Abstract
This chapter investigates relations between race and humour in digital games. Registering these complexities, we then focus on irony with particular focus on ‘Nuclear Gandhi’: the widespread gamer meme that an overflow error in Civilization caused Gandhi to appear as a hyper-aggressive character which, ironically, clashed with the historical record from which the game drew design and aesthetic legitimacy. However, Civilization eminence Sid Meier has recently stated that this is false: the humorous Nuclear Gandhi is in fact a complex entanglement of technical, social, and cultural factors. Drawing on Bhabha’s discussion of ‘sly civility’, we theorise Nuclear Gandhi as ‘cybernetic irony’ in which the collective element of humour is mediated by techno-racial claims to objectivity.
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Jayemanne, D., Kunzelman, C. (2022). Cybernetic Irony: Racial Humour from Mecha-Hitler to Nuclear Gandhi. In: Bonello Rutter Giappone, K., Majkowski, T.Z., Švelch, J. (eds) Video Games and Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88338-6_13
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