Digra keynote

1. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
‘Darmok’, Season 5 Episode 2, Star Trek: The Next Generation
No, I’m not insane (yet). It’s not the jet-lag. Or
a virus-corrupted slideshow.

2. Postcolonialism, History and Videogames
Playing Alternative Histories

4. What history? Whose history?
Perhaps in the
future there will be
some African
history to teach;
But at present
there is none …
Africa has
no history!
Indian society has no
history at all, at least no
known history. What
we call its history, is
but the history of the
successive intruders
India’s history is a
highly interesting
portion of British
History

6. Colonial Cybertypes: Indians are just Indians!
Consider, for example, the history
of India as told by Age of Empires 3
which has Brahmin healers riding
elephants and an infantry comprised
of Rajputs, Gurkhas, and Sepoys. For
those not familiar with Indian
culture and history, this can be
misleading: the Sepoy, unlike the
Rajput and the Gurkha, is not an
ethnic community but the standard
name for a soldier in the East India
Company’s time. Finally, elephants
were traditionally used by the
warrior class or the Kshatriyas;
Brahmins, or the priestly class,
would seldom be seen near them

7. Colonial Cybertypes : ‘Virtual UnAustralia’
One of the more controversial aspects of Europa
Universalis II, which contributes to Australia’s popularity as
a destination for colonization, is the ease with which the
‘natives’ may be either exterminated or assimilated. […]
This native population is assimilated into the colony once it
has become a certain size, and the natives automatically
become productive citizens in the economic output of the
colonies’ economy. A peaceable native population can be
easily assimilated to create a large thriving colony without
having to allocate troops to protect the colonists. Australia
is a desirable colony in the game because it has a large and
peaceful native population. However, trying to set up a
colony or even a trading post in a province that has large
and aggressive native population will often lead to the
extermination of the colonists. This can be prevented by
stationing the colony with troops, as even the weakest
colonizing troops can usually defeat a large native army.
- (Tom Apperley ‘Virtual UnAustralia: Videogames and
Australia’s Colonial History’ 2006).

8. E.H Carr – ‘idle parlour games’
E.P. Thompson – ‘unhistorical shit’
Johan Huizinga – ‘The historian must [...] constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will
seem to permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks
of the coup d'état of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously repulsed.’
Stephen Weber – ‘raise tough questions about things we think we know and […] suggest unfamiliar or uncomfortable
arguments about things we had best consider’
Niall Ferguson – ‘those which are essentially the products of imagination but (generally) lack an empirical basis; and
those designed to test hypotheses by (supposedly) empirical means, which eschew imagination in favour of computation’
(on videogames such as Civ and Empire Earth): ‘a crude caricature of the historical process’
Tom Apperley – ‘Europa Universalis II provides scope for players to articulate and explore their counterfactual imaginary.’
Adam Chapman – ‘These games’ function as counterfactual history is not entirely self-contained […] there are still
historiographical expectations that are more problematic.’
Counterfactual History and Historians

9. In Which Civilization is deeply hurtful to me:
Counterfactuality and the Persistence of Colonial
Stereotypes.
- Luke Plunkett in Kotaku.com, 2014
In later games this bug was obviously not an issue, but as a tribute/easter egg of sorts, parts of
his white-hot rage have been kept around. In Civilization V, for example, while Gandhi’s regular
diplomatic approach is more peaceful than other leaders, he’s also the most likely to go dropping
a-bombs when pushed. (Plunkett 2014)
[A]larming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing
as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal
palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to
parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor. (Winston Churchill 1931)

10. Reverse colonialism in the Maratha victory over Europe: the code pure and simple is the fetishization of the imperial perspective.
The SAME LOGIC as THEIRS!

11. Enter Postcolonial History (re)Writing: The
Nationalist and the Subaltern
1. Nationality, nationalism. nativism: the progression is, I believe, more and more constraining.
In countries like Algeria and Kenya one can watch the heroic resistance of a community partly
formed out of colonial degradations, leading to a protracted armed and cultural conflict with
the imperial powers, in turn giving way to a one-party state with dictatorial rule. (Edward Said
1994)
2. Subaltern historiography involves ‘focusing on their blind-spots, silences and anxieties, these
historians seek to uncover the subaltern's myths, cults, ideologies and revolts that colonial and
nationalist elites sought to appropriate and conventional historiography has laid to waste by
their deadly weapon of cause and effect’ (Gyan Prakash 1992).

12. Bhagat Singh (Mitashi 2002) was a first-person shooter in the style of Doom and instead of
fighting monsters, the player would be shooting British colonial police officers.

13. Explanation of the narrative discontinuity between Nusantara Online's cutscene and the game itself lies in
understanding the cutscene as a unit operation of "playable" nationalism and disregarding its incongruity with the
game's narrative progression. The cutscene's narrative of invasions, as a unit operation, metaphorically indicates the
colonial domination that threatens the formation of an ideal Nusantara in the game realm. (Iskandar Zulkarnain 2014)

14. The hero of the game, Enzo Kori-Odan, is the
ruler of Zama - a diverse country free of an
imperialist past but now threatened by a coup.
The story centers around Enzo and his wife
Erine, and their fight to regain the throne. The
hero's power comes from the collective energy
of his ancestors, a force known as the Aurion.
(Patel 2016)
We have an advantage with our colonial past, in
that we can relate to people from different
countries. (Madibe Olivier, developer of Aurion)

15. Subaltern History
Subaltern historiography necessarily entailed
(a) a relative separation of the history of power from any universalist
histories of capital,
(b) a critique of the nation-form, and
(c) an interrogation of the relationship between power and knowledge
(hence of the archive itself and of history as a form of knowledge).
(Dipesh Chakraborty 2000)

16. Playing Beyond the Archive(able): 80 Days There are also times we use fantasy to
enable us to tell the kind of story we wanted
to be able to tell, to redress some of the
colonialism, sexism and racism of the
period. If you’re inventing a world, why not
make it more progressive?
Why not have women invent half the
technologies, and pilot half the airships?
Why not shift the balance of power so that
Haiti rather than barely postbellum United
States is ascendant in the region? Why not
have a strong automaton-using Zulu
Federation avert the Scramble for Africa?
Why not have characters who play with
gender and sexuality without fear of reprisal?
History is full of women, and people of
colour, and queer people, and minorities.
That part isn’t fantasy - the fantastical bit in
our game is that they’re (often but not
always) allowed to have their own stories
without being silenced and attacked. That
their stories are not told as if they’re
exceptional.
(Meg Jayanth 2014)Inkle Studios 2013.

17. Playing Beyond the Archive(able): Sîochân Leat (aka The Irish Game)
“You’re playing the Irish,” she said. “You’ve already lost.” A
successful game meant that we lost the fewest amount of
game pieces possible—each piece represented thousands of
Irish people. The game began with each square of the board
holding two game pieces, one green figure and one white
figure.
During each turn, we placed an orange cube that represented
Cromwell’s army into one of the spaces, thus displacing the
Irish people (game pieces) onto other squares. Each square
could hold up to four figures, which demonstrated the tale of
the Irish losing their land and huddling together in
increasingly crowded areas. If no free spaces remained, we
placed the Irish figures off to one side of the board. These
figures, Brenda explained, would be shipped to Barbados to
serve as slaves. [...]
I wondered about how many families split up, how many lost
parents or children to slavery, and whether the English
officers felt any remorse for their actions. (Shannon Symonds
2013)
Brenda Romero 2009. The game is exhibited at The
Strong Museum of Play, NY.
It was a measure beneficial tthey said to
Ireland which was thus relieved of a
population that might trouble the Planters it
was a benefit to the people removed who
might thus be made English and Christians
and a great benefit to the West India sugar
planters who desired the men and boys for
their bondmen and the women and Irish girls
in a country where they had only Maroon
women and Negresses [sic] to solace them.
(J.P. Prendergast The Cromwellian Settlement
of Ireland 1868)

18. Set in an alternate reality post-colonial India,
the story follows a search for the mythical
city of Kayamgadh. According to the game’s
lore: “People of Kayamgadh do not speak.
They are afraid that their words might
penetrate the layers under which their
bodies are hidden. […]
As a comment on post-colonial nationalism,
Rituals reveals that fictions construct the
reality around us, while its mechanics show
that other people’s fictions can infect one’s
own sense of self.
(Jess Joho, KillScreen, 2014)
Playing Somewhere Beyond
the Archive(able)

19. Playing Alternative Histories
The historian must [...] constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will seem to
permit different outcomes. If he speaks of Salamis, then it must be as if the Persians might still win; if he speaks
of the coup d'état of Brumaire, then it must remain to be seen if Bonaparte will be ignominiously repulsed.
- Johan Huizinga, “The Idea of History.” 1973.
Postcolonialism, History and Videogamese-mail:souvik.eng@presiuniv.ac.in tweet: @prosperoscell https://tinyurl.com/gamepoco