Modern video games often act out the values of colonialism. Browse the top selling lists on steam and you’ll spot numerous titles that encourage players to explore new lands, stripmine them of their resources and genocide the local inhabitants.
When the topic of colonization arises, game developers state they want no part in promoting such ideas. However, for those folks who actively attempt to decolonize their games, they run into an issue; they lack game design tools to step outside the sticky web of inherited values they’ve already spent years mastering. All many developers know is how to make games about genocidal power fantasies.
A sad state of affairs. What if there were design tools that could help teams take their first steps into a broader, richer world of non-colonial mechanics?
Colonialism is admittedly a complicated topic. There’s so much history, so many layers of repeated misery, so many perspectives. But it is also a very simple topic: Maybe, just maybe, we could make fewer games that glorify murdering the locals and taking their stuff.
In that light, we propose the following limited scope for this paper:
This paper comes from a very specific point of view. We are commercial game designers speaking to other game designers. Unlike many voices in this discussion, we have deep empathy for commercial game designers and understand that they operate in a cursed world of limited resources and limited power; a capitalist hellscape of market and economic constraints that destroy most artistic and moral inclinations. Rarely can designers afford to be idealists even when our hearts are in the right place.
To enact change, we require boring, pragmatic design tools that frame rhetoric in terms of utility and economics. Our teams struggle to productively process emotional manifestos, well-intentioned shaming or densely alienating theory. We are not academics or revolutionaries. We are just simple farmers, people of the land.
Yet, we believe commercial game designers, even in the face of notable constraints, have the power to reach millions; leveraging vast engines of distribution and promotion that most allies can only dream about. If we, as game designers, can start interrogating and evolving the underlying values of our work, perhaps we can bring about a future abundance of innovative, decolonized video games.
Colonialism most commonly refers to a period beginning around the 1400s and ceasing officially in the early 1900s, where European nations conquered, subjugated and exploited over 80% of the world’s population. It reshaped the world, leaving hundreds of millions enslaved or murdered. Ancient cultures were pillaged and erased, their raw wealth redirected to Western coffers via religious, racial, legal and economic frameworks that still underpin current world power structures.
In the 1600 – 1800s, numerous board games educated European children on the joys of conquering others. Many of those boardgames still inform popular genres such as strategy, building and RPG titles. See Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (MIT Press) for an in depth discussion of this history.
These common mechanics of race, resource extraction, dehumanization and violent conquest are so ingrained in the language of modern game design, we struggle to even see them. We have entire professions such strategy design, progression design or combat design that naively trade in colonialist values.
Here is a list of specific mechanics that exhibit strong colonialist values.
Before we jump in, you should read this list with the following caveat: Game mechanics are like musical instruments; they can be played in many ways depending on the artist’s skill, intent and cultural context. Can a game have these colonialist mechanics and not be a celebration of colonialism? Absolutely! With effort, careful thought and context, you can make even a bongo drum sound mournful.
However, if you blindly embrace these mechanics in an unthinking way, you’ll get their default, perhaps undesired cultural expression. Our initial goal is visibility. Do you, a smart well-informed designer, see the potential issues?
Let’s start with 4X mechanics of eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXtermination made popular in various strategy games such as Stellar Conquest, Masters of Orion, or Civilization.
Exploration is an admittedly beloved mechanic that suggests openness and discovery. However there are some problematic variations to notice.
Once a player has ‘discovered’ a location that provides value, they must acquire or occupy it.
Once a location has been seeded, colonialist logic states that it must be stripped of resources, often for the benefit of some powerful empire or superior culture.
And finally we get to the destruction of Others or their culture. A video game staple.
There are numerous other patterns we see that have their roots in colonialism. For example:
A game like Civilization might score around 12 or more depending on how you count various systems. Decolonized games like a Bejeweled or Mario Party often have scores of 3 or less. It is an inexact rubric intended to generate insight, not direct comparisons.
You may look at this list of colonial adjacent mechanics and think, “Goodness! That covers almost every game mechanics I know how to design or enjoy playing.” Watch any expensive AAA media event and it is quickly apparent that there are a vast number of games out there that are essentially power fantasies about dominating and destroying others.
There are three main issues that designers describe when they first attempt to decolonize their game designs
A typical game design is not created from whole cloth. Most professional game designers perform craft-like creation within heavily defined constraints of existing well established forms. We consistently borrow old systems or tropes from existing genres. Much of our work is only culturally meaningful in the context of a trained audience who values a long history of highly derivative creations.
This is not easy work to create! It takes a designer many years to learn these design spaces and immense mastery to execute within them at a professional level. The result is that some of the most skilled designers in our industry have spent their careers passionately perfecting out how to craft games about killing natives in foreign lands.
When the project of ‘decolonizing play’ prevents a designer from using their trusty design tools, they are lost. For perhaps the first time in their career, they are faced with a blank canvas and they panic.
There exist immense (and profitable!) design opportunities out there for folks interested in creating decolonized gameplay. However, just as it took immense effort to master colonial mechanics, it takes time and practice learning new ways of seeing and making.
Many designers will need to go back to the basics and apply design fundamentals to these new design spaces. They’ll need to get to know and understand audiences who may not be like themselves. It helps to approach the problem with a certain sense of grit and determination. Creating decolonized gameplay will be a new long term journey towards excellence, not a switch you can just instantly flip.
Complicating all this is the reality that most professional game designers operate with the constraints of existing successes. No matter what our personal beliefs, we can find forward looking designs hamstrung by IP requirements, conservative team members and existing player genre expectations.
This is not insurmountable given strong creative leadership and buy-in across the team. However it adds a deep friction to most efforts.
These are substantial challenges, but luckily there’s some relatively straightforward options available to teams interested in decolonizing their gameplay.
We’ve put together a set of steps and tools that can be used to identify risks, assess available design flexibility, and provide design exercises to identify alternatives to major colonialist game verbs. It is a simple but impactful framework that will help you create games using core values that fit your design intention while stepping away from negative and problematic standards.
Most commercial designers work within well established genres or product categories. There are a considerable amount of genres that have little overlap with colonialist values. Yet, there are some genres that share a direct lineage with colonialist themes. The first framework we put together is the Risk Spectrum, a breakdown of game genres categorized by their risk factor in leaning towards colonialist values. We divided these genres and assigned them into a risk category based on their overall mechanics and player experience. Below is the listed breakdown and graphic that can be used to assess where your game falls.
The Risk Spectrum is a visual representation of game genres categorized by the level of risk towards colonial values
This is not an extensive list, but the following genres tend to be less problematic. There are exceptions, but they are rare. Some genres with low risks include:
The following genres include examples of both colonized and decolonized play. These titles are perhaps the biggest opportunities to shift existing games and franchises away from colonialist values while still preserving popular mechanics.
The following genres tend to be greatly rooted in colonialist values. You will tend to encounter the slippery slope of ‘accidentally’ keeping up with colonist values as you pull in design patterns and themes that are inherent to these genres’ player experiences.
It is possible for your game to fall in one or more risk factor categories. The important takeaway within this tool is to understand how much your mechanics and core experience is at risk of perpetuating colonialist values.
The good news is that beloved but problematic genres are not immutable. A genre is a composite bundle of existing human systems, values and culture. Consider what parts you want to keep and what parts you want to replace:
Once you know where your game fits in the Risk Spectrum, it should open you up to ask questions like:
The tool that follows will aid you in answering questions like the ones listed above. It’s meant to provide you with tangible solutions to address concerns by changing the perspective of the problem.
Your game’s values inform the creative pillars that flow across all the game’s features and systems. They drive the player fantasy and are supported by player verbs and game mechanics. They are reflected by the game’s narrative and world building. At the heart of most modern colonialist games are a set of naively inherited values. By thoughtfully replacing those values with alternative values and then building your game upon these new values, you can avoid creating problematic themes and experiences.
The question now is: How do you come up with alternative values? What better way to find alternatives than by using antonyms.
Our suggested approach is to take your gameplay verbs and pair them with respective antonyms, verbs that would be the opposite in meaning. These new verbs would represent the opposite values and give you the push to brainstorm ideas in a new direction.
Why gameplay verbs? We chose verbs because they directly translate to player actions and are the foundational concepts of systems. When you can strip a mechanic to its most basic action verb, you can easily deconstruct the role that it plays in the gameplay and find verbs that are similar or opposing to ideate further. Once you have an antonym for a gameplay verb, you can continue extracting more values by finding more synonyms, words that have similar meaning. Before you know it, you’ll have a list of new possibilities that will provide fodder for conversations.
Below is a short breakdown of the gameplay verb, antonym, and synonym process:
There are lots of ways this exercise can go but it should be fun to come up with options and think outside the box. When using this tool on your own or with a team, we recommend incorporating a visual element and to color code your verbs. Whether it be through a digital or physical format, use shapes and colors to aid you in the process.
Below are some verb brainstorms we did as a group and a visual format we used to categorize them:
A visual representation of the Gameplay Verbs and Antonyms Framework in use
Identify Design Flexibility
Now that you know where your game falls in the Risk Spectrum and have an understanding of alternative values to possibly implement, it’s time to figure out what areas of your game can and cannot be modified. The goal here is to help you answer the following questions.
Not all elements of a game are easily changed once development begins. The following elements of a game are listed in order from mostly flexible to least flexible.
Within reason, a team can more easily tweak their story and world elements, even relatively late in development. It is much harder to alter Player Fantasy and Verbs, unless you do early in the game’s development process, like concepting or pre-production.
As you dissect what features and systems have the most flexibility in design modifications, we’d like to suggest questions that you can use to further evaluate important aspects of your game. We broke them down by the categories used in the Design Flexibility Framework.
Even when using all the steps, frameworks, and tools listed above, it is surprisingly easy to get close to shipping a project and discovering that our game contains a handful of mechanics and symbols that accidentally tell a colonialist story. Solicit feedback to see how actual players (who are blind to your intentions!) might mischaracterize inopportune combinations.
Here are some tips.
So how does decolonizing play work in practice? The widely known game Pokémon contains numerous colonialist themes of exploitation and extraction. Over the years, other teams built some variations that are more colonialist, while other teams have focused on decolonizing Pokémon. Let’s explore the following Monster Collection titles to see how they handle the challenge:
In Pokémon games, the player fantasy sets you as a kid in a fictional world where animals are captured, domesticated and used for different purposes, such as fighting each other. You, as a pokemon trainer, are expected to collect the rarest and most powerful breeds of pokemons and compete in the highest fighting arenas with your captured animals.
It’s easy to see what are the exploiting themes here. Training animals to fight each other is not exactly legal in the real world and is mostly considered animal cruelty. Given that some Pokemon have human-like features, it also can be interpreted as a reference to slavery. There’s also a domination fantasy with the concept of gaining rank and status through collecting badges when you defeat a trainer gym and ultimately become the best trainer.
Sprites of Pokémon trainers featuring whips. Source
Of course, the world of Pokémon is not the real world and the developers sugar coated their concept to be more kid-friendly. The player is making friends with the pokemons they train, the defeated pokémons are only fainting and quickly heal with the care of nurse Joy. The fights between pokemons are presented as friendly sportsmanship similar to martial arts. All of these efforts make Pokémon an acceptable and enjoyable family-oriented game despite the problematic sides.
Palworld is a game that can be described with the following question: “What if we could arm pokemons with guns and hunt other giant pokemons, like in the Monster Hunter franchise?” It also mixes in elements of popular survival and automation genres. This game is obviously a satire of Pokemon, pushing all its problematic aspects to an extreme.
In Palworld, you can enslave cute pokemons to craft weapons for you. Source.
However, the game is presented with cute and kid-friendly graphics that are strikingly similar to Pokémon and the developers don’t seem to make an effort to nuance their statement. In the trailers, the player fantasy seems to be catching, exploiting and killing cute critters for fun. Is this satire? Since these values are ingrained in western societies and gamer culture, it is quite possible that few players understand or care about the fact that this game might be satire. Instead, they fully enjoy and embrace its system of values. All in good fun.
Cassette Beast is an independent game that tried to make a very similar game to Pokemon, but by turning all the problematic and exploitive themes around.
In Cassette Beast, the player uses recordings of the beasts they encounter to transform themselves into them and fight other beasts. Source.
In this game, the main character washes out in this weird land that seems to be out of time. That place is populated by incredible beasts that block your way in your quest to return home. However, in order to fight them, you can record their essence on cassettes and then turn yourself into these beasts with these recordings and inherit their abilities.
Cassette Beast changes the exploitive aspects of Pokémon in significant ways:
There are no zero-sum situations in that game because there is no one that has a net benefit or a net loss based on the game’s player fantasy. Beasts attack you because it’s in their nature, and you defend yourself with abilities that you virtually collected on them. Defeated beasts flee, while defeated “rangers” (equivalent of Pokémon’s other trainers), transform back to their human form.
While also being a parody on Pokémon, Cassette Beasts make some comments on capitalism and colonialistic values using a mature and thoughtful narrative and relationship you develop with your new neighbors that are as trapped as you are in this weird world.
In Pokémon Snap, the player is a wild-life photographer that strives to take the best photos of pokémons in their natural habitat.
In Pokemon Snap, you gain points when you succeed at taking good shots of Pokemon in special poses. Source.
As a safari visitor, you are not catching or disturbing pokemons in their everyday life, but rather patiently trying to photo shoot them in their best pose and light. Even more than in Cassette Beasts, Pokémon Snap is a non-zero sum game as no combat is part of the gameplay. You have limited control on the pokémons, except for some treats you can throw at them to get better pictures. It even teaches good environmental preservation values to the player, which are at the opposite of exploitation.
Colonization is a complex topic that is easy for game designers to latch onto thematically and mechanically. It is the game equivalent of the press’ worst predilection “If it bleeds, it leads.” Want some cheap design wins? Toss in a little murder of the less powerful. Afterall, humans have been expanding, exploiting and exterminating one another since the dawn of time. Pick any spot populated by humans and you’ll see that its culture is built on layers of bones, blood and borrowed beauty.
At the same time, we believe that humans are more than our worst instincts. Games need not be limited to the glorification of past horrors. We can move beyond fellating imperialism as the central focus of our joyfully broad and vibrant artform.
In part we were motivated to write this paper because we want to see fresh, new game designs that help society to move forward in a positive way.
What if you made a game that doesn’t involve moving into someone else’s space and killing everyone who lives there and then taking their stuff? It is certainly possible. We just need to understand the failings of the past, see the opportunity for promoting positive values. We can choose to devote our limited and precious lives towards creating a better world.
Colonialism in board games: Flanagan, Mary; Jakobsson, Mikael. Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (p. 173). MIT Press. Kindle Edition.
4X games: “The term is a loose acronym of ‘explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate’, coined in 1993 to describe the gameplay of Master of Orion.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_4X_video_games
Load bearing design: “A game has pillars made of key experiences that it needs to deliver in order for it to be successful. This is the heavy weight of player, publisher and market expectations. Various mechanical systems and content support those pillars. Those that bear the most weight and would hurt the game most if they failed are considered ‘load bearing’.”
New World: “During an interview with studio head Patrick Gilmore, I put a version of this notion to him. He looked genuinely shocked. ‘That’s not really been a focus at all,’ he said. ‘The lore of the game is that there’s a tainted aspect to this world, that it’s a garden of Eden that has fallen from grace.’ You could argue that this is precisely how 17th-century Europeans viewed the new world.”
Postcolonialist design themes: “From the series of hypothetical postcolonial interventions posted above (Monster Hunter, Stardew Valley, Breath of the Wild) and the design of Syphilisation, we can isolate some approaches that you can adopt if you want to try this lens.”
https://whynotgames.in/2023/02/11/generalPoco.html
This paper was produced by a workgroup of senior game designers at the 2023 Polaris conference. The non-profit Polaris Game Design conference seeks to gather the industry’s top designers in order to first, discuss our toughest problems and second, share this deep wellspring for the benefit of game teams everywhere.
In 2023, this work was made possible in part by our sponsor Xsolla and others.
