Single player games present a difficult barrier in carrying out recognisable anti/decolonial gameplays, considering that those games are meant to be played alone. The reason for this solitude is also at the core of the debates around perceptions and representations of who the player is and who the games are aimed at. If I am […]
Fall of Bali is a historical strategy game set in Bali in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Balinese kingdoms fought each other, their rivalry having started when the Gelgel Empire dissolved in 1686 and made many vassals independent. The game allows players to control, manage, and build one of the Balinese kingdoms in this […]
In 1947, at the age of seven, Khalid Bashir Rai crossed the new border between India and Pakistan after the end of the British Raj. The border was the creation of a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had little idea of the history, demography and politics of India. His hurried line and swift departure […]
The following post by Arturo Iannace is a reply to the HGN blogpost by Dr Adam Chapman for our (Post)Colonialism theme. In turn Adam has considered the points and his response is included here. Arturo Mariano Iannace is a PhD candidate at the IMT School of Advanced Studies, in the curriculum of Cognitive and Cultural […]
Many years later, as I face my laptop now, I remember a distant afternoon in 2002 when my cousin in college took me to discover Age of Empires II. While enjoying the old game two decades later, I noticed some issues from the perspective of environmental humanities. Different from other critical perspectives, such as feminism […]
Just a quick post to recap on our third HGN event, for our (Post) Colonialism theme, that took place on 15 December. We were pleased that the panellists and the audience, generated a fascinating discussion and raised lots of thought-provoking questions. In case you missed this, or would like to watch it again, you can […]
At this point, it’s not hard to understand the colonial viewpoint fundamental to the ideology of the Civilization series. There have been plenty of articles dissecting such things as the tech tree, the love of explosive growth and war, the great man theory embedded in the game, and the colonial philosophies that each of these […]
The British Library established a Digital Scholarship department in 2010. Its purpose was to explore and promote innovative and creative reuse, as well as computational and data-driven research using the Library’s data and digital collections – both the digitised analogue collections and increasingly, born-digital material. I was one of the founding members of the initial […]
Communities of play are vast and varied. The deeply competitive speedrunning community that still surrounds Nintendo’s 1985 release Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), wherein players compete to complete the game as quickly as possible, is a deeply varied community, and the parameters of this goal differ between communities of speedrunners and […]
In part 1 of this post, I described how historical strategy games have a natural tendency to function according to colonial logics, asking players to reenact the history of colonialism in order to succeed. I argued that this because this theme has an inherent resonance with games’ frequent use of space as power and the […]