Looking Down Not Up

<p dir="ltr">The history of artificial and virtual environments, particularly those found in digital games, is rife with destructive colonial ideologies. Themes of conquest, domination, and Othering permeate many kinds of game design, for instance, including board games where mechanics such as seizing large tracts of ‘uninhabited’ land, stripping it of resources, and dominating those that live there are considered part and parcel even today (Flanagan and Jakobsson 9). In <i>Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games</i>, Dyer-Witheford and de Pauter draw from Hardt and Negri’s <i>Empire</i> to articulate how digital games are fundamentally linked to the ongoing effects of colonialism. For instance, they trace how games feed into issues like energy consumption and exploitive labour practices in their production and dissemination: a result of unequal distribution of power and capital after imperialism (xviii). They also point to how games like <i>Grand Theft Auto: Vice City</i> (2002) have the player reassert and act out the processes and structures of imperialism, in which their relationship to the virtual landscape is to “occupy it, activate it, and network it into a setting for optimal capital accumulation” (162). Other scholars have pointed to how strategy and adventure games have players perpetuate colonial practices such as military manoeuvring, map-making, and resource extraction, and encourage them to lay claim to supposedly empty spaces through violence and exploration (Lammes 1; Mukherjee 35).</p>