This week, from the 18th to the 22nd of March, it’s the Game Developer’s Conference. This is an event in which Game Developers from across the industry give talks and presentations on what they do and how they do it to their peer group. In honour of this, I’m presenting articles this week that seek to summarise and explain some academic concepts from my own readings to a general audience. In deference to my supervisor, I am also trying to avoid writing with italics in these articles outside of titles and cites.
There’s an association with academic reading that fundamentally, academic writing and thinking is about a disconnected experience of reality that is explicitly not practical or realistic. ‘An Academic Point’ is a term we use to describe a thing that isn’t connected to any kind of realistic experience. I want however to talk to you about an idea from academia that gave me words to describe something I found important for living my life and being a better person. It’s an idea, it’s a tool, it’s a pitfall, and it is, importantly, a story.
It is a story that starts with the technique I use in my research called ‘autoethnography.’
What I do, generally speaking, is work with the academic toolset of autoethnography.
Autoethnography is a process of engaging with an experience, recording that experience somehow, then academically and critically engaging with the recording of that experience. I like to point to a number of forms this takes in general media – movie and game reviews, for example, are autoethnographic texts, where the experience of the reviewer is shared to an audience in a way that seeks to make that opinion a thing people can meaningfully engage with. Autoethnography is powerful for giving writers a way to share individual experiences that are not necessarily in forms that research can conventionally access. Quantitative research is very good at reducing averages and statistical trends out of large sets of data, with larger and larger sets of data being able to have more and more confidence – but how does that toolset handle addressing information that has happened to small numbers of people, and with access to an even smaller number of those people?
I like autoethnography and I like a lot of the researchers who use autoethnography. This is partly because they bring the tool to bear on ideas like the experience of being a closeted queer person or the emotional challenges of being an adopted parent. Partly it’s because it is a form of research that strives to respect the writer as part of the writing, and therefore what they experience and who they are is worth sharing and explaining. You know a little bit about me, hypothetically.
Autoethnography is — well, autoethnography is new. It’s also very old. The term autoethnography has been considered an academically useful term with a specific meaning since 2004, but prior to that its use is ambiguated by the people who were using it. Autoethnography isn’t a recent field, really, nor is it a recent word. If you want to point to the time in history where it first gets coined in the terms of the specific process of academic writing I’m doing, you look at the work of Carolyn Ellis, along with her cohort of fellow storytellers and meaningmakers, in the book Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research, 2015. By this timeline, Autoethnography is an academic discipline younger than Shrek 2.
If you want to step back through the timeline there are earlier works from other cultural writers talking about the idea of autoethnography, but not in those words. Ethnography, the study of culture, is something we’ve been doing for a long time, and by ‘a long time’ I mean ‘pith helmet and shooting people’ times. Autoethnography is an attempt to do this kind of cultural analysis that’s aware of the non-objective nature of the ethnographer. This idea that ethnography is not object is the result of numerous critics of the form, but one critic I want to highlight is a man who is responsible for coining the phrase key to this whole story.
Let’s call him Dwight, for now, because, y’know, that’s his name.
Dwight is responsible for writing the essay I Am A Shaman: A Hmong Life Story With Ethnographic Commentary (1986). I’ve not the text on hand, but that’s not too important here. The important thing is that with the title ‘I Am A Shaman’ the writer positions himself in the middle of the story of Hmong shamanism, set in the context of Hmong refuees in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in northern Thailand. Dwight came from Thunder Bay, in Canada, and spent years in this research becoming part of the community, approaching it authentically, and bringing what he could understand from the community in his research. This set something of a trend for this guy – he also worked researching the Chicago tenements, known as ‘Little Beirut,’ and then worked on American attitudes towards the death penalty. Generally speaking, I understand Dwight’s work to be well-regarded, respectful, but also, importantly, deeply involved in the communities he was researching.
In his work, Dwight describes four attitudes towards the other that are problems when writing about culture. He describes them as:
- The Custodian’s Ripoff. This is when a researcher appropriates cultural traditions in order to enhance their own projects. Imagine a museum curator who wants something interesting to build their repertoire of artifacts.
- The Enthusiast’s Infatuation. This is when a researcher is really into a superficial impression of the culture, which means they tend to ignore the differences between themselves and the other, and speak for them in ways that don’t appreciate the depth of meaning there. It’s fanboying for the culture you’re researching, as it were.
- The Curator’s Exhibitionism. This is when a researcher is trying to sensationalise and astonish with what they report, wanting to show the exotic, the primitive, and the culturally remote.
- The Skeptic’s Cop-Out. This is when the researcher just gives up and becomes detached from the research, suggesting it’s impossible to learn about, nor perform, as persons who are different from us.
It’s this last one that stands out to me. The Skeptic’s Cop-Out. The idea that while trying to learn about something, you find it too hard to find your own emotional connection with it, you find it too difficult to imagine being another person or a person of another perspective, and just give up and assert nihilistically that these things are impossible. This is a perspective you might see a lot in your everyday, with ‘I just don’t get it’ responses to queer ideas from non-queer spaces. There’s a cousin to it, too, in those queer spaces – you know, ‘cis people can never understand.’
Don’t take this the wrong way, by the way: People saying stuff like ‘cis people can never understand’ are probably basing that on some pretty meaningful personal experiences about not being understood by cis people. That doesn’t mean they’re right though.
I write about trans and gender issues pretty regularly. This isn’t because I am trans and have gender issues — it’s partly because I find them interesting, and I find the way they get talked about rarely intersect with the things about them that I engage with. For me, how to represent a trans character in a game matters a lot – no trans people are going to ask me how to expresss their being themselves in their lives, and nor should they. This got to a point where, a few years ago, someone asked me why I bothered to talk about it so much, because why would I if I wasn’t part of the community? Was it my place?
This is one of the first times I apparently made it clear that I’m bisexual in any space online, because I felt like I was being asked to show my queer papers. It was an unpleasant experience, but it came with it an unstated and slightly sad assumption I could see in the shape of the question:
Why would you try and understand or relate to trans people this thoroughly, if you weren’t one of them?
And that’s messed up, right? That’s a deeply sad assumption to have to deal with in your everyday life? Trans people aren’t the Black Speech or the Pattern Screamers, they’re not something where understanding them poisons your mind. They’re people. They have their own jokes about hoodies and salt licks and bananas just in the same way that tiktokkers have their own jokes about air friers and gotta-hand-it-toing Osama Bin Laden. They are people who have a cultural experience and that cultural experience has both shared signifiers (being trans) and they have unrelated experiences (most of everything in their lives that isn’t part of being trans).
I think as long as people are sharing information about who they are, that is information you can engage with. You can listen and you can ask and you can, if you are willing to, come to recognise why things are the way they are, because none of this is being built out of a magical, or spiritual perspective on reality. You don’t have to feel a thing to understand when someone else tells you how they feel. All it takes is being willing to listen to the people, remember what you’re told, and treat the telling with respect.
Here’s the big thing that sticks in my brain, that makes this list so easy to bring to mind, because it’s such a weird detail. Dwight, the guy who had these really serious thoughts about access to critical and ethical spaces, this guy who wanted us to think about who we were and how we can, if we are willing to try understand one another on a deeper level than these, had the name Dwight Conquergood.