Divide and the Rules: A Study on the Colonial Inheritance of Digital Games

Abstract

The current article is an exploration into the colonial inheritance of digital games. It argues that the pervasiveness and persistence of discursive practices, like imagining the play world as the otherworld and valuing the play world for its pedagogical potential, are tied to the colonial logic of exclusion, extraction and exploitation. Perpetuation of these colonial conceptualizations in the discourse surrounding digital games makes attempts at decolonization ineffective. The essay seeks to explicate the colonial in these discursive formulations.

Keywords

• colonialism
• videogames
• hunting
• OWW
• gameworlds