As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, part of the appeal of video games is their status as new frontiers. In an era when physical space has been thoroughly explored, virtual spaces harken back to the romance of the colonial frontier—as new regions to discover and conquer. 7 Such conquest is not just psycho-symbolic, but also sensitive to the legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment. Since most mainstream video games are produced and disseminated in the “developed” world, they are spaces in which primarily ex-colonial nations can continue to “conquer” the “other,” even in postcolonial periods.8 Such colonial narratives often promote a still widely prevalent Western brand of historical consciousness which depicts the history of colonialism as one of “white man’s burden”—as a benevolent process of taming the wild frontier through sword and scripture or, more recently, drones and democracy. For example, in many popular action-adventure or FPS games, the European or American white male avatar is thrust into a realm of chaos and disorder, and tasked with bringing civilization to the land—either through ridding the “noble savage” of evil and depravity, or through intervening in conflict on foreign soil.9

In sandbox-building games such as Minecraft, the player arrives, like Robinson Crusoe, into a terra nullius and encourages him to “improve” this land—by clearing jungles, draining marshes, building infrastructure and mining minerals. Its inhabitants—hostile monsters or local villagers—appear simply as obstacles in the path of development, or as resources to exploit. In the map-based interfaces of strategy games, entire regions are transformed into dehumanized tracts of land and resources, ripe for exploitation.10 Cartography, in the history of European colonialism, has been argued as a means by which to render land “legible”—that is, to point out its essential resources, enable their exploitation and minimize any competition to this supply of resources, such as the local population