That is the proposition that can only be supported with evidence internal to the piece. If Deus Ex is context-less on this point, as you and I seem to agree, than I’m not sure from where you draw the conclusion that the game is asserting that character to be a true/realistic representation of a black woman.

Racism in the sense it is being discussed, is a argument. One can not unintentionally advance an argument. One can unintentionally demonstrate the fact of it by action or performance, i.e. attest to the existence of racism. But how can we attribute a proposition like racism to an element of a text which lacks any internal context within which it can be located or interpreted as racist?

The position that individual elements of a text can stand for themselves, independent of their use or relation to other elements as well as the entirety of the creative work, is simply that, a position, and a tenuous one at that.

If each text, each aesthetic expression, has its own internal grammar, syntax, etc. it seems unfair to evaluate parts of that text on terms external to it. To do so can have interesting results, but none of which can be convincingly attributed to the original authors, or the work itself.

Some things are so vile that it does not need framing or further investigation. Hence why displays of police brutality and the protest of the 60s are usually shown as is. The police officer who pepper sprayed the college students didn’t need a lead in or further framing because the act spoke for itself on news stations. But in Deus Ex: Human Revolution the game actively removes any context that might have justified some stance for the character either in favor or against what the portrayal meant. The developers stand by their work and consequently the poorly devised info dump of a character and what she means, because the work give no detailed context for the imagery she represents. You say that without any context or synthesis she is not a measure of unintended racism, but no, its because there is no context that she is then presented as something that just is. This is a presentation that this is what a black woman is. The element has to stand upon its own merits and the merits aren’t good. Are the developers racist? No, just lazy.

Additionally, while we may not live in the world of Huck Finn we do understand it via its context. Were the characters and situations transplanted 120 years into the future and Jim didn’t heave Huck into the middle of the river at the first mention of his nickname it would be a racist work. The context of the work as a period pieces assuages that viewpoint by being a product and statement of its time. Deus Ex does not have that luxury. It takes place in the future and is a product of 2011. Its not that people outside of certain American context would recognize its racist history, but that the reason its racist in the first place is because its insulting. It is just made worse by the historical institutionalism of the ideas that portrayal represents.

And finally:

“Michael’s most insightful point: that the game provides to little (if at all) context on race to make racism a viable interpretive outcome. It’s a failure of vision, which may follow from ignorance or stupidity, but not unintentional racism. ”

That’s the definition of unintentional racism.

keep up the good work…

Though I’m not sure your fully addressed the issue of depiction vs. endorsement.

” ‘Before anything, we must admit that to simply depict something is not to endorse it.’

BULLSHIT. Yes it does or they wouldn’t have made it or changed their names in the credits to Alan Smithy thereby disavowing the work. A creator, by making something and releasing it to the world is standing by their work. All parts of it. Mark Twain stood by Huckleberry Finn, Bioware stands by Mass Effect and Edios Montreal stands by Deus Ex: human Revolution.”

Endorsing the entire text or aesthetic work is not quite the same thing as endorsing a particular view or depiction within the work. Obviously, Mark Twain endorses Huck Finn as a finished work, but not necessarily every viewpoint espoused by every character within it, though certainly he could endorse a specific interpretation of a character’s racist view/words as part of a larger dramatic framework or for larger social commentary purposes.

If anything, Deus Ex rails in this respect not from intended, or even unintended racism, but from disjointed and in-cohesive characterization; the irreconcilability of her character with its purpose as an NPC and the larger narrative/world its operating in.

To your larger point on context, well, it’s a tricky thing to nail down. Certainly, anyone in modern America encountering this part will be aware of its connotation, even if someone from another culture or another time period would not. In that respect, the game does not supply its own context for interpreting this part, either positively or negatively. And in that way, again, the game is incongruous but not unintentionally racist, for the very fact that it does not provide a background internal to itself from which players can construct a stable framework for interpreting it one way or the other.

One can read Huck Finn and not need to be from that time period in America to understand the stakes, viewpoints, and violence at play. That’s not the case with Deus Ex. No one playing that game outside of the modern American context would understand enough from the game alone to see it as advancing either a racist or non-racist viewpoint. Which is Michael’s most insightful point: that the game provides to little (if at all) context on race to make racism a viable interpretive outcome. It’s a failure of vision, which may follow from ignorance or stupidity, but not unintentional racism.

That said, you still raise some interesting and formidable challenges which I certainly appreciate. This is an issue that interests me a lot (in general) and my own view is still developing. Thanks again for the great read!

For you, the connecting point is the core, for me it’s one of the things a core can be. Whereas you find the connecting point in Lynch’s work I see the search for one (depending on the film) as potentially limiting. I think the Limbo would suffer if there was something in it that might explain it all (the damsel in distress trope goes too far as it is).

I’m quite aware that plot, narrative and story are different things but I wouldn’t call their definitions distinct. It doesn’t take long to find someone whose definition of them overlaps or contradicts someone else’s and what you see as me using them interchangeably is, I expect, a slight divergence in how you and I use them.

I could talk about Koyaanisqatsi but I feel this conversation has perhaps run its course. Before I sign off though I want to mention that I agree almost entirely with what you’ve written about Another World which is why I’ve had so little to say about it. It’s definitely a classic that should be played and, as you’ve said, it’s a game that shows that the new ground a lot of people think we’re breaking has already been broken and not even that recently.

And this brings me to something that really bugged me about your comment. Narrative, plot and story are not the same things. These words get used interchangeably, but they are very distinct concepts with different definitions. The plot is what is going on, the narrative is how what is going on is told to us, and the story is what it is all about. In Limbo we know what is going on and it is structured in a way that we do have a narrative direction. But what is it all about, I haven’t the a clue. Yes, the developers put a lot of time and effort into creating complicated individual elements and making sure they evoked a mood that came across, but not once in those pieces did they explain how they folded it into the larger work. The spider sequences are just that, the spider sequences. The story of their creation is divorced from the rest of the work. The central part has some interesting ideas on its own with water and the mind slugs as the beginning had the spider and the children, but they lack the same punch. And the final section has nothing to it at all. An entire third of the game has no imagery, mood setting or otherwise disturbing thematic elements to even attempt to connect to the rest of the work. The PS3 bonus level had more mood and atmospheric building than the entire second half of the game.

The first two-hour section could work on its own as a work unto itself, but that’s not what we have. The rest of the game fails to continue what the first part set up and it is set up because the game continues on for bigger and grander designs. Lynch’s work always brings his imagery around again like a big circle so that his work is consistent and images relevant to the whole piece. Koyaanisqatsi – a much better example of what you are talking about – piece by piece, image by image builds upon the last even though it eventually leaves the originals behind to work to some greater meaning. The images do not stand alone, but in conjunction with each other. Limbo does not.

I’m going to insist that Limbo was built around atmosphere. For sure, puzzles are the mechanics of the game but as Arnt Jensen (PlayDead’s founder and Game Director) said, “Limbo started with a mood setting…it was just this secret place. I tried my whole life to get ideas, but when I drew this first drawing–it was just like this is the place.” (http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/1120477)

There was an article posted at Edge (coincidentally the day after you posted this response) that looks at the spider sequence: (http://www.next-gen.biz/features/designing-limbos-spider)

“Jensen couldn’t pinpoint the moment Limbo’s spider appeared in his sketchbook any more than he could date-stamp the onset of his arachnophobia…“I really hate spiders. And I still do, so it was very natural to confront one in the game, and kill it”…The basic outline of how Limbo’s boy would interact with the spider crystallised in Jensen’s mind before PlayDead’s founding.”

It is revealed in the article that the puzzle part of the spider sequence (defeating it with traps) came later in the development after staff reacted with amusement to an animation of the boy being maimed by one and it describes the difficulty PlayDead faced in implementing the entire sequence. Development apparently rolled on for a year before staff meetings yielded anything more productive than observations of how challenging it was going to be, an extra programmer would eventually be hired to deal with the 2-minute cocoon sequence and in response to staff suggesting it be dropped altogether Jensen was adamant that it wasn’t going anywhere observing “a lot of times if you have an idea that’s too complicated, you just ditch it. But this was so important. I kept insisting, we have to do the spider”.

This doesn’t strike me as something that’s been “tacked on”. It’s clearly something that has been conceptualised before puzzles, before Limbo, before PlayDead and implemented with the passion to instill a sense of unease and communicate to the audience Jensen’s fear of spiders (note that there’s no mention of what it means to the story). But even the boy and the spider themselves were preceded by the creation of the “secret place” that they inhabit, this “mood setting”.

I feel that the importance of this point applies to the following:

“The story is what the work is about. It’s what the very center; the core of a work is where everything takes its direction.”

I disagree. What is at the center of a work is entirely interchangeable. The story is merely one element of a work which the creator can prioritise higher or lower than other elements. This is the case with Lynch who most certainly does not submit to narrative and whose work is driven by image and mood with meaning taking the passenger seat; still present just not at the wheel. If you found a key that unlocked the interrelated meaning of all the elements of Mulholland Drive then more power to you but any meaning you found was on the periphery of the visceral and textured atmosphere.

We seem to be in agreement that dramatising the subconscious and avoiding narrative can result in some pretty crazy output but you suggest that Limbo does not earn the consideration of being a product of this because it “doesn’t go far enough” and because it does in fact revel in narrative. I would argue that if Limbo does not go far enough then this does not necessarily make it incompatible with that methodology but rather an example of it done badly, failing as a result of the creators lack of imagination.

I’d also argue that Limbo draws atmospheric strength from the unexplained shifts in setting that you describe as hurting the game. The incongruous environments melting away into one another with “nary a word or pictorial why” demonstrates the marginalisation of narrative coherence in favour of mood; I felt like I was the protagonist in someone else’s nightmare. I should also point out that repeating motifs and themes don’t necessarily constitute a narrative.

In this response you’ve repeated that Limbo doesn’t have a connecting point. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with that but in my initial response to you I was questioning (regardless of whether it does or not) whether a game lacking a connecting point lacks a core by extension.

I guess my question to you would be the following: do you feel that a game can lack a connecting point but still have a core? That is, if a game lacks a key “which unlocks the meaning of everything else” then can it be anything more than a hollow shell? If the answer is no then may I also ask from where you derive this intrinsic value that you place on a connecting point?

I just wanted to say that I was aware of your recent racing game coverage but, as I said, I’m so behind right now that I haven’t been able to engage with it as I would have liked to, so that is why I have been silent. I’m getting there, though, and it should go without saying that if you ever want to hit me up for anything regarding the genre then by all means go for it as I’m always happy to discuss it with others. In the two pieces I have read of yours thus far, I already have two replies to make so you must be doing something right…