http://flowtv.org/2012/02/now-watching-black-web-series/ http://flowtv.org/2012/02/now-watching-black-web-series/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:08:01 +0000 TreaAndrea Russworm University of Massachusetts Amherst http://flowtv.org/?p=13539
Between Women Web Series Homepage

My television is dead.

Although we are in a moment of media history where the habit of watching television connected to a cable, broadcast, or satellite signal is becoming ever more compromised by emergent viewing practices, I say my television is dead not because I want to further hasten any divide between the study of old and new media forms. I say my television is dead because at the start of this academic year I finally tired of paying high cable bills for programming that I was not watching with any degree of regularity. Since television has always been an instrumental tool of work and play for me, declining to renew my DirecTV contract and not purchasing a basic cable package, a converter box, or even an antenna for my television felt profoundly counter-intuitive—highly suspect behavior for a media scholar. Truthfully, though, in recent years I have been watching less and less television in general, and the television shows I was watching hardly fit into either category of work or productive play (an example: Animal Planet’s I Shouldn’t Be Alive).

As I soon confirmed, for someone who studies cultural theory, race, and media, Internet “television” offers something network or cable programming never has: hundreds, if not thousands, of on-demand amateur and professional content (videos, serialized web shows, direct-to-Internet films, minisodes, animation, documentaries, vlogs) that are created by or star black people. Just keeping track of all of the available content that at least in part targets black viewers is no small research objective. A micro-niche model best describes how to think about the audiences for the current online content, meaning it is highly probable that a given viewer will find something in the multitude relatable and entertaining enough. For instance, the current offerings include the black lesbian and gay web series Between Women, Drama Queenz, The DL Chronicles, and Lez B Honest. Other viewing options include Jaleel White’s cheeky interracial romance comedy, Road to the Altar, snappy animated satires like Orlando’s Joint, and voice-over mashups like Fat Albert in the Hood. An even higher concentration of black dramatic performances have debuted online, namely mysteries like Celeste Bright and I Breathe This, crime series such as Touye Pwen, and sci-fi thrillers like Osiris. Highly talented black artists are turning to the Internet for the freedom to create “intimate,” collaborative projects that they have always wanted to pursue without censor, explain the creators of The PuNanny Diaries—a web series about “not getting any” that has become my favorite comedy online or elsewhere.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Producers of The PuNanny Diaries Explain Why They Created a Web Series

While it may remain to be seen if this moment of black new media authorship is either marginal or revolutionary in terms of ideological impact, it is quite clear that no moment in our media history comes close in terms of the sheer volume and diversity of material produced, distributed, archived, and lost—not the so-called Blaxploitation action film cycle of the 1970s or the work of black early filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams. When it comes to the explosion of black-authored content on the Internet, we are either tuning in to watch or missing a cultural renaissance.

As I shut down my television (or, more accurately, remediated it by connecting it to my laptop and using it to view videos streamed from my Xbox 360 and Playstation 3), I sought to answer a few questions about black web series production.

For starters, does new media and the web series format really, as it seems, represent the critical “Promised Land” for black actors, actresses, directors, and industry professionals? Relatedly, has the black web series answered the long-standing call for more diversity not only in terms of casting and crews but also in terms of the individual stories told? I should clarify what I mean by “long-standing call” in order to make more clear how web series might, in the best of scenarios, address perceived voids in representation created by traditional televisual programming. The long-standing call for the industry to support and sustain television shows that reflect a broader range of minority experiences has sounded loudly. That is, by now the claim that television (from Sanford and Son and Good Times to The Cosby Show and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) has endorsed a familiar set of stereotypes and/or measured African Americans against a narrow set of middle class values is not an unfamiliar one to many contemporary viewing audiences. In fact, I am finding that the evolution and explosion of black web series is, in large measure, the direct artistic response to conversations about representation that have finally become commonplace in college media studies classrooms and, to some extent, in high school curriculums and in popular public discourse.

Television and film scholarship, media literacy initiatives, and documentaries like Marlon Riggs’ Color Adjustment have—over time—played an influential role in the educational backgrounds of artists who are now using digital media and the Internet to craft and distribute stories that acknowledge the call for more diverse representation in visual media. New media channels of production enable an unprecedented number of black artists to participate in the kind of dialectic that informs Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer’s recent response to Tavis Smiley’s critique of their Oscar-nominated roles in the film The Help. For example, when Smiley asks the actresses if they share his ambivalence about the maids they portray in the film, both women defend their right to accept whichever roles they choose. Spencer further challenges, “If someone isn’t doing what you think they should be doing, why are you waiting? You should be doing it yourself.”

This is the type of DIY directive that black web series are answering most emphatically. In discussing her well-received hit web series, The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl, Issa Rae (who attended Stanford University and who has taken filmmaking classes at UCLA and New York Film Academy) makes clear that she is well aware of these kinds of discussions about representation, adding that she was motivated to create the show because she has not seen black women like herself on television or in film. In an interview with CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield Rae explains why web series production has become such a strategic mechanism for change, noting: “Especially for minority content creators, this is the way to go. There is no gatekeeper on the Internet. You can release whatever content you want. I think that this is the best route to take, honestly.1”

Rae and other web show creators have shared these comments about seizing the medium and making “our own content” with future cohorts of media-makers on college campuses, as several black webs series creators have taken their art on the “college tour” circuit. ABG’s wildly popular college tour includes a screening of the series, roundtable discussions about race and visual culture, and instructional tips for how college students can begin making their own digital projects. This activity further supports the notion that there is now a critical “revolving door” between new media content creators and academia. While these college tours are undoubtedly designed to bring in revenue for the series and its creators, the tours also function, as the ABG video below makes evident, as a way of extending and popularizing scholarly discourses about race and media history.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Awkward Black Girl College Tour Promotional Video

Similarly, the creators of the dramatic web series, Orisis, blog about their college tour of Historically Black Colleges. The blog includes on-going updates about distribution mechanisms and screenwriting instruction, among other things.

The current popularity of black web series in the new media Promise Land, then, finally actualizes what scholars like Anna Everett and Lisa Nakamura have been hoping for. As Nakamura writes, “those with expertise in the fields of race, ethnicity, and media studies…can bring their expertise to bear on digital media while it is still in formation.2”

Comments by artists like Rae and the producers of The PuNanny Diaries, along with the web show college tour as media/deconstruction workshop, demonstrate that critical expertise has indeed come to shape new media formation but, importantly, that influence pivots multi-directionally.

Osiris College Tour Poster

After watching more web series and Internet videos than television shows this year, I continue to grapple with two additional questions: Does it matter that the typical black web series is short-lived, and is television really dead?

If web series constitute a kind of Promised Land-realized for academics and artists alike, surely the ephemeral nature of DIY culture in general and of the average web show in particular has implications for any bold claims (like the death of traditional media) that I am tempted to make.3

Although there is an exhaustive amount of content available online, the reality is that countless numbers of black web series end abruptly and vanish completely after only one or a few webisodes have circulated. Case in point: the witty The Punnany Diaries and its irreverent critique of black cultural institutions ceased production before a discernible story arch was completed. Any number of other series seem to simply run out of funding (like the producers of Awkward Black Girl almost did before launching their Kickstarter campaign). Other black web series tend to halt when it becomes clear that their particular niche is too small to attract the attention of cable or small-market television networks. In fact any number of creators of successful web shows have expressed a desire to be on television now or in the near future. For instance, suggesting that television is very much an end goal, the Between Women crew is currently soliciting support from its viewers to help the web series migrate from Internet-to-television, with BET and WE apparently being the preferred contenders.

Regardless of if we think of new media’s relationship to television as “remediation” or “convergence,” television is not dead. In my house, the current production cycle of black web series re-animates a familiar tool of work and play—for now.

Image Credits:
1. Between Women Homepage Screen Capture
2. Osiris College Tour Poster

Please feel free to comment.

NOTES

1. ”Success of ‘Awkward Black Girl’.” CNN, October 6, 2011.”
2. Lisa Nakamura. “Digital Media in Cinema Journal, 1995–2008.” Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (2009): 159. See also Ann Everett “Click This: From Analog Dreams to Digital Realities.” Cinema Journal 43, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 93–98.
3. I also wonder if it matters that most black web series produce very few episodes before expiring. If this production trend continues, perhaps the longevity of an individual series will matter much less than the sum of the constant flux of new titles and projects.

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http://flowtv.org/2011/12/grinding-like-everybody-else/ http://flowtv.org/2011/12/grinding-like-everybody-else/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:22:49 +0000 TreaAndrea Russworm University of Massachusetts Amherst http://flowtv.org/?p=12704

Kobe Bryant and Call of Duty Advertisement

Irrespective of moments of controversy, like when Kobe Bryant appeared as a sniper in a Call of Duty television advertisement, the holiday season is the time of year when video games are most in public view. This year is no different, as the onslaught of games released between now and the New Year constitutes a veritable gamers’ paradise of mostly sequelized titles that run the gambit of genre and style. As most of us are probably aware, since mainstream journalism has been sounding the alarm for several years now, top selling video games are more profitable than high grossing films. There are a lot of reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that across generation, race, and class, games have become a—if not the—dominant form of entertainment in American households. Last year’s top-selling game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 eventually exceeded $1 billion in sales. Call of Duty 3, just released in November 2011, grossed over $400 million on the first day, making it the all-time best-selling property of any form on a single day.

In addition to exposing these bottom line figures for the industry as far-outpacing sales in music, films, and television, popular news sources have also informed us that gamers are not who we thought they were. The impression of the average gamer as a socially awkward fourteen-year-old sequestered in his parents’ basement has been recanted and deconstructed enough in reports from news outlets as disparate as Fox News, The New York Times, and NPR. Recently, Michael Abbott has identified a convincing set of popular tropes used in mainstream media to talk about games. Suffice to say, it is now trendy and obligatory to document the cultural saliency of video games. These leading accounts about the “grown up” and changing status of gaming culture has led to a public reassessment of gaming demographics—of who we imagine plays games—in ways that create, I argue, some problematic assumptions about authorship, agency, and consumption.

To this end, there is now greater public awareness around the fact that the average gamer is thirty-five, and aging. It is also much touted that at least forty percent of gamers are women, and it is probably not surprising that nearly seventy percent of American households have a console or PC that is used for gaming.1 What may be less apparent in the current public consensus about the existence of a more diverse mass population of gamers is, as Adrienne Shaw has pointed out, that “new definitions of game culture are never used to question the constructed past of video game culture’s insularity, maleness, and youthfulness.”2 That is, not only does the current public discourse around games treat any deviations from the gamer stereotype as new and changed, such accounts are often ever skeptical of both the “original” (constructed) image of gamer as white geek and the “new” (improved-less-reclusive-hipper-more-diverse gamer) in ways that are ultimately re-pathologizing.

Regarding race, two trends have emerged as a part of the corrective shift toward an emphasis on gaming demography in popular discourse. The first of these trends draws attention to the fact that the vast majority of mainstream narrative games fail to include characters who reflect the now common sense notion of a more diverse gaming consumer base. The most popular video games continue to reinforce a de facto white maleness within game worlds. In fact, part of the (sometimes) subtle, but nonetheless consistent, media backlash against game culture is the popular conviction that video games are violent, racist, and sexist. Statistical analyses like the widely-cited report conducted by Children Now are used to confirm the rampant circulation of stereotypes (such as “African American females were far more likely than any other group to be victims of violence” )3 and to criticize the under-representation of minorities in games (as such the “Virtual Census’” findings that “white characters account for 84.95 percent of all primary characters,” while outside of sports games, black people are mostly “featured as gangsters and street people”).4 I am not suggesting that these comprehensive analyses have not been both necessary and instrumental in illuminating some of the disappointing realities and need for systemic change in the video game industry. I am suggesting, however, that mainstream journalism often uses statistics like these to codify the conversation about games and race around issues of representation.

The popular iteration of this trend,as evinced in the Resident Evil 5 debates, argues that with representations of blackness in particular, we may rightly conclude that there are coons, bucks, winos, crack heads, minstrels, and gangstas galore. Another case in point: the recent discussion of Letitia, a black woman wino/dumpster-diver (is she homeless?) who appears in the critically well-received sci-fi futuristic thriller, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gamers, pundits, and bloggers have been swift and deliberate in demarcating Letitia, who has been called a character who “swims in the same dirty stream of ideas that gave America the welfare queen myth,”5 as emblematic of the ways in which image, voice-acting, and plot details combine to perpetuate stereotypes within video games—despite the much-acknowledged diversity of actual gamers. The responses to this image and to others like it demonstrate that popular audiences are primed to identify types and debate the extent to which such imagery is reductive, regressive, parody, or satire. Put another way, gamers, fans, and journalists are on the case when it comes to stereotypes and representational biases.

The other trend in this regard espouses a concern that even though video games, on the whole, reflect little cultural diversity that ventures beyond stereotype, —paradoxically—Black and Hispanic gamers are said to spend more money on games and play for more hours than other groups. What conclusions are we to draw from the finding that “Latinos, who play more per day than whites and form 12.5 percent of the population, are only 2 percent of characters”?6 Or, of the fact that low-income families play more games than high-income families? If it is commonly remarked that violence, racism, and sexism sell in games, and people of color, along with the economically disadvantaged, are playing games the most, is this ironic? Tragic? A cultural embarrassment?

Even though the intention behind a focus on gaming statistics may be to expose parity issues within the industry, there are ways in which amplification of the numbers narrows the conversation in unintended ways. For instance, is all too easy to be left with a compounding sense of passive, uncritical, and exploited minority gamers who spend a lot of time consuming the denigrated content of an already suspect medium. Further, the ways in which the shifting public perception of gaming relates to meta-discourses on race has consequences for how we as media scholars assess avenues for scholarly contribution.

A focus on demography and representation tempts us to miss the ways in which “new,” non-white, gamers participate in gaming culture in highly active, resistant, and, importantly, productive ways. What is most interesting to me in this moment is the overlooked fact that Black and Hispanic gamers are creating media every day to criticize problematic practices, speak directly to developers, and to start their own new media production companies. Here I am thinking of a growing, vibrant list of personalities, authors, machinima directors, and actors in the gaming community, including: the writers at Minority Gamer, Cori Roberts of Gameinatrix, Blackessence, the many hosts of Raw Game Play, Michael Hurdle, The Latino Gamer, and many more. For example, Blackessence produces video tutorials about machinima, a style of filmmaking that uses game play footage. She also maintains a YouTube channel intended for women gamers, and she talks extensively about what it means to be a black “Lady Gamer.” Her videos have become so popular that she was invited to visit Electronic Arts (the developer that distributes The Sims). She explains, describing her visit: “And for some reason the company knew who I was, well that Sims department. They knew who I was because they saw the video, the video had been passed around, and everybody recognized me everywhere I went.”7

Click here to view the embedded video.

The verb that I use in my analyses of new media productions like the ones created by Blackessence is “grinding.” Grinding most often refers to the way players “level up” and improve their characters in time-consuming role-playing games. The term emphasizes the monotony inherent in the leveling process but it is also often used with pride. As I survey the ways minority gamers actively contribute to gaming culture, the term has also come to signify the laborious persistence and measure of creative violence that minority cultural agents exercise within a culture that frames them primarily as consumers and outsiders. As Michael Hurdle, founder of Raw Game Play, says at the end of one of his many assessments of the industry, “We’re grinding like everybody else.”8 In a “state of the union” address on the topic of racism, entrepreneurship, and gaming, Hurdle further insists: “No matter what, no matter how much racism is out there, we’re going to strive, we’re going to trump…. I just want to let you guys know, we are here to stay, we aren’t going anywhere.”9

These new media authors and their productions are a substantial part of gaming culture; they offer complex demonstrations of how players negotiate gaming and spectatorial practices. The works challenge us to broaden our notions of gaming culture by decentralizing the game and its images as objects of study and by amending who we identify as agents in our conversations about race and video games.

Image Credits:
1. Kobe Bryant and Call of Duty Advertisement
2. ESA’s Gaming Demographics
3. Michael C. Hurdle

Please feel free to comment.

1. Reports by Nielsen, The Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Entertainment Software Association have been particularly influential in this regard.
2. Adrienne Shaw, “What Is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies,” Games and Culture 5, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 408 (emphasis mine).
3. Children Now, Fair Play?: Violence, Gender and Race in Video Games, December 1, 2001, 23.
4. Dmitri Williams et al., “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games,” New Media & Society 11, no. 5 (2009): 825, 830.
5. Evan Narcisse, “The Worst Thing About ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’,” Time, August 31, 2011, http://techland.time.com/2011/08/31/the-worst-thing-about-deus-ex-human-revolution/.
6. Dmitri Williams et al., “The Virtual Census,” 831.
7. EssenceOfTruth. “Get It Right, People: The Difference Between Girl Gamers, Female Gamers, and Lady Gamers…” YouTube, October 19, 2010.
8. RawGamePlay, “DO NOT CLICK UNLESS YOUR READY TO HEAR THE TRUTH,” YouTube, August 31, 2010.
9. RawGamePlay, “Racism In The Video Game Community Full Version (Watch If You Dare),” Youtube, September 7, 2010.