Wednesday, February 07, 2018

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang is a graphic novel that tells the story of Anda, a chubby girl who begins playing a role-playing game online as part of an all-female guild after someone comes into her school's computer class to suggest girls start playing games as girls.  Anda meets another girl in the game who convinces her to kill "gold farmers" within the game because gold farming is technically against the rules of the game. Anda ends up meeting one of the gold farmers, Raymond, who speaks a little English and she learns that he is actually from China and he hurt his back in a factory and now his job is to farm gold in this online game for money. Anda eventually convinces him to attempt to unionize so he can get health insurance for his job(!), but his boss finds out and he gets fired. But don't worry - he's fine in the end.

I'm so torn by this book.

On one hand, the whole thing has a pro-feminist slant and it's nice to see a female character who is not super thin with perfect blonde hair. It's also refreshing to see someone address economic differences and quality of life issues from a global perspective.

But.

Why is someone being allowed to come into a school to tell girls to play video games? Is this what's happening in 2018? 

More importantly, the whole idea that a teenager can just solve this person's problem from across an ocean is ridiculous and the entire ending got me really hepped up. There's a weird white savior issue, but more than that, everything dealing with Raymond is really a way for us to see Anda's personal growth. Which, I'm sure would happen, but it's sort of marginalizing of non-white characters to be used only as a way to build up your white hero. 

Anyway.

I found the whole thing problematic.

Someone please tell me what to think.
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1 comment:

  1. The Angry Taoist2/07/2018

    So, first of all, video games teach a lot of good things, like problem solving and logic. They can even teach empathy and morality. They can teach coordination. They are a mode of artistic storytelling when done well and if someone struggles with reading, perhaps video games give them the escape they can enjoy. Also, girls are being encouraged because for too long, science has been a boys' club kind of thing. Video games could get girls interested in programming, building computers, mathematics, etc. It can be a backdoor hobby that becomes something artistic or academic. I'm not saying there have never been girls in science, but it has traditionally been shown as being more interesting to boys at a certain age and it's time for that to change.

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