Thread by @enibolas

Day 7/10 of my anti-racist #gamestudies thread series.

Today: Playing Subaltern: Video Games and Postcolonialism by @Prosperoscell.

It takes us to postcolonial game studies. How does colonialism infiltrate games? And how does it affect Indian players?

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

First, it would be strange to believe that (post)colonial ideas don’t affect how we play and perceive games in general. But Indian players in particular are directly confronted with their colonial history when playing stuff like Empire: Total War or East India Company.

Videogames feature spaces, political systems, and ethics deeply imbued with colonial values. How to unpack them? Mukherjee introduces 2 key concepts:

1) Postcolonialism: this refers to the interaction between imperial culture and the complex of indigenous cultural practices.

2) Subaltern: a perspective or voice 'from below' which can’t ever 'know and speak itself'. It’s a bit more complex that that and has been discussed in different ways by postcolonial theorists. This meaning is based on Gayatri Spivak’s idea that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’.

These terms immediately inform the mission of this article. It is to examine the postcolonial in videogames. How does it become a medium of subalternity? Mukherjee looks at 1) maps and spaces in RTS games, 2) postcolonial identity, and 3) representations of the “orient”.

First, colonialism has often been described in terms of the ludic, and vice versa.

Think of war names like the “Great Game”, “playing fields of Eton” etc. In Age of Empire or Tropico, players are involved in colonialism and possession.

Games and warfare are very entangled.

Although empires are mostly gone now, some principles have survived. Take cartography, maps. These elements are central to empire-building video games like Age of Empires series, Empire: Total War, Rise of Nations, and Empire Earth.

Maps are key facilitators of action.

If you’ve ever played an RTS, they are all about ‘remapping’ the world, e.g. by removing ’fog of war’, constructing buildings, transforming spaces to become ‘our’ space.

But there are glitches. Glitches which western audiences and game scholars often fail to acknowledge.

But glitches which are obvious to Indian players. In Empire: Total War, “tea plantations are shown a century ahead of the British discovery of tea in Assam in 1824” while indigo plantations and important Islamic religious centres are missing. Misrepresentation of ashrams, too.

This raises the question of subalternity: How do game elements in empire themed RTS constrain players to follow wrong assumptions about their culture? And what makes them so difficult to protest against?

There ARE games where protesting against British colonisers is possible…

Mukherjee discusses Bhagat Singh, one of the first FPS made in India. The protagonist is an India freedom fighter, the enemies are policemen in the British Raj. The game is a platform for ideological protest.

But, structurally, it uses mechanics that use the same power fantasy.

What about games like Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry where we are a black freed slave turned pirate? This puts us into ‘uneasy shoes’, because this opens the floor to ‘identity tourism’, a concept coined by Lisa Nakamura. We take the role of an “Other”, appropriating it for fun.

When we walk through the Brazilian favela in Max Payne 3 or through an unnamed African country in Far Cry 2, these places construct touristic spaces for assumed white male players, disregarding the perspectives of people from these places.

They perform sth called orientalism.

Orientalism, a term from Edward Said, is the binary division into East and West from the point of view of European colonisers:

“Images of the orient are always being manufactured and only represent things that colonial imperialism wishes to show and see”.

Games use it a lot.

Mukherjee points to the character Dhalsim in Streetfighter 2 who performs 'yogic' postures, wears torn saffron shorts and a skull necklace indicating his Indian mystique. He can spew fireballs, levitate and likes curry and meditation.

So, like, how Europe wants to see the East.

Other bizarre representations can be found in Hitman: Silent Assassin’s Temple City Ambush level, and COD 3’s ‘Persona Non Grata’ mission which completely erases any Indian civilians and the Indian army from a shootout happening in India.

All of this shows us how the 3 aspects of postcolonialism, cartography and identity are like cogs in a well-oiled machine of orientalism.

This was a bit long but I think it's worth stressing 3 takeaways for game devs who are thinking of challenging colonialism in their games.

1) Remember that reversing the roles between goodies and baddies isn’t good enough. It still reproduces colonial logics of dominance

2) making marginalised “Others” playable isn’t good enough either because it sets you up for identity tourism

3) rethink spaces, maps & logics.