Journal of Games Criticism

by Sabine Harrer, Mahli-Ann Butt, Rilla Khaled, Florence M. Chee, Amani Naseem, Katta Spiel, Cale Passmore, Kishonna L. Gray, Outi Laiti

Published September, 2023.

Download full pdf of article here (TBC)

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“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”

—W.E.B. Du Bois

Writing these words in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’ words continue to resonate in global capacities around racial progress. Wars to end slavery, social movements to expand human rights, and other uprisings have done little to curb the appetites of those who feed on racial projects.

The horrors of racism and the legacies of inequalities continue to permeate through our institutions and are embedded into the fabric of society. With the elections of regressive candidates, attempts to overthrow democracies across the globe, and continued restrictions placed on the bodies of the most vulnerable, we continue to see these harms disproportionately impact minoritized populations. 

We extend these conversations that are happening in physical spaces to digital ones. As critical scholars of games, play and technology, we extrapolate concerns that emanate from the digital margins around gaming. By exploring games, gaming communities, and gaming culture broadly, we see the continued exclusionary trends that are imposed on us as users and critics of the space. We also hold space for the flashes of resistance to these hegemonic cultures that have been culturally exerted for decades. 

In the year 2023, when this bonus issue is released, we face new waves of resentment when we advocate for more diversity and inclusion. The pushback situates gaming as a colonial project that justifies the unequal power relationships operating in gaming culture and beyond. 

To recognise games as colonial projects is to see them as inextricably linked to the norms and infrastructures set up through modern European racism. Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ concept of coloniality is an apt reminder that current-day inequalities are updated expressions of colonial atrocity: “Coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspiration of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience” (2007). Coloniality survives in games, and this relationship ranges from the expressive, cultural ‘surface’ level of game design to the extractive, exploitative and deeply hierarchical nature of tech production (e.g. Noble, 2018; Benjamin, 2019; Amrute, 2020).

Pervasive Whiteness is one of the ways games make themselves known as colonial projects. Instead of remaining the “Twentieth Century problem” which W.E.B Du Bois observed “the problem of the color-line” has survived, has updated itself to mediate play in the Twenty-first Century.

Rather than merely a racial category, Whiteness is a historically shifting set of oppressive cultural practices, knowledges, and structures related to settler colonialism. These practices have produced infrastructures which maintain advantages for people categorized as White, and which create obstacles for those who do not inhabit the norm (Ahmed, 2004; Ahmed, 2012). White norms also fabricate an “imaginary moral centre” (Sheehan, 2001) which maintains rather than problematizes their dominance over, e.g. Aboriginal lives.

Within the area of critical game studies, scholars have extensively engaged with the way normative White supremacy, racism, and colonialism affect ideas, practices, and processes around games and play (Gray, 2012; Mukherjee, 2018; Nakamura, 2002; Trammell, 2023). One example is the convention of the default White character at the center of most video games, which has created a White habitus of play (Dietrich, 2013; Leonard, 2003; Passmore et al., 2017; Young, 2013). More recently, game writer Meghna Jayanth has talked about this tendency in terms of ‘white protagonism’, arguing that this design trope is a product of Anglo-American colonial capitalism linked to a specific type of imperial pleasure invested in “whiteness as a normative, default, whiteness that stands in lieu of humanity and personhood” (Jayanth, 2021). Overall, critical work which explores the White default in game design has documented how games function as ‘racial pedagogical zones’ and thus continue the project of coloniality through play.

Beyond representation, structural Whiteness also impacts economic decision making in game development, production, and distribution of games. For example, investing in diverse games is still generally perceived as a financial risk, pointing to a “racialising logic of capital” (Srauy, 2019; see also Bulut, 2021; Saha, 2016).

At the same time, game creators, educators, and activists have pushed for critical engagement with games beyond Whiteness, seeing them as spaces of opportunity for asserting control over representation (Lewis & Fragnito, 2005) and calling for its decentering and dismantling through self-determined praxis (Laiti, 2021; Laiti et al., 2021; LaPensée, 2018). 

Challenging colonial relationships is an integral part of many community efforts, including Tanya DePass’s advocacy platform #INeedDiverseGames, the Game Devs of Color Expo, the Games Professionals of Colour Discord server, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace ‘Skins’ project, and the Sami Game Jam. Among the breadth of related games created over the past two decades are Mattie Brice’s acclaimed life simulator Mainichi (2012), Meghna Jayanth’s decolonial game writing in 80 Days (2014), E-Line Media’s puzzle platform game Never Alone (2014), Akira Thompson’s police brutality LARP &maybetheywontkillyou (2015), Momo Pixel’s micro aggression simulator Hair Nah (2017), Derek Ham’s Civil Rights movement VR game I Am A Man (2018), Elizabeth LaPensée’s Indigenous history game When Rivers Were Trails (2019), and Twin Drum’s forthcoming Afrofantasy RPG Wagadu Chronicles.

The Surviving Whiteness in Games collection builds on these important initiatives with contributions that critically engage with and offer alternatives to pervasive Whiteness in games. It includes intersectional feminist, race-critical, activist angles and work examining the relationality of these discourses to Indigenous knowledge and creative practices (Eshraghi, 2019; Martin, 2018).

This compilation originally started as a panel submission for DiGRA 2020, entitled “Whiteness in Games.” This panel was supposed to take place in Europe, a region especially invested in old attachments to White innocence (Wekker, 2016), colonial selective amnesia (Rastas, 2012), and abstracted White supremacy in games (Robinson, 2014; Foasberg, 2016), but also a place of resistance and survival, such as in the case of Sámi Indigenous survivance (Laiti, 2021). In the panel we wanted to ask how structural oppression through Whiteness affects games culture today. Given both the increasing globalisation of game production, and of game studies as a discipline, and the rise of right-wing movements in Europe, this was an important question to be asking at DiGRA 2020. Within the specific context of the DiGRA conference, the panel was an opportunity to highlight critical questions regarding DiGRA’s own cultural and economic exclusivity as a conference primarily held in Northwestern Europe and North America (Butt et al., 2018).

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and caused DiGRA 2020 to be cancelled, we decided to transform this dialog into this Bonus Issue. As editors we bring a diverse set of expertise on game design, community, academia, activism, and life. Our relationships to Whiteness and coloniality differ, due to our different racialized positions, nationalities, languages and geographies, to name only a few. While this posed practical challenges (such as trying to coordinate meetings across several time zones on four continents!), it has also allowed us to approach editorial work through a plurality of critical languages. Working across different intersections allows us to acknowledge expressions of knowledge and expertise around game culture which tend to go unnoticed in traditional White game studies settings. It has helped us approach academic ‘rigor’ and ‘excellence’ from a multiplicity of perspectives, in awareness that these are terms intricately linked to White supremacist academia.

We acknowledge that critiquing Whiteness by naming it in the context of an anglophone academic journal comes at the risk of re-centering it. This is why we encouraged our authors to approach the theme of “Surviving Whiteness” as a problem statement rather than an end point. As games and related sites are largely designed for and reflective of European genealogies and diasporas, we acknowledge Whiteness as a condition which needs to be dismantled and left behind to arrive at liberating visions for game culture. We like to think of “Surviving Whiteness” as (1) a vested interest in challenging and overcoming discourses, structures, representations of Whiteness and settler colonialism, and Eurocentric knowledge systems as dominating forces in games culture (2) the practices and tactics of Black, Indigenous, creators and scholars of colour currently contesting and surviving the “white space” of games culture (Nishi et al., 2015).

It is not our claim that critical academic work alone can undo pervasive Whiteness in game studies, but as conversations in related academic fields, such as #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et al., 2018, Chee, 2019), and citational justice in Human Computer Interaction (Kumar & Karusala, 2021) have shown, there is a need to start unpacking the deep-seated racial inequalities in academic production. This includes the absence of non-White scholars from academic canons and key institutional spaces, the ghettoisation of race-related conversations in conferences, as well as the greater visibility of White scholars’ work on race and inequality (Chakravartty et al., 2018). There is no reason to believe that the line which has been traced from modern European racism towards the normalisation and institutionalisation of Whiteness in Communications cannot just as well be traced to game studies (cf. Mejeur et al., 2020).

And yet, we have under-utilized a hashtag like #GameStudiesSoWhite. As the volume of this compilation suggests, the problem space related to the theme of “Surviving Whiteness in Games” is immense. Whiteness in games mis-distributes opportunities, marginalizes communities, and threatens creativity. In the context of play, Whiteness is often associated with a loss of safety and fun for marginalized players (Gray, 2012; Mukherjee 2018; Trammell, 2023). And when play turns torturous, it is survived rather than enjoyed. However, by choosing the frame of survival, we also intend to acknowledge the achievement to persevere, sabotage and transgress Whiteness. It allows us to offer this Bonus issue as an archival resource to document our experiences but also to reimagine what it looks like to exist beyond mere survival. We are showcasing the flashes of thriving that are also possible despite the continued attacks on marginalized populations. To explore the many iterations of what it means to survive Whiteness.

This special edition draws together contributions from thinkers and makers addressing structural Whiteness in games from a broad variety of perspectives. 

A recurring refrain across many of the contributions is the ongoing legacy of colonialism on assorted facets of contemporary life. In Videogame Distribution and Steam’s Imperialist Practices: Platform Coloniality in Game Distribution, Mukherjee engages with the question of how Steam’s global distribution infrastructure ultimately ends up perpetuating colonial principles of expansion and domination. In Binaries on a Circle, Singha challenges the fixity of binaries that stem from the classification of colonizer/colonized. Interspersed with poignant autobiographical reflections, she demonstrates how three games commonly played in Indian playgrounds–hopscotch, ring around the rosie, and cricket–invite multiplicities of experience and perception. In Outside the Racist Nostalgia Box, Laiti and Harrer explore how the children’s board game Afrikan tähti communicates ludic racism through its deployment of  emotional mechanics that reinforce Nordic White supremacy. Against a contextual backdrop of Finnish colonization, White supremacy, and belonging, Laiti and Harrer analyze Afrikan tähti reviews from the perspectives of the loss of White innocence and grief.

The troubling relationship between White supremacy and player communities is further taken by other contributing authors. In The man with the gun is a boy who plays games, Kocurek discusses how public discourse around video games contributes to the perception that young White male mass shooters are innocent victims under the corrupting ‘influence’ of games. It examines popular press coverage of four recent mass shootings which have used games rhetorically to uphold White supremacy, suggesting the urgency of games researchers to pushback against this discourse.

Author positionality as a frame of reference for understanding structural Whiteness turns up across multiple contributions: alongside Singha’s work, Wu’s piece Pedagogical encounter with structural Whiteness in Games: Tales and Reflections from a game studies classroom reflects on how White supremacy expresses itself through doubt and hostility among students in the author’s Game Studies classroom. By relating hegemonic norms in game culture to personal teaching experiences, Wu traces her own process of confronting, surviving and moving past structural Whiteness as a Taiwanese professional in Games education. 

Depictions and representations of non-Whiteness in games are addressed by several of our contributors. Howard’s article Highway to the Golden Zone(fire) is a journey into concepts of Techno-Orientalist discourses surrounding the success of Korean esports in international play. Through the StarCraft II Visual Novel, Howard explores the aesthetics and deployment of Koreanness through bodies, technologies, and places for a presumed Western audience results in an essentialized presentation of Koreanness in esports contexts with epistemic effects on Korean/American subjectivation. 

Blackness in games and its inextricable links to the coloniality of White imagination in game design is a central concern in several articles. In the article Can “Red Dead” be Redeemed? Race and Gameworld Contexts, Hamilton argues that for Blackness to be legible in video games, their design needs to acknowledge the existence of White supremacy and its realities and material effects. The analysis of Red Dead Redemption 2’s Black characters Charles, Lenny and Tilly serves as a case study on the mechanics of Black tokenism prevalent in US American media more broadly.

In Black Deprivation in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Remastered and The Last of Us Part II, Hill examines Black subjective demise as a philosophical reflection of the White gaze, which they name Black deprivation. Through analysis of game elements and narrative, Hill illustrates the normative order of Whiteness and its existential impact upon digital Black bodies while also exposing the ideological construction of Blackness in relation to how the discourses of White prejudice operate.

Hines’s Standardizing the White Dragonborn through Representations of the Black, Savage Outsider in Skyrim leverages analyses of gameplay, environment, and characters to demonstrate how the game perpetuates colonialist assumptions, as well as racial essentialism and stereotypes. Hines discusses the complicity and agency of players both to reenact but also to undermine these through mods and subversive play.

Erion’s reading of Telltale’s zombie mechanics in Colonised Morality Mechanics: The Struggle to Be Good in Telltale’s Walking Dead considers how the presence of Black and Brown protagonists is linked to a historically grounded White American anxiety about Black agency. Importantly, the affordances of the choice mechanics frame how racialized experience is supposed to be inhabited and judged by the player, reinforcing White morality.

Indigenous identity and how it is expressed in game design is taken up by two of our contributors. In Appropriation or Erasure? Imagining Indigenous Futures in Games, Wallis draws attention to how games featuring Indigenous people all too often focus on traditions and historical tropes, and correspondingly, feature little-to-no direct involvement with Indigenous developers or consultants. In contrast, Indigenous Futurisms is oriented forward, and Wallis writes about how this perspective collides with  Indigenous-controlled game narratives. Further advancing the line of inquiry of Indigenous game design, in Theorizing Whiteness as a proceduralised ideology in video games, Aguilera investigates how Whiteness as ideology tends to weave itself into games’ computational procedures. Contrasting examples from Western and Indigenous game design, Aguilera traces ways in which games both repeat and potentially resist procedural tropes of character creation, conflict resolution, and relationality with the world.

Two contributions use speculative and artistic game design reflections to question Whiteness, racism and coloniality. In The Fight is the Dance: Modding Chinese Martial Arts and Culture into Beat Saber, Ong, Logan and Parrila reflect on the authors’ critical modding process of Good Bag, a VR mod which simultaneously aims to teach martial arts whilst critically commenting on contemporary race relations. By detailing the practical process of creating an artistic modding experience involving music and martial arts experts, the authors show how gaming technology can become a powerful tool for decolonial commentary.

Llagostera and Khaled’s impressive multimedia article On Cooking a Sour Game reflects on the process of making the alternative controller game Cook Your Way, which uses the metaphorical platform of a cooking station to explore the first author’s relationships with Whiteness, immigration, global capitalism and the material process of game design itself. The piece is a vivid reminder how designerly dialogs with game design create opportunities to confront our varying ties to coloniality and Whiteness.

The editors: Sabine Harrer, Mahli-Ann Butt, Rilla Khaled, Florence M. Chee, Amani Naseem, Katta Spiel, Cale Passmore, Kishonna L. Gray, Outi Laiti.

Editor Biographies

Dr. Sabine Harrer is a postdoctoral researcher (FWF Hertha Firnberg grant) at University of Vienna and a senior lecturer at the Game Design Department, Uppsala University. Previously, they have been a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, University of Tampere, and have taught games and culture at BTK Berlin and ITU Copenhagen. Their research focuses on critical game studies, HCI, and creation-based knowledge making. They are the author of Games and Bereavement (transcript 2018), and a co-designer of the environmental satire board game Kyoto (2020).

Dr. Mahli-Ann Butt, is a Thai-Australian feminist game studies ethnographer, and Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. She serves as Chapter Officer on the executive board of DiGRA and President of DiGRA Australia. She is chief investigator of the project “AI Ally: Co-Designing Anti-Harassment AI with Girls and Young Women”, author of the forthcoming monograph Gaming Lifeworlds: Videogames in Culture (MIT Press, 2025), co-author of Navigating Game Studies (Polity, 2024), and lead editor of The Post-Gamer Turn (MIT Press, 2024).

Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where she teaches interaction design, serious game design, and programming, among other subjects. She is Director of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, Canada’s most well-established games research lab, in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Dr. Khaled’s research is focused on the use of interactive technologies to improve the human condition, a career-long passion that has led to diverse outcomes, including designing award-winning serious games, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, developing a framework for game design specifically aimed at reflective outcomes, establishing approaches for capturing and reasoning about game design knowledge, and working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures.

Dr. Florence M. Chee is Associate Professor of Digital Communication in the School of Communication and Program Director of the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy (CDEP) at Loyola University Chicago. She is also Founding Director of the Social & Interactive Media Lab Chicago (SIMLab), devoted to the in-depth study of social phenomena at the intersection of society and technology. As a technocultural ethicist, Dr. Chee’s research examines the social, cultural, and ethical shifts in emergent digital lifestyles, working to translate insights about lived contexts across industrial, governmental, and academic sectors. She is the author of Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play (2023 Lexington Books), which is an ethnographic exploration of the social and cultural roles that games fulfill in everyday life. 

Amani Naseem is a Maldivian artist working with games. She founded w00t, Copenhagen Play Festival (DK) and Multiplicity Talks at Freeplay (AU). She is a member of the PlayReactive (AU) and Copenhagen Game Collective (DK). 

Dr. Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor for Critical Access in Embodied Computing at the HCI Group of TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology). Their largely participatory research is situated at the intersection of Computer Science, Design and Cultural Studies. It informs design and engineering in critical ways to support the development of technologies that account for the diverse realities they operate in.

Cale Passmore is a PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan and has worked in computer science, psychology, cultural studies, and English. His focus is on in-/out-group dynamics and how identity factors relate to experiential outcomes. While his publication focus has been on race, ethnicity, and cultural dynamics in gaming, the majority of his last decade in grassroots work has centered on dynamics of class, colonialism, rural-urban divides, and advocating for pluralistic health models.

Dr. Kishonna Gray is an Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She previously served as an MLK Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT in Comparative Media Studies and the Women & Gender Studies Program. She has also served as a Faculty Visitor at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research (Cambridge). Her scholarship is influenced by her interdisciplinary training and grounded in critical race theory and feminist approaches to knowledge production. She interrogates the impact that technology has on culture and how Black users, in particular, influence the creation of technological products and the dissemination of digital artifacts.

Dr. Outi Laiti is a Sámi game researcher and designer. She is an Associate researcher at the University of Helsinki Indigenous studies. Her field of research is education and computer science with a focus on Sámi language and culture in digital games and programming. She is also active in designing and co-organizing Sami Game Jams and has been involved in several game development and educational projects in the past. Her doctoral thesis “Old Ways of Knowing, New Ways of Playing” published in January 2021, discusses the potential of collaborative game design to empower Indigenous Sámi. In 2020, gamesindustry.biz nominated her as one of the 100 Game Changers for her work on promoting e.g. Sámi gaming.

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