Race and Identity in Digital Media

We would like to believe that in this modern world of ours that we have all but gotten rid of racism in our society but what we are really seeing is a shift in where racism is located, not in the public but in the new digital world. This is quite ironic too because the internet was heralded as a "global village", a place in which all of the world could communicate with out the notion of race, gender or ethnicity to separate or divide people. The Internet was to be a utopia for all people. Sadly though this did not end up being the case.

For many people the first issue encountered is the options made available to their avatars. For gamers their avatars are really important and help to define who they are in the game world. Many games say that they allow players to be who ever they want to be but they often do not allow the tools to make some avatars similar to minorities by not offering specific features such as skin colors that match their own. Others find harassment in the gender they choose."Yee found that many female players adopt male avatars to avoid sexual harassment. With so many female players “passing” as males online to avoid the anti-female gaming culture that Yee describes, maleness become the default identity."(pg.3) With statistics like this it is no wonder why females are not as prevalent in the gaming world. Female avatars are constantly harassed and even in games like Halo online if you are playing against a girl online you will see her be constantly verbally harassed.

   
We can also see people being judged in the online world by what nationality they are. In the case of Chinese gold farmers we see that the industry of playing these MMO's like WOW in order to sell virtual goods to american consumers has caused quite a bias against Chinese players. The process of gold farming has become racialized. ", because gold farmers often played female dwarves, “they have become the most despised class of character throughout the game…girl dwarves are now reviled by many players, systematically harassed, and unable to find anyone that will allow them to hunt in their groups…it seems as if a whole new form of virtual racism has emerged, with an in-game character class unreflectively substituted for unacknowledged (and largely unexamined) real-world differences between China and America.”"(pg 8). It really ruins the player experience for some people by having this happen to certain races in the games they play. It takes away their ability to choose a race to represent themselves just because of negative racial stereotypes that have now occurred in the digital world.

At the end of the day we can see that while public racism might have gone down in this country it is just being moved to the digital world where it can go unchallenged because you are rarely held accountable for your actions and speech, even if its hate speech.

My question is how can we help to prevent these occurrences from happening in video games? Is it possible for the internet to still be a 'Utopia' or will it be stuck in the racist rut that it is in forever?