Professor, Film + Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz / semurray[at]ucsc[dot]edu
“Raji‘s Burden” in CyberOrient: Journal of the Virtual Middle East and Islamic World. Guest Editors: Souvik Mukherjee and Zahra Rizvi. Special Issue: Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and Video Games. NOW PUBLISHED! (December 2023) Special thanks to the editors for being included in this very special issue!
Abstract: Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium, and treated largely as an entertainment product. But with the complexifying of the form, combined with a new generation of dynamic scholars, and an expanded understanding of how to write about them, games now constitute a robust area of critical engagement with topics in race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, ability, and other markers of difference.
Those interventions have been key in driving the discourse forward, but game studies now faces a new set of strategic challenges. The gains have likely come at great methodological cost. This essay explores the consequences of identity-focused analyses and the role of intersectional considerations of self and anti-essentialism as crucial tools in combatting enforced notions of belongingness. The author argues that the frontier of methodology in critical game studies may be to think outside of the prescribed ways in which academia encourages monolithic affiliation (or even false segregation) by validating and codifying identity-driven forms of expertise.
Keywords: representation; video games; videogames; belonging; anti-essentialism; game studies
“Postcoloniality, Ecocriticism and Lessons from the Playable Landscape”
Abstract: What methodological lessons for ecocriticism may be learned from previous critical game studies interventions? Specifically, I consider the political work undertaken by postcolonial critiques of video games, and their pertinent address of human-centered understandings of the land, within the context of larger issues of inclusion, representation, diversity, and the challenging of hegemonic power structures. What can ecocritical games’ crucial visual culture function be, in operating against the grain of profit and innovation-driven ends—or even the very real problems of raw resources needed for their existence? Can the context of games and play provide any lived-world intervention into the urgent ecological challenges that are becoming an existential threat? This work is an extension of a larger discussion about the functions of postcolonial and other critical cultural scholarly interventions. This article asserts that ecocriticism and postcolonial critique exert a doubled pressure on rote forms of play design, and present meaningful possibilities for video games as a maturing cultural form.
SORAYA MURRAY 