Games of Empire Ten Years on (original) (raw)
Related papers
Gamevironments, 2020
This article paves way for a materialist analysis of the games industry as 21st century imperialism that is economically and culturally structured to cultivate anti-democratic norms that lead to fascist movements against those who question or seek to change the status quo. While much research has studied the politics of reactionary movements in gaming cultures, few have paid attention to the relation between the games industry as part of an imperialist economic system, the chauvinistic ideals symptomized in their cultural products, and the reactionist consumer audiences they attract and cultivate. As I argue, the economic structure of the industry as 21st century imperialism leads to perpetual anti-democratic crises that are maintained by reactionary forces that cultivate, attract, and form fascist grassroots organization. To conceptualize this dynamic, I invoke the labor aristocracy theory as suggested by Friedrich Engels and V.I. Lenin. This theory helps highlight the material basis from which consumers of digital games are bribed to become ideologically aligned with the chauvinism that the imperialist nature of the games industry is justified by. I also invoke W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of a public and psychological wage to highlight the chauvinistic tendencies that the games industry cultivates via their products and marketing, in which the lack of democratic and equitable representation provides the reactionary consumers a sense of superiority. Together, these approaches account for the economic and cultural bases of both the games industry and its reactionary consumers. By anchoring my analysis in critical theories on imperialism and race, the article identifies the root causes of organized harassment and chauvinism in game cultures, as well as how the industry as 21st century imperialism benefits from and is protected by these forces of reaction.
Introduction to the Special Issue on Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Open Library of Humanities, 2018
The treatment of colonialism in video games, barring a few notable exceptions, is marked by a Western and, specifically, late 19th-century imperialist bias. Simultaneously, in the past two decades of multifaceted research and the development of robust theoretical frameworks in the still fledgling discipline of game studies, postcolonial discourses, whether they comprise critiques of imperialism or neocolonialism, have not been prominently highlighted until very recently. A coherent effort to bring together the current research on postcolonialism in video games was also urgently required. Further, the past years has seen a rather persistent, albeit unexpected, emergence of a pro-colonial or pro-imperialist discourse in mainstream academia that even justifies the continuance of empire as an ameliorating influence on the people of the so-called developing countries, most of which had formerly been colonized by European powers. Thus, it is the aim of this issue to address this epistemic omission and counter such bias where it exists by also bridging video games research with larger discussions of postcolonialism in other humanities contexts and disciplines. The various articles in this special issue offer a range of perspectives from epistemological power to theory and praxis in critical academia, to contexts of production and practices of play, to close readings of postcolonial traces in video games. These varying approaches to the analysis of video games and their societal and historical contexts open up the debates further to a diverse set of topics ranging from board games to phone games or from mainstream high-budget console games to indie titles that question colonialism. As video games address issues relating to orientalism, subalternity, and hybridity as well as the current ambiguities in conceiving nationhood and the postcolony, the articles in this issue will also likely adumbrate further serious commentary that will develop both game studies research and current conceptions of the postcolonial.
On the Cultural Inaccessibility of Gaming: Invading, Creating, and Reclaiming the Cultural Clubhouse
2018
This dissertation uses intersectional feminist theory and Autoethnography to develop the concept of "cultural inaccessibility". Cultural inaccessibility is a concept I've created to describe the ways that women are made to feel unwelcome in spaces of game play and games culture, both offline and online. Although there are few formal barriers preventing women from purchasing games, playing games, or acquiring jobs in the games industry, this dissertation explores the formidable cultural barriers which define women as "space invaders" and outsiders in games culture. Women are routinely subjected to gendered harassment while playing games, and in physical spaces of games culture, such as conventions, stores, and tournaments. This harassment and abuse is intensified toward female journalists, developers and academics who choose to speak publicly about sexism within the culture, particularly since the 2014 rise of Gamergate. This dissertation illustrates the parallel development of games culture and women's continued exclusion from it, from the exclusionary sexism of J. R. R. Tolkien's writing to the development of the "Gamer" as a fixed (and stereotypically cis-male) identity in the pages of video game magazines of the 1980s and '90s, to the online "Gamer activism" of today. At the same time, I also explore my own experiences as a female gamer and academic in the 2010s, using projects I have been a part of as a means of reflecting on developments in the broader culture. I first discuss a short machinima (a film made within a video game) that Elise Vist and I created within the 2007 Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Lord of the Rings Online entitled Lady Hobbits. Lady Hobbits becomes an entry point to consider the historical cultural inaccessibility of women's representations in seminal male-dominated media such as The Lord of the Rings. I then discuss the gender and games advocacy group that I co-founded at the University of Waterloo, The Games Institute Janes (GI Janes), and the many gaming events that v we ran, comparing the experience of our gender-integrated and women-only game nights. The challenges I experienced organizing GI Janes fuels my analysis of the cultural inaccessibility of game play for girls and women, as demonstrated by the tangled gender dynamics at play in the eSports community and Super Smash Brothers fandom. Lastly, I discuss my experiences as a staff member, and eventual first female editor-in-chief, of game studies publication First Person Scholar (FPS). This chapter interrogates the cultural inaccessibility of writing and publishing about games for women in the academic field of game studies, and the ways in which game studies' links to gamer identity replicate games culture's troubling sexism. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the more recent connections between games culture, Gamergate, and conservative political groups such as the Alt-right. The conclusion asks how women can study games culture and the politically-motivated violence with which it is has recently been linked if doing so puts us at risk of becoming a target of harassment and abuse. It underscores the importance of future social justice-oriented work in academia and at large. In summary this dissertation moves from examining the historical inaccessibility of representation and participation (chapter 2), to the inaccessibility of game play (chapter 3), to the inaccessibility of participation in the discourse of games culture (chapter 4), before finally moving to a conclusion about Gamergate and politics in 2018 and how cultural inaccessibility has become a problem that is much larger than just games culture (chapter 5).
Gender, Place & Culture, 2021
This article examines representative games from Zapak.com: India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between masculinity and colonialism within digital geographies, in postcolonial spaces. Three of the four games chosen here, Sleeping at the Meeting, Zombie Pirate and Yoga Teacher, are representative of games categorized as ‘Girl’s Games’ on Zapak.com: where the ludic engagement is limited to dressing and undressing of white women in a variety of professional or social contexts. The fourth game Bipasha’s Beach Blaze is a continuation of such reductive stereotyping, albeit in the different but culturally significant site of Bollywood. The four games were selected using a case-study methodology and represent discrete but related artifacts. Following a survey of key literature, the authors address the limitations of traditional game studies approaches and propose a replicable methodology located at the intersection of two epistemic frames: one of critical masculinity studies and the other of ludology. Through analyzing the strategic ideologies behind the production, circulation and the game-play of these digital artifacts we argue that Zapak.com not only enables online sexism but also becomes a representative digital space where anxious performances of postcolonial masculinity – that has its historical basis in India’s colonial legacy – can be materialized. Further in highlighting the status of these ‘Girl’s Games’ as artifacts that do not allow for any substantial ludic or narrative involvement – we emphasize the need to constantly interrogate digital spaces as sites where hegemonic ideologies about race, gender and colonialism are reproduced and reified.
Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years after Games of Empire
Games and Culture, 2020
2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come.
Alone In A World of Objects: Videogames, Interaction, and Late Capitalist Alienation
Alone In A World of Objects: Videogames, Interaction, and Late Capitalist Alienation Videogame criticism has, in the past few years, progressed beyond early questions posed about the suitability and legitimacy of games as artistic objects worthy of study. Certainly theories surrounding play, as Alexander Galloway notes in his Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, have proliferated throughout the 20 th century, from Johan Huizinga to Jacques Derrida, and videogames as a form slot into these cultural analyses quite ably. Furthermore, the rise of more aesthetically or politically minded analyses of videogames has taken Roger Ebert's famous claim that videogames could never be art and displaced it with a wealth of literary, cultural, and media critics who take the artistic quality of videogames as a matter of course and instead ask how they function and signify as art particularly. As Bill Nichols puts it, the task of the critic "is not to overthrow the prevailing cybernetic model but to transgress its predefined interdictions and limits" -we must reject regressive thinking and encourage progressive analyses of the digital landscape (Nichols 1988, 45). In this spirit, we see scholars like McKenzie Wark, whose Gamer Theory interrogates the gamification of the world and the introduction of the gamer archetype on the cultural scene. The need that contemporary theory must fill by reading videogames, Wark suggests, is a "primer…in thinking about a world made over as gamespace, made over as an imperfect copy of the game" (Wark 2007, 24). This folding of the game into the world is at once tragic, as the marketized, quid-pro-quo gamespace "is now the very form of the world" (Wark 2007, 17), and emancipatory, as the game allows the gamer to "[realize] the real potentials of the game, in and against this world made over as gamespace" (Wark 2007, 25). In their Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Grieg de Peuter expand this line of thinking into a more directed anti-capitalist critique, aligning what Wark calls "gamespace" with the concept of precarious affective labor, popularized by, among others, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in Empire and Multitutde. Taking their lead from Negri and Hardt's utopian visions of the potential of affective labor,
The International Journal of Humanities & Social Studies, 2019
Introduction During the 2014 Modern Language Association Convention (MLAC), postcolonial game studies were selected as one of the topics for discussion (Risam, 2016). Although there has been scant discussions about the relationship between cyber culture and the postcolonial in terms of the videogame and, particularly, with respect to the multiplicity of identities and narratives that videogames explore (Apter 1999), the videogame can actually become a medium for integrating a variety of voices from many parts of the world at geographical, cartographical, cultural and spatiality levels and in relation to empire-building strategies that videogames deploy. This can include temporality particularly with respect to the historical contexts that the games represent. From this light, a major challenge is to explore how empire can 'play back' (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009; Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2003) by deploying folklore as a postcolonial ideology. When Lisa Nakamura (2012) discusses gender, race and sexuality in the rhetoric of online games, she critiques sexist and racist behaviour, by encouraging readers to see it in terms of the structure of the gaming universe rather than in the light of something enacted by individuals. In media fandom spaces, there is a split in criticism, namely, that which pertains to the culpability of individual participants and that which alludes to structural discrimination. A second major challenge is therefore how to explore characterization in folklore to inspire moral upbringing of players in the videogame culture of non-violence. Digital games scholarship investigates issues like race, gender and sexuality focusing on representations, namely, the racist and sexist images and narratives that are found within games themselves, virulent types of discrimination not only through these representations but also at the hands of other players and resistance to this discriminatory culture of gameplay. This paper investigates how the oral tale can offer an alternative vision of the dominant ideology embedded in mainstream games and not a mere criticism of existing games for their shortcomings. Thus, it is no longer enough to point out neocolonial visions, the global capitalist drives, the sexism and militarism in games, it goes further to consider issues of diversity, inclusion, representation, and the defiance of hegemonic power structures. It is not a simple 'culturalization of politics' (Žižek 2008), on how postcolonial game studies functions, but an effort to create conversation around post coloniality and the meaning-making of video games. It addresses itself to the ways in which gamers and designers of oral literatures can accommodate and not only resist a hegemonic, Westerncentric game industry via practices of modding, counter-gaming, and alternative game design.
Videogames and the Technicity of Ideology The Case for Critique
Game Studies, 2022
This essay proposes that the method of Ideology Critique still has much to offer the discipline of game studies, particularly given the field's overarching concern with the concept of "agency." Contra posthumanist approaches which characterize videogames as an entangling of human and nonhuman agencies in democratic assemblages, this essay argues that videogames ought to be viewed as technical arrangements (apparatuses) which constitute their users as “agents.” Posthumanist theories, due to their elision of abstraction from their mapping of the world, miss this fundamental aspect of agency, which Ideology critique can effectively highlight. Following the work of French Philosopher Louis Althusser, this paper demonstrates that ideology is best understood not as a set of conscious beliefs, nor even merely as a set of “representations” in the way that Cultural Studies tends to discuss representations, but instead that Ideology is a technology which constitutes individual subjects, linking subjectivity to our technical being-in-the-world. In so doing, Ideology produces what we understand as “agency.” Ideology critique, when taken as far as it can go in this direction, offers game studies a fundamental starting point for videogame analysis: that videogames are sites of production in which corporeal movement becomes legible as a form of “agency” by subjecting such movement to a grid of computational, economic intelligibility.