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Virtual History examines many of the most popular historical video games released over the last decade and explores their portrayal of history. The book looks at the motives and perspectives of game designers and marketers, as well as the societal expectations addressed, through contingency and determinism, economics, the environment, culture, ethnicity, gender, and violence. Approaching videogames as a compelling art form that can simultaneously inform and mislead, the book considers the historical accuracy of videogames, while also exploring how they depict the underlying processes of history and highlighting their strengths as tools for understanding history. The first survey of the historical content and approach of popular videogames designed with students in mind, it argues that games can depict history and engage players with it in a useful way, encouraging the reader to consider the games they play from a different perspective. Supported by examples and screenshots that contextualize the discussion, Virtual History is a useful resource for students of media and world history as well as those focusing on the portrayal of history through the medium of videogames.

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.

Burn the Boards (Causa Creations, 2015) portrays the life of an Indian worker who recycles electronic waste in a precarious environment. Phone Story (Molleindustria, 2011) simulates the journey and process of production and consumption of mobile phones, from Congo and China to Pakistan. Whereas Phone Story is described as ‘an educational game’ that addresses the player directly as a consumer, Burn the Boards is a resource management puzzle that creates compassion through role playing. These games bring to the fore a hidden reality of the everyday that is ingrained in historical relationships and power dynamics, drawing attention to what Michael Rothberg has recognized as ‘exploitation in an age of globalized neo-liberal capitalism’ (2014: iv).  This article explores how these games denounce the smartphone industry by using that same technology. For this purpose, we refer to Game Studies theory on procedural rhetoric; values and ethics; and the role of the player, combined with questions of (neo)colonization, globalization, and neoliberalism drawn from Postcolonial Studies. Our analysis shows the complicity of users and their confrontation with the extreme vulnerability of others, emphasizing how the coloniality of power works in our global consumer society. Thus we study the power relationships described and established by these games, the affective reactions which they seek to trigger, and their potential to transform players from passive observers into ethical players and consumers.

This article comes out of a longer project looking at digital commemorations of slave rebellion. In this excerpt from that work, the author considers the issues at stake in videogamic representations of colonial Saint Domingue and its denizens, particularly for their depiction of the prehistory of the Haitian Revolution. In two mainstream videogames, both part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the history of Saint Domingue, its legacy of slave resistance, and the Haitian Revolution are made into fodder for an interactive entertainment experience that intervenes in and reshapes history in a complex manner. There are several issues at stake, which the author focuses on exclusively in terms of the commodification of Saint Domingue. First, the games place the history of slave revolt into the hands of game players of diverse ancestry, allowing for a redistribution of ownership over narratives of emancipation and empowerment. Second, the games identify themselves as tampering with history, and their mélange of fictional characters and real personages seems to risk rewriting the history of Saint Domingue’s legacy of slave revolt and—by extension—of the Haitian Revolution itself. Given recent events in the United States, and increased attention to strategies of black resistance such as the Black Lives Matter movement, it seems all the more imperative that our depiction of slave revolts in popular culture be handled with care. And yet, the author finds a subversive maneuver visible in the games: the use of untranslated language, especially Haitian Kreyol, may work to preserve and limit the player’s mastery over these histories. This article provides a tour of this complex territory of digital Saint Domingue.

Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. The issue of equality transcends the current focus in the field of Game Studies on code, materiality, and platforms. Journalists and bloggers have begun to hold the digital game industry and culture accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged behind. Contributors to this volume examine portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

The in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays in Queer Game Studies use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. This volume reveals the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games, demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world and establishing an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture.

In this article, I argue that digital games hold the potential to influence processes of cultural memory related to past and contemporary forms of marginalization. By bringing cultural memory studies into dialogue with game studies, I account for the ways through which digital games and practices of play might influence historical discourses and memory politics pertaining to marginalized identities. In order to demonstrate this, I conduct an analysis of Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, a digital game which includes representation of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade and its racist systems. This analysis is then contrasted with statements by two critics, Evan Narcisse and Justin Clark, about how Freedom Cry highlights specific marginalized identities and represents the past through the game form. These statements, coupled with my game analysis, make the case for a concept that I term ‘counter-hegemonic commemorative play’. This makes visible a form of potentially cathartic power fantasy within a historical struggle, alongside emphasizing a form of designed recognition of marginalized identities within contemporary historical discourses and memory politics.

Traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace.Deftly interweaving history, culture, and critical theory, Anna Everett traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace, particularly during the early years of the Internet. She challenges the problematic historical view of black people as quintessential information-age outsiders or poster children for the digital divide by uncovering their early technolust and repositioning them as eager technology adopters and consumers, and thus as coconstituent elements in the information technology revolution. She offers several case studies that include lessons learned from early adoption of the Internet by the Association of Nigerians Living Abroad and their Niajanet virtual community, the grassroots organizing efforts that led to the phenomenally successful Million Woman March, the migration of several historic black presses online, and an interventionist critique of race in contemporary video games. Ultimately, Digital Diaspora shows how African Americans and African diasporic peoples developed the necessary technomastery to ride in the front of the bus on the information superhighway.Anna Everett is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; and Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949.

This collection explores the relationship between digital gaming and its cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Encompassing key locations for global gaming production and consumption such as Japan, China, and South Korea, as well as increasingly significant sites including Australia and Singapore, the region provides divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies of specific games and gaming locales to macro political economy analyses of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows, this collection provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation, and consumption in the region.

This article presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented and represent themselves in video games. First, it analyses how various genres of European and American video games have constructed the Arab or Muslim Other. Within these games, it demonstrates how the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world have been flattened out and reconstructed into a series of social typologies operating within a broader framework of terrorism and hostility. It then contrasts these broader trends in western digital representation with selected video games produced in the Arab world, whose authors have knowingly subverted and refashioned these stereotypes in two unique and quite different fashions. In conclusion, it considers the significance of western attempts to transcend simplified patterns of representation that have dominated the video game industry by offering what are known as 'serious' games.

Postcolonialismo y feminismo utilizan conceptos comunes para el análisis y de/construcción de las narrativas dominantes. En países donde la colonización ha hecho estragos, las mujeres ponen en valor su empoderamiento como protagonistas de su destino. En esta línea las mujeres han aportado sus propuestas feministas para una nueva visión de lo colonial/postcolonial. Este trabajo pretende hacer un chequeo por aquellos trabajos videográficos de mujeres que, después de haber sido colonizadas, han realizado una descolonización cultural, situando su creatividad en varios continentes.

En este artículo, se aborda la temática del video como tecnología de género. El video es el medio de creación artística que algunas mujeres están utilizando para crear lo que se puede llamar imá genes en femenino. Se hace un acercamiento al discurso feminista y los presupuestos teóricos que se han tomado para el análisis del discurso videográfico de las mujeres. Se presenta un breve análisis de los trabajos de las videastas Pola Weiss y Pilar Rodríguez.

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos reflexionar sobre el surgimiento de la categoría Fotografía Latinoamericana hacia fines de la década del setenta. Una reflexión sobre las prácticas fotográficas que refleja un intento de descolonizar las definiciones y categorías sobre la fotografía realizada en América Latina.Desde aquel momento, se estableció un concepto que englobaba bajo una misma rúbrica la fotografía latinoamericana y la representación del Ser latinoamericano, su identidad y su historia compartida en las diferentes naciones de la región. Una definición que cambia en los años noventa donde puede observarse una renovación de los modos de representación que complejizan las miradas sobre el pasado colonial y la heterogeneidad de nuestras identidades.Tras el análisis general de la búsqueda de definir una práctica cultural desde una perspectiva poscolonial de la fotografía latinoamericana, buscaremos centrarnos en el caso de la fotografía brasileña en dicho período.

This paper discusses the visuality processes in Latin America since the called «decolonial turn» approach. It analyzes the structural relationship between visual practices and global power arising in the context of the modern world system. It seeks to study the relationship between visual technologies, discourses and practices and the analytics of the coloniality of power, knowledge and being. It addresses the different types of hierarchies produced through a visual dispositive in the context of the international division of technology labor, the racialization of the population, and the global economy of images.

Indigenous Art New Media and the Digital convenes leading scholars, curators, and artists from the Indigenous territories in Canada, the United States of America, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It brings forth urgent conversations about resistance to colonial modernism, and highlights the historic and ongoing use of technology by Indigenous communities and artists as vehicles of resilience and cultural continuity. This issue ignites productive dialogue around the definitions of new and digital media art and practice-based work within the framework of Indigenous art and theory

Transference, Tradition, Technology explores Canadian Aboriginal new media and references the work of artists within a political, cultural and aesthetic milieu. The book constructs a Native art history relating to these disciplines, one that is grounded in the philosophical and cosmological foundations of Aboriginal concepts of community and identity within the rigour of contemporary arts discourse. Approachable in nature but scholarly in content, this book is the first of its kind. A text book for students and teachers of Canadian Aboriginal history and visual and media art, and a source for writers, scholars and historians, Transference, Tradition, Technology is co-produced with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton; and Indigenous Media Arts Group, Vancouver.

This collection of essays provides a historical and contemporary context for Indigenous new media arts practice in Canada. The writers are established artists, scholars, and curators who cover thematic concepts and underlying approaches to new media from a distinctly Indigenous perspective. Through discourse and narrative analysis, the writers discuss a number of topics ranging from how Indigenous worldviews inform unique approaches to new media arts practice to their own work and specific contemporary works. Contributors include: Archer Pechawis, Jackson 2Bears, Jason Edward Lewis, Steven Foster, Candice Hopkins, and Cheryl L'Hirondelle.