My specialized interest in rhetoric and composition are issues related to literacy, race, and class. Therefore, before reading any of the other chapters for Thursday's class, I jumped straight to Sam's article "Racing Toward Representation."

Sam's discussion of identity within game play and her description of choosing an avatar of “’real’ color” for the first time brought rushing to my conscious mind how important choosing an avatar was for me and my five friends the night we played with (on?) the Wii during break. I don't know if this would have been less interesting or less significant for other people who are regular gamers, but choosing an avatar was a significant part of the play in which we were engaged. There were six of us playing - 4 Caucasian and 2 Asian. We spent quite a bit of time at the initial set up designing our avatars. I was surprised at how much selection there was in terms of hairstyle, skin color, height, accessories (e.g., glasses), and facial details such as eyebrow and lip shapes. And this was on the version of Wii marketed in Asia. Of course the animation of the characters on Wii is in no way as realistic as the ones portrayed in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (GTA:VC), the game referred to in Sam’s article. However, there seems to be a lot more choice involved in designing one's avatar from the pre-programmed selections on Wii than on GTA (unless I’m mistaken). And even though the Wii animation was of a much more simplified design, I don't think each of us playing would have spent so much time constructing our avatars if this gaming identity wasn't important to us in some way. It even became a social part of the "game" as we challenged each other to try on different eyes, face shapes, and facial hair, laughing and teasing each other. But we all ended up constructing avatars that we felt looked like us the most (down to my husband's blue beanie that he wears all the time).

I guess my point is that if identity and the construction of an avatar can be so important to individuals who are not regular gamers and who are playing with avatars that are not necessarily sophisticatedly drawn, I can get an idea of the importance of accurate representation of one's identity to a player who is a regular gamer and who "lives" for many hours in a virtual world. I can also understand how frustrating and maddening it must be to have to see one's race or gender represented in a very narrow or stereotyped way, for it was important to my friends and I to have accurate representations of ourselves even just to bowl or box. We certainly were not experiencing and processing anything as heavy as murder, rape, or gang warfare. I think Sam sums up the problematic limitations of player representations and visual stereotypes present in games quite powerfully when she writes “As long as gamers grow angry at the representation and liken it to visual representations of lynching, further connecting it to overt racism and societal ills, there is nothing playful about it” (213).