Colonial border games: On the white epistemic violence of European game studies

 keywords: game studies, Europe, whiteness, Eurocentrism, epistemic violence

Abstract
Among critical game scholars there is a growing consensus on the Eurocentric bias in games, play, and its disciplinary “lore”. However, so far the dominant role of Europe in the construction of this bias has been under-theorised. The question motivating this contribution is: What is particularly European about game studies’ Eurocentric bias? How has it been fabricated and what are current mechanisms of ‘epistemic violence’ which reinforce and cement white ways of knowing about games?

I approach these questions by building on two critiques concerning the Orientalist roots of European game scholarship, and the way dominant definitions of “play” have tended to centre whiteness and erased non-white experiences. Using the frame of white epistemic violence, a concept which focuses on how mechanisms of academic knowledge making maintain white norms, I ask: How does Euro-whiteness manifest itself in what has been studied, how it has been studied, and who it implies as the ‘ideal’ knower of games and play?

To ground this conversation in the local-geopolitical context of Europe, I make use of Josef Börösz’s sociological conceptual innovations ‘eurowhiteness’ and ‘dirty whiteness’ which illustrate how whiteness in Europe currently operates to produce and maintain divisions of power along colonial lines through moral geopolitical privilege claims. Böröcz’s analysis draws attention to the particular local conditions of European whiteness in which the academic productivity of game studies is regionally embedded. Seen in this context, I argue that ways of thinking in European game studies emerges as a reflection of, rather than independently of, race. This includes the neocolonial urge to define western play as ‘universal’ (e.g. Huizinga’s magic circle), to canonise white male European Orientalists as ‘ideal’knowers of games and play (Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois), and to structure knowledge through binary mythologies (e.g. ludology versus narratology) which repeat the ‘center vs. periphery’ logic of colonial thinking.

The purpose of discussing European game studies in connection to race and whiteness is to contribute to the growing work on racial justice and equity in games and academia. Arguably, acknowledging the ways in which our thinking about games is embedded in structures of coloniality and whiteness, and thus complicit in perpetuating unconscious racial bias is a necessary first step. While this extends to western academia more broadly, the paper at hand strategically focuses on the European game studies discourse in order to confront the myth that this is a ‘race-free’ zone. The current absence of Europe-focused approaches in postcolonial game studies in fact indicates the urgency of this work, suggesting that the white bias of European game studies epistemology has largely gone unseen by scholars working from within this paradigm. Since epistemic bias is productive of injustices which impact the lives and opportunities of game scholars by keeping colonial imbalances alive, addressing white bias is not optional for equitable academic conduct.