David J. Leonard, "To the White Extreme: Conquering Athletic Space, White Manhood, and Racing Virtual Reality"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Importance of sports games to the industry
- A racialized project
- Black coolness as constructed by white ideology (minstrelsy, not in any way transgressive or liberatory)
- Love/hate for blackness is present in sports games
- Black = athletic, white = intellectual
- Extreme sports as an "alternative" white masculine athletic space (rebellious, dangerous), reaction against "pollutant" blackness in "mainstream" sports
- White male athletes conquer urban black spaces (such as the ghetto, absent of black people in digital game versions), or wild natural landscapes (frontier imagery)
- Affirm/reinforce "common sense" notions about race, gender, sexuality
- Naturalized privilege/superiority of whiteness (race = non-white)
- "it is futile and contemptible to treat cultural productions as pure texts."
- White male as victim, subsequent white male backlash (Beck's Loser as an example of this? Seems a bit different than what Leonard is describing, maybe.)
- Risk-taking, sexual prowess, male bonding and small community, rule-breaking, "alternativeness," individual masculine success, performativity are all celebrated in extreme sports
- Non-white male characters in extreme sports games are either tokens or caricatures
- Non-white female characters are exotic sex objects
- Cultural cache of hip-hop authenticity within virtual ghettos empty of black people, existing to be dominated by white male extreme athletes
- Complete erasure of women in some games, hypersexualization as objects of male pleasure in others
- BMX XXX as exemplary, not isolated and unique, in its construction of a racialized, sexualized space for white male athletic superiority
- (Virtual) white male disregard for the law (graffiti, property damage, skater "mayhem") is marked as badass or extreme, while in reality black males are brutalized and incarcerated for the same crimes
- Would have liked more discussion by Leonard of the relationship between "mainstream" sports games that capitalize on black stars and extreme sports games.