“Cracks in the Code”: Developing Abolitionist Practices in Video Gaming Communities

• In Event: Critical Game Literacies for the Abolition of White Supremacy and Hetero-Patriarchy

Abstract

Objectives

Arundhati Roy (2020) argues that portals are “a gateway between one world and the next.” Within the context of social rebellion and global pandemic, new portals have revealed social possibilities, facilitating the development of emancipatory and abolitionist practices, such as freedom dreaming, developing and amplifying new social values, and building new relationships within society. Contemporaneously, video gaming spaces have played an important role in mediating such collaborative imaginings of new possible futures (Author, 2022, 2023). This paper highlights how a video gaming streaming community, the player and audience, coded in new social algorithms and relationships into the fabric of a popular game, Grand Theft Auto V. In particular, I explore how players created new practices that challenged transphobic and homophobic practices emerging in the context of roleplay, opening up new ways for playing the game.

Theoretical Perspectives

Transformative agency (Edwards, 2017, Sannino, Engeström, & Lemos, 2016) explicitly foregrounds the learning processes that emerge as people learn how to break away from oppressive practices and imagine new futures, collectively, it highlights the process of designing for abolitionist and emancipatory learning ecologies. Here, transforming ecologies, as Benjamin (2019) offers, are “never simply about bringing harmful systems to an end but also about envisioning new ones” (p. 162). To operationalize transformative agency, I draw on the historical actor (Author, 2019) framework to examine the expansive learning processes that participants engage in during game play: (a) jointly defining a double bind, (b) identifying possibilities in the social order, (c) experimenting with new tools and practices, and (d) expanding the purpose of a given activity.

Methods and Data Sources

I use 50 hours of video records of streaming activity on Twitch. Participants included a Queer, Latinx, gamer, and streamer named Tee and their online gaming community. The practices highlighted are from Tee’s engagement on Grand Theft Auto V, where they engage in roleplay. Using FiveM, a multiplayer modification to GTA V, Tee and their community of gamers develop characters and complex storylines as they play with each other. The data sources were triangulated using two main processes: (1) analysis of collaborative activity between Tee and their community in a gaming ecology, and (2) the generation of open-ended and focused thematic codings (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Dyson & Genishi, 2005) of observational field notes, writing, and interviews.

Findings and Significance

Over the course of game play, Tee and their community routinely experienced homophobia and transphobia in their roleplay on a specific server. Over time, Tee and their community formed a queer witch coven, using the tools of supernatural roleplay to challenge the cis-heteropatriarchy, transforming the rules of game play without compromising the broader principles of roleplay (e.g., referencing real life, breaking character, etc). This paper highlights how these practices illuminate the process of historical action and transformative agency, with implications for how educators might leverage abolitionist and emancipatory practices that young people engage across everyday learning environments. In particular, the paper traces how these practices transform form individual initiatives to collective action.

Author

• Arturo Cortez, University of California - Davis