Playing With, Not Against, Empires: Video Games and (Post)Colonialism
Video games can be understood as a medium characterized by remediation and convergence: they often take elements from other media, adapt them to their medial specifics, and add their own unique aspects, thus creating new, playable versions of cultural material. Such adaptations apply to certain plot elements, character archetypes, or specific genres, but they also hold true for long-standing myths and narratives. The Western, for instance, becomes a genre not only through formal characteristics like the existence of cowboys, saloons, or horses but also by peddling core myths of the American national imagination, such as the myth of the frontier or the idea of the rugged individualist—elements that, accordingly, can be found in Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902) or John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) just as much as in Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption series (2010, 2018). These narratives transport particular ideologies—or, rather, they can be understood as concealing an […]