For a Decolonial Approach to Game Design Methods Beyond Representation

Abstract

This article draws attention to game design methods in decolonialist studies. As the importance of systematization in game design starts to become apparent, there is an opportunity to challenge the normalization of values, tropes, and power fantasies that have shaped the industry over the years. The article discusses the ways in which colonialist values permeate recurrent elements of game design, contrasting it with characteristics found in pre-colonial games and how they can be related to indigenous perspectives, which usually do not fit capitalist premises.

The challenge of decolonization is to remove the roots of colonial mentality and shed light to forgotten or dismissed epistemologies (Martins & Oliveira, 2016). It is necessary to reconnect with traditional knowledge and other modes of conceptualizing the world and the human dynamics within it, that are not wrought by the excessive rationality of Enlightenment. It entails thinking other ways of production and consumption, but also looking for other ways of telling stories and other stories to tell.

The effects of colonialism and the values which propelled Europe's pretentious endeavors are still very much present in contemporary culture. As explained by Black Studies professor Kehinde Andrews (2022), colonialism is the apex of the white-supremacist agenda of the European enlightenment. It is the large-scale enactment of the racist world-view that had been brewing for centuries in Europe, systematized in a way that is unprecedented even accounting for earlier forms of slavery and ethnic dominance (Andrews, 2022, p. 7). Such an inculcation cannot be dissolved easily.

Still according to Andrews (2022), colonialism is based on beliefs that justify its modus operandi. For this paper, we can synthesize these beliefs as (a) the myth of white superiority, (b) the myth of Europe's civilizational mission, and (c) the myth that expansion is progress. Andrews further adds that such tenets justify the practices of whitewashing knowledge, genocide, slavery, and deflecting the harm caused in a way that allows for western nations to benefit from it without guilt.

It might sound farfetched to claim that such old-fashioned values could be present in modern-day game design and game development practices. But it is not, and it needs to be addressed. Contemporary gaming practices are a post-industrial phenomenon that rose to the same plateau as importance of other media forms such as literature and cinema. The gross turnover of the Video Games industry has surpassed those of other media forms, becoming arguably the biggest form of entertainment in past years (Wainwright, 2023). Parallel to that, the tabletop games industry—a less noticeable but still important aspect of gaming culture—also saw a growth trend in recent years (Fortune Business Insights, 2023).

For as ancient as games might be, game design is still a recent practice which is still maturing. Thus, it is important to consider carefully its epistemological foundations. The communication features, strategies, and potential of games and ludic interaction as language forms are yet to be systematized. In this process of practical exploration, a shared language is bound to emerge from game creators and scholars alike (Neves & Zagalo, 2021a, 2021b).

Establishing game design good practices and conventions is something important for the field as it improves collaboration between professionals over time and across companies. A shared vocabulary helps identify and make tangible subjective constructs that need to be addressed, like balance, immersion, or appeal (Zubek, 2020). Following similar design procedures might ease the start of new projects or keep things going when staff changes happen. Thus, the discussion of the importance of game design methods has been increasing in the last decade (Anthropy & Clark, 2014; Neves & Zagalo, 2021b; Zubek, 2020).

Nevertheless, it is also important to be critical and careful about it. The establishment of conventions and methods has the goal of facilitating processes by homogenizing what is deemed inconveniently plural, replacing subjective and spontaneous approaches with objective and structured steps. The benefits of methods do not come without the reduction of diversity.

It is in moments like this where economic and cultural imbalances show their influence. As Nylund, Prax, and Sotamaa reflect (2020), “game heritage is defined by and for the people included in it, but not by those who are left outside” and the history of electronic media defines “who can speak about its values, and who may not.” What will be considered standard might tend towards the dominant culture and prevailing opinions among the groups that have more influence in the education of future professionals. Methods are designed to help practitioners achieve what is considered a good result. Therefore, they bring embedded a notion of quality relative to the context in which were created or created for.

The conventions and methods adopted in the long run preserve knowledge and values of its creators. We can illustrate this with a music analogy. People in the West and its colonies have been conditioned to consider European scales as normal, making non-European tones and intervals sound off, wrong or at least exotic. Being a phenomenon of the globalized world, it is easy to believe that games are beyond such distinctions and what constitutes a good game is already established by the global community of players and their spontaneous evaluation of titles. But again, the soft powers of cultural influence propelled by economic advantages also play a role in setting consumption standards.

English is the world's dominant language and one of the first hurdles to overcome for any venture in contemporary digital games development. Despite translation options for development software interfaces, coding language are mostly based in English. Even Lua, a programming language created in Brazil in the 90's, used for coding games for Roblox and Playdate, is based in English. And only in 2012 did we get قلب (pronounced alb) a programming language based on Arabic characters (Dewedar, 2013; Smith, 2015).

This can be attributed to the material underdevelopment of former colonies and their resultant economic subservience to the same powers in the global north that used to hold them captive. Wolf's compilation of the history of videogames around the world (Wolf, 2015) helps to see how political and economic hardships prevented South America and Southeast Asia to play important roles on the game development scene until recently. Coincidentally, the boost on production in Brazil starts after 2005 (Wolf, 2015, p. 89) coinciding with the release of Unity, a free 3D game engine. But also after the country's debts to the International Monetary Fund were paid (Roza, 2008).

Therefore, current traditions in game design and development come from a particular moment and part of the world, aligned with its perspectives and interests. The Industrial Revolution's push for mass reproduction of consumer goods was responsible for the distinction of design as something apart from traditional arts and crafts. This differentiation lies mostly in the adoption of the methods employed before and after, each accounting for different constraints such as resource availability and distribution systems but also for different mindsets and purposes. Think of how ancient utensils were covered with pictures of deities, heroes, and noble figures. Even the boxes of Senet, the ancient Egyptian board game, were covered in text, mixing historic records and practical information, for life and for the afterlife. Such overlay of different topics would seem jarring nowadays—unless we’re talking about brands sponsoring sports teams or making appearances in Fortnite.

This article argues that colonialist values are ingrained in common notions of what good games are and in recurrent game design tropes. Understandably, game designers have been telling stories embedded in the same assumptions and beliefs that shaped the globalized world they live in. The forms of production, distribution, and consumption influence these messages, affecting who gets to tell stories and who gets to hear them. If we want to see a movement towards decolonization, it is important that conscious game designers, as Flanagan and Nissenbaum (2016) would call them, can break free from these assumptions and open space for alternative methods.

Decolonialist efforts in game design

Much is being done to bring non-western perspectives to games. Australian researchers have been using game engines and gamification as learning tools to educate a wider audience about the languages and cultures of indigenous groups (Hardy et al., 2016, Pumpa, 2008). Similarly, Brazilian research group LEETRA, led by Prof Maria Silvia Cintra Martins, has been collaborating with various Amazonian Indigenous groups to preserve and revitalize their languages, creating digital games based on their stories (Martins, 2022).

Moving beyond educational purposes, Elizabeth LaPensée has been creating award winning games that combine indigenous activism and philosophy. One of her notable works is When the Rivers Were Trails, winner of the Adaptation Award at IndieCade 2019. The game development process was community-oriented, with over 30 Indigenous leads actively collaborating. Writers were selected based on community recommendations, and they had the autonomy to contribute content that resonated with them (LaPensée, 2020). In another of LaPensée's games, Thunderbird Strike, players assume the role of a mythical thunderbird destroying oil pipelines and reviving animals and plants. It has attracted the US media attention, so much so was even labeled ecoterrorist by oil lobbyists (LaPensée & Kinder, 2020).

Even more on the entertainment side, a 2024 indie game, Tales of Kenzera: Zau got the attention and global reach that other Afrofuturistic games like the 2016 Cameroonian game Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan couldn’t reach. Nevertheless, despite appraisal for its poignant story, the game received some criticism for having simple combat (Green, 2024). But it begs the question: did this game, which in the author's words is “an ode to the people we have loved and lost” (Summers & Salim, 2024), need to be an action game? This choice hints to one of the issues pertinent to this research.

These few examples were purposefully selected to show that decolonial efforts can be made on many fronts, by telling stories from non-western contexts and perspectives, by empowering indigenous authors and artists, by advocating indigenous rights and championing indigenous causes. And these efforts are also important on game mechanics and gameplay conventions. Games are based on conflicts, be it the opponents we face, the obstacles we need to overcome or simply the choices we need to make (Fullerton et al., 2008). Well-designed conflicts present compelling challenges that engage our minds and motivate us to overcome them. It is important to consider decolonialism in games beyond the indigenous people narrative representation, to break from game mechanics' conventions and norms that also carry some values we want to challenge.

The expression of colonialist values in game mechanics

In games, sociocultural knowledge is communicated not only through the game's narrative, audio, and visual aspects, but also through its mechanics (Arrivabene, 2017). More precisely through the rules that condition the representation of the player, the environment, and the gameplay activities (Perez Latorre, 2015). And it is within the gameplay activities’ rules that colonialist values can permeate any game genre.

Game designers create experiences by designing interaction procedures (Murray, 1997), so when a game represents a situation, fictional or not, it does so by simulating its properties (Frasca, 2001). Simulations are models of systems, always constrained by the budget, the knowledge, and the intentions of the designers (Robinson, 2008). When game designers define goals, and the valid actions to overcome challenges, they are bound by their own notions of merit and fairness, their own capacity to develop a system that enforces it, but also by their audience expectations.

In this way, notions of entitlement are often reproduced in tropes of good versus evil, the fight against the other. Protagonists are entitled to positive outcomes for their violent actions. How many white male protagonists have we played, acting as the sole logical-minded creature against hordes of brutes? And how many of those henchmen, fanatics, blind followers of evil leaders, were non-white, or non-human? Note that replacing the white male savior with another gender or color does not automatically remove the belief on the entitlement of the rational to exterminate the irrational. It is as if those who are not rational by the same criteria are no more than beasts, thus deserve to be subdued.

The so-called white men's burden appears in tropes of sanitization and restoring the order. Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak (2024) warns about how “city people” urge actions to “sanitize” or stop any undesirable influence of nature on their environment. Many games about saving the world prompt players to do so by fighting against the forces driving change, in a protagonist-centric way. The idea that the human-world needs to be saved, be it from others or from nature itself, is certainly related to a sense of self-preservation. But it also highlights the belief that the human mode of being and human interference in the world, or civilization in short, is necessary and worth of preservation. These are characteristic traits of anthropocentric mentality which are not necessarily shared by non-western cultures. For those more connected with nature or spirituality, humans are not that central.

In the same sense, many games carry a positive idea of expansionism. The idea that bigger is better is common and often valued in games. Players of strategic games will often find better chances when they have more resources or more units. These generally allow for more moves, more reach, more options. Similarly, action and adventure digital games will often benefit players who gather more items, more currency, more weapons. This is because designers tend to simulate the benefits of having such quantities while omitting any side-effect of carrying or keeping them (Dormans, 2011). Uneaten food does not rot, a bag full of diamonds does not slow you down, a massive army does not demand higher effort in management or faces more cases of insurgency. A common trait of indigenous peoples is the awareness of the importance of self-regulation and respect for nature's capacity to provide, even to the extent of fear of displeasing it (Tacey, 2013).

Resource management mechanics are common to many boardgames. They deal with allocation of staff in different functions, in playable economic systems in all sorts of contexts, fictional, or not. Curiously, among those non-fictional, many borrow themes related to colonialism. Games made by European designers receive the names of Caribbean islands, African, and South American peoples and places. Others praise the technical progress of the industrial revolution, enabling the player to build railways and commercial empires. These mechanics tend to focus on the entrepreneurship, often recreating the extractivist logic of the conquistadores and pioneers (Trammell & Foasberg, 2016). They also reproduce command or management attitudes oriented to exploitation, detached from the environmental consequences, not to mention the blood-soaked resources and labor that allowed such enterprises (Andrews, 2022, p. 89).

Obvious examples of these values in games are the popular genres known as 4X which is often—and this point is very telling—blurred with another, known as Civilization games. The 4X title stands for the four main action verbs found in these games: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Which means that in those games, each player controls a group or faction, which inhabits some land. To win the game, these factions need to thrive, and the way to do this is by exploring the land, revealing new areas. Exploring is a way to find resources. And to guarantee the exploitation of such resources, players need to settle in the new-found land, thus expanding their territory. And lastly, the limited land and limited resources are to be disputed with other factions, player-controlled or not, which leads to conflict.

While 4x gameplay dynamic usually relies heavily upon this last mechanic, sometimes only allowing resources to be used for military developments, the Civilization games, on the other hand, emphasize developments in culture, arts, and science and the political aspect of the settlement. They often present idealistic and palatable versions of the colonialist logic. You, the player, will still perform all those four verbs, but you do so to achieve a higher plateau of humanity. All the damage done to the environment and to other groups are in favor of this noble goal. Advancements in culture and science are mostly achieved from within your group, and other groups are usually a problem, not an influence. Interestingly, in the classic civilization game Age of Empires, priests were tactical units capable of converting enemies to your side. Here religion, which is for many cultures the connection with nature and worlds beyond human, was depicted as a tool to conquer the other. Rationalism frames the non-human world (plants, animals, minerals, and non-white bodies alike) as resources to be harvested and harnessed, so game designers tend to apply the same logic to their fictional worlds.

These cultural artifacts reinforce a real-world and widespread pernicious belief that expansion and material progress are the signs of good decisions and leadership even when it means death for many humans and non-humans (Condis & Arponen, 2022). Expectedly, clear colonialist points of view are to be found in colonialism simulators like these. Designers of 4X and Civilisation games likely want to provide their players the experience of the victorious powers.

So ubiquitous are these power fantasies in popular culture that is easy to think they are just natural, instead of representatives of the goals that mobilized white peoples to oppress people of color across the world. Certainly, conflict over resources, territorialism, and even slavery predates colonial expansion (Andrews, 2022, p. 79), but the world domination trope in games seems typical of the imaginary formed after the European colonial expansion.

Pre-colonial games

A quick look to games created before the colonial era should help to support the last point and identify the different nuances in similar situations. The desire for conflict, which French sociologist Roger Caillois (2001) described with the Greek word Agon, is undeniably a driving force in many ancient games. Agon was central to traditional sports. They are based on demonstrations of strength and skills, which makes a good opponent something valuable. The presence of an antagonist is not the question, it is the dynamics toward them that matters. The ancient boardgames known in the west as Nine-Men's-Morris, the game of Draughts, and Chess—the whitewashed version of Indian game Chaturanga—presented the idea of eliminating opponent pieces. But the elimination is not connected to profit or resources from the act. In modern games, Necrocapitalism seems to be much more present. Enemies often burst in coins or drop valuable items when eliminated. The systematic disposal of bodies in order to open paths to progress, or to gain and accumulate resources, underpins several contemporary ludonarratives.

Ancient boardgames also played with concepts of expansion and territory domination. Noughts and Crosses, Go and Bagh Chall are all about occupying spaces, looking for specific configurations, but not about exploiting their resources or “developing” them. Hounds and Jackals, The Royal Game of Ur and other ancient race games such as Moksha Patam, known in the west as Snakes and Ladders, would have players occupying spaces on the board with their pawns, getting rid of the opponent's ones when possible, and making use of resources or advantages obtained in special places. Notably, these games don’t allow the direct movement to such spaces, relying on luck—or fate—to determine part of the player's movements. Maybe because of that element, they are also thematically connected with spiritual, esoteric, and moral themes (Curtis & Finkel, 1999).

Traditional games of Mancala relate to natural resources in the way they symbolize cyclical sowing and harvesting. They bring the governance of the commons into play, by making players share resources and spaces. This is different from popular modern games such as the tabletop Agricola or the digital Stardew Valley. In those, as cozy and idyllic as they might be, farming is a systematic anthropocentric transfiguration and exploitation of the land and its non-human inhabitants. In traditional cultures and cosmovision, animals, trees, rivers, and mountains, are seen as valuable beings, sometimes sacred, but always as something to be respected. In the rationalist mindset that defines western positivist ontology, completely disconnected from subjectivities of this kind, nature is just a canvas for the construction of idealized futures.

In favor of different approaches

The desire for good competition and for puzzling through resource management challenges don’t need to be suppressed. The fun that comes from it will and should fuel new games with these elements. But the methods we, game designers, use to create and evaluate our games should consider the extent in which the tropes we use reinforce established standards. Who or what are the players competing against and how interdependent are these opposites? What are they competing for? Why are they competing in the first place?

Game design methods should help to put common design decisions in perspective. They should help expand the possibilities of games, encouraging and enabling the reconnection to knowledges beyond the commercial-validated and to ancestral ways of seeing the world. Other stories and perspectives can suggest different conflict drivers for challenges and different notions of success.

By playing, one can connect with other realities and can experience possible futures. In a recent paper on afro and indigenous futurisms, Henry Jenkins (2023) notes that “we cannot build a better world until we can imagine a better world.” These movements bring and share alternative cosmovisions pointing to the ancestral and spiritual as valid and important sources of knowledge.

Many modern games allude to the spiritual, often by drawing inspiration from mythologies around the world. Few of them are concerned with spirituality, though. Some games in the past were sacred. They were meant to be played with reverence because they were connected to something beyond. Modern mobile games are designed to be played as if they were some deity themselves, requiring users’ daily dedication to their sacred screens. It feels that everything we do, from working to socializing, is in front of a screen. And games have been instrumental in this. As Krenak (2024) puts it, the mediatization of modern life has taken us first from citizens to consumers, and now from consumers to spectators, when what we really need is more florestania—a concept of citizenship that embraces the time and cycles of the forest and the non-human elements.

So, if we are to think of an alternative future for games, it needs to emerge from a reconnection with nature and the sacred, whatever it might be. This requires methods that consider play as something beautiful and empowering, while putting games’ own importance in perspective. Game Designers consider their production and their cultural and environmental impact. We need to encourage games and methods for making games that consider healing and nurturing other aspects of human existence beyond our tendency to compete, accumulate, to be addicted. We need to explore interactive poetics, further from expanding, exploiting, and exterminating.