Digital Storytelling across the Americas: Adoption, Adaptation, and Counternarratives in Video Games

Mills, Regina; Mills, Regina

"Digital Storytelling across the Americas" asks the questions: How do people use digital media tools to tell stories, create counter-narratives, or further entrench hegemony? How do these digital storytellers create or dispute a hemispheric American identity? The abstracts we chose focus on video game narratives by and about Latinx, Latin American, and Indigenous voices. In particular, they look to how games create counter-narratives, comment on power, and can be adapted and adopted beyond what the gamemakers imagined. The papers provide not only commentary on U.S. Latinxs, but also Latin American and Indigenous voices, and thus create a hemispheric conversation.

First, we begin with Regina Marie Mills's "Games and the Latinx Child: Agency in Papo & Yo, Life Is Strange 2, and El Hijo: A Wild West Tale." Mills depends on the scholarship of Mary Pat Brady (Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child) as well as Marah Gubar's conception of the "kinship model" of agency from within children's literature studies which refuses to see agency as a zero-sum game that adults always have and children never have. Mills argues that the gameplay mechanics of these three video games that center Latinx and Latin American children do not emphasize the powerlessness of children but rather the spaces available for agency. While they refuse the child protagonist (and thus, player), violence as a mechanic, their use of stealth, puzzle platforming, and choice-based mechanics enable other forms of agency.

Next, Carlos Kelly Gonzalez looks to the popular adaptation of The Last of Us Part 1 (HBO Max, 2023). His presentation, “Rasquache Holmes: A Transmedial Rereading of Joel Miller as Latinx in The Last of Us Part I” aims to insert Latinx ways of seeing, specifically through the Chicanx term rasquachismo. Depending on the work of Mark Dery, Marc Pizarro, and Laura Gutiérrez, he argues that rasquachismo–an underdog attitude, a way of cobbling together resources to create meaning or something new—is one way of understanding how Joel navigates the world around him. The casting of actors Pedro Pascal and Gabriel Luna (as Joel and Tommy respectively) carves space for Latinx audiences to insert our lived experiences and culture via a rasquache attitude that seeks to co-create/insert Latinidad into the TV show and game, producing new readings of the The Last of Us franchise.

Third, Daniel Chávez Landeros presents "Cruel and Unusual Punishment, the Challenges of Playing Indigenous Violence as Self-Defense." One of the standing challenges for designers and players representing Indigenous characters and peoples is to escape what he calls "the conceptual trap of subaltern violence." On the one hand, a beat’em-up game like ColorBlind’s Aztez seems to perpetuate the preconceived notion that Aztec culture was essentially violent-based and blood-driven. On the other hand, the inclusion of the Mexica and Maya empires among the options in Microsoft’s Age of Empires seems little more than an occidentalized reduction of thousands of years of Pre-Hispanic history. However, contemporary historical perspectives (Clendinnen 2003, 2014; Montell 2021; Restall 2004; Salmerón 2021) and game studies approaches (Mukherjee 2018; Penix-Tadsen 2016, 2019) can help players and critics conceptualize the ludic representation of Indigenous violence as a call to revisit, and understand, the right of Indigenous peoples to territorial self-determination and cultural self-defense.

Lastly, Nicole Pizarro's "Modding for Sims Liberation: How Modders Add Representation to Life Simulators" focuses on how players of color modify (mod) the popular life simulator for their own representational purposes. She focuses on The Sims 4 (2014), which received backlash for its lack of representation. It wasn’t until December 2020 (the same year that the Black Lives Matter movement re-gained popularity) that the company updated its base game to include 100 editable skin tones as opposed to its original 18 shades, which included the colors green and blue as skin tone options. Engaging with Carlos Kelly Gonzalez's work, Pizarro asks, What happens, when a sandbox game that is supposed to allow for players to literally recreate themselves as characters doesn’t account for intersectional identities? Pizarro analyzes the impact that modders of color have had in adding representation to The Sims long before 2020. She argues that gamers of minoritized groups represent themselves but that their modding labor is inherently problematic, as it allows The Sims’ game developers to skirt the responsibility of simulating real-world intersectional identities, thus putting the burden of representation on people of color to represent themselves, for free.

The session will operate as a traditional panel, with each panelist presenting for 12-15 minutes, leaving substantial time for Q&A.

556 Digital Storytelling across the Americas: Adoption, Adaptation, and Counternarratives in Video Games: Calls for Papers