The Race Card. Tara Fickle

      Introduction

      Ludo-Orientalism and the Gamification of Race

      In the summer of 2016, Pokémon GO, an augmented reality (AR) mobile game based on the beloved 1990s Japanese franchise, took the United States by storm. Initially praised for promoting exercise and fostering new friendships, the game’s novel lamination of virtual and real spaces soon exposed more insidious forms of social mapping. Minority players described being the target of suspicious glances while playing in predominantly white neighborhoods; suburban children were cautioned against straying into “bad” neighborhoods; an Asian American grandfather, the game’s first casualty, was shot for alleged trespassing while playing near a Virginia country club. Many popular and social media commentators saw these incidents as evidence of the de facto segregation that still defines how race and space are delimited in the United States. They rued the fact that real-life inequality shattered the ludic illusion: that racism had spoiled the game by making it too real. For despite its cast of adorable, cartoonish “pocket monsters,” Pokémon GO counterintuitively provided a disturbingly realistic approximation of the racial and economic schisms of everyday life. “Let’s just go ahead and add Pokémon GO to the extremely long list of things white people can do without fear of being killed, while Black people have to realistically be wary,” game designer Omari Akil concluded in his much-cited article “Pokémon GO Is a Death Sentence If You Are a Black Man.”1

      But was this unwanted intrusion of reality simply an unfortunate contamination, an inadvertent “glitch” of the game? Didn’t Pokémon GO, by making distant travel a necessity for capturing Pokémon, in some sense actually force players into such boundary-crossing enterprises? Did it not, by making requisite such discomfort as might otherwise be avoided or at least anticipated in daily life, actively reify the abstract fact of inequality with an unpleasantly vivid material reality? Akil’s observation that the very premise of the game “asks me to put my life in danger if I choose to play it as it is intended and with enthusiasm” suggests that Pokémon GO was not simply a reflection of existing white privilege, but an active participant in augmenting the “reality” of racial difference—that is, our sense of race as a socially meaningful sign of human difference—by extending it into the realm of play. If, as Friedrich Schiller famously remarked, “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays,” then in Pokémon GO nonwhite players encountered a “real-life” Pikachu and the fact of their own incomplete, “virtual” humanity in the very same moment.2 For, like the Pokémon themselves, who only appeared on the game map when the player was within sufficiently close range, the social meaning of race “activated,” was put into play, only once players traversed spatial borders and became aware of being “out of place,” made to feel at once threatened and threatening.

      If even a cute, seemingly “colorblind” game like Pokémon GO could be said to play a role in the way race acquires its meaning in everyday American life, grasping the implications of that kinship requires a radical revision of our current assumptions about games as innocent and fantastic escapes from the demands and toil of “real life.” This book topples that myth by demonstrating how games have actively shaped Americans’ thinking about race, progress, and inequality for over a century. To play a game, this book emphasizes, is not to free oneself from but rather to voluntarily subject oneself to arbitrary constraints. Although the nascent field of game studies has begun to attend more closely to the interpenetration of games and “real-world” political and economic relations, scholars have largely continued to challenge the notion of gameplay as racially free by focusing on the level of visual representation, such as the caricatures and stereotypes reproduced in video games like Grand Theft Auto or the number of skin shades available for avatars. Yet the overt “signs” of race that have historically constituted the horizons of our study of social politics in video games are epiphenomenal, on-screen symptoms of far more entrenched racial fictions encoded within. In a non-anthropocentric game like Pokémon GO, there are virtually no visible signs of race—at least, not in the limited way we have come to think of that term through corporeal qualities like skin color, hair, body type, accent, and so forth, and especially from within a black-white binary. The Race Card extends our purview of games and play beyond that artificial binary, and below the surface, by examining the infrastructure of gaming as itself a raced project. In this respect, it builds on more syncretic “second wave” discussions of gaming representation that have emerged to resist the tendency to view representation as “pure content” separable from game mechanics, thereby loosening the grip of equally artificial binaries of aesthetics versus mechanics, image versus code, story versus game.3

      The