RACE AND GENDER IN

VIRTUAL WORLD
KIT311 week 12

Race and Racism

What is race?

What is racism?

Defining and Contextualizing Racism

Racism is:

the systematic subordination of members of targeted

racial groups who have relatively little social power by
members of the agent racial group who have relatively
more social power (Wijeyesinghe, Griffin & Love, 1997).

 Is there racism in Australia?

https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/race-cyberspace

The internet
Radical democracy
Utopian equality in online community
Is virtual communities our best hope ever of achieving a

truly non-racist society?

Color-blindness
In Cyberspace, nobody knows your race unless you tell

them. Do you tell?

Whiteness (in) 2.0: Racial Privilege in

Cyberspace
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG3gAPHOxM0
(6.15)

5 Types of online racism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT-G0FlOo7g
1. Visual profiling of users
2. Voice profiling of users
3. Racism against avatars
4. Identity tourism: Racism using avatars
5. Anti-immigrant racism in virtual worlds: How a pink-

haired dwarf can become a despised race

Are games racist?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brnpRhjJl8w

KPK, Inc.: Race, Nation, and Emergent

Culture in Online Games
to understand how race and ethnicity are marked by

geography, language, and specific cultural practices

within virtual worlds and multiplayer game spaces,
and how those markers might provide insight into the way
race functions in cyberspace as well as in the cultural
imagination of those who inhabit these worlds.

KPK Group
U.S. players began a campaign against Korean playersboth

inside the game-space and outside on Web sites and forums.

They used tropes of national borders and boundaries, and
framed Korean players as illegal immigrants and invaders.
the identification of Korean player behaviors as savage or

barbaric, attempts to distinguish proper and improper

domains for the discussion of race, explicit disavowals of
racism.

Players began joining games with Korean players with the sole

intention of disrupting gameplay and literally chasing them off

of the servers. Some players adopted racist or anti-Korean
names.

Korean Player Killers Incorporated,

blamed Koreans for server instability, excessively long

wait times to join games, international video piracy,

creating a sense of excessive paranoia, and filling chat
rooms with nonsense and numbers. Korean players,
they argued, sought to disrupt their enjoyment of the
game.
As they describe the problem: It is also all too common

for a normal, peaceful, public chatroom to be instantly

filled with meaningless dribble by Koreans who desire
only to piss off the Western realm users.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBz211c
ryhU

KPK Group
For KPK members, the term they use to reference

themselves is Fed or Agent. Those terms themselves

suggest a notion of authority grounded in the state making
them Federal Agents, working on behalf of a broader
imagined national interest, policing the borders of
cyberspace and nation spacesa legitimating discourse
in their imaginations. Furthermore, it is a chance for youth
to play at positions of adult authority.

Labels used
FoK (Forces of Kimchi). Kimchi is a special Korean food. This is used to

refer to one or many Koreans (as in: that FoK or the FoK came after
me again!).
WOA (Way Out of Area). This term should be obvious. These are the

Koreans who clog up the Battle.net realms outside of the Asia net.
CEA (Cabbage Eaters Anonymous). Similar in usage to FoK.
I-Plz. This term refers to one single Korean player. It is short for Item

plz!!!!!! which is something any B.net player is all too familiar with
seeing. It seems the only English that they have learned is Item Plz!!!
Gogo. Another singular term for a Korean player. Again, anybody who

has played on Battle.net must be familiar with this, as they write it

everywhere possible for totally
inexplicable reasons. (KPK Web site)

 being Korean violates the design principle. As

a result, what is to be banned is not any particular act, but

rather the performance of an

identity.
The question at stake is one of manifest destiny: not only
who owns the space, but who
owns the rights to the space. KPK, Inc., embodies a kind
of American exceptionalism that
its members use to justify their extremism.

Race, Place, and Disavowal

KPK, Inc., members are clearly aware that their words, actions,

and rhetoric will be read as racist. Accordingly, they go to great

lengths to explain what racism is and why their discourse
should not be read as racist. Central to their discussion is the
formulation of racism as an all-or-nothing proposition.
Racism, they contend, has a certain absolutist quality, which

must be both open and 100% derogatory. Such

conditionality provides a space for disavowal through
possessive investment. Racism is no longer defined either by
the content of the discourse or the effect that such language or
actions may have on others.
Instead, racism is defined, or rather negated and erased, by

uses of counterexamples.

NOTICE statement
As was stated on the NOTICE page, this site is not racist, nor do we

condone open racism. Your personal views are your own, of course,
and nobody can stop you from feeling or thinking whatever way that
you do. However, on this site, we do not and will not condone the use
of openly racial slurs which are popularly recognized as being 100%
derogatory. Please refrain from the use of words such as: Gook, DogEater, Frog-Head, and Slant-Eyes. They imply much more than
annoying B.net behavior and also indicate a distaste for all Asians,
not just Koreans.
Lets not miss the point here, we are only concerned with Diablo II on

Battle.net, not world issues or race. Also, please remember that it is

within KPK Inc. policy to place a non-Korean on the Most Wanted List,
and really, this site is all about PKing the most annoying bastards on
B.net who try to spoil the fun for the rest of us. It just so happens to be
that 99% of them are Koreans, thus KPK.

Concluding marks
we should look to issues of power, privilege, and

investment as markers of race in cyberspace, and that

often these issues are manifested in strategies of denial
and disavowal, rather than explicit racism.
All too often, our temptation is to look for the physical
markers of race and ethnicity, markers that are easily
erased or submerged within the nonphysical space of
virtual worlds.
That does not mean that race, ethnicity, or racism have
disappeared, but rather that each has been transformed,
and in some cases radically altered, within the context of
the net.

Questions to ponder
Do you think that virtual environment promote or reduce

racism?

Dialogue
What do we do about racism?

Is it possible for a consensus-building dialog to exist with

our vast racial, ethnic, regional, and cultural differences,

when even the English we speak varies from community
to community?

Race and cyberspace

Can the digital platform provide a mutual space for such

dialog to occur?

More thoughts
In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies

of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where

we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural
diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us-white folks and
people of color-will have to shed the defensiveness that
surrounds the topic of race. Many are experimenting with
new ground rules and modes of communication that
enable us to explore the potential of digital technology to
bring together people who would historically have never
had contact and encourage them to compare notes, test
assumptions and overcome ignorance and stereotyping.

Why video game play is a male dominant

activity?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8ZVZRsy8N8
Is it the game plot? (2:50)

Ms man character
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYqYLfm1rWA

Is it marketing? (3:08)
What can be done? (5:00)

Gender stereotype in video games

females as sex objects or prizes,
females as victims, (damsel in distress)
Damsel in Distress: Tropes vs Women in Video Games
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q
females in feminine roles, females as heroes or action

characters.

Gender stereotype in video games

Compared to male characters, females were more likely

to be represented in a hypersexual way: being partially

nude, featured with an unrealistic body image and shown
wearing sexually revealing clothing and inappropriate
attire.
Similarly, Haninger and Thompson (2004) found that in

the sample of 81 teen-rated video games, women were

significantly more likely to be depicted partially nude than
men.
In addition, there were much more male playable
characters (72 out of the 81 games) than female playable
characters (42 out of the 81 games).

Gender and Racial Stereotypes

in Popular Video Games
Considering the content of the games, only 14 games

included an introductory sequence.

Therefore, only 34 human characters were identified and
coded.
Among them, 15 were leading characters, four were
opponents, and 15 were supporting characters. Most
(93.8%) of the leading characters were heroes, with one
as a gangster.
All of the leading characters were male.
Most of them were White; with an exception of four Black
leading characters from a basketball game.

Gender and Racial Stereotypes

in Popular Video Games
Most of the female characters (83.3%) appeared

unrealistically thin, and one third with partially revealing

attire.
On the contrary, no male character appeared with partially

revealing clothing, and most of them were of normal or

heavy size, masculine.

Gender and Racial Stereotypes

in Popular Video Games
In total, there were 26 human characters on the covers of

the 19 games;
22 (84.6%) were males, while only four (15.4%) were
females.
The only four female characters appearing on the game
covers were all unrealistically thin, and half of them
wearing partially revealing attire such as bathing suits.
In contrast, all male characters appeared with unrevealing
attire, and most of their bodies were in normal shape.

Gender and Racial Stereotypes

in Popular Video Games
Gender was portrayed in an unequal way.
Male characters, especially White male characters

predominate in video games. In particular, most of the

leading characters and heroes are White male.
There is almost no female or minority character in leading
role in popular video games. The only exception is the
Black leading characters in a sports game.

Female characters
Female characters are predominately supporting

characters, who are either to be rescued or assistants to

the leading male character.
Female characters are also never portrayed as opposing
characters, which in most of the cases are villains.
The portrayal of female characters is consistent with the
stereotypical mass media female characters.
The attire and body image of the female characters are
often very sexy, with revealing attire and unnatural body
(either very thin or very voluptuous).
Yet male characters are portrayed in normal or
masculinized way.

Minority characters
Minority characters are underrepresented in video games.
Consistent with previous studies (Lachlan et al., 2005),

our content analysis did not find racially stereotypical

portrayals.
There was no significant difference between the portrayal
of white and minority characters as villains, though the
leading hero characters are more likely to be white male.