The Game Looks Back Into You: Rhetorics of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Authoring the Virtual Self

Lee Sherlock · Tanner Higgin · Phill Alexander

Thu., June 11, 11:00–12:30, Class of ’24 (4th floor, East Central)

Have you ever created a character to play with in an online gaming space like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes? If you have, what kinds of choices did you make in designing that character? Why? Were you frustrated by any of the constraints placed upon you?

This symposium will address these questions and more, considering how rhetorics of race, gender, and sexuality get constructed in online gaming environments, especially MMOs. The session will place a particular focus on the logics deployed by character creation systems and how players have responded to the rhetorics and norms of those systems. Audience members in the symposium will have an opportunity for hands-on character creation. They will not only design new characters, but also debrief in a discussion of the rhetorical implications of character design, including their own recently created virtual personages.

Given the rhetorical focus of the discussion, attention will be paid to how character creation tools are politicized technologies that discursively construct and/or disrupt common sense notions of race, gender, and sex identity. Consequently, the discussion will include an analytic for breaking down the cultural politics of character creation and hypothesized strategies for progressive intervention.

The analytical tools emerging from this symposium will also be placed in dialogue with pedagogical applications and frameworks to offer some productive strategies for a range of teaching contexts, such as how character creation systems can be used as a platform to engage students in critical race studies. The discussion will also consider the ways in which character creation can be used as a space for digital/visual composition as students play with and read into their own rhetorical practices and sets of literacies. This latter implication draws from work in New Literacy Studies and more directed notions of cultural literacies such Jonathan Alexander's “sexual literacy,” which have just begun to be considered in the context of digital gaming.