Gaming race in Brazil: Video games and algorithmic racism

This article argues that video games can function as a critical platform from which to intervene into the conjunction between embodied experiences of racialisation and the production of race as a category within the cybernetic forms of identification of platform capitalism. Through analysis of the role played by race in video game cultures in Brazil, I explore both the affordances of video games and the limitations of their use in the fight against the specific forms that racism takes in the digital age. I carry out an in-depth analysis of two recent games, Dandara (2018) and Mandinga (2021), which both construct powerful critiques of "algorithmic racism" in Brazil, by focusing on 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 of authoritarian and "instrumentarian" (Zuboff) power in contemporary Brazil, Mandinga highlights parallels between its gameplay and the processes of racialisation to present algorithmic racism, which often goes unnoticed, as an act of violence that inherits some of the procedures of slavery and the social systems that perpetuated it.