Thread by @enibolas

Day 8/10 of my anti-racist #gamestudies thread series.

Today: 'The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture’ by @sorayamurray

olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16…

It’s one of the most thorough surveys of what postcolonial game scholarship actually does and why it matters.

Why should we believe any theoretical analysis of games matters? Murray points to a ‘mock formula’ by @molleindustria in 2016:

“You think [pop culture artifact] is cool and progressive but here’s how it reinforces [capitalism/sexism/militarism]’.

Mic drop. Critical work done.

The subtext of this formula is a bit like: Those who can do, those who can’t theorise. It’s probably designers, not scholars who make the *real* difference, the real interventions.

Instead of rejecting this view Murray uses this provocation as a starting point for her article.

She translates it into a question: Is it acceptable to just write about problems with capitalism, racism, and militarism in games and then assume some critical work has been done? Is that enough? What’s the actual point of that?

This moves the discussion to the question what postcolonial game studies actually is: As discussed in yesterday's thread, it’s a field that unpacks the the legacies of colonial history and imperialist expansion in the context of games: how are these histories still present?

There’s been lots of studies which have tried to answer this question. Murray divides this work into two thematic categories: 1) work on the representation of territories, peoples and resources in games, and 2) work on the way mechanics and game logics reinforce values of empire.

In a nutshell, one project of postcolonial game studies is to see “games as play-training in the value systems of empire”. Games create spaces which tell us what to do through ideological frames & mechanics.

Things like colonial maps, fog of war etc. discussed yesterday.

The problem: Who is interested in this kind of work? Murray says that writing on games (journalism, game studies) is mostly focused on entertainment not politics.

We want ‘product reviews’ not complicated subtle essays on games’ nuanced relationship to power.

To a degree, doing critical game studies in academia is stigmatised as well: games have entered scholarship at a time when technical training was prioritised and unis went increasingly corporate.

Quantifiable outputs, performance ratings: The whole neoliberalism shenanigans.

Corporate academic culture affects critical studies. The labour by minorities becomes a product. The product generates performance points for the kind of structure it wants to change. That's the paradox of inclusion (Murray points to Sara Ahmed's ‘On Being Included’ - big tip!!)

What does this mean for critical studies?

There’s the risk that “critical cultural interventions into games do nothing beyond their own performance of the radical, hip, perhaps the politically right-minded—but without any substantive change.”

2 things critical work can't do:
1) spoon feed suggestions on how to make a game (we should trust devs's critical ability to do so themselves!)
2) make value judgments about whether a game is “good”.

But analysis can intercept public debate & apply pressure towards public good

But what is ‘public good’? It has to do with players’ and designers’ lived consciousness and responsibility.

It's an “ongoing commitment to social awareness and self-reflexivity within the larger context of understanding one’s self as a part of a public sphere”.

Murray introduces the concept of 'affirmative sabotage’ to pinpoint what critical analysis can do:

We can sabotage the idea that there are singular answers to global problems while affirming our existence as ‘planetary creatures’ living with contradictions.

Affirmative sabotage is a move away from binaries of ‘globalisation’ (masters/slaves, users/used) and towards ‘planetary’ awareness. “We must struggle to discipline our minds away from global domination, expansion, and think instead of the fragility of our relations to ‘planet’”

For academics, affirmative sabotage is a tool to rethink our relationship to academia: how far do I want to play the institutional game? do I bow to quantification culture or embrace the messiness of our field? The point is not better products but larger political interventions