Luke Hernandez
Student Bio
Luke Hernandez is a scholar and poet from San Antonio, Texas. Luke is a Master’s Student in Emerging Media studies where their research interests are critical game studies, Latinx studies, and Queer studies. In Spring 2022 Luke is going to graduate with an MA in Emerging Media Studies. Their master’s thesis is titled Ludo-Latinidad: How Latinidad is made and played out in games. Their research work involves how digital games and play embody larger political systems such as borders and identity.
About
Thesis Title
Ludo-Latinidad: How Latinidad is Made and Played Out in Digital Games
Committee
Josef Nguyen (Chair), Hong-An Wu, Juan Llamas-Rodriguez
Degree
MA with Emerging Media Studies
Abstract
This thesis investigates the cultural practice of play in digital games where the play of Latine characters evoke border violence. By providing the framework of Ludo-Latinidad, it reveals the way global games, such as Overwatch and Valorant, systemically recode and remediate systems of border infrastructure, bordervelliance, and necropolitics as fundamental aspects of play. Despite the way Overwatch and Valorant are set in the speculative future, this framework draws out the imperial ideologies seeped into the game play where violent border ideologies and racialization are being reproduced. Ludo-Latinidad also interrogates the everyday practice of play as a participatory process that implicates every player in the performances of borders. It also pivots thinking of game worlds as playable borderlands where enforcement and disruption of border ideology takes place among players in a multitude of ways. While the encoded ideologies of borders may haunt the intended play of Latine characters, this research concludes with the possibilities of resistances enacted through play where ruptures of borders are possible. In the playable borderlands, oppressive systems are present but so are.
