The Postcolonial Games Manifesto

The dream:

• Make games with something less hateful to say.
• Make games with something new to say.
• You can choose which of those is more important to you.

The enemy (incomplete):

• The hero savior
  • Does no one else in this world have autonomy?
  • Personal choices are not enough to stop climate change.
  • We also know who the hero savior always is and know how little need there is for him.
  • The cultural tourist may not admit it but is always backed by the Empire.
• Industrialism
  • Fungibility
    • You must have no soul for every tree to be the same.
    • Or every strawberry.
    • Or every house.
    • This is true for recipes too. Do you really cook the same way every time?
    • Handcrafted means something. Not everything must come from the machine.
    • Please don't bring up NFTs. It will deal me psychic damage if you do.
  • Growth for the sake of growth
  • Eternal optimization, both macro- and micro-
• Races, classes and other ways to categorize people
  • Nationalism is also the enemy.
  • Please no savage native tropes. Treat people like people.
• A win is a win
  • Humanity is in both the means and the ends.
  • The real world is not zero-sum
  • The actions you take both change and define you.
  • Must you use violence to get your point across?
• The map is the territory.
  • Does no one live in the space in which you plant your flag?
  • Is there no better goal than to paint the map your color?
• Perfect comprehension
  • You will never fully understand the entire world, let alone anything more.
  • You will never fully understand a single other person.
  • You will never fully understand yourself.
• History may have led here, but it could have led somewhere much better.
  • We are not living in the best of all worlds.
  • Respect the history of those who were colonized.
  • History is much more than the battlefield.

Solutions (very incomplete):

• History from below
• The real world has more cooperation than competition.
• Ahimsa
• Pollution
  • Why would you divorce exploitation and industrialism from its consequence?
• Knowledge and space as fluid and not fixed.
• Break the authority of your own code.

Solutions:

• Humanity.