The question I pursue across my research is how the ideologies behind industry practices of video game development influence how developers communicate through the medium of video games. Games are not value neutral. Game production is embroiled in representation which carries with it ideologies about how we make sense of the world and how people are meant to exist in society. Production of any cultural artifact - any text meant to inform, entertain, or persuade through language and shared values - is unavoidably influenced by relationships, movement, spaces, bodily capabilities, power, industry, and authority (to borrow from Winner’s foundational “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”). It is therefore necessary to understand from a critical perspective how video game production works and how the values and meanings encoded into games say something about how we relate to and understand the world, each other, and ourselves.
How Does News Publications’ Relationship with the Games Industry Influence their Production of Articles on Sexual Misconduct?
My dissertation is a content analysis examining the California Department of Fair and Equal Housing’s (DFEH) sexual misconduct lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, Inc. (ABK). Games journalists’ livelihoods depend on their relationship with public relations (Stanton & Hohnson, 2024, 4), as they rely on the games industry for access to games and press events along with revenue for running their ads on the publication’s website. Therefore, journalists have developed practices to maintain their relationship with public relations (Fisher & Mohammed-Baksh, 2020). I investigate to what extent this anxiety to maintain relationships with the industry has an influence on journalistic practices. I chose the DFEH lawsuit as a bounded case study not only for its high-profile status that led to a rich pool of data but for the opportunity to examine how games journalists report on news that casts the industry in a negative light while trying to maintain their relationship with the industry.
I developed a database of 90 articles from both gaming-focused publications and general, mainstream publications and coded each one to see how differences in the relationship between the publication and the games industry impacts reporting. Reporting on the breaking news of the lawsuit, journalists from mainstream publications challenged ABK’s response to the lawsuit with facts from the lawsuit more than gaming-focused press who would often print the full statement from ABK in the article unchallenged. However, as more voices corroborated the lawsuit’s reports and as journalists started reaching out to victims, gaming-centric press took slightly more risks than mainstream press in investigative reports, reports of the walkout by ABK employees, and reports of the lawsuit settlement. This potentially indicates that while a journalist’s relationship to the industry might initially shape their coverage of sexual misconduct, as more information is brought to light journalists take more risks in reporting.
The dissertation will serve as the basis for further research and publication on two trajectories. I would conduct interviews with journalists who have covered sexual misconduct in the games industry. Interviewing journalists will provide direct insight into the decisions behind their practices when reporting on sexual violence in the industry while navigating their relationship with the industry. The second trajectory is a discourse analysis of user comments on articles about sexual misconduct at ABK. Reporting can shape the public and policymakers’ perspectives on social issues (Johnston et al., 2015), and as such journalism has power in reflecting and constructing reality (Nelson et al., 1997). Therefore, it is important to understand if the reporting has any impact on users’ perspective on sexual misconduct in the industry.
How Do We Develop Location-Based Mobile Games Using a Decolonial Framework?
How can we guide the production of a video game that is meant to advance the goal of decolonization? Games have historically embraced colonial tropes in their mechanics. This can be seen in mainstream location-based mobile games (LBMG), mobile games that overlay a virtual world on top of the physical world and use the player’s movements as inputs in the virtual world. Players of LBMGs like Pokémon GO are encouraged by the game to treat the local environment as a means of accruing as much power as possible and claim land that doesn’t belong to them through dominance and subjugation.
Reflecting on this, my colleague and I created a framework for developing decolonial games based on prior literature and used it to produce a concept for a decolonial LBMG. We found that games developed with decoloniality in mind center on interrogating colonial systems and tropes (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Trammell, 2022), listen to indigenous perspectives (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Trammell, 2022), and revolve around a responsibility to the community rather than the individual (Kurniati and Mwariko, 2025; Pearce, 2009; Quijano, 2019; Trammell, 2022). The goal of our game concept is to give players an opportunity to reflect on their actions in the game and encourage them to be critical thinkers and active participants in their local communities.
To meet our goal, every game mechanic we chose had to be based in our framework. To move away from gameplay about conquering the land for individual gain, we developed the game concept around players working together to reclaim and maintain areas in the game world from an all-encompassing force known as The Corp which is transforming the world into parking lots and crumbling buildings left for property speculation. We developed player classes that accommodate many different playstyles and commitments to the game; one class can reclaim land from a distance, for example. LBMGs can exclude players who have impaired mobility. Therefore, a decolonial LBMG needs to be rooted in mobility justice and provide an equitable experience for all players. Overall, we found that decolonial games are founded in cooperativeness among a community who shares a responsibility to the well-being of every player. Thus, we constructed a game concept that was about fostering a bond between fellow players, the game world, and the local neighborhood.
The goal for our concept is for it to exist as a fully-fledged mobile game like Pokémon GO. My colleague and I have presented our game concept at the 57th annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and the Society for Philosophy and Technology 2023 conference. I also workshopped it at the “Decolonizing Comparative Global Rhetoric” seminar at the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute 2023. Following the suggestion of one of the attendees at HICSS, we plan on first testing this concept as a board game or developing it on a web-based platform. This provides a low-cost way to test the concept while also potentially leading to alternatives for players who do not have smartphones. We hope to work with a variety of community and indigenous stakeholders as their experience in grassroots collaboration and community building is necessary to realize our vision.
If you would like to learn more about our research on our decolonial LBMG concept, we have published our research in the proceedings of the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.