Digitally Divided and Undivided

When boys play digital games in Southern Peru, they put themselves at risk of being insulted as “indios” or “Indians” - by their friends, by other Peruvians, and by players displaced around the globe. This process of racialization gets linked to a particular kind of playing style or “gaming persona,” and it implies a kind of digital divide between “Indian” and “non-Indian” players: someone who plays as an “Indian” is a player is imputed to play selfishly, and obnoxiously, with little commitment to one’s teammates, and in blissful ignorance of the finer details of game play. In this short talk, I give an account of the ways that young men in Southern Peru encounter and make use of this racialized persona in game play, largely to create new forms of masculine solidarity.