Gaming Race in Brazil: Video Games and Algorithmic Racism

This article argues that video games can function as a critical platform from which tointervene into the conjunction between embodied experiences of racialisation and theproduction of race as a category within the cybernetic forms of identification ofplatform capitalism. Through analysis of the role played by race in video game culturesin Brazil, I explore both the affordances of video games and the limitations of their usein the fight against the specific forms that racism takes in the digital age. I carry outan in-depth analysis of two recent games, Dandara (2018) and Mandinga (2021),which both construct powerful critiques of “algorithmic racism” in Brazil, by focusingon the relationship between their representation of race at the levels of narrative, plot,and imagery and the ways in which the player interacts with the games’ algorithms.While Dandara exploits tensions between the two to draw attention to the mix ofauthoritarian and “instrumentarian” (Zuboff) power in contemporary Brazil, Mandingahighlights parallels between its gameplay and the processes of racialisation to presentalgorithmic racism, which often goes unnoticed, as an act of violence that inherits someof the procedures of slavery and the social systems that perpetuated it.