Langer “The Familiar and the Foreign”

While Langer is specifically discussing World of Warcraft and race relations within it, her concepts can easily be applied to most games where there is a protagonist fighting against some kind of domineering force. In her article, Langer discusses how characters and hierarchies in video games can be and are metaphorical representations of different real-life races and social classes and how including these in games can have real life repercussions.

Langer quotes and comments on Nakamura’s observations on being able to choose your own race when creating an avatar, saying that, “‘Identities that do not appear on the menu are essentially foreclosed on and erased,’” and that “These ‘menu driven identities’ therefore act not only as erasures of the possibilities outside of them, but also as reinscriptions of the particular identity types,” (Langer 102). Art forms such as film and video games are often able to operate under the guise of diversity and representation by merely including several different races on the screen. However, in video games, you cannot have total free reign over the world and options cannot be unlimited for the game to remain some semblance of control over the player. In limiting racial options and the physical characteristic choices within those racial confines, the game itself is making a statement on how it perceives these races whether the developers like it or not. They have to sit down and make conscious decisions about what is included in the game, therefore their choices must be critically interpreted.

Langer’s argument, overall, is that race relations in video games are generally relatively toxic. Many players use virtual worlds to play out fantasies and claim that including racial hierarchies is just contributing to the realism of their fantasy, but Langer criticizes this by saying that this desire is merely a fantasy of the player himself. Video games do give us the option of exploring different possibilities, but when it comes to race, options are generally very limited and often rooted in stereotypes.