GTA: AFRICA

***CONTAINS SENSITIVE MATERIAL***

This video is a critique of the implications of race in video games.

The game I played was Grand Theft Auto (GTA): San Andreas. Though it is based on a free-world/roaming concept, gamers have to complete mandatory objectives in order to advance in the game's story line. In engaging these pre-programmed missions, gamers inevitably have to interact with problematic representations of race, class, and gender. Robbing houses, holding up fast-food restaurants, tagging-up turf, and stealing from the government are just some of the objectives, CJ, the San Andreas' main character has to complete. The side missions are not any less fraught either. Some of CJs options were playing basketball, working out, or being a valet parker. These (side)missions are problematically raced and classed insofar as they affirm the idea of a deviant, anti-establishment, poor black male, whose day-today activities are limited to leisure, low paying jobs, or crime.

David Leonard explores the racial content of games as it relates to pleasure, privilege, and power. He maintains that racialized (and classed) representations in video games are powerful instruments of hegemony, which allow insight into dominant ideologies of race, gender, and nationalism, while simultaneously eliciting ideological consent. As such, race in video games "affirms the status quo, giving consent to racial inequality and the unequal distribution of resources and privileges" (2). Anna Everett builds upon this idea by further arguing that race-centric games act as pedagogical instruments for game players, youth gamers in particular, that oftentimes propagate problematic lessons about race in American culture.

My project is in conversation with San Andreas, Leonard, and Everett. While these texts focus primarily on hegemonic ideologies of race, class, and culture in a U.S. context, I explore how dominant racial discourses may operate within a more global context. Working within orientalist narratives of a mythicized inferior, uncivilized, anti-modern, and savage Africa, my project is a critical-parody of San Andreas, which aims to highlight the problematic ways in which San Andreas game-world and game-play is constructed.

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• Orientalism
• blacknesss
• race
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