Cheng Xu/M.S. in Philosophy, University of Miami
In Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back, author Souvi Mukherjee works on the analysis of video games from a humanities perspective. He argues that for a long time, issues related to gender, race and diversity have been closely followed, but in the last 20 years of game research, there has been little research on games from a postcolonial perspective. The reality is that video games in non-Western regions often focus on critical colonialism, while mainstream Western games like Assassin's Creed IV: Freedom Cry and Far Cry 2 also highlight issues related to postcolonialism.
Despite early attempts, it wasn't until the past two years that more and more game research publications began to explore issues related to the post-colonial era. The rich research materials in reality and the neglect of the theoretical circles form a strong gap, which shows the serious lack of relevant academic works. Therefore, the author believes that it is necessary to study and summarize the postcolonialism embodied in video games, and the book is based on an objective requirement of reality. Mukherjee's aim is to conduct a coherent analysis of video games and postcolonial theory, to use this book to make up for this missing point, to advance existing research on the attitudes of global players (especially non-Western players) towards these games, and to build an academic study of postcolonial thought from the perspective of games.
As for how to define postcolonialism, the authors point out in the book that the definition of postcolonialism is often ambiguous and complex because it involves many different cultural experiences and different regional colonial processes. The process and consequences of colonialism are usually manifested as "not only the extraction of resources, products and wealth from the conquered countries, but also the reorganization of the latter's economy, which has left them in an intricate relationship with their own countries, so that there is a two-way connection between human and natural resources between the colonized and the suzerainty, slaves, labour and raw materials are transported to the industrial countries, and the colonies become dumping markets for European commodities." ”（Loomba 2005, 21）
Readers should note that the term postcolonialism used by Mukhji does not in itself imply the end of colonialism, nor does it refer only to the post-independence situation of the former colonial powers. In societies that have gained independence, the legacy of the colonial era often continues to show enormous impact, and the emergence of new elites (whether new classes born under a new system or the transformation of old bureaucrats into new aristocrats) often does not alleviate contradictions, but exacerbates inequality and exploitation. In general, postcolonial theory encompasses a broad range of issues that are closely related to the former domination of European imperialism, as well as the responses of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania to these issues.
With the exception of video games, the connection between games and colonialism has long been a novelty, and before the advent and popularity of video games, the mutual reflection between the two has become a way for colonizers to express their dissatisfaction and rebellion against the colonialist system. In the 2001 Bollywood blockbuster Lagaan, the real-life sport of cricket became a medium for discussion of games and colonialism, and the film had a global impact after being nominated for an Oscar. The story takes place in an Indian village hit by drought, where the British, as conquerors and colonizers, levi unrealistically high land taxes on the villagers. The British commander, Captain Russell, gave the villagers a choice: if the villagers, who knew nothing about cricket, could beat the British in cricket, they would not have to pay taxes, otherwise they would have to pay the taxes even if they smashed pots and sold iron. The film tells the story of how the protagonist announces how Wan managed to train the "village team" and defeat the British in the game of the British and the rules set by the British, and also tells the protagonist to overcome the traditional caste prejudice in India to build an Indian "national team".
Poster for the movie Once Upon a Time in India.
In this film, the game of cricket represents not only the resistance of the colonizers to the tyranny imposed by the colonizers, but also involves the means to get rid of the colonization and the social problems after the end of the colonization - to achieve reconciliation and independence through non-violent means, and to establish an equal society of modern civilization in post-independence India. Cricket games from Britain foreshadowed the rules and "civilization" imposed on India by Western civilization, and the Indians, by mastering this foreign culture, in turn integrated into the colonizers' society and defeating the colonizers, also used the stimulation of foreign civilizations to transform and eliminate the "dross" in the local culture.
Similarly, video games often have similar themes and ideas. However, the author also realizes that the game with anti-colonial theme and even the enemy of the colonizers in the game is ostensibly against colonialism, but in fact there is still the arrogance of Western-centrism, just like in "Once Upon a Time in India", although the cricket game symbolizes the Indians getting rid of British colonial rule and entering the epitome of modern civilization, the game - and even "modern civilization" itself, is brought and imposed by the colonizers to the Indians, and the film itself reflects the wisdom and courage of the Indians at the same time. It also acknowledges the "transformation" and "progress" brought by the colonial system to Indian society. The British game of cricket itself contains the connotations of struggle, unity and equality, and the modern spirit brought by these Westerners has helped Indians overcome laziness, selfishness and hierarchy in traditional culture, so the British who saw this film can also claim to have brought the "liberation" of civilization to Indian society.
Assassin's Creed 3 game poster.
Similarly, Assassin's Creed 3 is a game that criticizes imperialism, and although the game carefully provides the best plot and graphics, the indigenous heroes in video games, as well as other historical elements constructed in the game, show that the perspective of the game is based on mainstream Western values, and the core of the Individual Heroism and various other heroic acts of the West is implanted in a man with the appearance of an indigenous population, so the end user of the game is still white. Male and Westerners. （Shaw 2015, 15）
Representing the Western stereotype of the Chinese "Fu Manchu".
An imaginary image of the other with distinctly exotic characteristics is ultimately used to satisfy the values and pursuits of traditional colonizer society, which in itself indicates that gamers agree with the colonizer's "transformation" of the colony and appreciate the spiritual taming of the colonizer. However, when it comes to the question of identity, there is a deeper ambivalence among the colonial subjects. On the one hand, Westerners' stereotypes of colonies deepened their own alienation to other peoples, tying unfamiliar groups with fixed words without reflection: the Irish tended to be stupid, Chinese were always unpredictable, while the Arabs were violent (McLeod 2010, 53). On the other hand, when the colonists explained the phenomena they saw in the colonies based on the inherent culture of their own peoples, they believed that the "advanced civilization" to which they belonged could explain the "backwardness" and "ignorance" of the colonies in an all-encompassing way, and self-righteously ignored the cultural background of other nationalities, believing that after the "transformation", the indigenous peoples would uphold the same way of life and value pursuits as themselves.
So how do video games present these fierce conflicts and grand colonial scenes to gamers? The authors argue that this is a topic that has hitherto received little attention, and it involves the relationship between video games and colonialism and how empires "reappeared." Only by linking the spatial problem of imperialism to the space of video games can imperialism be explored more directly.
Empire game screen.
The author believes that the mixed properties of postcolonial space are clearly defined in the map of the Game of Empires. These maps are both maps for colonists to carve out new territories and space for players to begin to transform world history into personal stories, creating their own colonization story. (Lammes 2010) Personal history is intertwined with colonial logic and constructed from colonial logic, which is an inherent assumption of game design. Empire: Total War lets players occupy 23 regions — including India, Florida, Gibraltar, Iceland, New France, and more — and its logic is always tied to its perception of spatiality. In the game No Man's Sky, where players explore and survive in an infinite galaxy, it allows players to name planets and places, and even newly discovered races and species, all of which reproduce the dream of a colonial explorer — just like naming Mount Everest, the act of naming is important and consistent for the expansionism of the empire and the personal ideals of explorers (colonists), which is also the basic colonization assumption of the game.
Mukherjee astutely pointed out that colonial expansion meant a change in geography and appearance, even beyond the lines and names on the map. Once an area is occupied, the map is redrawn with a distinct colonial color. In Herbert 2011, author Eugenia Herbert describes how British colonists in India struggled to change the landscape with their private gardens and imported plants. Diplomacy, trade, war, the exchange of technology and money are other key factors in defining geographic change.
Civilization 5 game screen.
Diplomacy, trade, war, the exchange of technology and money are often important plots of colonial-themed games. These elements themselves embody the expansion and industrialization of capitalism, so that, despite implicit greed for land, resources, wealth, and even slaves, colonialism is portrayed as a healthy competitive game in which pure money transactions are the standards and can be won by mastering wealth. Such a resource-hungry geopolitical setting also created a binary confrontation between the suzerainty and the colonies. The purpose of this dualism was to seize the property of weaker states and incorporate them into the economic system of the empire, ensuring that other competing imperial powers were at a disadvantage over their own. (Walberg 2011, 24) There is a similar setting in games such as Civilization 5: colonists are keen to establish capitalism and strict hierarchies in the colonies, while peripheral facilities such as ports and warehouses are built to guide players to establish centralized control and hierarchy in the suzerainty and colonies.
In order to more vividly and comprehensively show the state and interaction of the suzerainty-colonial system, the game developers also added a key element to Empire: protest. The exploited colonies would be angry, petition, and even riot. Therefore, the space of these game empires goes beyond the traditional concept of space and enters the perspective of living space. When players build their own blueprints for their empires in another game, Interstellar, there are also many living spaces for the player to imagine in addition to the territory map, such as worker riots, diplomatic disputes, and building construction.
For colonial residents and indigenous peoples to understand their post-colonial identity, it was necessary to discuss the issue of slavery and discrimination. Resident Evil: Infinity deals with slavery. Video game designer Alejandro Quan-Madrid described his experiences in the game: He had the opportunity to shoot a black woman tied up and a white man, who he guessed were a couple, and the white man begged people to forgive the woman. (Quan-Madrid 2012) Mukherjee argues that the colonial fear of racial intermarriage is on full display here, and the fact that black women have no voice is evident. One of the characters in the game ponders the difference between a man and a slave: a man can choose, while a slave can only obey. The game recognizes what "slave" meant under the colonial system—slaves don't belong to humans. In addition, in the game mechanics, the emancipation of slaves itself becomes an act of impure motives — the game rewards the player based on the number of freed slaves — and the free slave becomes the game's currency, contrary to the lofty intention at the beginning of the game.
BioShock Infinity game poster.
In postcolonial historiography, the colonial past is often seen as a process by which colonial powers eradicate and rewrite indigenous history. Many video games attempt to present history from a critical and "other" perspective. On the one hand, while video games claim to be able to provide critical interpretations of history, they tend to eventually return and support mainstream narratives, and on the other hand, as games evolve, they constantly challenge mainstream narratives through alternate history and individual interpretations.
Video games are a pluralistic medium that allows players to create their own stories, so that strategic games based on historical situations can effectively interpret historical events from a counterfactual perspective. Players can re-experience situations in different ways and learn from their own game experiences. In terms of postcolonial history, video games involve marginal narratives that regulate historical discourse, contain hypothetical scenes of counter-historical facts, and also create opportunities to speak on behalf of the small people who are drowning in history. As a postcolonial historian, the exploration of the past involves writing or recreating that history in different ways, and the same is true of video games as a medium for writing and experiencing postcolonial history.
As a postcolonial historian, the author is also aware of how the temporality of the game plays a role in understanding imperialism, and places special emphasis on the overlap and inversion of the historical context represented by the game and the game itself. History has the potential to repeat itself, and the reversal of roles in the roles of former colonized countries now becoming colonizers of territory remains in line with the logic of imperialism – not postcolonialism, but neocolonialism. (Mukherjee 2017, 96) By deducing alternative possibilities that were originally hidden in the mainstream historical narrative (such as assuming that european and American imperialism exploited and squeezed colonies in a way different from historical facts, or imagining asian and African countries in turn colonizing the developed countries of Europe and the United States), we may be able to explore the historical pluralism that post-colonial historiography focused on, and then re-examine the new forms of colonialism that we are facing today and in the future. If video games can present history from a postcolonial perspective, then what they narrate and present is the discourse about empire.
Age of Empires game screen.
Whether the player is from a previously colonized country or elsewhere, in games dealing with colonialism, the video game medium offers the possibilities of slavery, resistance, elitism, and hegemonism at the same time— an understanding and experience of the post-colonial era. (Mukherjee 2017, 19) However, we will also realize that the rules of the game tend to promote colonialism, as reflected in series such as Age of Empires and Civilization, where upgrades and victories are achieved by increasing control and exploitation of colonies and natives.
Despite these problems, video games still show considerable potential in presenting the diversity and possibilities of postcolonial discourse. Video games recreate the ecology of the colony from multiple perspectives, which can help us gain experiences that we wouldn't have been able to get through other traditional ways. Even if the player equates their character with the "colonizer", this identification makes people more immersive in thinking about identity from the position of the colonial subject. Moreover, the possibility of deducing alternative histories also provides an opportunity to perpetuate or critique the logic of empire.
Video games have gone a long way, from stereotyping colonialism to trying to present the exclusivity and oppression of colonialism. While postcolonial themes were added to game development, game research also began to focus on key issues related to postcolonialism. Diversity and inclusion research is growing rapidly, and postcolonialism as an interconnected subject is at the forefront of game research.
Having completed an extension of the theme of postcolonialism to the study of video games, the authors are also ambitious to expand the topic to a wider scale— within the lens of internet culture. Although today's network culture seems to be constantly dissolving and homogenizing the identity differences of Internet users, so that all netizens regardless of region, race, rich or poor, as long as there is a device accessing the Internet, they can enjoy the "same" right to speak on the Internet, regardless of the individual behind the screen, they are all equal individuals without difference in the Internet surfing, but this seemingly equal vision of everyone, one person, one vote, is actually just a fantasy of "no race, no discrimination".
In the information age, the study of internet culture may not be able to eliminate the long-standing racist nature, and in the information, wealth and technological inequality of society, the websites of developed countries in Europe and the United States and the elite groups that occupy social resources have always controlled capital and labor, and they manipulate and determine the so-called "hot spots", "truth", and "identity". The problems of cyber culture have become more apparent in the post-colonial era, and the essence of colonialism has not faded from our world. When Tesla electric vehicles collect all kinds of community data and even private information in the name of better serving users, today's colonization is no longer the plunder and oppression of territory and other physical entities, but the seizure of privacy rights or digital information without people's knowledge or even active consent, and the consequences of this "neo-colonization" will likely give the colonizer greater benefit and power, as well as a more serious threat to the property, resources and even life of the colonized.
Finally, throughout the book, the author discusses questions about colonial stereotypes, as well as the spatial, identity, and pluralistic construction of colonial and postcolonial themes in video games. The discourse of postcolonialism helps us understand how the hegemonic dominance of the West in the multicultural world was established and, on this basis, shakes up this established structure from a pluralistic perspective. Games are a powerful medium for conveying this diversity — cricket subverts the colonial order, while strategy games about empire-building can modify the colonial system in reality, thus challenging the colonists' normative system and superiority theory. The game itself becomes a reproduction of colonialist and anti-colonial discourse. The author also attempts to bring together various positions, and his work has largely contributed to encouraging further constructive discussion in this area.
bibliography:
[1] Loomba, Ania. 2005. Colonialism/postcolonialism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
[2] Shaw, Adrienne. 2015. Gaming at the edge: Sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Press.
[3] McLeod, John. 2010. Beginning postcolonialism. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan.
[4] Mukherjee, Souvik. (2017). Videogames and postcolonialism. Springer International Publishing.
[5] Lammes, Sybille. 2010. Postcolonial Playgrounds: Games as Postcolonial Cultures. Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture 4 (1): 1–6.
[6] Herbert, Eugenia W. 2011. Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
[7] Walberg, Eric. 2011. Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press.
[8] Quan-Madrid, Alejandro. 2012. BioShock Infinite Forces Players to Confront Racism (Hands-on Preview). VentureBeat. n.p., 12 July. Web. 23 November 2016.
Editor-in-Charge: Fan Zhu
Proofreader: Yan Zhang