A Little Personal Reflection on Gamer/SF Culture

We didn't talk much about the Lisa Nakamara today but it resinated with me more than I initially thought that it would. 

When I think back to my childhood, a lot of it involved playing video games and along with that, my family is heavily invested in science fiction films. I spent a lot of time playing the Sims with my parents along with other PlayStation and Xbox games, watching Star Wars and Star Trek and even movies like The Thing or The Matrix at what now seems like a pretty young age. I also hate to make this sound like one of those "I'm not like the other girls" things but, really, I was more invested in playing legos and reading books about animals and presidents than I ever was in playing dolls (though now I spend a lot of time shopping online as procrastination). Even now, as a philosophy major I'm surrounded by men and participating in discourse which is traditionally a more "masculine" discipline, if one wants to call it that--at the very least there are many more female english and art history majors than there are female philosophy majors (and don't even get me started on the low number of WOC philosophy majors...I also think I know one other Black female philosophy major and she graduated last year). As far as the humanities go, philosophy is one dominated by (cis white) men. 

The interesting twist, I think, to add to this story is that my parents are two Black women--though growing up I never really noticed that there was anything particularly weird or different about it....this is a whole other can of worms for my therapist to get into. The point is that for me, video games and science fiction etc. were a huge part of my formative years and, upon reflection, inform a lot of the things I'm interested in today--particularly with art, new media and philosophy. But, they never were--I guess they couldn't be--associated with white cis male-ness. For me, these things are at the core of the experience of growing up in a household of only WOC--and queer WOC at that. 

I guess this is more of a reflection than a critical post at this point but the connection for myself between my growing up on video games and science and philosophy, and through these interests internally identifying as a "nerd" or "geek" etc--is also rooted in the Wendy Chun discussion of sorcery. I think these are related. We can think of the image of the Wizard coder, the "oppressed" but self-absorbed cis white male gamer, and the kind of philosopher that some philosophy majors (and maybe some academics more broadly) embody (I think the philosopher comes to mind especially if we think of all of this in relation to Nietzsche and the will to power). 

I also find the Chun and Nakamara interesting and just the general maleness of the gaming and science fiction world interesting because the idea of imagining new futures and moving beyond the realm of the possible, positing utopian projects, is something that I associate with revolutionary projects for people who are actually, let's say, oppressed. Think of Afrofuturism, for example, which I know almost nothing about but theres a way in which the video gamer and science fiction offer ways of thinking outside of our oppression and current realities. 

Though, I do not discount the inherently colonialist plots of science fiction films/novels or game narratives that much of these texts engage in.... 

Not very critical but some food for thought that I couldn't quite articulate in class.