Similarly, Souvik Mukherjee has suggested that play provides “a way of constantly subverting the ‘centres’ that colonialism tries to construct” (21–22).Īs we will demonstrate in this article, the Mass Effect series and Dragon Age: Inquisition (BioWare 2014) are significant in that they failed to deliver on their promises.
For example, Chris Patterson has argued that “when played consciously … and with an urge to explore less trodden routes” game series such as Mass Effect (BioWare 2007–12) offer means to look into the workings of imperialism (225). After all, the neoliberal heirs to the empires of the past control the means of production and dissemination of mass media, effectively making players of RPGs “serial imperialists.” At the same time, scholars and players continue to ascribe a democratizing and transgressive potential to video games, as game studios appear to try to push the proverbial envelope. While postcolonial criticism debunked the fallacious assumption of coherent imperial control in historical terms ( Bhabha Memmi Said) and video game studies continue to probe the freedom of movement, choice, and decision in games as always already an illusion ( Domsch Fassone Tulloch Wysocki and Schandler), the allure of imagined control continues to hold sway. The historical pursuit of imperial ventures shares an illusion of control with the immersive appeal of playing video games. While video game adventures draw on this established narrative tradition, video games and their players are particularly susceptible to its potency and allure due to the medium's interactive and affective nature. Cawelti, Martin Green, Krishan Kumar, and Brian Taves have discussed the latent imprint of empire on adventure stories. Neoliberal capitalism has since harnessed newer forms of global control, which include mass-marketed, globally dispersed adventure stories, which have carried the specter of serialized empire building well into the twenty-first century. In the realm of fantasy, they could practice empire while the world moved into postmodernity. Adventure tales took imperial agents to these fantastic spaces, where they continued to engage with the Other. Off-world locales, magic-filled realms located in mythical times, and “lost” pasts, hidden in the cavernous body of the Earth, quickly became new and, arguably, inexhaustible imperial geographies. In particular, when “ terra incognita disappeared from European maps, writers of adventure stories retreated from realistic to fantastic, purely imaginary spaces” (Phillips 7).
Not only are historical processes reimagined and passed on in such narrative forms, but adventures have also fueled the collective fantastic imagination. Within the still dominant paradigm of Western techno-science, adventure tales assiduously tell and retell the story of the continuing telos of modernity and its attendant eschatology. More specifically, Western adventures are a premier form that perpetuates the history of “western civilization” and are, as such, inextricably entangled with discourses and practices of empire. This basic narrative formula “is one of the most important arts of the white world” (Green 37). Eventually, the adventurous heroes variously establish a new order or restore an old one, thus bringing balance, unity, and peace.
A series of quests, trials, and tribulations bring about a climactic resolution to the imperial conflicts that more often than not undergird the journey. Their adventures bring them into contact with diverse cultural communities (i.e., the Other), thereby engendering moments of acquisition (of knowledge, possessions, wealth, resources, and/or land). Individuals set out on exciting journeys, with or without a small party, that take them to faraway places and distant shores. Adventures adhere to a storytelling formula often reminiscent of Joseph Campbell's monomyth where the narrative pattern underwriting the hero's journey is that of adventure. They add that “BioWare creates games focused on rich stories, unforgettable characters, and vast worlds.” To be sure, this is the “stuff” adventures are made of, administering excitement and escapism as remedy for ennui since time immemorial. “Welcome to adventure.” This is how BioWare, a Canadian video game developer who specializes in role-playing video games (RPGs), advertises their games to potential customers on their website.
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