Week 5 Post

While Squire acknowledges a “fetishization and marginalization” of black culture in America, I do not buy into his justification of Grand Theft Auto as an “empowering” game that facilitates an “understanding” of life for blacks in LA in the ’90s (2006, p. 21). In fact, I think its representation of the black experience perpetuates negative stereotypes including but not limited to the one proposed by Williams et al. (2009, p. 830) of the black man as a gangster. As such, I believe “agency” to construct the narrative fiction in a game is not necessarily productive when the context provided—in this case, life for blacks in the streets of LA—is not fictitious but rather, is a reality that they as Scottish developers and most of us as players outside of this context do not understand. How might we scaffold learning experiences in video games in a productive way that allows for both fun and learning?