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 to look at my own practice as a player, video games are made for me as they appeal to some of my subjectivities. However, for other parts of me they are not. It is under this complex position that I write these lines on playing a single player game. It is within this variation that I intend to start exploring the merits, limitations and possibilities of playing with an anti/decolonial perspective. What are the possibilities of truly carrying this perspective to fruition if no one can be there to recognize it? Is then the anti/decolonial perspective coming into being or is it just me playing?
To be able to recognize and play from an anti/decolonial perspective connections are important. While the argument might seem similar to recent discussions on paratexts and videogames (Seiwald & Vollans, 2023), I consider the need to go further and include as comprehensibly as possible the content of the game, the player and the playthrough. For this post I propose that the player’s context and perspective need to be at the centre of consideration. It is not a new idea, the focus on player experiences has been at the core of academic and game development analysis. However, it has mostly been around the individual gamer and his[1] unidirectional relationship with the game (Hefner et al., 2007; Klimmt et al., 2009; Van Looy et al., 2012). The perspective I am looking at gameplay with seeks to further revert this view, while still looking into single player experiences. I see the importance in understanding the player in connection with their environment, how they relate with what they bring into the game, how they relate to other players, within the game and outside of it as well. It is a relational analysis that will focus on my own experience.
As I play, even single player games, I bring everything I know, learned and experience with me into the playthrough. It includes my knowledge and understandings of history, and just like me, every player takes this action whether consciously or unconsciously. Involved in this relationship with the game they are playing are not only what they know of the period that involves the game, but also considerations about historically based events and processes that might be referenced in games. Colonial practices, representations and ways of understanding the world are a part of historical knowledge acquired willingly or passively. Therefore, for the argument I present here, it is important to be conscious of how that knowledge connects and relates with our playing as we dive into the different worlds that games present to us. The analysis below is a clear example for representations of historical constructions and processes in non-strictly historical games.
This is not a new concept, nor I am the first to bring these issues to light. The list of amazing work being done in this area is too large for me to be able to honour them properly in these lines (Penix-Tadsen, 2019; Oakley, 2019; Miner, 2022; Gray, 2020, 2023). I am indebted to that work in my understanding of how to play with an anti/decolonial perspective. In essence what I bring when I play is the capability to see the ways that colonialities are embedded in the text, in the gameplay and in the objectives of the game. Once again, I am not the first, and great work continues to happen to consider ways to avoid including the colonialities into games (Laiti, 2021; Clapper, 2021; LaPensée, Laiti and Longboat, 2022, Loban, 2023). However, as it happens in the case of diverse gender and sexuality representation, there is the need for willpower from development companies and their decision-making processes (Shaw, 2014; Tompkins & Martins, 2022; Santos, 2022). Similarly, it takes new perspectives and understandings in creating games for that to happen. The argument that players do not wish that to happen is what I am challenging with this read of anti/decolonial player practice.
At this point, I will focus on what an anti/decolonial gameplay deals with. There is always a structure of coloniality present in the background, or foreground, of video games. Thus, the first action of this style of gameplay is necessarily recognizing this reality and unveiling its presence as to how the digital world created/represented by the game is crossed by the coloniality of knowledge, being or gender and always by the coloniality of power (for a short description of these elements within video games, see Wallace, 2023). To fully understand its presence or its integration in worldbuilding may take playing time, or even several playthroughs,
I will illustrate with an example of my latest playthrough of Pillars of Eternity: Definitive Edition (Paradox-Obsidian, 2017). The game starts with you travelling with a caravan, which is attacked by a group of people to defend their sacred ruins. At this point in the early game, the encounter is set up to instil feelings of danger; interestingly it does so by initiating the Othering of the attackers through commentaries and opinions by NPCs, not by the attackers introducing themselves. This group will continue to appear throughout the game, being described and treated, by many of the characters you encounter, as people who exist outside of civilized society. This pattern is easily recognizable. In this playthrough, the whole context was clear, as well as how inescapable are the actions to advance the game that imply death for members of this group at each encounter. Here lies one of the difficulties in allowing for anti/decolonial gameplay to be enacted. Outside of expressing disconformity and opposition, and having someone to listen to it, there is not much else to do. It is not until you reach the zone that corresponds to the inhabited territory of this group that you learn more about them, their connection to the territory, to their ancestors and to the surrounding nature. By then you have actively participated in the destruction and elimination of members of the group and their history. While at no point it is explicitly said that this group is the Indigenous population for this world, they do share many of the negative descriptions that have served to oppress and attempted to eliminate Indigenous people worldwide (Byrd, 2016; LaPensée & Emmons, 2019). This makes me, the player, complicit in yet another symbolic annihilation process (O’Sullivan, 2022).
As with several other games, Defiance Bay, the city, is a place with plenty to do, but with a very low tolerance for difference. The placing of many Otherings in the general form of xenophobia and racism directed to different people that inhabit this fantastic world in this urban setting diverges the attention placed upon the group previously analysed. However, the representation that marks this situation as something that is bound to happen in city environment makes this part a little tedious and overextended to the anti/decolonial player. In the case of Pillars, this type of discrimination can be temporarily avoided, although the first encounter in it is an anti-immigration rally. Afterwards, you have to choose to ally with one of two groups that wish to be saviours of the city, The Dozen and the Knights of the Crucible. The idea of the game is for you to ingratiate yourself with either group, or even both, so you can later advance the main story. The player has to choose between the racists or the classist racists. The other option I have left is the nihilist option, to go the lonesome hero route. None of these options can escape even a superficial colonialities analysis. I believe, however, that the racist vs racist or the idealized individualism of the hero against the world is a forced pathway for the player that can be productive, if it produces this type of critical viewing/playing.
Due to limitation of space, I will not dwell much more on the playthrough or the story but remain with the content shared so far. While it is merely an adjacent necessary part of the game’s central story, the player, me, is forced to carry out these attitudes and actions to be able to play the game. As we cannot change the fixed storylines, nor the structure of game production, just yet, then this gameplay can only be of anticolonial character. However, an anticolonial positioning and playthrough, such as the one shared above, can inform decolonial practices that allow for more profound and structural changes to be proposed and enacted. This connection can be made by recognizing them as resistances and to reach that point the need for witnessing faithfully (Lugones, 2003) is central. This communication is part of my argument for it to reach that status and people to recognize it, engage with it, and discuss over it. I believe this visualization practices need to happen, in this and other formats. They are needed, not for the subjectivities to whom the gamer identity does not speak, but to talk to those parts of me that are aligned with the gamer identity, as a continuous praxis against all forms of exclusion and exclusivity in a landscape that allows for exclusionary voices to continue to raise their cries.
Leandro Wallace (he/him/él) is a non-Indigenous PhD Candidate at the Department of Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University, originally from Argentina, in Abya Yala. He works with Prof. Sandy O’Sullivan in their Project “Saving Lives: Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBTIQ+ creative artists” focusing on experiences and resistances of queer Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander gamers. In his work, he looks to connect the anti-colonial Indigenous practices and theorizing of both geo-political spaces: Abya Yala and the continent known as Australia. Leandro is also an Editor-member of the International Online Journal “EnGender!”, co-organizer of their annual Conference, and co-host and co-producer of the podcast “EnGender Conversations”.
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[1] I use the masculine on purpose since the preconception of the gamer identity is that of a cis-het, racialized as white, middle-class man from so-called central countries. The attempts of bringing a new Gamergate to life, as these lines are being finalized, serves as proof of the perceived centrality of this idea still.