Chapter 1 - Video Games as Ideological Projects

Abstract

This chapter examines video games as ideological projects deploying hegemonic notions of race and gender. Video games as socially organized phenomena are implicated in both the production of social meanings and the power relations expressed by and sustaining those meanings (Ewick & Silbey, 1995). From this standpoint, video games have the ability to articulate and reproduce existing ideologies and hegemonic notions of power and inequality. Race and gender, as hierarchical structures, have manifested in video games. Specifically, by employing Omi and Winant’s conception of racial project, we can see how many popular video games fit within this theoretical schema where “racialized ideas, bodies, and structures are constructed, mediated, and presented through a safe medium” (Leonard, 2003, p. 3). Additionally, hypersexualized depictions of women are reflective of the male gaze of the female body. As Mulvey suggests, this production of the male gaze situates the female body as the bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning (as cited in Kennedy, 2002). Similarly, Collins (1998) argues, the racialized female body is practically silenced when she is written into the narrative by hegemonic structures and remains powerless to speak for herself.