DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR IN US VIRTUAL POP CULTURE
1
A formal or informal behavior which evokes a negative response and negates social
conformation is referred to as a deviant behavior (Goode 2015). A deviant behavior can be
voluntary or involuntary. It can take place in the virtual as well as in the real world. One such
virtual world is constituted by the video game pop culture in the United States. Video games in
US are not only games or the sites of stereotypes in US-they represent a space to engage
American discourses, racial dynamics and ideologies (Gray 2012). This space, however becomes
a medium to exhibit deviant behavior, where black Afro-Americans male gamers are at the
receiving end and their white counterparts are at the giving end. The paper thus, aims to find out
the workings of racial discrimination as a deviant behavior and its effects on the victims in the
virtual gaming community of Xbox Live.
Afro-American male gamers in the United States experience the biting tooth of racial
subjugation in the virtual gaming network of X-box Live (Ramos 2014). The resultant stigma
associated with racial hatred instigates the white majority to label the black body of the Afro-
American males as the site of deviance-and this is done through a course of linguistic profiling-
that the male black gamer sounds within the space. Researchers have used the method of virtual
ethnography in order to find out that in the midst of a series of instigating, questioning and
provoking, what comes to the fore is an entire gesture of racism. Thus, the labelling of the male
black gamer’s body as the site of deviance is synonymous to executing a deviant behavior-as a
result white masculinity is conserved. It is important to understand that video game is a
phenomenon which is socially organized- it is implicated to produce social meanings and power
relations, expressed by and sustaining those meanings. Thus, as a hierarchical structure race
manifests itself in the socially acknowledged culture of video games (Higgin 2015). In the sport
oriented video games approximately 80 % of Afro-Americans are depicted as aggressive people

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Deviant Behaviour in US Virtual Pop Culture

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