Interactive Homelands: Processes of Play and Resistance in Digital Games

• In Event: (De)Colonizing Digital Gamespaces: Games, Gender, and (De)Colonial Praxis

Abstract

Peacemaker (2007) is a game about finding a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This paper argues that the closed systems of many online games, such as PeaceMaker, reify the territorialist rhetorics of spatial conflict and confinement; on the other hand, many game platforms have great potential to engage colonialist constructions in experimental ways. Games have the possibility of presenting material homelands in simulated, affective environments that can manipulate, layer, and augment space in ways that real geographies or flat maps will not allow. They provide an important representational medium through which to critique alternative models of security and homeland.

Presenter

• Laini Kavaloski, SUNY Canton