The meaning of a game: Stereotypes, video game commentary and color-blind racism

Abstract

Scholars have begun to explore how conversations occurring in entertainment publics often extend into discussions on broader social issues. Media sociologists have described entertainment publics that engage in such discussions as aesthetic public spheres. This article is among the first to adopt this framework to study video game commentary. To do so, I examine the debate over Resident Evil 5’s (RE5) racially problematic imagery on the popular Internet discussion forum NeoGAF. Forum posters participating in this debate present multiple understandings of racism and video games’ social significance. Posters also construct two competing narratives about what they describe as America’s problematic racial hypersensitivity and racism’s enduring presence. My analysis indicates that video game publics are clearly capable of functioning as an aesthetic public sphere, but such discussions predominantly rely on prevailing racial discourses in civil society. Posters primarily incorporate principles from color-blind racism to reject the idea that RE5’s imagery is troubling and to characterize the game’s critics as racists themselves. In doing so, these posters ignore contemporary forms of inequality and marginalize those looking to discuss these issues. Consequently, my findings highlight how the particular discourses adopted by aesthetic public spheres promote society’s existing power dynamics.