Some of the topics that we discussed in week six of the course were platforms, interfaces, controllers, empathy, and even coding. I enjoyed the coding aspect of the week. I think that we have focused a lot on the unjust parts of society in this course, mainly in video games. However, it was baffling to see that there are definitely other aspects of the world that also deals with the mistreatment towards certain groups. In Julianne Tveten’s article, “Code is Political”, we learn about some other types of coding languages that tend to be undermined because they are not like the normal American English language. In some sense, this can be connected to genres in video games. Somehow, society has found a way to create barriers between things that differ in just the smallest manners.

In her article, Tveten states, “Because the advent of software engineering arose in the United States, major programming languages—even those developed outside the US and Europe (e.g., Ruby and Lua, which originated in Japan and Brazil, respectively)—are written in American English” (4). As we can see, Tveten is trying to prove that major programming is only written in the American English language across the board. With this, other forms of programming that are not in this language do not have a place in the computer science world. She goes on to give an example of an Arabic programming language. This code, which is written by Ramsey Nasser, is devalued and even causes people to question whether or not they can code without learning the English language (11). What I find interesting about this entire conversation is that languages can be translated, yet, society and the computer science world is reluctant to be open to other forms of software. It is clear that at times, problems with outsiders not being accepted in certain places, just because of a few minor differences, occurs. I mentioned earlier that the article also reminded me of genres in video games. Of course, there is a broad range of genres in games, which is a great thing! The only bad part is that certain genres are considered illegitimate and maybe not even a genre to begin with. I think this demonstrates that there is a concealed element at work. The only reason that a genre might be considered illegitimate is because it might be appealing towards a certain group of people. Drawing a connection to the coding languages, is it really fair to throw out a coding language just because it is not in the form of American English? What about the people that can relate to it, the people who can understand it easily over American English? I think these are the questions that really matter. We have a lot of work to do in society, and it starts with accepting the fact that different objects will be appealing to others. It is just a part of human life.

Overall, we can clearly see that issues that occur in the gaming world might actually be the subparts of some larger problems at work. We see this when certain game genres are designated to certain groups of people. Coding languages that are different than American English tend to be displaced and disvalued, probably because they do not fit with the “normal” American English speakers and audience. Sadly, Tveten also states that hackers may even deface a website just because it endorses something different (11). As a society, we need to be more open about diversity. There is no need to treat something or someone differently just because they do not fit our expectations or assumptions about how something should be.

-Andy Kissoon