Playing Geopolitics in Singapore: The Geopolitical Imaginations in Digital Games, Among Consumers and Content Creators
Despite the popularity of digital games in everyday life all around the globe, geographers have only tentatively engaged with the medium. Compared to other forms of popular media, play is a distinctive feature of digital games and enables a unique form of encountering geopolitical content in games. The dynamic relation of production and consumption is particularly interesting, since global game production is unequally distributed. Although smaller studios exist around the world, many people play games developed somewhere else, incorporating imaginations from ‘elsewhere’.
This raises the issue of representation. How are others portrayed, particularly in and through strategy games, which often depict various nations or cultures incorporated in certain (Western) imaginations. Further, players can enact influence themselves. Rather than ‘only’ playing the game, they are able to play with the game through changing its character. As amateur coders, so-called modders, they can re- and overwrite files provided by the developers and share their results online. This activity represents an intriguing case of participatory culture in face of a very spatially concentrated production network of digital games.
Thus, my research aims to expand knowledge around digital games, especially from non-Western countries. Singapore provides a suitable case study with its high digital media literacy, excellent digital infrastructure, and widespread English literacy. I will cover the issues of representations, consumptions, and prosumptions through combining different academic fields, i.e. game studies and critical geopolitics, and reflecting on the dynamic nature of digital games.