Symbolic violence in the language of Pathfinder descriptions of black bodies

Abstract

This presentation was published in Games & Culture and can be found above as "Symbolic Violence in the Language of Game Descriptions of Blackness: The Case of Pathfinder"** Presentation for the Tampere University Spring Seminar 2022 This paper analyzes the impact of discourses surrounding Black bodies in tabletop role playing games. Research has discussed the issue of visual representations of differing ethnicities in fantasy role playing games, even though roleplaying games have traditionally conflated “race” with “species”, often leading to most humans being represented as White (Dietrich, 2013; Garcia, 2017; Long, 2016). New discussions in tabletop gaming spaces center on the absence of diverse representation, and efforts to address these concerns. I use discursive thematic analysis to examine the descriptions of individuals who are to be represented as Black in the Pathfinder game setting, a game system loosely related to the popular Dungeons & Dragons which has human ethnicities that are Black. Via a method combining Gee (2004) and Fairclough (2001), I critically analyze descriptions for Black bodies in the game materials that extensively discuss the Black ethnicities in the game. I demonstrate how the discourse represents a symbolic violence surrounding Blackness (Bourdieu, 1991). While the authors seek to provide imagery and word use to highlight the positive aspects of the characters, the overemphasis on these techniques signal the lurking stereotypes behind the paratextual discussion as a conceptual “other”. These characters then become examples of “good Blacks” that differ from “bad” individuals. The positive imagery provokes a stereotype threat, and a need to uphold this “good Black” mentality, lest one becomes the Other (Arronson and Steele, 1996; Richard, 2015).