Watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The danger of a single story,”1 I realized the importance of audience relationships with gaming and other media. She touches on how, growing up in Nigeria, she was only exposed to books and literature concerning white characters who had life experiences that she never had. In addition to having different ethnic backgrounds, these characters also had different life experiences given their geography such as eating apples and playing in snow.
When audiences, specifically minorities, are not represented in the media they consume, it creates an emptiness, a desire to have a story that they can truly connect with. This is why the past and current hegemony of cishet white males in media is so problematic and damaging. Earlier in the course, we touched on a game that reworked Passage to feature LGBTQ representation, abandoning and critiquing the original white, heterosexual relationship that was featured in the game. By reworking Passage, those developers stressed the “danger of a single story.”
This leads me into our current work on the final project, as well as serious games. My group’s final project is a game that attempts to replicate someone’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease, and this will be done through a Twine game. Through this game and our research, we are trying to shed a light on a minority of people: those experiencing Alzheimer’s. This game tries to give players another perspective that is not their own; we want to challenge them by offering something that they may not be used to. All of the final projects in the class are important because inherently they all offer different perspectives, being created by dozens of different individuals with different life experiences. This magnitude of creation is what defeats the “single story.”
Works Cited:
- “Tedtalks: Chimamanda Adichie–the Danger of a Single Story.” TED, 2009.
I agree with this! One thing I find very frustrating in many kinds of media is how the big companies do not let representation through in what they create. Many cartoon shows cut LGBT representation for fear of international censorship and such. Yet at the same time they celebrate the tiny amount of representation they have, because they are trying to cater to every audience. But with all of these contradictions, when they confuse themselves on what they want, they go to some kind of “default”, which is the white cishet experience. Having this as a default is damaging because again, this isn’t really representative of the whole world; this is just one kind of group (as you said before).
This got me thinking about the single story centered around gay characters in media specifically. Stories around these characters have historically been a wrestling with identity, whether it resulted in tragedy like Brokeback Mountain (2005) or whether it was allowed that happy ending like in Love, Simon (2018). Many of Chimamanda’s encounters with the single story seem to be rooted in misinformation, that people she met in the US were surprised that people from Nigeria could have such similar experiences to them. While the representation of gay and other LGBT characters has, recently, come to center around that experience, many are still frustrated that the only story LGBT people can have exclusively centers around this one part of their identity. This has led to a push for more casual representation, where we follow a diverse protagonist who breaks this cishet white model but the whole story does not center around this diversity.