Coda

Abstract

The coda speculates on the world-making potentials of games in providing new ways of understanding race—both race in games and race in the everyday. The authors make a case for the study of games based not merely on the massive economic potential of the industry or the similarly boundless potential of the medium but also on games as an inherently political site where race, alongside other configurations of difference and power, is made and remade through play. The coda does so by examining several genres of role-playing games in terms of their procedural logics of racial management, thereby asking how game logics can express varying and often contentious ways of imagining race, particularly from an institutional (as well as an editorial and curatorial) standpoint. Specifically, the authors examine the racial logics structuring the Mass Effect series, Genshin Impact, and Divinity: Original Sin 2.