Higher Level Gamer

The discourse of representation, stereotypes, and racism surrounding video games is fraught, and quite frankly not at all progressive. During “black history month,” I took notice to the number of my Facebook feeds that posted the obligatory Black History Month topics, memes, and other throwback media. While I felt a temporal nostalgia for many of the mostly prematurely dead celebrities, activists, and prolific writers, my prosthetic memorial experiences of others like MLK, W.E.B Du Bois, and Ossie Davis was shoddy. Prosthetic memory is an expression coined by Alison Landsberg that describes how people experience a memory (one in which they were spatiotemporally absent from) through commodified mass cultural media (i.e., film and TV). So in my case, this prosthetic memory through Facebook was an impalpable one because the truncated biographical sketches of the late-great individuals were subsumed by the Facebook poster’s social networking energy and wall activity. Rather than feeling a communal celebratory vibe, Facebook in February leaves me feeling like I am consumed by a void—a huge gap—not by time, but by connectedness. To be honest, I am often confronted with this as an African-American (AA) gamer and researcher. While my Facebook experience is unparalleled to my critical-gaming experiences, it scraped at the wounds of my disdain and disappointment of black representations in video games, and specifically, my impalpable prosthetic memorial experiences in games that predominantly represent AAs. These are the types of games that not only touch on black history, but are also instrumental in the (re)making of black history. For these reasons, I will turn to one of the most culturally significant games of African-American History—basketball, and specifically NBA 2K14. Continue reading →