Sometime in the early nineties – at about the time I was moving from Tone Loc and Public Enemy to Soundgarden – I went through a brief phase in which I would rush home from school to play the PC game Wing Commander II. Although now I wish I had stayed at school and tried to make out with girls, WC2 then seemed like the awesomest thing ever because it was one of the first games to prioritize narrative, particularly as one’s actions in the game affected which part of the story one saw next. Sure, replaying the game now it seems almost ludicrously cheesy – your anthropomorphic lion enemies uttering lines that that would make George Lucas cringe – but at the time it was incredibly compelling because it seemed as if I was part of the story, that it was me and my actions that were driving the plot forward.
But when playing such a game, who exactly is the “I” being referred to? After all, in Wing Commander II, my character was a white guy with brown hair – probably the inverse of what I’ll look like in thirty years (pic). So when my fourteen year-old self said “I just beat that guy” or “I just won the game”, was “I” a white guy or a brown guy? Obviously, my (white) character’s identity was decided for me; but without (brown) me, he would have done nothing. And it was precisely this weirdness of me/not-me that was going through my head as I recently played through Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a game created by UK team Naughty Dog. The title, which is rooted in Indiana Jones-style pulp adventure, features protagonist Nathan Drake who, Naughty Dog have claimed, is supposed to be a sort of everyman. While it certainly isn’t a criticism, the fact that Drake is white is significant, not least because most of the people he shoots at are not white. One imagines that when he is not adventuring, Nathan Drake is into irony, Mos Def and threatening to move to Canada. But more generally, as I, a ‘brown guy’, played the game, when “I” jumped off a ledge, ran through a forest or shot at a dark-skinned guy, who exactly was this “I”?
I admit, this may seem ludicrous – what possible difference does all this make? Well, one answer is that player-character identification is one of the primary mechanisms of meaning or relevance in gaming. Similar to how film and literature often work ‘to mean’ by creating empathy with the protagonist, as video game narratives become more sophisticated, the mutually dependent space between the player and the character becomes more central to reading games as cultural artefacts rather than mere distractions. And, using race as one way to think through this relationship, it bears asking a slightly different question: what race am I when “I” am both myself and Nathan Drake.
It begins to broach the absurd, but when playing Uncharted, I ‘felt’ neither white nor brown, neither Drake nor myself. Perhaps just as importantly, when not playing the game the division was obviously clear, but when immersed in the title, it was not. In the playing, “I” was a composite of separate but connected things: my own identity, a representation on a screen, and the actions performed by both ‘me’ and my ‘character’, a sort of me/not-me. And rather than becoming the reader-writer of a book – the interactive reader who through interpretation creates, as much as receives, meaning – I was something else. A reader produces meaning using the same tools as the writer – language, images, symbols etc. The meaning I made came from what I did, from the performance and enactment of the of the story in microscopically unique ways. The story did not change or become unique but my playing and experience of the story did. When I first moved in this direction, then moved this way and performed this action, all of this changed my experience of what “I” did, even though the constraints of narrative in the game were fixed. The difference here is subtle, but important: a filmic or literary story is about recreating things or ‘objects’; playing a game is about reproducing identities or ’subjects’. In movies, characters are still objects, little collections of signs and symbols to be understood and perhaps related to. In games, characters are identities waiting to be performed.
And performing identities is never straightforward: if I wore a dress and ‘acted girly’, doing that in my hairy, somewhat manly body would still produce something not quite boy nor girl, straight nor gay; I’d be ‘trans’ in a very interesting way. And so, upsetting millions of teenage misogynists and homophobes everywhere, it seems fair to say that when we play games we are, in fact, transvestites of a sort, occupying other identities in a way that both submits to and plays with the categories of identity at work. And so it seems it’s time to pull out one of those infuriating answers – in this case, to the question “Am I brown or white when I play a game?”: well, yes, both of those and none, exactly those things and of course, something else entirely.
But I don’t think this is just academic wordfuckery. There’s something neat here to hold on to – the production of identities in playing games is perhaps the first chance to do something new and relevant precisely because it ‘isn’t real’. In real life, as much as I might like to try it out, I can’t walk down the street and pretend to be white. In gaming however, I can temporarily and provisionally occupy a space that is not myself in a manner fundamentally different from empathising with someone. Because of the weird temporal aspect of it – that the I/not-I only exists while one is both literally and figuratively ‘playing’ – it is, I will argue, more experiential than intellectual. Put another way, you get what it feels like rather than having to think about it. And I think there’s the beginning of an interesting way to look at gaming – as performances of particular identities that combine the player and character. Rather than an attempt to simulate somebody else’s vision or story, playing a game is an odd, dynamic experience in which you both submit to becoming somebody else and also insist on making that somebody else ‘you’. This approach, I believe, has ramifications to how we read and interpret games. Those, however, will have to wait for another time. If you have any thoughts or see where I’ve gone wrong, him the comments and let me know.
