Bibliographie complète

What could a history of game studies be from the perspective of a queer Chickasaw feminist scholar? Should this be a disciplining manifesto, a polemical call to arms for radical transformation, a survey of the existing scholarship that has thus far framed games ludologically as fun, as sportsmanship, as design, or as epic struggles for political power where the player rather ominously wins or dies? I’m a bit of an interloper as a recent arrival from Indigenous studies to video-game studies, a field that represents both the end of history and the ahistoricity of pop-culturally–oriented archives that are presentist at best, and at worst, complicit with an industry derived from settler militaristic technologies and platforms and compelled by niche markets to innovate faster and faster to saturate more and more households at the structural level of occupation. And then there is the problem of what the history of game studies has been: Greco-Roman, European, cis white male, heterosexual, orientalist, algorithmic, and code driven with the techno-optimism of Silicon Valley alongside Jane McGonigal’s fundamental belief that games have and will save the world once they unite the collective brain power of all the gamers and bend them to a single task—and if not all that, then peak 1980s geekery with a hint of liberal multiculturalism thrown in, if Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is anything to go by. It is as if the history of game studies has only ever been an imperial read-only memory to be mined, played, and spatialized within the conscriptions of conquistador archives already known and yet to be discovered.

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