Blackless fantasy : The disappearance of race in massively multiplayer online role-playing games

Games and Culture

Volumn 4, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 3-26

  Higgin, Tanner ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Avatar; Blackness; Character creation; Cybertype; Discourse; MMORPG; Race; Virtual world; Whiteness

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949483324     PISSN: 15554120     EISSN: 15554139     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1555412008325477     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Adams, E. (2003, August 27). Not just rappers and athletes: Minorities in video games. Retrieved August 27, 2003, from Gama Sutra Web site: http://vvww.designersnotebook.com/Column5/055-Not-Just-Rappcrs/body-055-not- just-rappers.htm
2. Austin, J. L. (1962). How- to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
3. Brown, J. S., & Thomas, D. (2007). The play of imagination: Beyond the literary mind. Games and Culture, 2, 149-172
4. Brown, J. S., & Thomas, D. (2006, April). You play World of Warcraft? You're hired! Wired Magazine, p. 120
5. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of "sex". New York: Routledge
6. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge
7. Castranova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games. Chicago: University of Chicago
8. Cheng, A. A. (2005). Passing, natural selection, and love's failure: Ethics of survival from Chang-rae Lee to Jacques Lacan. American Literary History, 17, 553-574
9. Collins, P. H. (1998). Fighting words: Black women and the search for justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
10. Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3-7
11. Eng, D. L. (2001). Racial castration: Managing masculinity in Asian America. Durham, NC: Duke University
12. Fullerton, T. (2007, November 27). Beyond the hegemony of play. Lecture given as part of the Mellon Workshop on Affect, Technics, and Ethics at the University of California, Riverside
13. Galloway, A. R. (2007). Starcraft, or, balance. Grey Room, 28, 86-107
14. Guins, R. (2006). May I invade your space? Black technocultural production, ephemera, and video game culture. In A. Wallace & A. Everett (Eds.), Afrogeeks: Beyond the digital divide (pp. 113-138). Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB Center for Black Studies
15. Hall, S. (1996). New ethnicities. In D. Morley & K-H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 441-449). New York: Routledge
16. Hansen, M. B. N. (2004). Digitizing the racializcd body or the politics of universal address. Substance #104, 33, 107-133
17. Kang, J. (2003). Cyber race. In R. C. Lee & S. C. Wong (Eds.), AsianAmerica.net: Ethnicity, nationalism, and cyberspace (pp. 37-68). New York: Routledge
18. Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. (2000). Introduction. In B. E. Kolko, L. Nakamura, & G. B. Rodman (Eds.), Race in cyberspace (pp. 1-13). New York: Routledge
19. Lastowka, G. (2006, May 16). Cultural borrowing in WoW. Retrieved June 13, 2006, from Terra Nova Web site: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra-nova/2006/ 05/cultural-borrow.html
20. Leonard, D. J. (2003, November). "Live in your world, play in ours": Race, video games, and consuming the other. Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, 3, 1-9
21. Leonard, D. J. (2004). High tech blackface-Race, sports video games and becoming the other. Intelligent Agent, 4, 1-5. Retrieved September 9, 2006, from http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/IA4-4gamingleonard.pdf
22. Leonard, D. J. (2006a). Not a hater, just keepin' it real: The importance of race and gender based game studies. Games and Culture, 1, 83-88
23. Leonard, D. J. (2006b). Virtual gangstas, coming to a suburban house near you: Demonization, commodification, and policing blackness. In N. Garrelts (Ed.), The meaning and culture of Grand Theft Auto: Critical essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland
24. Lhamon, W. T. Jr. (2004). Optic black: Naturalizing the refusal to fit. In H. J. Elam, & K. Jackson (Eds.), Black cultural traffic (pp. 111-140). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
25. Mullen, H. (1994). Optic white: Blackness and the production of whiteness. Diacritics, 24, 71-89
26. Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge
27. Raphael, C. (2001). The Web. Culture works: The political economy of culture (pp. 197-224). In R. Maxwell (Ed.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
28. Steinkuehler, C. (2005). The new third place: Massively multiplayer online gaming in American youth culture. Tidskrift Journal of Research in Teacher Education, 3, 17-32
29. Talk: Leeroy Jenkins. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2006 from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lceroy-Jenkins
30. Taylor, M. C. (1997). Hiding. Chicago: University of Chicago
31. Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster
32. Wark, M. (2007). Gainer theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
33. Wiegman, R. (1995). American anatomies: Theorizing race and gender. Durham, NC: Duke University
34. EverQuest. (1999). Verant Interactive: Sony Online Entertainment
35. EverQuest II. (2004). Sony Online Entertainment
36. Grand Theft Auto III. (2001). DMA Design: Rockstar Games
37. World of Warcraft. (2004). Blizzard