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ABSTRACT
Although the popular choose-your-own-adventure video game Detroit: Become Human is fictional and set in a futuristic time involving humanoid androids, its characters face issues of race, gender, and sexuality that exist today. With unique game mechanics and storytelling choices that enable the formation of parasocial relationships and identification with marginalized game characters, Detroit: Become Human creates an immersive experience for players. We argue that it serves as a promising example of how video games and the parasocial relationships therein can become a means of exploring the social locations and experiences of marginalized others. Our analysis focuses on how race, gender, and sexuality are constructed and complicated in Detroit: Become Human. More specifically, we focus on the following: constructions of racial identities, the meaning of a strong female protagonist, and the problematic objectification and hypersexualization of female characters. Ultimately, we call for future scholarship to further investigate what it means to “try on” marginalized identities in video games.
Notes
1 Detroit: Become Human, prod. Quantic Dream (Paris: Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2018), video game; Anthony Garreffa, “Detroit: Become Human Has Sold 3.2 Million Copies on the PS4,” Tweak Town, October 4, 2019, https://www.tweaktown.com/news/67929/detroit-become-human-sold-3-2-million-copies-ps4/index.html.
2 Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch, “Uses and Gratifications Research,” Public Opinion Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1973): 510–11; Carolyn Lin, “Looking Back: The Contribution of Blumler and Katz’s Uses of Mass Communication,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 40, no. 4 (1996): 574.
3 Elihu Katz and David Foulkes, “On the Use of the Mass Media as ‘Escape’: Clarification of a Concept,” Public Opinion Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1962): 379.
4 Adrienne Shaw, “Are We There Yet? The Politics and Practice of Intersectional Game Studies,” The Velvet Light Trap 81 (2018): 76.
5 Carolyn M. Cunningham, “Unbeatable? Debates and Divides in Gender and Video Game Research,” Communication Research Trends 37, nos. 3–5 (2018): 8; Adrienne Shaw, “Rethinking Game Studies: A Case Study Approach to Video Game Play and Identification,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 5 (2013): 347–61.
6 Donal Horton and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” Psychiatry 19, no. 3 (1956): 215.
7 Nicole Liebers and Holger Schramm, “Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters: An Inventory of 60 Years of Research,” Communication Research Trends 38, no. 2 (2019): 5.
8 Ibid.
9 Christoph Klimmt, Dorothée Hefner, and Peter Vorderer, “The Video Game Experience as ‘True’ Identification: A Theory of Enjoyable Alterations of Players’ Self-Perception,” Communication Theory 19, no. 4 (2009): 356.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 363; Liebers and Schramm, “Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters,” 15.
12 Liebers and Schramm, “Parasocial Interactions and Relationships with Media Characters,” 5, 14.
13 David J. Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real: The Importance of Race- and Gender-Based Game Studies,” Games and Culture 1, no. 1 (2006): 86.
14 Lisa Nakamura, “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” Works and Days 13, nos. 1–2 (1995): 181–93.
15 Julia T. Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory and Muted Group Theory: Commonalities and Divergences,” Women & Language 28, no. 2 (2005): 62.
16 Ibid.
17 Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real,” 83. See also Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins, eds., From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988); Shira Chess, Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Adrienne Shaw, “Do You Identify as a Gamer? Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Gamer Identity,” New Media & Society 14, no. 1 (2011): 28–44; “Are We There Yet?”
18 Benjamin D. Singer, “Mass Media and Communication Processes in the Detroit Riot of 1967,” Public Opinion Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1970): 240.
19 Thomas Nakayama, “The Significance of ‘Race’ and Masculinities,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17, no. 1 (2000): 113.
20 Leesha M. Thrower, “You’re Born Black … You Become African American: Naming and Defining Race,” Kentucky Journal of Communication 29, no. 2 (2010): 108.
21 Izabela Tomczak, “America’s Digital Messiah(s) in Detroit: Become Human (2018),” New Horizons in English Studies 4 (2019): 158–72.
22 Etsuko Kinefuchi and Mark P. Orbe, “Situating Oneself in a Racialized World: Understanding Student Reactions to Crash through Standpoint Theory and Context-Positionality Frames,” Journal of International & Intercultural Communication 1, no. 1 (2008): 71.
23 Cunningham, “Unbeatable?”
24 For example, see Jennifer deWinter and Carly Kocurek, “#1reasonwhy Women in the Gaming Industry Matters,” Flow 17, no. 7 (2013): https://www.flowjournal.org/2013/02/1-reason-why-women-in-the-gaming-industry-matters/; Tracy L. Dietz, “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Videogames: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior,” Sex Roles 38, nos. 5–6 (1998): 425–42; Edward Downs and Stacy L. Smith, “Keeping Abreast of Hypersexuality: A Video Game Character Content Analysis,” Sex Roles 62, nos. 11–12 (2010): 721–33; Jesse Fox and Wai Yen Tang, “Women’s Experiences with General and Sexual Harassment in Online Video Games: Rumination, Organizational Responsiveness, Withdrawal, and Coping Strategies,” New Media & Society 19, no. 8 (2017): 1290–307; Teresa Lynch, Jessica E. Thompkins, Irene I. van Driel, and Niki Fritz, “Sexy, Strong, and Secondary: A Content Analysis of Female Characters in Video Games Across 31 Years,” Journal of Communication 66, no. 4 (2016): 703–18; Shaw, “Do You Identify as a Gamer?” Dmitri Williams, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory, “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games,” New Media & Society 11, no. 5 (2009): 815–34.
25 Technically, androids do not have a sex. However, as android inventor and Cyberlife CEO Elijah Kamski states in a short film released before the game’s launch, “We had to imagine a machine in our own image, that resembles us in every way,” so androids are given a sex by design. See RajmanGaming HD, “DETROIT BECOME HUMAN—Elijah Kamski Interview (Cyberlife CEO) @ 1080p HD,” YouTube, May 22, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpnuBfyIRcw.
26 Williams et al., “The Virtual Census,” 824–25; see also Downs and Smith, “Keeping Abreast of Hypersexuality,” 727–30.
27 See note 24.
28 Jeroen Jansz and Raynel G. Martis, “The Lara Phenomenon: Powerful Female Characters in Video Games,” Sex Roles 56, nos. 3–4 (2007): 142.
29 See, respectively, Helen W. Kennedy, “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?” Game Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 1–12; Jansz and Martis, “The Lara Phenomenon,” 147.
30 Cunningham, “Unbeatable?” 12.
31 Garreffa, “Detroit: Become Human Has Sold 3.2 Million Copies on the PS4.”
32 See note 24.
33 Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 49 (1950): 433–60. Note that the original Turing Test sought to determine the sex of the participants, thus centering gender identity within the question of machine versus human.
34 Fox and Tang, “Women’s Experiences with General and Sexual Harassment in Online Video Games,” 1301–1303.
35 See Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana Mastro, “The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters on Gender Stereotyping and Female Self-Concept,” Sex Roles 61, nos. 11–12 (2009): 808–23.
36 Eric Tyndale and Franklin Ramsoomair, “Keys to Successful Interactive Storytelling: A Study of the Booming ‘Choose-Your-Own-Adventure’ Video Game Industry,” i-manager’s Journal of Educational Technology 13, no. 3 (2016): 32.
37 Victoria Beck and Chris Rose, “Is Sexual Objectification and Victimization of Females in Video Games Associated with Victim Blaming or Victim Empathy?” Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2018): https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260518770187; Christopher J. Ferguson and M. Brent Donnellan, “Are Associations between ‘Sexist’ Video Games and Decreased Empathy toward Women Robust? A Reanalysis of Gabbiadini et al. 2016,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 46 (2017): 2446–59.
38 Wood, “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” 62.
39 Klimmt, Hefner, and Vorderer, “The Video Game Experience as ‘True’ Identification,” 356.
40 J. J. De Simone, “What Is Good Can Also Be Bad: The Prosocial and Antisocial in-Game Behaviors of Young Video Game Players,” Atlantic Journal of Communication 21, no. 3 (2013): 149–63.
41 Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real”; Nakamura, “Race in/for Cyberspace.”
42 Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real”; Shaw, “Are We There Yet?”
43 Lisa Bowleg, “When Black + Lesbian + Woman ≠ Black Lesbian Woman: The Methodological Challenges of Qualitative and Quantitative Intersectionality Research,” Sex Roles 59, nos. 5–6 (2008): 312–25.
44 Leonard, “Not a Hater, Just Keepin’ It Real,” 86.
45 Ibid., 87.