Katynka Martínez: Pacman, MacArthur Park, and El Imigrante
Filed at 2:51 pm on August 9, 2007 in Identity, Digital Divide • Leave a comment
Katynka discusses new Los Angeles narratives created by urban youth. Who would be chasing Pacman if he were navigating the city streets of LA?
A group of Los Angeles high school students recently created a version of Pacman that is based on people that they have interacted with in their Pico-Union and Koreatown neighborhoods. (See the games here). This fact alone - that is, their choice of characters - suggests that the games will be quite different than any games these kids have ever played. The protagonists of the games include a hot dog vendor who is pursued by demonic ducks, a boy being chased by alcoholic homeless men, and an immigrant being pursued by minutemen. The new narratives of Los Angeles that are presented in these games serve to challenge the images of LA that are offered in games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Using games to create a place-based narrative also signals an intervention in the discourses around critical media literacy and urban studies. The urban studies scholar Raúl Villa uses the terms “barrioization” and “barriology” to discuss Chicano cultural production in greater East Los Angeles. Barrioization refers to the “combined use of the law, the media, and the built environment in sociospatial repression.” Barrioization would refer to such things as municipal regulations that criminalize street vendors and zoning laws that allow numerous liquor stores to be built in low-income neighborhoods. Barriology refers to the “culturally affirming, place-specific, hybrid knowledges and practices that result from interaction with destructive urbanization.” Villa focuses on cultural artifacts such as community newspapers, punk rock music, and murals.
The kids that created the LA video games offer a new kind of culturally affirming artifact that is informed by destructive urbanization. By creating a new narrative for an old video game, the kids give voice to the sociopolitical and cultural struggles that are rooted in their community’s everyday spatial practices. The games that they created point to the possibility of drawing from digital media literacies to create a counter-discourse that serves as a response to the threats of both institutional and neighborhood violence.
View the games here.
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Tags: civic-engagement, game-design, immigration, minority-youth, race-ethnicity, urban-studies
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