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What a game made to understand thousands of words reveals about language What a game made to understand thousands of words reveals about language
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4 Little Black Sambo, I’m Going to Eat You Up!
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Published:November 2015
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Abstract
This chapter looks at the controversial appearance of a racial slur in a game about language and how that teaches one about our expectations for language, and games. The focuse of this chapter is on the 5th Cell’s Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts, which features an enormous dictionary of terms, any of which can be written to summon objects to solve puzzles in the game. Including, the word “sambo”, which is a racial slur for a derogatory way to refer to a black man. This chapter looks at the origins of the racial slur and its connections to the book Little Black Sambo. This chapter emphasizes the fact that it is not the inclusion of this word that is troubling, since the game developers did not recognize it as a racial slur, but rather people’s reaction to the inclusion of this word into the game. On the one hand, it is tempting to celebrate this new ignorance, as some players suggest. If a more accepting and less bigoted society is one we want to live in, then there is some sign of cultural success when a racial slur obsolesces. But on the other hand, this very neglect points to a social ill even worse than racism itself: disavowal. We must strive for more than the destruction of stereotype, slur, and other visible signs of bigotry, as if eliminating the symptoms also cures the cause.
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