powerless, or
overcome. You're never forced to
interact with the systems of the game via an apparatus beyond blunt force,
because blunt force is always enough to overcome a given challenge: your agency
in the game is absolute, and you are the ultimate source of authority, the
framing device that determines who lives, and who dies (spoiler alert: it's
everybody but you). You're also given
relative freedom to identify yourself however you like. While, in Wolfenstein
and Doom, there's a tiny man at
the bottom of your screen, he's relatively unimportant. Other Golden Age titles forgo any kind of
framing whatsoever, and put you in, say, the cockpit of an X-Wing, without so
much as a how-dee-do: you're still you, whoever you are, you just happen to be
shooting down TIE fighters.
Games started playing with mechanical agency early in the PC-gaming
era: Bungie's Pathways Into Darkness
came out in the same year as Doom,
and took a similar set of mechanics, but added a few of its own twists, like highly
limited resources and challenges that couldn't be overcome with violence: Bungie inserted enemies that couldn't be
killed easily or weren't worth the bullets that they'd take to bring down, introduced
opponents that required "puzzle solving" to be defeated, and even
introduced a few foes that outright could not be fought, that required that
players run from them in order to live. Wasteland let players decide what their
characters were named, what they were good at, and, thanks to the restrictions
of early graphics engines, allowed them to largely imagine what they looked
like. But, even so, these games utilize
relatively unrestricted notions of player agency: if players want to try and
solve a problem in a particular way, they're given the freedom to. While their capabilities are not absolute,
they've got a large amount of freedom in determining their own course of action.
The stories and frameworks of video games often carry with
them the implication of cultural normativity as implied by relative freedom of
action they permit. The presumption that
gamers would primarily be members of a dominant social group has been broadly
accepted for much of the history of video games, and as games began to evolve
as storytelling tools they begin assigning the markers of that dominant social
group to their protagonists. As games
grew into a medium capable of rendering their protagonists in a palatable,
sometimes even realistic, light, they issued an avalanche of generic white
dudes for "gamers" to identify with, and project authority
through. The agency implied by this cultural
ubiquity gave rise to a habitual empowerment of these protagonists, and games began
to get a reputation as a storytelling medium devoted to power fantasies that
elevated the relative agency of an already empowered social group: while games
won't necessarily gift you with special powers or material goods, they give
players the freedom to achieve amazing things, empowering their them, and
encouraging them to play more.
There's no single point where one could say that games
stopped explicitly representing power fantasies, but the notion of game
structures being about more than just realizing a power fantasy entered the
mainstream at some point, and never really left. Half-Life
was certainly a significant issuance on this front, with its deliberate
indictment of choice in video games, and Bioshock
did some great things to disabuse players of both their avid lust for more
power, and the notion that they actually controlled their own actions, but for
me one of the most significant turning points in the construction of agency in
video games was actually Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare.
In Modern Warfare
there's a scene where you, the player, as a faceless soldier who has been
bravely and ably fighting for most of the game, are suddenly exposed to a
nuclear blast and a helicopter crash.
The rules of the game, that you'll always be able to fight your way out,
that you'll always be able to win, are suspended, and you, as a player, are
forced to recognize that your agency in this world is not absolute. The characters that you inhabit can die. What's more, they are dying, and there's
nothing you can do about it, and you have to live through it with them. This moment of self-recognition is still
mounted inside of a fantasy of military-industrial empowerment, but it's still
an important moment, so important that Infinity Ward has dutifully re-created
it at least once in each of its following Call
of Duty titles, usually to considerably diminished effect.
Perhaps it is this relationship with existent power
structures that made players and critics so comfortable with this loss of
agency: players who were forced to die in Call
of Duty: Modern Warfare were given a taste of their own powerlessness, of
what it means to be powerless, without being forced to inhabit that space of
powerlessness for too long. Even so, it
seemed to give a high-sign to AAA game developers that it was acceptable to
tell stories about characters who weren't supermen, characters who didn't win
every fight. This trend, if it is even a
trend and not just a tide, a natural occurrence that games, as a medium, were
destined to eventually engage with, has since taken root, and of late we've
seen a wide variety of games where players have increasingly reduced agency and
have to contend with increasingly challenging or insurmountable threats.
This has coincided with games, as a medium, becoming more
friendly to women and people of color: as these previously
"invisible" groups, who were really always there, became more visible
in the games they played, and began to see their own struggles and lack of
social determination and agency reflected in the games they played, they began
to speak about games more confidently, more effectively, and to create their
own games intended to express their own personal journeys, and their own lack
of agency. Each time a game asks a
player to endure threats rather than overcome them, each time a game asks a
player to avoid danger, to outwit and flee an opponent instead of subjugating
that opponent, that game is asking a player to consider what it means to be a
figure in a given setting who has serious structural impositions on their agency,
on their capacity to act. They're being
asked to look at the world through the eyes of a person who can't expect to be
given a fair shot, a person who, has to be stronger, smarter, or luckier than
the rest of the people around them just to make it through the day.
Over the last half-decade we've encountered games about
being a young woman who is powerless to change the tidal forces pulling her
loved ones apart from one another, a game about being a biracial child who is
forced to live through the end of the world and survive on her own after losing
surrogate family after surrogate family, a game about having depression and
needing to make hard choices to have more options down the line, and a game
about being a blind girl. It is perhaps
unsurprising that this trend seems to make certain people uncomfortable: a
medium that appeared to be about actualizing power fantasies has been
transforming into a medium about experiential art, about learning what it means
to inhabit other people's bodies, to relate to other people's experiences. To people for whom these experiences remain
Other, the implication can be troubling: these are situations where the
relative social and physical agency that someone might be accustomed to have
been removed. These are situations where
the restrictions placed on people we identify as Other are brought to the
attention of a general audience, beyond the spectrum that might normally engage
with them. Efforts like this present a
revolutionary framework that doesn't simply illustrate the struggle of being a
particular kind of person who is, in their daily life, received as "less
than" by other people: it asks those who might see that person as Other to
inhabit a social space that they have, perhaps unwittingly, had a hand in
creating.
The response has been heartbreaking. Instead of taking a moment to reflect on how
these new types of expression illustrate worldviews that are important to
engage with, people who feel indicted or undermined by these works of art have
lashed out at creators who are trying to eke out these new spaces, claiming
that the work at hand either doesn't fit into the nebulous category of games
(the "not a real game" camp) or that it makes them, as people, feel
bad about themselves by merit of calling attention to the frameworks they
benefit from. Zoe Quinn is perhaps the
best example of this: a young woman who, in attempting to make a game about the
very personal subject matter of living with depression, drew the ire of an ex
who felt undermined by her achievement, and used his relative ubiquity to call
attention to what he saw as an injustice: a game that wasn't a game. The actual underlying injustice, that a woman
should have to prove herself in a more dramatic or demonstrative manner than a
man in order to certify her artistic integrity,
that a woman cannot exist in whatever cultural space she chooses without
risk of attack or reprisal, remains in the subtext of most of the dialogue (if
dialogue it can be called) surrounding the bullshit that Quinn had to deal
with, but even her proponents have trouble saying that the fundamental issue
here is that Quinn, and people like Quinn, remain Others in the eyes of what is
construed as a dominant cultural paradigm.
But here's the rub, and the really important thing to understand about
games as a medium: they're not the Other at all, and they never have been.
I was flipping through a backlog of Leigh Alexander's work a
while back, and found an op-ed (well, more accurately, a screed) on Gamasutra
wherein she talked about the "death of the gamer label." Her intention was obviously to incite some
sort of response from a group that had internalized its own privilege, where
privilege means "right to be included," but in doing so she created a
cultural definition of "gamer" built on every negative, dissociative
framework that anyone who's ever earned the name nerd or dork or spaz has had
to navigate, a framework that the medium of games seems to be arcing towards
disabusing. It was a gesture intended to
push people away, and that's a shame, because the core of what Alexander was
saying was actually wholly true: that the idea of "gamer culture" is
over. But in saying so, she invented a
notion of gamer culture that never existed, only passingly recognizing that her
consideration of it emerges from marketing exercises and trade shows, the
spaces enthusiast press inhabit that prevent them from seeing the world beyond
those veils. Because while the in-situ
press might be a white boys club, and the people who have the capital and time
to attend marketing events might, likewise, be part of a dominant and
culturally privileged group, the people who engage with a medium are not, nor
have they ever been.
Likewise, the creators of a given medium are not the people
who surround or comment on that medium: a decade and a half of life sputtering
in and out of academic corridors that cycle around the creation and discussion
of art have taught me that, while there will never, ever be any shortage of
pale men who want to talk about original art, much of that art they are drawn
to comes from people who, in generations past, would be considered Others, who
are often still considered Others by the apparatus that comments upon them, but
who are excised from the discussion of their own art through the very system of
agency and Otherhood their art bridges the gap of. Even as these brave men and women create and
present their own vulnerabilities to the world, they're systemically isolated
from these spaces or relegated to minor roles with them, even as they're
celebrated by that same apparatus that oppresses them. It's not that these people didn't exist
before, or that their audience, a group of like-minded people who have
experienced similar things, or people who consider the experiences of these
groups to be important, indeed vital, to forming any kind of real understanding
of what it means to be a person, wasn't around, or engaging with work. It's that that audience wasn't visible, that
it didn't present itself in a way that allowed for easy access. You'd have to go looking for it, in basement
parties or in chat rooms late at night.
You have to endure interminable or outright bad art before you find
great work. You have to give up some of
your agency, some of your capacity for commentary, in order to have these new
experiences and enable someone else's experience.
And if you've spent most of your life in a framework of
relative agency, that can seem like an appalling idea. Inhabiting a space of powerlessness in order
to give someone else a chance to speak, or worse understand their perspective
more fully, is scary. It calls attention
to all the ways we benefit from systems we might despise, in ways we might not
recognize. That moment of
self-recognition is terrible, like when a shitty person loves a great band, but
it's important to engage with, because it represents a crucial potential
learning moment. What's more, these
moments represent a growing trend in video games as an art form, one arcing
away from blithe issuances of empowerment and towards quiet, human stories and
interactions, stories that ask us to question our privilege and our ability to
act, stories that ask us to inhabit spaces of relative powerlessness, spaces of
vulnerability, where we have to struggle to emerge from depression, where we
have to hide from the things that threaten us, or use guile or luck to evade
stronger, faster foes. When one
recognizes the harm that comes from making another person into an Other, when
one recognizes the harm of prejudice, however minute, to all parties involved, there
are only two ways you can go: you can rage at the voice calling you out, deny
your involvement, tacit or otherwise, in a systemic problem that we've been
struggling with for almost as long as we've been walking upright, or you can
sacrifice a portion of your agency by refusing to sustain dominance over
another person, and instead opt to let them speak, to listen to them as if they
were not an Other, but part of the dominant paradigm, observing their work as
if it was anyone else's, with the same relative importance and inherent merit
that we associate with any genuine creative gesture.
This new medium of video games, this experiential medium
still in its infancy, permits us to engage in the latter process with increased
efficacy, but it's far from perfect.
This framework, this series of tubes through which you're reading this
piece, permits us to see more and more people not as Others, but as members of
an emerging global community, but we also all too often use it to eke out a
space where we can find people who share our convention of Othering other
people as the community we once saw as dominant fades around us. I'll close by bringing up the example of New
York, wherein cultural enclaves form and do their best to push
"unlike" people out, through a combination of systemic and personal
acts of aggression, whether it's a group of Hasidic men mugging and beating a gay
black man for walking through "their" neighborhood, or a group of
real estate developers aggressively attempting to push families out of a
neighborhood they built into a community generations ago. You can look around New York City and see
these microcosms play out every day, and they are, for the most part,
heartbreaking. But those terrors don't
devalue the beauty of people coming together and seeing one another as
people. For every act of aggression,
there's a street fair with bouncy castles and booths set up to let you learn
about the cultures and traditions of your neighbors . There's the woman who recognizes you, not as
the only white dude who comes to her bagel shop on the regular, but as the guy
that always gets a bacon, egg, and cheese with pepperjack on an everything
bagel, a considerably more meaningful marker than the color of one's skin.
