Sam Srauy, "Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry: A Vicious Circuit" (Routledge, 2024)
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LinkedIn, your next great hire is here. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom DeSena, from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Sam Shroy, the author of Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry of Vicious Circuit.

In Vicious Circuit, Shroy offers a detailed and much-needed examination of how systemic racism in the U.S. shaped the culture, market logic, and production practices of video game developers from the 1970s until the 2010s.

Through an historical analysis of the video game industries, console, PC, and indie, from a critical political economic lens, this book specifically examines the history of how such practices created, enabled, and maintained racism through the imagined gamer. The book explores how the cultural and economic landscape of the United States developed from the 1970s through the 2000s,

and explains how racist attitudes are reflected and maintained in the practice of video games production. These practices constitute a vicious circuit that normalizes racism and the centrality of an imagined gamer. My guest today is Sam Shroy, an associate professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations at Oakland University. Yes, Sam and I have been colleagues for a number of years.

Her research examines race, video games, and the political economy of the video game industry. Troy's work appears in various academic journals, including Social Media and Society, First Mondays, Games and Culture, and Television and New Media. She teaches courses on identity, race, racism, digital media production, and video game studies and production.

Prior to academia, Shroy worked for over a decade in the high-tech industry. Her experience in that field includes municipal wireless networks, open-source technology, and streaming media systems.

Sam, welcome to the New Books Network. Hi, Tom. Thank you. I like to start my interviews by asking an author what brought them to their respective projects. And one of the things I really enjoyed about your book is the way that you drop small, very self-reflective moments throughout each of the chapters.

There is one that I find particularly poignant, and I'd like you to start there and read to start our talk from page 69, which opens the second chapter of the book. Sure. I love video games. During the 1990s, I spent far too many hours playing video games on my buddy's Super Nintendo Entertainment System, i.e. SNES, or my PC. While I always knew that I was the target audience for video games...

I didn't quite understand why I never felt that they were for me. It was a strange feeling to have at 13 or 14 years old. I saw Asian people in games like Ninja Gaiden, but they were hardly common. My friend David always seemed untroubled by any of this. On the other hand, David never seemed to see race at all, but I always felt like his, like Luigi to his Mario.

an afterthought in the games we played. It didn't bother me exactly, but it didn't make sense either.

Until one day, I had a conversation with his mom. She and I were talking about something innocuous. Paint, I believe. I said something to the effect of, you can mix all the colors together and you get black paint. For some reason, it occurred to me to say that it was just like the United States. If you mix everyone's color, quote unquote, together, we were all just basically black. She immediately countered, no, if we mix all the colors together, we'd be white.

The United States, as you know, was basically white.

The gamer identity presented in the previous chapter lies at the center of the video game industry. Moreover, the identity is the foundation of the vicious circuit. That is, the cultural space post the 1983 collapse crystallized in an imagined gamer. The gamer becomes seen as the safe and necessary audience to target because of the idea of fun. The gamer's tastes and beliefs are mined from the cultural context of the decade and

informing economic structures. And as we will see throughout the rest of the book, those economic structures, e.g. marketing and investment models, cause production practices to be formed, resulting in texts and belief that enforce ways people belong in video game communities. This is the flow of the vicious circuit. How

how power is circulated and maintained in what we now understand as the video game industry. This chapter focuses on the idea of community. In particular, the vicious circuit enables the normalization of who is not included in this community via the gamer identity. So we'll come back to the idea of community and we'll talk about this chapter in full. But for right now, I think this particular moment captures so much of what goes on in the book that

Let's unpack it a little bit. Would tell us what you mean by the vicious circuit. You know, it's fair. You know, I really meant it as a knockoff on that economic concept of the virtuous cycle.

Right. In the virtuous cycle, you do something good, it's successful and people build on it. And the idea is that economic activity on in, you know, on balance is good for everyone involved if, you know, profits are maintained and people are employed and so on and so forth.

But it is also a play on the term a vicious circuit or a vicious cycle where you start off with a bad idea. And no matter what you do, you try to, you know, it's almost like that sunk cost fallacy where you sort of get stuck into it. And because of the way you've done it before, it is that way that you keep doing it over and over again. And it becomes a norm and perpetuates itself.

So the idea of the vicious, vicious circuit was that it's a circuit in the sense of because it's digital electronics. So it might tend to be a little cute, but it was also a circuit in the sense of that economic process. Right. I wanted to invert that idea that that, you know, it's just, you know,

It's not fair to say this, but I'm going to say it anyways, that there is a common view that economics is supply and demand. I mean, economists don't actually say that, right? It's more like people in the press and, you know, the rest of us. But, you know, the reality is it's not just supply and demand, it's supply, demand and culture. And so the vicious circuit is a way of saying that.

What happens to supply and demand when you add this cultural element that is kind of problematic and it becomes a vicious cycle in this circuit? So hence the vicious circuit. But describe for us, like there's three moments in the circuit, right? So describe that for our audience a little bit, just to flesh it out. So we grab that page again.

So the first moment are the economic forces. So things like uncertainty.

Um, uncertainty structures all economic activity, right? Or at least the specter of uncertainty, right? The more certainty you have, the more a business or a firm can plan and so on and so forth. So expenses can be mitigated. You can sort of have a reasonable bet that you'll make money. Well, the second thing is like, how do these economic forces, how are they understood, right? Like

Why is it that somebody chooses to make an investment when the cost of borrowing is low? Right. I mean, right. Part of it is it's rational, but part of it is also like why these investments other than those investments are

those type of questions built onto the second moment in the circuit, which is industry practices, right? So like there is this really kind of cool concept that really, I don't think it gets enough play in the academic world called mimetic isomorphism. And I can't remember, I've said in the book, but I can't remember for the life of me who came up through who coined that phrase, but like the idea is that

if you have something successful,

you may push up the margins, but you'll largely do the same thing as other successful groups, right? So the idea is like Amazon's pet subscription and Chewy.com's pet food subscription is really no different than Pets.com when the cultural space for something like a Pets.com finally was okay. So right, Amazon adds it to this larger subscribe and save space

but it's relatively the same sort of idea. So that's the second moment, the industry practices. Well, then all industry practices are also informed by who people think they're selling to. In the idea of a gamer, there is this imagined person who plays video games, the creator,

Here's the safe bet for whom games are made, the guaranteed purchaser of games. And if you keep them happy, that solves the uncertainty problem a little bit, right? And you know how to solve that by going back to these old industry practices. So they all sort of like serve as this

recursive cycle or circuit rather that informs each other over and over. And if I understand your argument, and feel free to correct me, it's the figure of the gamer that in a lot of ways seems to drive a lot of the, at least the viciousness of the circuit. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, you know, in the research,

The gamer... The video game industry is this weird industry that started off, who games were made for, wasn't actually the gamer that you and I think of today. Originally, who played video games and who was targeted, video games were these casual things that were found in bars. They were really an evolution of those...

electromagnetic toys that we saw at boardwalks. So those were like family affairs or adults, you know, having on a Friday night, having a couple of brews with their friends. Yeah. So in a way, video games, and especially when video games, you can sort of see it as video games are toys made for adults to consume during other activities. And when that translated or transformed into like the home console market,

It was easy to make it like it's meant for everybody. But then you have that crazy crash that happens. And that's the sort of the shock that caused everyone to go, OK, we can't make something for everybody. Who are we making this for? And that's when the gamer emerged. OK, so there's a whole bunch of stuff. And I am going to apologize right from the beginning. Somehow or another, I'm just about the right age to have been, you know,

interested in video games, but somehow the phenomena passed over me. I've also never been on a skateboard, even though many of my friends were on skateboards and they had video game consoles. I don't know how I missed it, but

You are talking to someone who is very much a neophyte at this. There's a whole host of distinctions that you draw throughout this work, and even your description just a minute ago seems to involve a lot of this. Let's discuss some of the important distinctions that seem to be embedded in what you just said.

The term video game itself seems to sweep up a lot of different ideas and concepts, formats and platforms. How are we to understand the idea of a video game? Yeah. OK, so if you think about, you know, I make it I make reference to it, that video games is really like this really large broad concept thing.

Yeah, but what I wanted to do was not focused on the PlayStation or the Nintendo Switch or arcade machines, but rather this larger cultural imagination of video games.

And so when we talk about video games, the way it's treated in the book is this larger social imaginary of the video game experience. And because of that, it kind of hoovers up things like, you know, arcade machines and home consoles and even smartphone, you know, App Store purchases like Candy Crush, stuff like that. OK, but that's a lot of different stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

And a lot of different experiences. So, but the common thread does seem to be this gamer identity, right? And this emerged, again, this is another one of those things where there are a number of different eras in what we might call the proliferation of the video game concept, right?

In sort of a brief summary, give us an idea of what these different eras were. Yeah, so... You describe this very well in the book, and that's why I wanted to sort of flesh it out for our audience. Sure, thank you. Yeah, so, like, I think it goes to the idea of the gamer as well and why video games as a concept...

is both, you know, really, you know, on one hand, we shouldn't talk about it. So grant, you know, so big, and so grandiose, and so monolithic, because it isn't. But on the other hand, that common thread, right? So the way the book describes what is a video game, it's really the, the artifact for whom this type of activity is created, right? So video games becomes this

that's defined by its audience. And we see that through these, like you said, these proliferation periods. The first period in the early days of video games, it was sort of a toy, like I said, with adult beer drinkers in pubs and bars, right? It was sort of this...

curiosity meant for adults it was just not a not the idea of games wasn't um it was sort of an amusement that wasn't meant for like kids in particular

And then we have the proliferation of arcades where, you know, that, hey, you know, this idea of putting coins into a machine got really, really popular. And so we saw during the 70s and really the 80s and 90s as well. But, you know, again, we're starting to see this branching off and what we mean by video game and how expansive it is. But we start to see like

the imagined group who plays video games as, frankly, both younger teen boys and girls who would go to these arcades. And it was a social experience for them, right? So there was both hanging out with their friends, hanging out with each other, going to the snack bar, and feeding coins into these machines.

Well, the big turning point, and eventually before I get ahead of myself, and what eventually happened was that these video game arcade cabinets kind of pop up all over the place, right? Like in burger joints and pizza joints, places where you'd find families. I'm sorry?

Skating rinks. And skating. I remember them from skating rinks, but go ahead. Right. Endless rounds of asteroids at skating rinks. But go ahead. Right. Right. You hear the sound of asteroids along with skating. Right. Right. So what that happened was it kind of translates.

from just sort of an amusement for adolescents to sort of, oh, families can all play this. You know, we put these in places where you would find families. But then something happened in the late 1970s. So about 1977, the industry collapsed, right? And

Part of that is stuff that, you know, economists sort of point out that businesses come in cycles, right? And there's always this phase of early adopters that fail for whatever reason, and they sort of

coalesce and the industry tightens up and the ones that survive are the ones that dominate the industry. So that was accepted and that was expected. And what kind of from that first collapse, the ashes of that first collapse is Atari. And Atari made consoles and

excuse me not consoles they made arcade machines they were incredibly popular we get companies from japan coming in from england coming in called like taito and and they were all incredibly popular like capcom um and eventually uh video games made into the home right so with the idea of

understanding video games as a sort of abstract myth, abstract concept as this thing that families can enjoy and play, they wind up as these small little computer-like things that we would stick in our houses and you would hook up to your television and play it that way. So they became a thing for families. So the first Collatz happened. So that was like the end of the first era. And then the second sort of era that happened was this

after that when catastrophe struck again in another collapse that the industry wasn't expecting. You sort of, much like the dot-com boom and bust, you expect online companies, some of them to fall apart, and then it's not like online shopping goes away, it coalesces, and you get Amazon, or you get these behemoths. Yeah.

What wasn't expected was the Atari behemoth to collapse in 83 and

With the rest of the industry, it collapses. And out of those ashes, it was really wild because I remember looking at Atari records saying, oh, my God, 82. We made so much money. We're opening so many different locations. And these were internal communications. I even saw some like New York Times articles like, oh, my gosh, this is a billion dollar industry.

I'm so glad it survived the 77 crash. And then all of a sudden, unexpected, 83 happens and it crashes like devastatedly where retailers are returning merchandise. They're having a fire sale and everything. And then in 83, 84, the conversation was it's dead. Right.

A little bit later, Nintendo comes into the market in the United States in this sort of chaotic era and has to figure out because

What ended up happening is during that boom period, Nintendo decided to make inroads into the United States because that's where sort of it's sort of like the cultural home of video games, you know, along with Japan. But, you know, obviously it's the United States is sort of like the at the epicenter of it. And so they try to come into the United States. They start in America and this collapse happens.

And so they take a few years to sort of regroup and then it becomes the Nintendo era and that goes crazy. So Nintendo almost single-handedly resuscitates this limping industry that was, you know, on hospice, right? And then eventually we have then the next phase where we have the phase where the technology changes, the idea of the gamer grows up, and then we have...

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especially the Japanese companies, in order to make inroads into the United States, have to kind of disguise their racial identity? Is that the right way to say it? Yeah. Effectively, they have to effectively make themselves appear white, right? Like the other reality is that

nothing in the world happens in a vacuum, right? Everything happens in a larger cultural, social context. And the same is true for businesses. So you have Japanese companies coming to the United States to try to make inroads in a time of really just fierce anti-Japanese sentiment. And because

of that, there is when Nintendo came to the United States, they created a wholly owned subsidiary called Nintendo of America. And while the president of Nintendo was a Japanese man, the profile, like I literally saw these

these packets with headshots, like in Hollywood, right? Where they would send them out to stores hoping to be able to place their products in these stores. And in the products, these glossy, really slick headshots had the Japanese head of Nintendo of America, but in his description really played up the fact that he went to MIT or went to school here in the United States, spoke English fluently, was...

was, you know, culturally very American, right? And to round it off, they had these, the vice president, the, some other head honchos who were essentially white. And of course, then you had

Mr. Nintendo, the icon of the Nintendo, you know, a player who is who who is white himself. And again, this is, you know, reading your book, it brought me back to sort of living in the epicenter of all of this. The figure of the gamer that starts to emerge is again, you know, it.

The anti-Japanese sentiment, I grew up in metropolitan Detroit. And so that was very much a current of living in this area. And also the figure of the Reagan Democrat.

You know, I grew up in Macomb County, Michigan, where, again, right, that was sort of the epicenter of the whole Reagan Democrat phenomena. The figure of the gamer emerges out of all of that sort of cultural, all of those cultural currents, correct? Yeah. So, right, part of the anti-Japanese sentiment was sort of like this idea

this view, this pushback against automation and sort of the idea that the Japanese are going to take over, right. We had after, um, I mean, Jimmy Carter takes, you know, the popular blame, but as I put in the book, it really predates and, and, and, and continues after Carter where the economy was, was, was in bad shape. And, um,

Because of that, we saw this move away from working class blue collar workers to the Reagan Democrat, moving away from the Democratic Party during the 1980s because the Republican Party defined the problem as those Japanese foreigners coming in, taking your jobs, coming in, taking your manufacturing jobs with their automation or whatever.

Yeah, that is sort of the genesis of how this gamer identity kind of emerges. So the argument that I make is that as these voters became recognized, and they were definitely recognized when that shift happens for the Reagan Democrats go to Ronald Reagan, because it was this landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter, right?

And some of the rhetoric around Reagan is like, you know, you're waking up, you're going to America. And, you know, ironically, that's the beginning of the America first, you know, type of make America great type of rhetoric. And because of that, that became sort of the ascendant moment. And remember, in the 1970s, when video games came into the household, the move was from

Games are for grownups who are drinking with their buddies to games are for families. Games are effectively then become games are for kids. And so here's Nintendo coming in at this crazy historical moment going, crap, who do we make these games for? Especially when all of a sudden there's this huge collapse. They've already invested in the United States. And so what they decided to do was market the games to the political group that was in its ascendancy, the Reagan Democrats.

And so there is this view then is that they were going to make video games not for families in this abstract way or, you know, children or adolescents in this abstract concept, but rather for this group of people for whom had the political and economic power at the time, or at least their children. So there's another distinction that I wasn't familiar with, which

that I read in your book that I want to kind of tease out here a little bit. And this is the distinction between AAA and indie game. Help us understand what really amounts to sort of a difference in

production or creation regimes? Is that a way to think about it? Yeah. So, you know, it is one of those terms that is used as a shortcut to define a really more nuanced and porous thing. So it's almost like how we kind of talk about Gen X or Gen Y or whatever, right? There's a kind of nonsense terms that really don't define anything in particular.

But they serve as a shorthand. And that's what we have with AAA and indie. They serve as shorthands to talk about those game companies that make these really large, big-budget blockbuster video games versus...

The quote-unquote indies, which are smaller companies, I mean, I say that in quotes because some of them are pretty big as well, and their focus is less on those big spectacle video games and more on smaller, slower-paced, narratively built video games. So it's more a stylistic difference. Am I understanding that correctly? Yeah, there's sort of a stylistic element in what type of titles get created.

But I almost feel like a part of that emerges from, like you said earlier, sort of the production regime. There's Brendan Keogh from Australia kind of, you know, cheekily points out there's no such thing as a video game industry because he kind of says that, you know, effectively everyone's making a video game kind of functions in this sort of

milieu where everyone's doing the same thing, but what the so-called indies have is this business model where they're not tied to the idea of huge returns, but rather a

good returns. And because of that, they have more freedom, or at least the belief goes, they have more freedom to create content. So the first era that you described takes place, again, you sort of described this in the late 70s until the 80s. And this is where the idea of fun and quality kind of rescues the video game industry, right? So how does that rescue take place? And how does that rescue rest on certain racist ideas? Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, after that second collapse, and again, that second collapse in 83 was this, holy moly, we weren't expecting that, you know, here's this billion dollar industry that in a matter of a few months just kind of evaporated. And when video games start as an industry start to, you know, start to appear again, the whole idea is that, well, now we have this huge risk, right? So like in that third, in one of those moments, in those three moments of the vicious circuit,

One of that is uncertainty. And so we have this massive uncertainty that happens after the second crash in 83. And that's, okay, has the audience dried up or is it there? And we need to think about the audience differently.

And so in that amount of uncertainty after 83, when Nintendo comes in, they decided to then focus on this imagined gamer, which is the child of the Democratic Reagan Democrats. And because of that, when we look at who the Reagan Democrats were, they were working class people.

but they're a predominantly white working class, right? And because of that element, because of this imaginary in other parts of the world that America is, you know, is white, this sort of imagined white American as the standard model, that became the imagined child of these Reagan Democrats. And as that progressed, because misogyny being what it is, there is this tendency to view white

That through the lens of it was a boy. And so that masculine assumption came into play. And of course, that's not true because what we find is that everyone has always played video games, regardless of gender, race, whatever. And but yet this assumption of a male child of Reagan Democrats, which means he's white, becomes like this archetype in the minds. And that becomes

That becomes sort of this normalized production practice. So how does that get manifested in the games themselves? Like, what are we looking at in the games that tells us these things? So when you take a look at some of the games, my favorite example is Bad Dudes. Bad Dudes. Yeah. What a title, right? Yeah.

I can't remember off the top of my head now who created that, dudes, but it was a Japanese company who created the game originally as an arcade cabinet, but then turned it into a title that you can plug into home consoles and play it there. This title comes up after the resurrection, after the second crash, and you literally play...

Two white guys, the, you know, eponymous bad dudes, right, who are trying to rescue President Ronnie from Dragon Ninja and his assortment of ninja kidnapping assassin spies trying to do away with America. Yeah. So not subtle.

No, not subtle. Yeah. So you have stuff like that. Yeah. Wow. I, I, I, that is, I, wow. I'm now thinking about my friends in a different light. Who's the word? Um, so the, the second era that you identified, and this is where we started our conversation, um, takes the idea of fun, the idea of fun and quality, and then links it to a sense of community. Uh, what,

Talk a little bit about how that how we make that leap from from, you know, sort of a thing that's more or less atomized. Right. I mean, you're kind of playing these consoles at home to a sense of community formed through the gamer identity. Yes. An interesting thing happens. Right. Like so when you run this sort of economic precarity that happened from the second collapse, you start to say, how do you ensure the title is

right? How do you ensure that this audience member, even if you're correct, right? If this, you're correct. And young white boys are the primary consumers of your product. How do you keep them happy? Right? How do you build an industry off of that? How do you target them? And then, you know,

because games are this form of electronic amusement, the idea then, well, it has to be fun, but it has to be fun for them, right? So the question of fun for whom, it's fun for them, right? So then we already have this idea or this phenomenon where video games are targeting this audience member. And then the content, the quality, sort of the things that goes around that goes to satisfy that audience member, right?

imagines who that audience member is and what they may like, right? And when you do that, you have a weird thing happening. You have this sort of construction of a community, right? It becomes this... The video games themselves wind up becoming a boundary object for who belongs and who doesn't belong, right? So if the games... If you don't enjoy the games, then they're not for you. You're not a real game player. You're not a real gamer. Um...

And we could sort of see that happening over and over when people start to push back and say, well, I play video games too. I just don't like to play videos that look like X, Y, and Z. You know, and when companies try to accommodate that, when essentially consumers are saying, I want video games that have different things instead of just a white burly protagonist.

then you got pushback, right? Because this demographic has been catered as the norm for so long, they become real protective of that idea that the games are for them. And if you're not

consuming the games that the way that quote unquote were then you're doing somehow violence to this whole institution of video games and when you have that you have this policing of well who's video game who are video games for right what constitutes a video game right then the larger question of what is the video game comes into play right like

Are video games then the first person shooters or do things like those casual games on your phone? Do they count as video games as well? And then you have if those casual games are games, well, then maybe they're not for gamers. And so this sort of community element comes into play. But I think one of the things you're also referring to is the idea that how did video games exist?

become something more than a person playing it at home. So interestingly, Nintendo was the start of that. Shigeru Miyamoto, the artist at Nintendo who creates games

Mario and Zelda and all those games, you know, one of the things that he was really famous for this one famous story where the head of Nintendo at the time calls him in because he's making the legend of Zelda and it's this really expensive game, but it's really hard. And he says, it's too hard. Make it easier for our American audiences, you know, effectively American audience, but really it's for all of our audiences. Make it easier for,

but really he means Americans because that's sort of the major, the two major places right now are Japan and the United States with United States being a really large market. And Miyamoto defies him and instead makes it even harder, right? So, oh, I'm sorry. So, oh, I'm sorry. Where was I? Yeah, so yeah, Miyamoto. Yeah, so the boss of Nintendo calls him in and says, make the game easier for our target audience. And

And he actually goes around and says, no, and he makes it even harder. So in The Legend of Zelda, instead of beginning with the sword like you originally had, you began with no sword. And just by the structure of what's happening on the screen, you wind up in this cave and an old man says, it's dangerous to go it alone. Here, take this. And it was the first sort of idea that you're not supposed to play this game alone, right? That

the game is dangerous, you're supposed to play with others. And true to form, I remember playing Zelda with my friends and watching them play. And whenever, you know, it was sort of like, we were all controlling Zelda. One person was controlling, excuse me, Zelda. One person was controlling Link, but we were all involved like with the choices. And, you know, when I got stuck with a problem, there wasn't online to go and try to figure out how to solve a puzzle. I'd have to go talk to my friends and their friends to figure out how it was done. So,

So this sort of thing was sort of this collaborative form of group play and discovery. And that's sort of like, you know, the thing that kind of that type of activity that creates that sort of community. Interesting.

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You have a calling. We have an answer. Learn more at todaysmilitary.com. So the next chapter takes us into the present, the last era, sort of the 21st century. And you argue that the vicious circuit is now putting a constraint on fun. So why is this the case? Well, the vicious circuit creates this idea of fun, and then that sort of gets...

you know, I mean, you know, logically we call that affirming the consequence, right? You ask a question in a way where there's really only one answer and you say, that's the correct answer to heck with all the other possible answers, right? Like, so in a way that video gamer that was created in the 1980s becomes like a way of begging the question over and over, but who is the audience? Who is the audience? You know?

Well, what ends up happening in the present era is that we have this extended period of time where over and over games have been made and become this huge industry once again off of selling to this idea of who a game is for. And even though it's not the case that they were the only people buying video games and the only people participating in video games,

Much like myself, who was talking to my friend's mom, even if you don't fit that mold, you know enough about that mold to cram yourself in there somehow, to grab a piece of that mold.

space to include yourself, at least in your head, into that definition of community. Well, so in this present era, we've had this extended period of time where all these games were being made and over and over money's being made off of that idea of the gamer. Well, you know, video game developers, like all people, are creative folks too, so there's always been this sort of tension where there's a push to try to make it more

um to make it different to make to expand what's possible to to embrace creativity to include more people right and in the present era what we found was like one of the things i outlined was assassin's creed and sort of that weird phenomenon where um you want me to talk about assassin's creed um okay so

Post 9-11, right, we had this crazy turn where, not crazy, post 9-11, we have this turn where

where in media, the imagined bad guy is now not the Russian or Soviet or Chechen combatants, but rather the terrorist in our imagination is now Middle Eastern. And so we have this obscure game at the time called Assassin's Creed that highlights literally a Middle Eastern assassin going into Russia

Christian areas in the Middle Ages waging holy jihad against the Knights Templar. So you'd imagine, oh my god, this is really risky. No way in hell this game's going to sell and make money.

It does, right? In a crazy turn of event, it does. They messed with the narrative enough that really kind of made that element sort of like a flavor, but not really central to the story. And so it sold a lot of titles. It was really successful. It was highly rated and regarded. And so it comes time for a sequel. And instead of going back and visiting...

visiting the Assassin's Creed original characters and setting, the games now take place in Renaissance Italy, and you play a white guy named Ezio Auditore, and tons of money, tons of more money is dumped into the development of this game, to the point where you have not just one game, but you have

Three large AAA releases, all centering Ezio Auditore in Florence, Italy, in the Renaissance era, even though the game originally started off as, you know, the assassins against the Knights Templars and you're an Eastern assassin. Wow, that's interesting. So the conclusion to the book tries, in your words, to find hope in a hopeless place.

So what makes video games a hopeless place? And then how do we find hope in them? Yeah, I say that kind of, you know, cheekily. I think it feels hopeless, right? For, I know that for a lot of people who are on the outsides of video game culture, what has happened is, you know, we sort of constructed our own video game or sense of video games for ourselves.

So it's not hopeless in the sense that you love the Deagons, but this is not for you. So, you know, you're fighting a pointless battle, right? So it's not hopeless in that sense.

But it feels hopeless because by and large, you're kind of reminded over and over again that video games are for a particular body and occasionally get a game for you now, but they're really mostly for this particular imagined body. And what I said is, how do you find hope in this hopeless place? Well, if you take a look at the vicious circuit and those three moments of that vicious circuit, ultimately the thing that drives the engine of that circuit is

is capital, is money. And what drives sort of that narrowness of the, for whom the titles are made is, is money, right? Is that production process, the larger production process is,

And what I thought would be a great way to sort of disrupt that circuit is to monetize or at least make economically wise the idea of loss. Because if you think about when firms go out to make a product or an item, the thing they're trying to avoid is economic loss, right? So it's all precarious. They're trying to avoid the loss. They're trying to make money. Well, if you could...

turn that loss into a positive somehow or a form of R&D, then you might be able to disrupt that circuit. So I purposely sort of chose the idea of R&D, of research and development,

Because with larger tech companies, a lot of the tax breaks that they get are for things like research and development that goes nowhere, right? Like skunk works, right? These really advanced ideas that don't pan out, but may lead to something else later on down the line. And so what I said was,

Right now, you sort of have this, we sort of have this expectation that these small indies are able to be the ones that rescue the industry from like racism and all that stuff. But the problem is they're still under that same economic pressure of making a profit and trying to answer uncertainty in any way they can. And so I said was, what if you have these larger firms that could bear loss and

create a tax structure that allows them to effectively reduce their tax burden by, I know this is going to sound at this point in time in our history, this makes me sound like an awful person because it sounds like I am trying to reduce the tax burden for large wealthy corporations.

I'm sorry. I got it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't mean it like that. But what I mean was that if you give that structure, then maybe they could create these research groups in the model of a nonprofit or in the model of research and development where they could effectively shelter their tax liabilities from their massive sales in these places and

that then allows these effectively nonprofit publishers to publish quote unquote riskier titles that if they make money, then great. These larger companies can then license or whatever, right? It ends up being a way of offloading some of that risk for them in a sort of like a proffer. You know, we'll make it easier for you to stomach taking what you perceive as risks if you let us take these risks. Well, good.

So Sam Shroyd, thank you for your time to being here today. Before I let you go and bear in mind that I am asking this question as a host on the New Books Network and not as a senior colleague, what are you working on next? Wow. I'm having a hard time not hearing that as a senior colleague in my car. No, I'm kidding. Just kidding, Tom. I know. I hope. You've always been very kind to me and very collegial.

What I'm looking at right now is my question is, well, what is the lived experience for the developers themselves that are precarious in these marginalized positions? Right. So part of me putting my foot in my mouth or sort of, you know, is making the grandiose argument. Well, grandiose arguments, especially ones that are built off of documents, are cute, but...

Show me the money, right? Like where, tell me how people who are living these realities are actually experiencing it. So that's my next book. My, what I'm working on next is I'm, I'd like to go and conduct a series of interviews with marginalized video game developers, both indie AAA, however you want to define that. And yeah,

see some of the unrecognized and unpaid labor that they have to do and how that affects their perception of their place within the industry. And again, just for context, I think this is true. The video game industry has a reputation for being a fairly brutal work environment. Yeah. Yeah.

There's this concept of crush, which is, oh, man, horrifying, like forced overtime. You know, there's like this, you know, coerced overtime, forced overtime where people are working tons of hours, not seeing their families, trying to meet an arbitrary deadline and often missing it and not being compensated for it. So, yeah, it's brutal. Yeah. So that would be that that sounds like a that sounds like a great next place to take your research. That's fascinating.

Well, Sam, thank you again for taking the time to talk today. I really appreciate it. Is there any last thing you want to tell us? Yeah. You know, the reality of video games is that it has always included, or at least who plays video games, the place for people in video games has always included all of us.

And one of the things I hope comes out of the book is that it is only by myth and these arbitrary indicators that we use that says video games is not for us. So...

It is possible to push back. So it feels hopeless, but it's not. And I just hope that more people who play video game enjoy video games and keep making their presence known, however they can choose to do so. Well, thank you for that. Once again, my guest today has been Sam Shroy, my friend and colleague and the author of Race, Culture and the Video Game Industry, A Vicious Circuit from Rutledge. My name is Tom Desenna and you're listening to the New Books Network.