Playable Bodies

This roundtable opens part 2 of the collection, “Playable Bodies,” by following the first section of theoretical framing with a focus on queered experiences of bodies in video games, game making, and the processes of manufacture. The roundtable features the game makers Naomi Clark (creator of Consentacle), Sisi Jiang (creator of LIONKILLER), Domini Gee (creator of Camera Anima), and Toby Do (creator of Grass Mud Horse), who discuss racial representation in games from the perspective of the North American industry, noting how pernicious racist stereotypes of Asians as “below-the-line” rather than “creative” workers get exacerbated by racist presumptions of Asian American designers’ perpetual foreignness and their connection to a monolithic Asian “mothership.” The discussion thus considers how bodies appear in games and games discourses as geopolitical entities for which the expectation is translation and return.

Chapter 4 considers the Metal Gear Solid series (Konami, 1998–2015), which follows several covert agents as they infiltrate terrorist bases and active war zones. It analyzes the player character Solid Snake as half-Japanese and half-white, locating Snake’s biraciality in the context of Japanese racial formations. The chapter argues that Snake’s racialization premediates the games’ antiwar and antinuclear message in ways that absent Japan itself from the series’ overall critique of global militarism. In so doing, it develops the concept of “playable deniability” to describe the formal processes that allow play to appear free from the historical politics around militaristic violence in Japan. In the end, this research speaks to the ways that specific representations of biraciality preserve the primacy of play—the political inconsequentiality of action—via a racial logic that mediates play.