Media and cultural studies Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside in the English Department. I research race, gender, and power in videogame cultures. My dissertation, Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture, develops a theoretical framework for understanding race in videogames. Supervisors: Lisa Nakamura, James Tobias, Toby Miller, and Keith Harris
The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, 2015
Organized as a rough chronology, this entry covers the topics of racism, sexism, and homophobia w... more Organized as a rough chronology, this entry covers the topics of racism, sexism, and homophobia within online games, starting with multi-user dungeons (MUDs) in the 1990s and moving through to the contemporaneous indie games movement with a predominant Western focus. This issue is framed as a political and discursive struggle between the dominant culture and the diversification of a medium designed, in many ways, as a bastion of normative White masculine heteronormativity in the face of eroding and indeterminate identity at the interface. Key topics include experimentation with and freedom from identity, stereotypes and intentional design, griefing (abusive game behavior) and trolling as discursive policing, and progressive game design. Keywords: abuse; digital culture; gender; griefing; hate speech; race; sexuality; trolling
In the introduction to Tactical Media, Rita Raley addresses what she believes to be a credible an... more In the introduction to Tactical Media, Rita Raley addresses what she believes to be a credible and “strong ” objection to tactical media from media theorists Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter. Since tactical media, according to Raley, “signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible ” (2009: 6) and “absolute victory is neither a desirable nor a truly attainable object ” (2009: 10) Lovink and Rossiter (2005) argue that what tactical media accomplishes is to “point out the problem and then run away ” and this temporary disruption consequently assists the aim of capital and capitalists who “[thank] the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement”. Raley’s response to Lovink and Rossiter is that our focus should not be on “whether tactical media works or not ” but on how the media projects impact social relations a...
This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of bla... more This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hypermasculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations prolifera...
Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of videogam... more Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the popular message board 4chan. These raid...
This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of bla... more This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, ren-dering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations prolife...
UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Sep 2012
Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of
videog... more Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of
videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in
game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay
resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced
racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that
focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or
beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first
three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through
displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put
theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the
popular message board 4chan. These raids serve as a compelling but flawed model for future
viprogressive performative interventions in gamespace. The conclusion considers how to
progressively transform videogame design by placing African American expressive traditions,
indie games, ethics, philosophy, and the interaction design of Erik Loyer in conversation. It's
within this nexus that the project ends, gesturing toward a future paradigm of interaction and
aesthetics within videogames that handles difference productively, and does not rely solely on
strategies of visual inclusion.
Have you ever created a character to play with in an online gaming space like World of Warcraft o... more 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.
The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, 2015
Organized as a rough chronology, this entry covers the topics of racism, sexism, and homophobia w... more Organized as a rough chronology, this entry covers the topics of racism, sexism, and homophobia within online games, starting with multi-user dungeons (MUDs) in the 1990s and moving through to the contemporaneous indie games movement with a predominant Western focus. This issue is framed as a political and discursive struggle between the dominant culture and the diversification of a medium designed, in many ways, as a bastion of normative White masculine heteronormativity in the face of eroding and indeterminate identity at the interface. Key topics include experimentation with and freedom from identity, stereotypes and intentional design, griefing (abusive game behavior) and trolling as discursive policing, and progressive game design. Keywords: abuse; digital culture; gender; griefing; hate speech; race; sexuality; trolling
In the introduction to Tactical Media, Rita Raley addresses what she believes to be a credible an... more In the introduction to Tactical Media, Rita Raley addresses what she believes to be a credible and “strong ” objection to tactical media from media theorists Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter. Since tactical media, according to Raley, “signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible ” (2009: 6) and “absolute victory is neither a desirable nor a truly attainable object ” (2009: 10) Lovink and Rossiter (2005) argue that what tactical media accomplishes is to “point out the problem and then run away ” and this temporary disruption consequently assists the aim of capital and capitalists who “[thank] the tactical media outfit or nerd-modder for the home improvement”. Raley’s response to Lovink and Rossiter is that our focus should not be on “whether tactical media works or not ” but on how the media projects impact social relations a...
This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of bla... more This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, rendering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hypermasculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations prolifera...
Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of videogam... more Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the popular message board 4chan. These raid...
This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of bla... more This article focuses on questioning and theorizing the visual and discursive disappearance of blackness from virtual fantasy worlds. Using EverQuest, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft as illustrative of a timeline of character creation design trends, this article argues that the disappearance of blackness is a gradual erasure facilitated by multicultural design strategies and regressive racial logics. Contemporary fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) privilege whiteness and contextualize it as the default selection, ren-dering any alterations in coloration or racial selection exotic stylistic deviations. Given the Eurocentrism inherent in the fantasy genre and embraced by MMORPGs, in conjunction with commonsense conceptions of Blacks as hyper-masculine and ghettoized in the gamer imaginary, players and designers do not see blackness as appropriate for the discourse of heroic fantasy. As a result, reductive racial stereotypes and representations prolife...
UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Sep 2012
Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of
videog... more Gamic Race: Logics of Difference in Videogame Culture makes race central to the study of
videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in
game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay
resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced
racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that
focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or
beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first
three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through
displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put
theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the
popular message board 4chan. These raids serve as a compelling but flawed model for future
viprogressive performative interventions in gamespace. The conclusion considers how to
progressively transform videogame design by placing African American expressive traditions,
indie games, ethics, philosophy, and the interaction design of Erik Loyer in conversation. It's
within this nexus that the project ends, gesturing toward a future paradigm of interaction and
aesthetics within videogames that handles difference productively, and does not rely solely on
strategies of visual inclusion.
Have you ever created a character to play with in an online gaming space like World of Warcraft o... more 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.
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Papers by Tanner Higgin
videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in
game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay
resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced
racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that
focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or
beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first
three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through
displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put
theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the
popular message board 4chan. These raids serve as a compelling but flawed model for future
viprogressive performative interventions in gamespace. The conclusion considers how to
progressively transform videogame design by placing African American expressive traditions,
indie games, ethics, philosophy, and the interaction design of Erik Loyer in conversation. It's
within this nexus that the project ends, gesturing toward a future paradigm of interaction and
aesthetics within videogames that handles difference productively, and does not rely solely on
strategies of visual inclusion.
Talks by Tanner Higgin
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.
videogames and videogame cultures. The project emphasizes the need for critical race theory in
game studies to understand how race is informed and reshaped by the logics of gameplay
resulting in the multi-layered, politically complex, and agile concept of gamic race. Displaced
racialization, the project's other key concept, revises former studies of race in digital media that
focus predominantly on representation, shifting interest to racialization occurring alongside or
beyond bodies within game code and player experience. Moving along this trajectory, the first
three chapters of Gamic Race explore different layers of gamic race and its formulation through
displaced racialization: spatial, technologic, and discursive. The final chapter attempts to put
theory into practice via an analysis of racially inflammatory raids of virtual worlds by users of the
popular message board 4chan. These raids serve as a compelling but flawed model for future
viprogressive performative interventions in gamespace. The conclusion considers how to
progressively transform videogame design by placing African American expressive traditions,
indie games, ethics, philosophy, and the interaction design of Erik Loyer in conversation. It's
within this nexus that the project ends, gesturing toward a future paradigm of interaction and
aesthetics within videogames that handles difference productively, and does not rely solely on
strategies of visual inclusion.
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.