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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.

"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.

In this article, I examine the Machinima film Finding Fanon II, by London-based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, for what it can tell us about the relationship between video gaming and the postcolonial. Evoking Frantz Fanon, one of the most piercing voices of the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), one of the most technologically advanced and, at the same time, scandalous video game series of the 21st century, Finding Fanon II amounts to a scathing critique of both the game series’ depiction of race and academic scholarship that has been defending the series on the grounds of its use of humour and irony. Shot in the in-game video editor of GTA V, Finding Fanon II lets this critique emerge from inside the game and as an effect of the artists’ engagement with it. By suspending the game’s mechanisms and programmed forms of interaction, the artwork brings their racialised logic to the fore, pointing towards the ways in which GTA V commodifies black men for the consumption of white players. This commodification has the effect of normalising and naturalising the precarious position of black people in Western society. What the artwork adds to this argument through its facilitation of a Fanonian perspective is a reminder that it is not only the gaming experience of white players that is framed in this way. Players with ethnic minority backgrounds might also accept the white gaze of the game as a given. Acts of self-commodification along the lines of a white Western rationality must thus be seen as a plausible new form of cultural imperialism promoted by the GTA series.

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.

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual and player practices. Until recently, the focus of research on the social and cultural aspects of video games has been on the traditional centers of the video game industry consumption, while the international flows of digital gaming remained largely underexplored. This chapter analyzes the cultural dynamics and technological processes influencing both video game development and the gaming culture in the Middle East. It conceptualizes Middle Eastern video games as imaginary spaces that entangle diverse and contradictory processes: global cultural flows, media policies of nation states, visions and engagements of private entrepreneurs, and migration and appropriation of Western game genres and rule systems. By mapping out dominant trends, the chapter offers the opportunity to think about processes and flows influencing the video game industry in the Middle East during the first fifteen years of its existence

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.

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.

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.

What are the implications of freedom and agency when a player exercises agency to prevent another player or a non-player character fromacting freely? Such a scenario, taken to an extreme, would be that of slavery and in turn, would raise questions about the nature of freedom itself. Video games have recently begun to address questions of slavery in earnest although academic discussions on games have not yet caught up: the presence of slavers in Fallout 3, the portrayal of racism in Bioshock Infinite (Irrational Games 2014) and the direct depiction of the Caribbean slave trade in Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry (Ubisoft 2013) are extremely appropriate cases in point. This article compares the representation of slavery in video games to that of slave narratives in earlier media in order to examine how effectively digital games are able to convey the horrors of slavery as a human condition and what they can teach about the notion of human freedom and agency per se.

Muslim members of the video game industry discuss the current state of Muslim representation within video games. This includes current problems with the way Muslims are represented and potential solutions. Our panelists come from all sides of the industry. From AAA, to indie, the panelists all have a unique voice and angle they would like to bring to the discussion. All panelists have grown up Muslim in western countries and have had to deal with certain adversities and challenges. It's through that experience that the panelists want to bring a lively discussion, backed with personal accounts and sources, that is not only engaging, but educational.

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.

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland.

Video games are an enormous segment of popular media today, comparable to tele-vision and movies. Moreover, video games represent a new form of media distinguishedfrom previous forms due to the interactive element, where game players have the ability to change and influence the game world. This paper contributes to the study of race and popular media by examining how race is presented in role-playing video games throughthe feature of avatar creation. Capabilities for avatar creation are analyzed in over sixty massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) in service as of early2010 and twenty offline role-playing games (RPGs) published over the past 10 years.The analysis shows that the vast majority of games, both online and offline, do not allow for the creation of avatars with a non-white racial appearance. Forcing an Angloappearance on avatars that purport to represent the player has the potential to reinforce asense of normative whiteness as well as shape the social composition of online worldsinto all-white virtual spaces, contributing to the creation of a virtual“white habitus.”

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual, and player practices. This collection includes essays from scholars from eight countries analyzing game cultures on macro- and micro-levels and investigates the growing transnational nature of digital play

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of “diversity” in the game industry. Yet the common practice of “adding women on” to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from “Where are women in game history?” to “Why are they there in the way that they are?” To do so, the essay strategically deploys Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams as an exceptional case study on the problem of gender in videogame history. Drawing from both media archaeology and feminist cultural studies, this contribution first outlines the function Roberta Williams serves as a gendered subject of game history. The remainder of the essay is organized as three short, non-chronological vignettes about specific objects and practices in the biography of Roberta Williams. Attention to the contextual specificity of Roberta Williams and her historical moment produces an alternative genealogy for gaming centered around relations of intimacy and labor in domestic space. Rather than producing a chronology, the method of this essay illustrates a historical critique by sketching a contour that unsettles the presumptive logic of what we must account for when we write about the objects and subjects of game history.

This article explores issues of racial essentialism and ethnicity in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW). The fantasy world of Azeroth mirrors elements of real-world race-based societies where culture is thought to be immutably linked to race. The notion of biological essentialism is reinforced throughout the gamescape. Race plays a primary role in the social and political organization of Azeroth. Among other things, race determines alliances, language, intellect, temperament, occupation, strength, and technological aptitude. The cultural representation of the respective racial groups in WoW draws upon stereotypical imagery from real-world ethnic groups (e.g., American Indian, Irish/Scottish, Asian, African, etc.).