Souvik Mukherjee

Playing Subaltern Video Games and Postcolonialism

The postcolonial has still remained on the margins of Game Studies, which has now incorporated at length, contemporary debates of race, gender, and other areas that challenge the canon. It is difficult to believe, however, that it has not defined the way in which video games are perceived; the effect, it can be argued, is subtle. For the millions of Indians playing games such as Empire: Total War or East India Company, their encounter with colonial history is direct and unavoidable, especially given the pervasiveness of postcolonial reactions in everything from academia to day-to-day conversation around them. The ways in which games construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics, and society are often deeply imbued with a notion of the colonial and therefore also with the questioning of colonialism. This article aims to examine the complexities that the postcolonial undertones in video games bring to the ways in which we read them.

Sherlock Holmes Reloaded: Holmes, Videogames and Multiplicity

After disappearing in the Reichenbach Falls while grappling with Professor Moriarty in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893), Holmes re-emerges in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ (1903), supposedly having spent three years (in the Holmesian time-scheme) disguised as the Norwegian explorer Sigerson so as to fool Moriarty’s dangerous minions. Since then, Holmes has continued to return in many different places and times. In the world of Holmesian pastiche, he lives myriad lives in stories by enthusiasts all over the world. The Mary Russell novels, Anthony Burgess’s short story ‘Murder to Music’ (1989), Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary (2005) and films such as Murder by Decree (1980) are just a few examples. This narrative multiplicity of the Holmes stories is intriguing, and there are few parallels in literature. Like Lord Blackwood, Holmes’s antagonist in the recent Sherlock Holmes (2009) film, Holmes too is continually resurrected, almost as if by magic.

Videogames and Post colonialism: An Introduction

Videogames have been analyzed from many perspectives in Humanities thinking and in recent years, a closer engagement with issues relating to gender, race, and diversity is in evidence. Despite early depictions of colonization in videogames, such as Sid Meier’s Colonization or Microsoft’s Age of Empires, there has been very little scholarship on postcolonial perspectives on gaming in almost two decades of game studies research. Despite this seeming absence, videogames in non-Western geographies have often critiqued colonialism and more recently, even mainstream titles such as Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Far Cry 2 have also addressed themes associated with post colonialism. This introductory chapter creates the context for exploring issues of space, time and identity as described in the postcolonial theoretical positions of leading postcolonial thinkers vis-a-vis their application in computer games.

Playing Alternative Histories: Post colonialism, History, and Videogames

Videogames allow players to replay their stories; strategy games based on historical situations, therefore, effectively play out historical events from a counter-factual perspective. In postcolonialist historiography, the past is often viewed as a colonized terrain where indigenous histories have been eradicated and rewritten by colonizing powers. Many videogames attempt to represent history from a critical and “othered” perspective. On the one hand, while videogames claim to provide a critical reading of history they games often end up supporting the dominant narrative and on the other, as games are played out, they continually challenge dominant narratives by changing the conclusions, the events and the validity of monolinear readings. This chapter will address the key problems regarding the postcolonial (re)construction of temporality and history in terms of how videogames provide a hitherto unique perspective on the issue.

Rethinking (Post) Colonialism in Videogames: Toward a Conclusion

The ludic has always been linked with colonial and postcolonial discourses across the world. This concluding chapter addresses the question of how even videogames that are ostensibly critical of colonialism nevertheless end up perpetuating its key assumptions. It also looks at the nascent discipline of Game Studies to encourage a deeper engagement with diversity within the field at large. As, arguably, the newest media to comment on and critique empire and colonialism, videogames provide yet another perspective for rethinking—and replaying—the key issues involved, here. The discussion book is intended not as a to open up the already growing Game Studies research on diversity and the margins to include the larger debates on empire and post colonialism.

Playing the Hybrid Subject: The Slave and the Subaltern in Videogames

Drawing on the work of Lisa Nakamura on race in videogames, and the previous chapter’s discussion on colonial cartography in videogames, this chapter will engage with current postcolonial theory such as that framed by commentators on how postcolonial identity is perceived. Complicating Ranajit Guha’s initial definition of subalternity, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sees the subaltern as a voice from below that can never articulate itself. In a similar vein, one needs to consider the issues of identity and the denial of selfhood in slavery. This chapter examines what it may be like to identify with the postcolonial subject in the videogame, especially when the avatar is an ex-slave like Adewale the protagonist of Freedom Cry and what this identification or lack thereof means in terms of how identity is constructed in videogames.

The Playing Fields of Empire: Empire and Spatiality in Videogames

As in historical accounts, empire in videogames, too, is concerned with the acquisition of geographical space. Videogame empires work on the necessary logic of spatial expansion connected with which is the necessity to remove the “fog” which prevents the player’s ‘line of sight’ from accessing information about surrounding areas. Although much scholarship exists around the representations of the spatiality of Empire in more traditional media, there is little that addresses the videogame representations of Empire. Following on from the general position on the need to examine notions of postcolonial spatiality in videogames, this chapter specifically addresses the representation and experience of space in conceptions of Empire vis-a-vis in empire-building videogames, as understood in terms of both cartography and the lived experience of space.

An Assassin Across Narratives: Reading Assassin’s Creed from Videogame to Novel

While recounting his journey to Jerusalem, the French traveller Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand describes having faced a ‘real embarrassment’: ‘Should I give an exact description of the holy places? But then I will merely be repeating what others have said before me.… But would that not remove the most essential part of my journey, and defeat its end and purpose?’ (Chateaubriand 2011). In a rather different context and a narrative medium that Chateaubriand could not have anticipated, the player of Ubisoft’s cult videogame Assassin’s Creed (2007) faces a similar problem. As the fictional game protagonist, Altair ibn Ahad, perches atop a high tower inside a virtual recreation of the holy city, the same issue arises of representation and comparisons with earlier narratives and narrative media. How does Altair/the player’s experience compare with the narratives of the earlier travellers and storytellers? This chapter will briefly discuss this question; but it will also examine how narratives in the videogames themselves compare with novels adapted from those games. The Assassin’s Creed games and the popular series of Assassin’s Creed novels by Oliver Bowden (a pseudonym used by the author Anton Gill) will be considered here because they self-consciously take their stories across multiple media and into different periods of history. By looking at how narratives transition into particular kinds of media—from the printed book to the digital game and vice versa—this chapter aims to encourage a broader analysis of the ways in which ‘narrativity’ operates in literary and cultural terms.

Shapeshifting Stories: Reading Video Game Stories through Paratexts

Will it ever be possible to ‘read’ games as the previous chapter seems to suggest? How does one read a text that keeps changing and indeed, what is the text of a video game that is being played again and again by many players? In Literary Gaming, Astrid Ensslin, writing as recently as 2014, takes on the analysis of what she calls ‘hybrid literary-ludic artefacts’ (Ensslin, 2014, p. 38). In her conclusion, she points to possible projects, one of which is ‘to examine literary gaming from the user’s perspective, applying methods of empirical reader-response, audience, and player’ and also to look at ‘the creators of literary-ludic artefacts and studying their creative agendas and processes.’ As seen in the previous chapter, the analysis of storytelling in video games needs to reflect the originary supplementarity between the literary and the ludic; as such this book extends its scope beyond any specific category that can be called ‘hybrid literary-ludic artefacts’. Ensslin’s conclusion, however, points at some key interventions that are necessary in the field. The story that unfolds in the experience of playing a video game varies from player to player, of course depending on the game itself. This is the challenge that The Stanley Parable throws at its players/readers and the Prince of Persia in The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time reiterates in his attempt to negate the player’s death, ‘No no no, that’s not how it happened — do you want to hear my story?’ The complex multitelic experience described here will be addressed in the following chapter; this one will attempt to understand whether the ephemeral text, which the player plays out and changes with each gameplay, can be analysed at all.

Playing in the Zone of Becoming I: Agency and Becoming in Video Games

When the Prince of Persia turns the clock back yet again and recreates his narrative, who is the author of this story? Is it the player acting as (w)reader, both reading and scripting the story, or is it the game designer who shapes the outline of the plot and the spaces of possibility? Finally, what about the Prince himself — as the embodiment of the artificially intelligent processes and the algorithmic environment of the game? The multiple narrative strands in the rhizomatic structure of video games raise yet another key question in the analysis of video games as narratives. How is it possible to explain the creation of these multiple narratives? Can the process of (w)reading these narrative actualisations into existence be likened to authorship? Even if it is, then such a process is quite different from the commonly held conception of the text as a product of the author’s imagination. In video games, as stated previously, the process of narrative construction involves the machine and the player besides the game designers themselves. A straightforward explanation of gameplay as authorship cannot suffice to comprehend the situation in its full complexity.