‘Why not Leeloh?’ and Other Disasters:
Children’s Computer Games as a Site of
Cultural Contestation, Corporate Corruption
and, Despite all that, Cognitive Development.
Daphne Desser
The intellectual need to which this article responds is articulated
well by Kathryn C. Montgomery, co-founder and President of the
Center for Media Education (CME), a D.C.-based nonprofit organi-
zation public interest group dedicated to ensuring that the elec-
tronic media serve the needs of children and families; she writes:
A comprehensive, multidisciplinary research agenda is
urgently needed to guide the development of digital
children’s media, including systematic studies that
begin to assess the ways in which children interact with
the new media and the impact on children’s cognitive,
emotional, and social development. Unfortunately,
although market research for new media products and
services for children and adolescents is growing at a fast
pace, formal academic research on the impact of this
emerging new media culture is lagging behind. (160-
161)
The emotional need to which this article responds is less easily
pinned down, but to simplify, let me say that I intend to respond to
the following quotation taken from user-reviewer “TxMike
Houston, Tx, USA, Earth” on IMDb, the Internet Movie Database.
Our granddaughter is visiting this week so one of the
DVD rentals was “Lilo & Stitch.” My first question, why
didn’t they spell her name ‘Leeloh’? That would have
been easier to pronounce correctly…..Secondarily,
while I in general like the animation style used, all of
the Hawiians [sic] were drawn with these rounded pig-
like noses and very heavy legs which are not attractive
at all.
WORKS AND DAYS 43/44, Vol. 22, Nos. 1&2, 2004
While it might seem mean-spirited of me to use this passage as a
starting point for my discussion of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch computer
game for Playstation One, I have to say that studying the creative
process behind this computer game—which began as an idea for a
children’s book set in Kansas (a boy and his alien dog type story)
and eventually morphed into a multi-million dollar marketing cam-
paign with significant buy-ins from the Hawaii Tourist Bureau and
in which the boy from Kansas becomes a Hawaiian girl and the lost
alien finds a home in Kauai for no compelling reason beyond a tour
guide’s cheesy explanation of the Hawaiian term ohana to one of
the writers who was vacationing in Hawaii at the time—has not put
me in a generous mood (Fischer).
There is a long history of American revulsion toward Hawaiian or
Native Hawaiian bodies that TxMike’s passage expresses. Similar
descriptions of fear and disgust at encounters with Native
Hawaiian women’s differing presentations of their bodily and
rhetorical selves appear in letters from missionary women. This is
from Nancy Ruggles, a missionary woman who arrived in 1820
with the first boat, the Thaddeus:
Had a visit from the chief, his two wives, and two wid-
ows of Tamahahaha, with numerous train of attendants.
The chief was dressed in English attire and appeared
well. The wives and Queens were dressed in China
dresses on account of our being on board. They gener-
ally go almost naked. The Queens are monstrous
women, judged to weigh about 400 pounds
each…Their heads were crowned with a wreath of yel-
low feathers. The sight of white women was a novelty to
them. They expressed a desire to become acquainted
with our customs, were much pleased at the idea of
writing, tried themselves, and succeeded very well.
They ate with all the simplicity of untaught barbarians,
without politeness, or even decency.
Any analysis of the computer game Lilo & Stitch cannot be sepa-
rated from the history of American colonization, illegal annexation,
and consumption of Hawaii as an object of touristic desire, and
thus the latter part of this article will address the particular histori-
cal and cultural injustices this seemingly innocent computer game
perpetuates, making of its players accomplices in such crimes.
I’ve had a strong (perhaps exaggerated) sense of social responsi-
bility (although one, perhaps, that Montgomery might approve of)
associated with this article since I first described it to my daughter’s
preschool teacher. “Oh, so many of our parents don’t think about
whether the computer games should be played at all. Perhaps you
could come talk about your research for one of our parent-educa-
tion nights,” she enthused. Whether or not I ever dare to follow up
on this invitation, the parents of my daughter’s classmates in
Hawaii have been my imagined secondary audience for this piece.
What would I say to them on such a parent-education night, know-
38
WORKS AND DAYS
ing that most of these parents would likely feel ambivalent at best
at being lectured on something of local concern by a mainland
white person from the university, that they tend to examine popu-
lar culture less critically than myself, and that they, unlike myself,
have become accustomed to portrayals of Hawaii in the popular
media that serve to bring attention and dollars to the islands while,
in exchange, they endure stereotypical responses such as the one
illustrated by “Texas Mike” above?
For me, a still relatively new assistant professor at the University
of Hawaii, reconciling my own lived experience here as my place
of work and homebuilding and child raising with my growing
awareness of Hawaii’s fixture in the popular imagination as an
object of touristic desire remains a riddle of which, on most days,
I can make little sense. Reading work by E San Juan, Jr. helps. He
writes:
Hawaii is one those words/terms so thoroughly
fetishised that is seems impossible any more to grasp
what its referent is, if that has not been completely
erased by its status as a signifier fashioning its own sig-
nified. Michener’s Hawaii, the film South Pacific, and
an avalanche of tourist brochures, travel promotions
and advertisements in magazines and on the Internet
have all guaranteed to fix and sanctify Hawaii as an
icon of the exotic, pleasure-filled Otherness or ‘Fantasy
Island’ and to reproduce infinitely. (71)
Try writing from this lost referent and you begin to feel the move-
ment of the islands beneath you. It’s not firm ground. Nevertheless,
it’s from this location that I intend to argue that the cognitive (and
other) skills gained when children play computer games, whether
or not they are transferable to other arenas, do have pedagogical
value, but that these skills are acquired in representational settings
in which stereotypical notions of gender, race, and ethnicity are
often perpetuated and in which children are not just constructed as
consumers, but as consumers of such reductionist stereotyping. I
analyze Disney’s Lilo & Stitch Playstation One computer game—
which additionally constructs its locale, i.e. Hawaii, as an object of
fantasy, desire and touristic consumption—to illustrate how this
complex of reduction works to constrain the pedagogical value of
current computer game technology for young children.
Cognitive Skills and Computer Games: At what Cost?
Underlying the academic debates on the potential cognitive
value of computer games is the back and forth between those who
look down on computer games and see them as obstacles to tradi-
tional and more respectable avenues for children’s growth and
development and those who, despite all the academic jargon
brought forth to the task, ultimately are saying; “Yeah, but, com-
puter games are fun. They’re challenging. Have you actually tried
Desser
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