‘Ready Player Juan’ author reckons with loving video games that denigrate the cultures of players

Carlos Kelly is a writer who spent countless hours of his youth roaming fantastical realms.

Kelly is Mexican American, and he was drawn to the participatory storytelling of video games, where the main character is almost always a stoic white guy.

For Kelly, the accumulation of these experiences got him thinking about what the games he loves taught players like him about how the world views people like him. He writes about this in his new book, “Ready Player Juan.”

Kelly joined The Show to talk more about the book, and as a case study, he talked about one of the most popular video games of all time, Uncharted 4. The game follows the adventures of white treasure hunter Nathan Drake, and an early scene in the game finds Drake trapped in a Panamanian prison.

Full conversation

CARLOS KELLY: Everyone around you is brown and speaking Spanish, and they’re all criminals and wearing like, you know, tank tops and … cursing at you. And the first thing that comes up is “Push square to punch” or something like that.

And so that’s your introduction. The first thing is you punch the brown Latinx guy. So what does that lead to? Well, he does it on purpose so that he can then get inside of solitary. And when he gets into solitary, then we realize that he’s in cahoots with the corrupt corrections officer, who is also Latino. …And then not long after that, we get introduced to the drug lord Latino.

And so all those three representations are revolving around criminality, suspicion, untrustworthiness … all of these ideas that aren’t even original. They’re borrowed from film.

SAM DINGMAN: Right, the kind of fundamental implicit proposition of that scene in Uncharted is, “Oh dear, I, a white person, am having to deal with being in this scary foreign place with all these people who want to hit me. … What a plot twist that I would end up in a prison.” Like, that is sort of a fundamentally white framework to impose on the idea of a main character.

KELLY: Yeah, and I mean iit’s someone with a past of criminality, right, because Nathan Drake’s a thief, right? I mean —

DINGMAN: Yeah, he is a criminal, by any definition.

KELLY: But he’s like, it’s, I don’t know, there’s a lot of tension there in, in that observation, right? Because he’s a criminal, yet, he’s not supposed to be there, right?

And so us as the players are like, “Well, why are we in a prison? Like, Nathan Drake can’t be in prison.” … But he doesn’t belong there, but the other people do. It normalizes the stereotype.

DINGMAN: Yes, and I think this, this is also related to a really significant point that you’re making in this book, which is that there’s a fundamental difference between that moment and a representation of a scene like this in a film. Because in a film it’s being presented to you, which obviously has a normalizing effect.  But critically, in the video game, you are participating in the telling of this very racialized story.

KELLY: Yeah … I think that’s the beauty and sort of danger of video games, in the sense, that I say this all the time: The way we can tell video games are a unique medium is that like when you die, you don’t say, “Oh my gosh, my character died.” You know, you’re like, “I died. I keep dying. I can’t beat this level. I can’t get past this boss. I, I, I, I, I.”

And so there’s just this extreme connection to our characters and what’s happening on screen. And action adventure games are even more important in that way, because you spend so much time with that character. And so you begin to see the world the way these developers have programmed the game.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, by way of illustrating this, Carlos, I thought we could talk about a scene from another game that you write about in the book, which is called Shadow of the Tomb Raider. And I’ve got some clips from that scene here and I thought we could play them and have you tell us a little bit about what’s going on in these clips as viewed through the lens that you’re proposing here.

So, just to set the scene here, this is a cut scene where Lara Croft, who is a white British woman, and her — what do you call him in the book, her like friendly Latino sidekick?

KELLY: Trusty POC sidekick.

DINGMAN: Trusty POC sidekick, yeah. His name is Jonah, I believe.

KELLY: Jonah, yeah.

DINGMAN: They are trying to bust up this corrupt criminal organization, and they’re in Cozumel, Mexico. And it’s Día de los Muertos. They’re overlooking this square where there’s a Día de los Muertos festival happening. They see somebody who they want to talk to and they decide to go down and see if they can track this person down, and this is what happens before they go into the square. Jonah speaks first.

JONAH: You heard that too, right?

LARA CROFT: Let’s see where he goes.

JONAH: Wait, hold on. Let’s try to blend in.

DINGMAN: Tell us about that moment where Jonah says, “Let’s try to blend in.”

KELLY: Blending in is an interesting choice of words. Here’s Lara Croft and he says, “Let’s try to blend in,” and so he hands you the player, Lara Croft, a calavera mask. And so you put on this mask and all of a sudden that is to insinuate that now you blended in.

DINGMAN: Right, that’s all it takes

KELLY: But it is funny that we think that that’s enough to sort of blend in culturally, right?

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, I have a clip here from one of the, the next moments where Lara and Jonah do venture into the courtyard.

CROFT: Where did Dominguez go?

JONAH: He can’t be far. He must be in the courtyard somewhere.

CROFT: Yeah.

JONAH: Let’s look around.

CROFT: Someone must know something.

DINGMAN: So one of the points that you make in the book about this moment, and I’m curious if you can expand on that a little bit, is she’s not there to have a Día de los Muertos experience. She’s just there because she needs to find somebody, and they’ve just kind of stuck her in this place without making any attempt to honor or talk about the nature of what’s happening in the square.

KELLY: No, because as I argue in that game, it’s not about the people in the game. It’s always about Lara Croft and her ideas or her pursuit, right?

And so one of the kids she would talk to lights a sparkler. And instead of interacting with the kid and asking him about what the sparkler means or, you know, him and his idea, you know, whatever his his subjectivity, she goes, “I should light one for my mom.” Or something like that, you know. Like it’s always about her.

Día de los Muertos there is not about the holiday, it’s about context to like, exotify it a little bit more, right?

DINGMAN: Right. It occurs to me as we’re talking about this that they’re also presenting this incredibly rich cultural tradition as an obstacle to this white woman’s attempt to do what she’s there to do. Like it’s not a rich tradition, it’s like a crowded square she has to navigate where people are saying stuff that confuses her.

KELLY: Yeah, it’s like, you know, like any movie, right? Like the heroes got to go through some random event like, “This is happening now? Like I didn’t plan for this!”

It’s very much in the service of who they think is going to play this game, which is mostly people like them. White guys, right?

DINGMAN: Right, right. So, this makes me think of another idea that you’re writing about in the book, Carlos, which is the idea of video games as a kind of border.

KELLY: Yes, so, when I think about video games as borders, I think of it as a firm representation, a line that says, “This is how we developers see the world. This is the what you’re stepping into. This is what you’re crossing into, our beliefs of how we see the world.” You know, whether they meant it or not.

DINGMAN: Yeah, well, and think about that tutorial we were talking about earlier. I mean, you are literally stepping into a world where it’s like, OK, you want to move in this world, you have to press this button. You wanna, you know, advance the story, you have to punch the brown guy.

KELLY: Right. And, and so in a sense, we’re crossing into these narratives. We can cross into these games and realize that this is some way that somebody sees the world. And if you’re someone like me, a Mexican American, then there’s this very heavy frictions and tensions that are starting to arise.

DINGMAN: Yeah.

KELLY: But any player can experience these tensions and frictions. It’s only about sort of increasing our perspectives and our knowledge. All video games have that ability for us to cross into new stories, new experiences and new ways of seeing.