Abstract
Age of Empires, the cult strategy game that has entertained millions of fans since 1997, recently published its fourth official iteration, Age of Empires 4 in 2021. With the amount of downloadable content (DLCs) and expansions that the game franchise keeps introducing with steady regularity, commentators observe that the logic of the game remains the same: exploiting natural resources, creating labor for exploitation, and imperial expansion. One question that comes to mind is why the latter is such a common and persistent gameplay mechanic for real-time strategy games and whether any alternative mechanics can be considered. Viewing the issue from the perspective of code and the very algorithm of the game, one could argue that a critical study of the code itself is necessary. Drawing on recent positions in critical code studies, this paper will argue that the problems of colonial thinking are replicated in the algorithm and the logic of real-time strategy games such as Age of Empires. With the understanding that code is not neutral, this article aims to reassess the gameplay mechanic of the patches and DLCs of Age of Empires. Instead of repairing the problem, the software code or patch that is added to these games merely extends the context of inequity and colonial thinking. This article will focus on The Forgotten Kingdoms expansion of Age of Empires 2 as an example of how even additions to the original games perpetuate the inequities in the very algorithms of these real-time strategy empire-building games.
Digital colonialism is increasingly being recognized as a reality. Scholars such as Michael Kwet have claimed that “Big Tech corporations have fashioned a new ‘Manifest Destiny’ for the digital age,”1 and others such as Safiya Umoji Noble have noted how algorithms and “digital decisions reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling.”2 While these processes in which the digital remediates earlier processes of colonization have been discussed in the context of software studies and digital humanities, videogames have not received adequate attention when it comes to scrutinizing their algorithms and the technical aspect of digital colonization that some software makes possible. Postcolonial studies has reached videogames late, but there is now a substantial body of work on videogames and colonialism.3 Most of this research, including my own previous work,4 revolves around the content of the games, and indeed, there is still much to be said in this context as the current work of scholars such as Emil Hammar and Soraya Murray reveals.5 Little, if anything, has been said of how the algorithmic or procedural logic of these games, their functional aspects, their code, and finally, their numerous patches, updates, and downloadable content (DLCs) might work to perpetuate notions of empire and of colonialism. The idea behind the regular updates to games is that they require maintenance and constant repair. The game software, as it were, is seen to need to remain always current and always free of flaws. Updates, patches, and DLCs are considered such toolkits of repair. It seems that even play, otherwise claimed to be a free activity, is in need of repair where digital games are concerned. More on repairing play and colonial historiography will be said later, especially using the example of the rewriting of the history of the Pala empire in the Age of Empires series.
Discussion of the updates, patches, and DLCs will also reveal the fundamental issues with what will be called “procedural colonialism” here, deriving from Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric. While viewing updates, patches, and DLCs as a multiplicity, this paper will nevertheless aim to see them as paratexts that add to and inform the core of the game-as-text as well as to think of them as tools to enhance or modify functionality and add context and content to the extant game. This essay will consider the 2022 DLC of Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings,6 originally published in 1999, as a key point of inquiry. The DLC titled Dynasties of India is part of the new definitive edition,7 “a remaster of Age of Empires II released on November 14, 2019” and is linked to the game’s update number 61321.8 It is in this connection that the update is viewed as a historiographic tool, one that determines how the history of India should be represented using the videogame as a popular and interactive medium through which history can be experienced. As a more specific case study, it takes the remediated history of the Pala empire, which ruled in modern-day Eastern India and Bangladesh from the seventh to the eleventh centuries AD.
Remediating and Repairing Play
New-media theorists are well aware of the concept of remediation. Formulated by J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin,9 remediation addresses a double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy, both processes working in tandem to refashion the material from one medium to another. Immediacy is the process whereby the medium tries to erase traces of mediation, whereas hypermediacy is the process that makes the user or viewer aware of the medium. Bolter and Grusin’s term also has parallel connotations besides that of refashioning that is more commonly understood by new-media scholars. This refashioning (and as Bolter and Grusin make clear, this is not restricted to digital media) can also be viewed as a pun—as a remedy (a remedy-ation). In fact, in architectural restoration or even in legal parlance, the term is used either interchangeably or in comparison with repair, although this is not the intended purpose of Bolter and Grusin’s term. Nevertheless, they go on to say, “Each new medium is justified because it fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfils the unkept promise of an older medium.”10 It is in this context that this article will also address the updates, DLCs, and fixes in the digital game as historiographic interventions. Turning the relationship on its head, the refashioning project of historiography in digital games contingently involves repair or, in this sense, repairing history. So do the Age of Empires DLC and the patches, updates, and hotfixes repair history? This question will be dealt with in detail in the discussion of the Dynasties of India DLC throughout this article.
Updating History: A Colonial Project
Another concept of repair in digital games comes to mind, especially in the context of colonial historiography vis-à-vis how digital games do history. Aaron Trammell’s recent book, Repairing Play, addresses the fundamental problems in the Eurocentric view of play as free and constructive; instead, it focuses on how play can be toxic and haphazard but also on how it can be reevaluated from a perspective of “play that both repairs the damages wrought by colonialism, and is itself a form of reparations, in an effort to consider how we might advance an understanding of play that is inclusive of BIPOC people.”11 How the Age of Empires 2 DLC can be seen to respond to the historiographic concerns of play as raised in Trammell’s sense of repairing is also important to study. To situate how and even whether the DLC and updates of Age of Empires can serve as a repairing and a reparation, first the nature of such colonial historiography needs to be thought through.
James Mill, father of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, notes in his magnum opus, The History of British India,12 that Indian history is an interesting part of European history. According to commentator Antis Loizides, “[a]lthough Mill intended to write an ‘introduction to the knowledge of India,’ he conceived it essentially as a British history, attempting to correct British misconceptions and prejudices about Indian society as well as exemplify principles of legislation via the ‘many important experiments’ British experience in India had to offer.”13 Mill’s history of India was an update—a patch aimed to correct or remedy the ignorance of his fellow countrymen about their colony and also, by implication, to impose order on the chaotic understanding of history and historiography of the people of India. Mill never visited India but claims that “a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England, than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and his ears in India.”14 Mill’s closet is different from and yet akin to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s bookshelf wherein it was impossible to “deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”15 Such a presentation of history is not relegated to past historiography but is again evident when a very recent narrative and entertainment media such as videogames present history.
That videogames are becoming recognized as a medium to present and teach history is beyond debate now. Jeremiah McCall makes the case for them eloquently: “Games are an important form of public history, a participatory form. The designers engage history, transforming and translating it into their games. The players complete the game and do history when their choices shape an overall gameplay narrative.”16 Adam Chapman makes a similar case for games as history, but he also posits the case of the “developer-historian,”17 by which he establishes a connection between the game’s algorithmic logic and its historiography—a question that is going to prove critical in this study. Discussing the relation between the videogame’s rules and the workings of history, Andrew Elliott and Matthew Kappell reveal more issues of interest in this context: “The game player does work within a system of rules when playing a historical game, but those rules are at least in part defined not by the programmer or the game (or even the player of the game) but through an understanding of the generally accepted rules of causality within the discipline of history and a common understanding of history itself. Thus, in historical games the ludic rules are at least somewhat—and often largely—external to the programmed ‘system of rules’ of the game itself.”18 It is intriguing to consider two of the phrases here: “generally accepted rules of causality” and “common understanding of history.” Multiple questions arise here: Who constitutes the general and the common? Is this a majoritarian narrative that we are to consult here, and if so, what of the many whose voices are unheard or, in the language of postcolonialism, rendered subaltern according to historians such as Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty and postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak? In a somewhat different spin on subalternity, theorists such as Walter Mignolo would ask why such generally accepted rules of history would necessarily have a Western bias and, therefore, seek an epistemological delinking. An additional question would be: do the rules of history (if there are any) differ from the rules of the game and the algorithm of the software? If the player’s understanding of the rules of history is the determining factor, then how does one understand the part played by the procedure of the game? In the face of such questions, Rebecca Mir and Trevor Owens’s work on the representation of indigenous peoples in Sid Meier’s early game, Colonization,19 is a classic illustration of how the game mechanics and algorithm support an imperialist logic. Mir and Owens point out “the model of the world in the game comes with a ‘procedural rhetoric,’ an argument expressed in the computational logic and design that drives the game. The game’s model inherently suggests certain strategies and positions and thus shapes player agency and action.”20
The Pala Empire in Age of Empire II: Dynasties of India
After over two decades since the game’s initial publication and the release of two full-blown sequels Age of Empire 3 and Age of Empire 4 (2021),21 the developers released the definitive edition of Age of Empires 2 as well as a DLC, The Dynasties of India. Newly featured in this DLC are Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty; Rajaraja Chola, the founder of the Chola dynasty; and Devapala, the third king in the Pala empire of Eastern India. Recently, incidentally, both Babur and the Cholas have been featured in TV series and films and much remains to be said about the treatment of historical sources in both of these productions. Meanwhile, although a powerful political entity in medieval India that ruled much of Eastern India for centuries (ca. 750–1161 AD), the Palas have received scant attention in contemporary entertainment media and retellings of history. Devapala, who was the grandson of the founder of the Pala empire, Gopala, and the son of Dharmapala, another illustrious ruler of the Pala dynasty, is considered one of the most important rulers of the dynasty.22 It is difficult to obtain detailed information about the Pala rulers except for evidence gathered from contemporary copperplate inscriptions that are mostly eulogistic. Some of the key works on the Pala dynasty are Rakhal Das Banerjee’s Palas of Bengal (1918), Dinesh Chandra Sircar’s Pal Sen Juger Bangshacharit (1982), Jhunu Bagchi’s The History of the Palas of Bengal and Bihar [Cir. 750 AD–1200 AD] (1993), plus older accounts such as the Arabic Hudud al Alam (ca. 983 AD) and the Buddhist monk Taranath’s (1575–1634) history of Buddhism. Devapala’s copperplate inscription from Munger declares that he was victorious against multiple kingdoms and that “his army (elephant) in the course of its victorious career wandered about in the midst of the Vindhya forests”;23 the grant further mentions the victory of Devapala over Kamrupa (modern-day Assam in Northeastern India) and Utkala (modern-day Orissa in Eastern India) as well the “khamboja empire.” He is said to have scattered the armies of a king from Southern India. Given the legendary status of Devapala in his own dynasty’s copperplate inscriptions and subsequent accounts, it is not surprising that the developer-historians (to use Chapman’s terminology) of Age of Empires 2 selected him as their candidate for their updated history of the dynasties of India.
Interpretations of the copperplate inscriptions vary significantly. Some historians have identified the Kambhoja as Tibetans while some describe them as tribes that ruled the northwestern parts of the subcontinent. The copperplate inscriptions also mention the Hunas being in conflict with the Pala forces, but again, historians differ on whether the Pala armies actually went as far as the northwestern region to engage the Kambojas and the Hunas. According to Abdul Momin Chowdhury, “If we place unquestioned reliance on the evidence of these records, we have to think of Devapala as the sole sovereign of the whole of northern India ... but the subsequent history of the Pala rulers ... [does] not support this view.”24 Devapala is known to have enlarged and endowed the Nalanda University and also contributed to the development of culture and learning, judging from the copperplate inscriptions of his own time as well as later ones.
The Age of Empires campaign, however, constructs its own version of Pala history, and contrary to Chowdhury’s caveat that the inscriptions are probably exaggerations, it presents a loose reading of what is suggested in the Munger copperplate and portrays Devapala’s history in a fictitious reconstruction that is mapped to the four noble truths as declared by the Buddha as being the foundations of Buddhism. The campaign depicts the Pala attack on Kamrup and Utkala and then goes into the historically more dubious territory where it portrays Devapala as the de facto ruler of northern India. As counterfactual history, the game may be said to explore the richness of the possibility space and speculate on what could have happened.25
The problem, however, arises when the game decides to connect the Buddha’s four noble truths to Devapala’s battles; this is especially striking as the Buddha’s main preaching was on ahimsa or nonviolence. While the DLC takes some of the historical material from the standard historical texts (mostly the earlier ones from the colonial period), it also adds its own flavor to the discourse; it is important to note that the update of the original game, while being an update in code (and therefore a software repair or supplement), also coincides with an update to history.
The Bengali civilization (although whether this even existed historically in the way the game posits is again open to question) has as its unique technology, Mahayana, which is a sect of Buddhism. The Buddha’s teachings have been variously followed as the more orthodox Hinayana (the lesser vehicle) and the more widespread Mahayana (the greater vehicle). While Mahayana Buddhism may have been the principal religion in the Pala kingdom, equating such a religious sect to a technology is a curious decision. Also quite worrying is what the technology entails: it reduces the so-called population cost of the civilians. As a result, more civilians can be created at town centers without crossing the population limit, thereby reducing the value of the civilian population by making people more expendable as in-game units. Why the unique technology of a Buddhist civilization should devalue the impact of nonmartial units is a question to ponder. The videogame’s perspective on history is thus problematic on both counts: in describing the Mahayana Buddhist sect as a technology and in attributing a reduction of population cost to the Mahayana way of thinking.
Despite having unique technologies and units for each civilization, Age of Empires continues to retain its importance for universal technology trees, and in fact, as Angela Cox points out,26 the technological assumptions in the game are very Western and the historical mismatches surprisingly prominent. For example, just as the town centers of Palas look similar to those of the Franks and the Chinese, the Pala navy is able to field cannon galleons centuries before they appeared in the region. In this particular campaign, the developer-historian also makes an imposition of galactic proportions, literally. As a Reddit user observes,27 the dialogue of the Devapala campaign borrows substantially (and one might add surprisingly) from Star Wars movies, and the characters in the campaigns often use the sentences spoken by Emperor Palpatine and Count Dooku in the Star Wars franchise. Again, how the history of Eastern India needs to be told using the dialogues of a twentieth-century Western sci-fi franchise is difficult to explain. With videogames being mooted as a tool to teach history, such issues merit more careful attention and debate.
Updates, Colonialism, and Games
In this context, the concept of procedural rhetoric needs to be explained. Used by Ian Bogost in his influential Persuasive Games, the term means “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions, rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures.”28 A literal example of such procedural rhetoric at play is Mark Sample’s analysis of the code of Micropolis—the open-source twin of SimCity. Expanding on Bogost’s work, Sample identifies that the span.cpp, a subprogram of the game, contains a set of variables that govern the software’s understanding of the crime rate of SimCity. The crime-rate analysis is conducted discretely, section by section, and in “this strict algorithm, there is no chance of a neighborhood existing outside of this model. The algorithm is totalizing and deterministic, absolutely so. A populous neighborhood with little police presence can never be crime-free. Crime is endemic, epidemic.”29
In a similar example that is more apposite for this article, Mir and Owens describe the gameplay of the earlier version of the Civilization game, comparing it with a version made fourteen years later, noting that the procedural rhetoric remains the same in an autoethnographical analysis:
Trevor first played a copy of the original version of Colonization (released in 1994) when he was in the sixth grade. He played the game repeatedly, first learning the basic rules and then trying out different play styles. At first he played as the French and the Dutch. The French get bonuses in interacting with Native peoples and the Dutch get bonuses in trade. In both cases, Trevor would try to rewrite history and coexist with Native peoples. After exploring that side of the game, Trevor eventually played as the Spanish, who receive extra gold from destroying Native cities. These bonuses remain in the 2008 version of Colonization, called Civilization IV: Colonization[,] because it was made using the Civilization IV engine. (Emphasis added)30
The hardcoded colonial exploitation is easily evident from their description; intriguingly, it persists in the updated version over a decade later. Mir and Owens contend that even after modifying the game’s code to make the Native Americans a playable faction, as a modder observes, one needs “ʻto change the “bPlayable” field in CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml file to 1 … , but the gameplay is uninteresting’” because “[n]atives are not really playable in the same sense as the colonial powers because the game was designed for players to act as colonizers.”31 The code of Civilization literally does not support the non-European original inhabitants of the region in this software simulation that has been described as popular history by commentators. Even if the game is repaired from the modder’s perspective by making the Indigenous faction playable, the colonial bias of the game is not removed. Of course, updates as repairs may not wish to address issues of colonialism at all and indeed may even function as a means of aggravating the colonial bias, whether implicitly or explicitly.
Another example is important in this context. This is from another videogame by Sid Meier who designed Colonization. Generations of players of Civilization games are familiar with the nuclear Gandhi, a so-called videogame glitch that portrayed Mahatma Gandhi, the champion of nonviolent struggle for Indian independence, as a political leader who is most likely to use nuclear bombs. For many players the world over this may have been offensive, but others have considered it funny and it is often featured in internet memes. The story behind this rather unusual development decision was purported to be a bug that set Gandhi’s very low aggression level even lower based on some player actions.32 The supposed consequence was that the value fell to -1, and because the program code did not support negative values, it changed the value of the aggression level to the highest possible value of 255. Since the game unlocked nuclear capabilities only after a civilization reached democracy, Gandhi was already nuclear-capable by the time that happened and this led to India suddenly attacking other civilizations with nuclear missiles.
In 2020, Sid Meier, however, debunked the bug theory in his memoirs stating: “[b]ut at no point did a democratic score change, or any value approaching 255, come into it. That kind of bug comes from something called unsigned characters, which are not the default in the C programming language, and not something I used for the leader traits. Brian Reynolds wrote Civ II in C++, and he didn’t use them, either.”33 The popular rumor, however, was followed by an update that really did make Gandhi a nuclear warmonger in the game as Meier acknowledges: “Gandhi’s preference for nuclear weapons over other forms of warfare was set to 12 in Civilization V, as revealed by the game’s lead designer, Jon Shafer. But that was nineteen years after the original release, and Jon was only leaning in to the existing amusement over Gandhi using nuclear weapons at all.”34 So what is termed a non sequitur in the original game actually becomes an update in the later game—almost two decades later. I have asked this question elsewhere and I will ask it again:35 of all the historical personages in the game, why choose Gandhi?
It is, of course, quite possible to dismiss this as an innocent joke but then that is the standard practice of making memes about European colonialism (for example, a meme on the British Empire depicts a semi-unclothed Indian woman at the feet of a British colonial officer with the title, “Britain should apologise for Empire,” where the officer says no). Instead of choosing other leaders such as Abraham Lincoln or Elizabeth I, the choice of Gandhi as the most violent leader arguably betrays a long-standing colonial prejudice and fear. Consider, for example, British prime minister Winston Churchill’s remarks on Gandhi: “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious Middle [Inner] Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.”36 Churchill had later commented that Gandhi was not the politician who would fly airships but then that was not Gandhi’s agenda; firing nuclear missiles was even less so. The videogame update that chose to continue with nuclear Gandhi was perpetuating an existing colonial fear and discomfort that arises when the traditional modes of colonial government are challenged by less conventional modes such as civil disobedience and nonviolence. Bringing Gandhi back into the fold of the conventional would seem the obvious response of those supporting colonialism and empire, whether consciously or subconsciously. Here, Chapman’s notion of the developer-historian also features importantly—the game developer takes on the role of procedurally determining the rhetoric of history. The success of the nuclear Gandhi meme merely points out how in the hands of the developer-historian a colonial aspect of historiography is further reified.
In a recent keynote lecture at DiGRA India’s conference, the game designer Meghna Jayanth identifies the wide-ranging white protagonism in videogame development in no uncertain terms. The full keynote is relevant but for this essay a small section will be illustrative:
The kinds of fantasies that the “model designer”—who is also white, and male—has embedded into the supposedly objective notion of the protagonist are in desperate need of marking and being made visible, and I believe reveal more about the desires, pleasures, anxieties, intuitions, fears of the white male designer than the possibilities of protagonism. By marking and learning to identify the “whiteness” of the protagonist and seeing it as a product of a design space that it structured by capitalism-colonialism and the Anglo-American imagination,37
Jayanth does not mince words here and alleges that the premises of game design are often based on “an enormous store of false knowledge which masquerades as truth about the world while obscuring it from us.”38 The nuclear Gandhi is a glaringly obvious instance but there are many others that abound in videogames today. Of course, in the case of the Colonization mod or the Civilization update, what is involved here is the update or the supplement to the base game. The update, as the supplement, informs the very idea, the center as Jacques Derrida describes it, of the game, arguably. Robert Bernasconi states that “the supplement is an addition from the outside, but it can also be understood as supplying what is missing and in this way is already inscribed within that to which it is added.”39 The supplement as update is not merely an addition but is originary; it is part of the ontology of the very concept itself. The process of repair through the update implies an addition, but simultaneously, it is also a restoration. It is a returning to the core intrinsic logic of the game even as it adds to or replaces some section of the game. Trammell does not directly engage with the Derridean notion of supplementarity in his book, but repairing play is implicitly such a concept as it involves not just a fix or even an addition but a rethinking of the very concept of play itself beyond the positions of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Jean Piaget, who view play as essentially positive. Trammell argues “that this approach to play is shortsighted and linked to a troubling global discourse that renders the experiences of BIPOC invisible and seeks to incorporate experiences such as torture also into the very identity of play.”40
Moving on from the identity of play to the player, one observes that the update is crucial even in shaping the software user’s identity. In her recent book, Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Hui Chun provides a formula: Update equals crisis plus habit. Chun argues that “things and people not updating are things and people lost or in distress, for users have become creatures of the update. To be is to be updated: to update and to be subjected to the update. The update is central to disrupting and establishing context and habituation, to creating new habits of dependency” (emphasis added).41 The update is a response to regular creations of crises wherein habit is disrupted. Thinking in terms of game patches, updates, and DLCs, therefore, becomes a crucial part of the gaming habit. Consider, for example, the update number 61231 of the videogame Age of Empires II, which was mentioned previously. In the hands of the developer-historians, such updates become an important tool for delivering historical commentary. The update as a tool for repair is not only an addition but also an important supplement: one that changes the center, always and already. The analysis of the Pala empire as an update to Age of Empires 2 will be a case in point. In this instance, the videogame remediates the narratives in history books, documentaries, films, and earlier narrative media but the update too can be viewed as a remediation of the traditional sources of history wherein corrections and amendments are constantly being made.
Updating the Pala Empire
The Dynasties of India DLC is accompanied by a number of updates and one hotfix. These updates make a series of changes to the civilizations’ capabilities, fix bugs in the gameplay, and remedy any faulty visuals. For example, update number 61321 “reworks the existing Indian civilization to Hindustanis.”42 Historically, there has been no ethnic community or civilization in India called Hindustanis, and the word is loosely used for Indians in general and also for a language spoken in the Indian subcontinent with a mix of historical influences from early north Indian languages and Persio-Arabic languages. The update also lists other fixes such as “trebuchet projectile impact graphics now properly appear after Chemistry was researched” and “Joan of Arc (hero) no longer has Camel Rider death sound when killed.”43 It is very unlikely that trebuchets were ever seen in Indian battles nor would Joan of Arc riding a camel. In the updated version the “Imperial Camel Rider upgrade cost decreased from 1,200 food, 600 gold to 1,000 food, 500 gold [and] attack damage decreased from 9 to 8,”44 thus revising the game’s own retelling of history by changing the value (and thereby the affordances and importance) of military units.
Indians, as a civilization, were introduced in the game’s second official expansion, The Forgotten, in 2013. The name of the expansion itself is of interest because it identifies one of the most populous regions of the world as “the forgotten.” A decade later, the entire civilization was split and “reworked into Hindustanis, Gurjaras, Bengalis, and Dravidians, making the Indians the only civilization to receive a full rework.”45 The full scope of such a reworking is as follows:
Most of the assets of Indians, like the technology tree, unique upgrade, unique technologies, the language of units and civilization theme, passed onto the Hindustanis. However, their unique unit was split among the other three civilizations. Their Castle, old Wonder (the Brihadeeswarar Temple [sic]) and the fishing bonus passed onto the Dravidians. Their civilization icon and campaign passed onto the Gurjaras. As such, the Hindustanis are considered the continuation of the Indians. The Hindustanis received new bonuses to focus more on North and North-West India, rather than the whole nation. The Hindustanis are also available to everyone without the need to purchase the expansion. The AI player names were also divided among the four civilizations.46
After including the Indians over a decade after the release of Age of Kings, the Age of Empires franchise has kept updating its representation of South Asia and thus rewriting the history that it has itself presented. While the updates contain fixes for in-game bugs, that is not their only objective. They are involved in making regular changes to the historical representation in the games. Here, some other observations are very important in the context of how the game constructs nationhood and ethnicity. The Hindustanis are considered the continuation of Indians—a very problematic contention for modern-day India, which is a sovereign nation to which multiple ethnicities of people belong as per its constitution. The term Hindustani has a colonial connection, and as a commentator states, “One part of that history is the way in which colonial establishment explored the possibility of identifying a language Hindustani, that would subsume numerous linguistic varieties and their literatures into a single, standard language that could be located in dictionaries and grammar books, taught in schools, used for official purposes as new and diffuse genres of communication throughout much, if not all of India.”47 Judging by its roots, Hindustani comprised both Khari boli (a language that originated in Northern India) as well as Persian, Arabic, and Turkic elements, and it was prevalent from the period of early Muslim rule in India. As such, it would be anachronistic for the campaigns of the Palas and the Cholas, and AoE II does not make the timeline clear. As such, the update does not resolve the problems of historical representativeness and authenticity that it aimed to fix, and as both remediation and repair, it creates a further set of problems.
Drawing on Chun’s description of the update being the product of crises and habit, a comparison of the Devapala campaign as an update of AoE 2 will be useful in this context. The campaign is, of course, responding to a need to portray history in fuller detail, but as Neil Nagwekar alleges, the “inattentiveness of developers led to an undercooked civilization” that players did not like for their play,48 and one may argue that the Dynasties of India may be a response to the earlier shortcomings of the Indian civilization in the game. Of course, the developers of the game had initially claimed that they had aimed to create what they called “Hollywood history” where “history's real value, from a gameplay perspective, was as a shorthand to help players learn the rules. For that, accuracy was irrelevant. As long as Age of Empires seemed historically authentic, it would be accessible to a much larger and more diverse audience.”49 Nevertheless, from the first AoE game as it existed in 1997 to the latest updates and patches, not to mention the recent Age of Empires IV game, the franchise has seen substantial changes. In AoE IV, the developers at Relic Entertainment have attempted “to teach ... history ‘outside of conquest and fighting,’ from written history to fully narrated documentaries that offer historical context. Gone are the caricatural accents and bad acting, replaced by a dispassionate, History Channel-esque narrator.”50
The Dynasties of India is also responding to what Chun would term a crisis: for example, reacting to the problem that this Reddit commentator points at regarding the Indian civilization as it was originally introduced in 2013: “They actually attempted to represent the entire subcontinent: the architecture style they use in the game is based on Vijayanagara empire. The fishing bonus is based on Cholas, a fishing economy and arguably had the strongest navy amongst all the medieval subcontinent kingdoms (also featured in Khmer campaign). The unique techs-Sultans is not necessarily only applicable to Turkic empires in the north.”51 The division of the Hindustanis into the multiple Indian civilizations seems like a direct response to such a complaint.
While the response to the crisis is part of the update, so is what one could call habit. The easy acceptance of the updates, the Hollywood history, the universal technology trees, and the single idea of what empire and governance should be would constitute habit or what the AoE player is used to. As Chun defines them “[h]abits are creative anticipations based on past repetitions that make network maps the historical future. Through habits, networks are scaled, for individual tics become indications of collective inclinations. Through the analytic of habits, individual actions coalesce bodies into a monstrously connected chimera.”52 The algorithms of the game updates perpetuate the idea of empire and colonialism that the players are used to and keep expecting from the gameplay, not just as individuals but as a network of players globally. In Trammell’s terms, one might ask how the DLC functions as a repair in that it perpetuates the same colonial logic in the update to the game. Repair, here, is deployed in irony—the attempt to repair the initial game’s colonial bias by including a marginal (from the Eurocentric view) civilization as a reparation falters since the failure of such reparation is evident. Likewise, the innocence and freedom of play claimed by Western play theorists also fails as Trammell shows, and the very concept of play needs repair. Such repair or restoration to the originary notion of play is marked by slippage and differance (the Derridean formulation of being different and deferred); the DLC that ostensibly aims at repair through reparation by including the so-called marginalized civilizations—indeed one of the expansions is officially called Age of Empires: The Forgotten—also does not succeed in its intention, whether it is in the sense of repairing historical narrative or making reparation.
Nevertheless, this attempt to repair leads to the realization that such repair is not feasible, and the condition of play is akin to the postcolonial condition, wherein any possibility to effect complete reparation remains elusive. The DLC or update as supplement resembles the dangerous supplement of Derrida’s formulation wherein the added content reconfigures the very conception of the originary, whether it is that of pure play, empire, or even writing history.
Conclusion: Colonial Toolkits of Historiography
In adding to the game’s content, the DLCs, updates, and patches are paratexts that are nevertheless as central as the game itself. Mia Consalvo speaks of how game mods and games function in concert and how each influences the other in that “we need fewer ‘central’ texts and more study of the relatedness, interconnectedness, and contingent nature of (re)many kinds of popular culture texts.”53 Even as this holds true, the interconnected networks of digital games and their updates tend, like other software, to promote thinking that is “predicated on specific values from specific kinds of people—namely, the most powerful institutions in society and those who control them.”54 As Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, warns “algorithms, like viruses, can spread bias on a massive scale at a rapid pace.”55
Of course, as mentioned earlier, Age of Empires 2 is not the only game to algorithmically support imperialism and colonialism. Jacob Euteneuer notes that in Clash of Clans, “one can see how a settler colonialist mindset is part of the game’s internal logic,”56 and Mir and Owens’s earlier example of Civilization also illustrates this. It is, however, not only the algorithm of the software itself but also that of the update or the fix, which, although aimed at remedying the content of the game, ends up remediating the colonial assumptions and the Western bias of the original game algorithm. To that end, the update becomes part of the colonial habit.
In a recent controversial article in the Third World Quarterly, American political scientist Bruce Gilley defended Western colonialism stating its civilizing mission “led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism. It also involves learning how to unlock those benefits again. Western and non-Western countries should reclaim the colonial toolkit and language as part of their commitment to effective governance and international order.”57 “Colonial toolkit” is an interesting choice of words and one that aptly represents the algorithmic perpetuation of colonialism in the procedural rhetoric of digital games. The updates and the DLC are also such toolkits, and it is necessary to review how they function when deployed by developer-historians to (re)write history. If one is to view such toolkits as geared toward repair (comprising Trammell’s formulation of repair and reparation) or a remediation, in the sense that incorporates remedy, the algorithmic bias of such DLCs and updates needs to be kept in mind; such toolkits of repair often end up being colonial toolkits that perpetuate empire and its logic in videogames.
Footnotes
1. ^ Michael Kwet, “Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South,” Race & Class 60, no. 4 (2019): 3–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/030639681882317217. [1] Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
2. ^ Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
3. ^ See Sybille Lammes, “Postcolonial Playgrounds: Games as Postcolonial Cultures,” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 4, no. 1 (2010): 1–6; Souvik Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Souvik Mukherjee and Emil Lundedal Hammar, “Introduction to the Special Issue on Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies,” in “Postcolonial Perspective in Game Studies,” ed. Souvik Mukherjee and Emil Lundedal Hammar, special issue, Open Library of Humanities 4, no. 2 (November 6, 2018): 33, https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.309; Soraya Murray, “The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture,” Open Library of Humanities 4, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 13, https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.285; and Elizabeth A. LaPensée, Outi Laiti, and Maize Longboat, “Towards Sovereign Games,” Games and Culture, June 28, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211029195.
4. ^ Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism.
5. ^ Emil Lundedal Hammar, “Playing Virtual Jim Crow in Mafia III—Prosthetic Memory via Historical Digital Games and the Limits of Mass Culture,” Game Studies 20, no. 1 (February 2020), http://gamestudies.org/2001/articles/hammar.
6. ^ Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings, Microsoft Games (Ensemble Studios, 1999).
7. ^ Age of Empires 2: Dynasties of India, Xbox Games Studios (Forgotten Studios, 2022).
8. ^ Samuel Tolbert, “Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition Release Date Set for November 14,” Windows Central, August 20, 2019, https://www.windowscentral.com/age-empires-2-definitive-edition-release-date-set-november-14-2019; and Age of Empires Wiki, 2022, https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Age_of_Empires_Series_Wiki.
9. ^ J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
10. ^ Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 60.
11. ^ Aaron Trammell, Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023).
12. ^ James Mill, History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817).
13. ^ Antis Loizides, James Mill’s Utilitarian Logic and Politics (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019).
14. ^ Mill, History of British India, xxxiii.
15. ^ Thomas Babington Macaulay, Speeches, ed. G. M. Young (London: Humphrey Milford, 1863).
16. ^ Jeremiah McCall, Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History (New York: Routledge, 2011), 11.
17. ^ Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York: Routledge, 2016).
18. ^ Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2013), 19.
19. ^ Sid Meier’s Colonization (MicroProse, 1994).
20. ^ Rebecca Mir and Trevor Owens, “Modelling Indigenous Peoples: Unpacking Ideology in Sid Meier’s Colonization,” in Kapell and Elliott, Playing with the Past, 91.
21. ^ Age of Empires 2.
22. ^ Abdul Momin Chowdhury and Ranbir Chakravarti, eds., History of Bangladesh: Early Bengal in Regional Perspective (Up to C. 1200 CE, vol. 1, Archaeology, Political History, Polity (Dhaka: Asiatic Society Bangladesh, 2018).
23. ^ Sailendra Nath Sen, Ancient Indian History and Civilization (New Delhi: New Age International, 1999), 341.
24. ^ Chowdhury and Chakravarti, History of Bangladesh, 723.
25. ^ On counterfactual history and videogames, see Chapman, Digital Games as History; Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism; and Tom Apperley, “Counterfactual Communities: Strategy Games, Paratexts and the Player’s Experience of History,” Open Library of Humanities 4, no. 1 (2018): 15, https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.286.
26. ^ Angela Cox, “The Othering of Time in Age of Empires II,” Play the Past (blog), August 1, 2013, http://www.playthepast.org/?p=3902.
27. ^ Thorwyyn, “All Star Wars References in Devapala Campaign,” Reddit, May 4, 2022, www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/ui0n2w/all_star_wars_references_in_devapala_campaign/.
28. ^ Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
29. ^ Mark L. Sample, “Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000153/000153.html.
30. ^ Mir and Owens, “Modelling Indigenous Peoples,” 93.
31. ^ Mir and Owens, 94.
32. ^ See the Civilization Wiki 2008 for details, https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/M._Gandhi_(Civ1).
33. ^ Sid Meier, Sid Meier`s Memoir! A Life in Computer Games (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020).
34. ^ Meier, Sid Meier’s Memoir!.
35. ^ Mukherjee, Videogames and Postcolonialism.
36. ^ Amy Iggulden, “The Churchill You Didn’t Know,” Guardian, November 28, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/28/features11.g21.
37. ^ Meghna Jayanth, “White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design #DIGRA21,” Medium (blog), December 7, 2021, https://medium.com/@betterthemask/white-protagonism-and-imperial-pleasures-in-game-design-digra21-a4bdb3f5583c.
38. ^ Jayanth, “White Protagonism.”
39. ^ Robert Bernasconi, “The Supplement,” in Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, ed. Claire Colebrook (London: Routledge, 2014), 34.
40. ^ Trammell, Repairing Play.
41. ^ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
42. ^ “Update 61321,” Age of Empires Series Wiki, April 28, 2022, https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Update_61321.
43. ^ “Update 61321.”
44. ^ “Update 61321.”
45. ^ “Indians (Age of Empires II),” Age of Empires Series Wiki, April 28, 2022, https://ageofempires.fandom.com/wiki/Indians_(Age_of_Empires_II).
46. ^ “Indians (Age of Empires II).”
47. ^ David Lelyveld, “Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 4 (1993): 668.
48. ^ Neil Nagwekar, “On the Postcolonial Analysis of Indians in Age of Empires 2,” in DiGRA India Conference 2021 Day 2 Panel 2, January 17, 2022, YouTube video, 1:40–27:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3EDTJnKz9E.
49. ^ Richard C. Moss, “‘The Least-Worst Idea We Had’—The Creation of the Age of Empires Empire,” Ars Technica, January 8, 2018, https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/01/the-age-of-age-of-empires-as-told-by-the-devs-who-built-it/.
50. ^ Will Bedingfield, “Age of Empires IV Wants to Teach You a Lesson,” Wired, October 25, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-empires-iv/.
51. ^ AddyCod, “Why the Indians Civ in AoE2 Makes Me Cringe So Hard,” Reddit, January 31, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/l965bq/why_the_indians_civ_in_aoe2_makes_me_cringe_so/.
52. ^ Chun, Updating to Remain the Same, 3.
53. ^ Mia Consalvo, “When Paratexts Become Texts: De-Centering the Game-as-Text,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 2 (March 15, 2017): 177–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648.
54. ^ Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.
55. ^ Joy Buolamwini, “Joy Buolamwini: How I’m Fighting Bias in Algorithms,” TED Talk, March 9, 2017, https://www.ted.com/talks/joy_buolamwini_how_i_m_fighting_bias_in_algorithms.
56. ^ Jacob Euteneuer, “Settler Colonialism in the Digital Age: Clash of Clans, Territoriality, and the Erasure of the Native,” Open Library of Humanities 4, no. 1 (March 23, 2018), https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.212.
57. ^ Bruce Gilley, “The Case for Colonialism,” Third World Quarterly, September 8, 2017, 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037; article withdrawn and no longer available, accessed November 18, 2022.