ABSTRACT

The past five years have seen the development of what Mukherjee, S. (2018. Playing subaltern: Video games and postcolonialism. Games and Culture, 13(5), 504–520) and Murray, S. (2018. The work of postcolonial game studies in the play of culture. Open Library of Humanities, 4(1), 1–25) (amongst others) term postcolonial game studies. Postcolonial game studies looks at how games represent colonial and postcolonial environments in the story worlds they present, and also considers how these games are consumed by players in postcolonial nations. Fittingly, it is a critique both of how games reproduce colonial tropes. In this essay, I argue that the work of decolonizing games requires that we also decolonize play. Here I shall argue that the foundational theories of play that game scholarship is predicated upon are built upon a racist and xenophobic binary that pits civilization against barbarism. This binary is a consequence of a white European canon of game studies scholarship that has supported a grand theory of play apprehended only through an etic lens. If we are to consider the future of game studies, I think we should work to decolonize play. Crucially, we must attend to how Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) play globally and consider the many other ways—beyond merely games—that this play is articulated.

摘要

在过去的五年里，Mukherjee, S. (2018. Playing subaltern: Video games and postcolonialism. Games and Culture , 13 (5), 504–520) 和 Murray, S. (2018. The work of postcolonial文化游戏中的游戏研究.人文开放图书馆, 4(1), 1-25)（除其他外）术语后殖民博弈研究。后殖民游戏研究着眼于游戏如何在它们呈现的故事世界中表现殖民和后殖民环境，并考虑这些游戏如何被后殖民国家的玩家消费。恰如其分地，它是对游戏如何再现殖民比喻的批评。在这篇文章中，我认为游戏非殖民化的工作要求我们也将游戏非殖民化。在这里，我将争辩说，游戏研究所依据的基本游戏理论是建立在使文明与野蛮对抗的种族主义和仇外二元论之上的。这个二元是欧洲白人游戏研究学术规范的结果，该学术规范支持仅通过伦理镜头理解的宏大游戏理论。如果我们要考虑游戏研究的未来，我认为我们应该努力使游戏非殖民化。至关重要的是，我们必须关注黑人、原住民和有色人种 (BIPOC) 如何在全球范围内进行游戏，并考虑到游戏之外的许多其他方式来表达这种游戏。