BLACKS as VIDEO GAMErS
There is a common misconception that minority gamers are not in fact true gamers. Interestingly, a 2011 Nielsen survey found that Black gamers actually spent the most time of any demographic playing console video games. This mythical assumption is also evident in the limited amount of academic scholarship devoted to the topic (there is hardly any). So what are the actual experiences of Black gamers? The quote below from Rampage Jackson accurately summarizes the Black Experience in video games: I’ve been a video game freak all my life. I play X-Box 360’s Need for Speed: Carbon (2006), Gears of War (2006) and Dead or Alive 4 (2006). They need Tekken to come out on the 360. I got ideas for a racecar game and a motorcycle game. I got so many ideas, I guarantee you, people will love my ideas for games. I played Halo (2002). But when they came up with Halo 2 (2004), it was more like for the online thing. I stopped ’cause my own team would kill me because they’d hear my voice and start calling me “nigger.” “Nigger this, nigger that!” If you was right next to me at the arcade, you wouldn’t say nothing. I don’t ever tell them who I am, but I just forgive them for being ignorant. Much of the information that is available on the experiences of minority gamers stems from the online communities that minority gamers have created. A defining discussion that influenced the direction of my work stemmed from a blog posted by A.B. Frasier, co-founder of the Koalition, a video game website catering to urban and hip-hop communities. He elaborates on the myth specifically relating to Blacks playing within gaming communities: …when you have the video game media not show so much color then of course something like “black people don’t play video games” gets spat out from a idiots mouth. The major media doesn’t have any personalities that shows gaming from an urban perspective, therefore we don’t exist in many people’s eyes…You can call me a nigger, porch monkey or whatever, but I’m still a gamer. Frasier highlights two important issues: 1) the video gaming industry has all but ignored minority gamers in character, video game content, and advertising; and 2) the default gamer has yet to welcome minority gamers often lashing out in inflammatory ways within the virtual gaming space. As I contend, this behavior should be viewed through a lens of linguistic profiling. Similar to racial profiling, linguistic profiling is based upon auditory cues that may include racial identification, but which can also be used to identify other linguistic subgroups within a given speech community. Scholars have long studied linguistic stereotypes finding discrimination based on accents and dialects against speakers of various ethnic backgrounds. What is seen in the American context is that voice discrimination and linguistic profiling is used as an effective means to filter out individuals who may be deemed inferior, leading one to not engage in meaning relationships with this type of other.
Linguistic discrimination is more subtle and difficult to detect, especially in physical spaces. The anonymous spaces of the internet compel users to disclose personal information about themselves knowing that the party on the other end will never find out their true identity. For example, if I were engaged in a conversation with someone and disclosed my occupation, the people on the other end have no true way of confirming this information. Additionally, I could create a false identity altogether with no way