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In the last decades, digital games have moved from niche to mainstream. As more people play, talk about, and engage with these artifacts, they have become an important part of contemporary cultures, giving rise to game literacy—the set of skills needed to meaningfully engage with video games. While the potentials of game literacy have, to some extent, been already discussed in the literature, we have not adequately discussed the need for a game literacy that problematizes the sociocultural dimensions of gaming, including the hegemonic, exclusionary rationales implicitly disseminated through mainstream gaming. In this chapter, I outline a decolonial model for game literacy, remarking how the reflection about the gaming circuits of production and dissemination should be part of any initiative that aims at dealing with critical and creative competences towards gaming, and how these are crucial for any citizen in contemporary societies.

The present paper discusses questions related to the histories of videogames, more specifically in how we approach videogames in Global South. By using Zeebo, a Brazilian console produced in the late 2000s as an epistemic tool, I discuss the limitations of universalist, mainstream-centric epistemological models for exploring videogames as cultural phenomena. By investigating Zeebo’s discourses about piracy and players in the Global South, I argue that this platform can be seen as a partial decolonial project, destabilising conventional historical narratives about South-North relationships in videogames, but refraining from challenging a mainstream, Global North oriented epistemology. This exploratory work, therefore, elaborates on how a decolonial project of history of videogames, one that is more epistemically just to Global South, could be sought.

Repairing Play: Toward A Black Phenomenology of Play In this talk I offer the term "repairing play" or play that both repairs the damages wrought by colonialism, and is itself a form of reparations, in an effort to consider how we might advance an understanding of play that is inclusive of BIPOC people. I focus in on the Black American experience in order to better theorize a moment of repair, and consider how torture is memorialized in play through song. I also will draw on examples from Black artists and game designers in order to help show how their work in repairing play draws from the tradition of Black radical aesthetics. Bio: Aaron Trammell is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He writes about how BIPOC experience the games they play. Specifically, he is interested in how games and play further values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek culture. Aaron's work has been cited in Wired and featured on National Public Radio. It has been published in Game Studies, Games & Culture, New Media & Society, and G|A|M|E. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia editor of the Sounding Out!

Counter-Hegemonic Representations of Japanese Cultural Icons in Sekiro Abstract: Through fictional or non-fictional narratives, media representations of the past communicate specific interpretations, which lets users negotiate the past's prospective meanings. Additionally, these cultural constructions of the past are produced and disseminated in the present. Hence, the existing hegemonic power relations influence the depiction and recognition of cultural communities in the construction of the past. Therefore, the approach to framing cultures in pop-culture representations becomes a preponderating factor in how people perceive such cultures and periods. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, at first glance, can be considered as a game that follows the same vein of exploiting the western craze for the ninja archetype, as seen in its predecessors like the Onimusha and Tenchu series. However, it takes a bold stance against the persisting ‘self-Orientalist’ framework by reclaiming the ninja myth from marketized exoticization. Borrowing from Said’s theory of Orientalism, I would first like to analyze the existing self-Orientalism in depicting and marketing Japanese cultural icons. I would then like to highlight how this game is not an exoticized cultural artefact and further discuss the implications of such a portrayal in the contexts of representation and authenticity. I conclude that by undercutting innate stereotypes and using inherently Japanese characters, the game reappropriates the agency to depict Japanese cultural icons, from a non-Oriental, non-exoticized viewpoint. Thus, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice becomes a stand-out in the video game industry in this respect. Bio: Geoffrey Fernandez is a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Pilani campus. His doctoral research examines the use of culture, mythology, and folklore in video games.

Recent research has started focusing on the representation of history in videogames. Such representation is almost always of mainstream history and usually presented from a Western perspective. Set in a fictitious Himalayan kingdom in South Asia, Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4 is arguably a crucial example of how history is represented using Western and even colonial frameworks and where the narratives that do not emerge from conventional written history are almost always rendered invisible. Using the frameworks of Subaltern Studies and “border-thinking,” this essay attempts to unpack issues of Orientalism and “colonial difference”; it then engages with postcolonial digital humanities and postcolonial game studies to comment on how history is represented in videogames and how the neglected gaps and silences in the game are important in constructing the historiography in videogames. In the process, the essay engages in a debate with current notions of videogame-historiography.

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play.

This essay considers how the experience of Black folk descended from slaves in North America helps us to rethink a definition of play that has been largely informed by scholars and philosophers working within a White European tradition. This tradition of play, theorized most famously by Dutch Art Historian Johan Huizinga, French Sociologist Roger Caillois, Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, and New Zealander Brian Sutton-Smith reads play in a mostly positive sense and asserts that certain practices, namely torture, are taboo and thus cannot be play. I argue that this approach to play is short-sighted and linked to a troubling global discourse that renders the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) invisible. In other words, by defining play only through its pleasurable connotations, the term holds an epistemic bias towards people with access to the conditions of leisure. Indeed, torture helps to paint a more complete picture where the most heinous potentials of play are addressed alongside the most pleasant, yet in so doing the trauma of slavery is remembered. In rethinking this phenomenology, I aim to detail the more insidious ways that play functions as a tool of subjugation. One that hurts as much as it heals and one that has been complicit in the systemic erasure of BIPOC people from the domain of leisure.

While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like 'Mass Effect' or 'Dragon Age', Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. 'Video Games Have Always Been Queer' argues that the medium of video games itself can-and should-be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D.A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game 'Portal', or what Eve Sedgwick offers 'Pong', Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in 'Octodad' or explore the pleasure of failure in 'Burnout: Revenge', Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games-because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

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.

This article considers larger methodological questions of what political work is undertaken when scholars engage in postcolonial critiques of video games within academic intellectual frameworks. What is postcolonial game studies, and what is its purpose, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures? After surveying some of the key literature in postcolonial game studies, the author provides critical frameworks for understanding the means by which these approaches have largely been excluded from video game studies, and their crucial function in operating against the grain of profit and innovation-driven discourses in games. This work is the extension of a larger discussion of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance discourse within the liberal academy, and particularly the functions of postcolonial, postmodern and other critical cultural scholarly interventions. In this article, the author argues for a postcolonial approach to game studies, but one that refuses to be reduced to an institutional cultural labor of due diligence, or according to Slavoj Žižek’s term, a ‘culturalization of politics’. Through the work of Stuart Hall and Sara Ahmed on intellectual diversity work within the context of large systems and academic institutions, this article asserts that the perception that critical theorizations (like postcolonial game studies) exert pressure on efficiency and innovation is greatly outweighed by the rich toolkits they bring to video games as maturing cultural forms.

As a media form entwined in the U.S. military-industrial complex, video games continue to celebrate imperialist imagery and Western-centric narratives of the great white explorer (Breger, 2008; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Geyser & Tshalabala, 2011; Mukherjee, 2016). While much ink has been spilt on the detrimental effects of colonial imagery on those it objectifies and dehumanises, the question is why these games still get made, and what mechanisms are at work in the enjoyment of empire-themed play experiences. To explore this question, this article develops the concept of ‘casual empire’, suggesting that the wish to play games as a casual pastime expedites the incidental circulation of imperialist ideology. Three examples – Resident Evil V (2009), The Conquest: Colonization (2015) and Playing History: Slave Trade (2013) – are used to demonstrate the production and consumption of casual empire across multiple platforms, genres and player bases. Following a brief contextualisation of postcolonial (game) studies, this article addresses casual design, by which I understand game designers’ casual reproduction of inferential racism (Hall, 1995) for the sake of entertainment. I then look at casual play, and players’ attitudes to games as rational commodities continuing a history of commodity racism (McClintock, 1995). Finally, the article investigates the casual involvement of formalist game studies in the construction of imperial values. These three dimensions of the casual – design, play and academia – make up the three pillars of the casual empire that must be challenged to undermine video games’ neocolonialist praxis.

Game Devs & Others: Tales from the Margins tell the true stories of life in the industry by people of color, LGBTQIA and other marginalized identities. This collection of essays give people a chance to tell their stories and to let others know what life on the other side of the screen is like when you’re not part of the supposed “majority”. Key Features This book is perfect for anyone interested in getting into the games industry who feels they have a marginalized identity For those who wish to better diversify their studio or workplace who may or may not have access to individuals that could or would share their stories about the industry Includes initiatives aimed at diversifying the industry that have a positive or negative impact on the ongoing discussions Coverage of ajor news items about diversity, conferences aimed at or having diversity at its core of content and mission are discussed Included essays are written with as little game dev specific jargon as possible, makeing it accessible to people outside the industry as well as those in the scene but that may not have all the insider lingo

Peut-on envisager une autre histoire du jeu vidéo ?

"Les bandes dessinées, chansons, films, jeux vidéos, musées, reconstitutions, romans, séries télévisées et voyages occupent de plus en plus de place dans la vie des élèves. Comment exploiter en classe ces biens, loisirs et services culturels d'histoire pour que les élèves posent de mieux en mieux certains actes mentaux que les historiennes et historiens doivent effectuer lorsqu'elles et ils adoptent leur pratique? Pour répondre à cette question, les auteures et auteurs de cet ouvrage explorent les usages scolaires possibles et souhaitables des produits qui ne sont pas associés à l'histoire savante et sur l'exploitation didactique de ce que la Loi québécoise sur les biens culturels désigne comme "?une oeuvre d'art, un bien historique, un monument ou un site historique ... une oeuvre cinématographique, audiovisuelle, photographique, radiophonique ou télévisuelle?". Les auteures et auteurs s'intéressent à des oeuvres qui ne sont pas créées pour l'école, mais qui peuvent néanmoins servir aux enseignantes et enseignants pour faire apprendre l'histoire aux élèves."--Résumé de l'éditeur.

From #Gamergate to the daily experiences of marginalization among gamers, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from the latest research and from popular games such as World of warcraft and Tomb raider, Woke gaming examines resistance to spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players toward progressive ends, illustrating the power and potential of video games to become catalysts for social justice

"Queerness in Play examines the many ways queerness of all kinds - from queer as 'LGBT' to other, less well-covered aspects of the queer spectrum - intersects with games and the social contexts of play. The current unprecedented visibility of queer creators and content comes at a high tide of resistance to the inclusion of those outside a long-imagined cisgender, heterosexual, white male norm. By critically engaging the ways games - as a culture, an industry, and a medium - help reproduce limiting binary formations of gender and sexuality, Queerness in Play contributes to the growing body of scholarship promoting more inclusive understandings of identity, sexuality, and games."--Provided by publisher.

To date, game studies has largely undertheorized the co-production of postcolonial stories, exploration, and mapping in games. Furthermore, as has been noted before (Carr, 2006), the work that has been done on postcolonialism and play so far often leaves the player out of the equation, even sometimes as a theoretical construct. Yet player experience is crucial to understanding such games, as narratives are not only built on the ‘master’ level of game mechanics, but also through the personal stories players processually (Ash, 2009; Thrift, 2008) develop through their journey of touring and mapping, thereby developing spatial stories (De Certeau, 1984; Jenkins, 2004; Lammes, 2009) that may present us with conflicting spatio-temporal accounts. Through a comparative and collaborative auto-ethnographic analysis of Civilization VI (Sid Meier, 2016) – a turn-based strategy game – we want to push this discussion further and improve our theoretical understanding and analytical purchase of the triad relation between narrative and postcolonialism in games, thereby contributing to the field of postcolonial theory and game studies. Drawing on postcolonial geography, science and technology studies (STS), non-representational theory and game studies, we argue that games, through their playful, explorative and emergent qualities, are a powerful means of rethinking and reimagining colonial (hi)stories in this postcolonial era (Lammes, 2009, 2010) including issues of spatio-temporality, cartography and the hybrid relation between women and machines.

The postcolonial has still remained on the margins of Game Studies, which has now incorporated at length, contemporary debates of race, gender, and other areas that challenge the canon. It is difficult to believe, however, that it has not defined the way in which video games are perceived; the effect, it can be argued, is subtle. For the millions of Indians playing games such as Empire: Total War or East India Company, their encounter with colonial history is direct and unavoidable, especially given the pervasiveness of postcolonial reactions in everything from academia to day-to-day conversation around them. The ways in which games construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics, and society are often deeply imbued with a notion of the colonial and therefore also with the questioning of colonialism. This article aims to examine the complexities that the postcolonial undertones in video games bring to the ways in which we read them.

This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience ? including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.

Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.