Gaming the System: Games as Text and Metaphor for Postcolonial Resistance


By Delbert Tran
Georgetown University

Abstract:

The historical experience of Native Americans is one of the clearest examples of colonialism’s impact on a people. Examining Louise Erdrich’s novel, Love Medicine, I explore how two central characters, Lyman Lamartine and Lipsha Morrisey, offer two contrasting models of resistance to the colonial legacy that afflicts their community. In doing so, I uncover the centrality of the game as a literary metaphor for postcolonial resistance. As such, I incorporate analysis of the video game text itself by analyzing the popular multi-platform videogame, Bioshock, as a postcolonial text that displays the struggles of agency and resistance. Deconstructing the binaries that emerge in Bioshock, and deconstructing the binary between Lyman and Lipsha, I explore how models of resistance to power might be synthesized into the best method of resisting dominant power systems.

 

 

 

 

Everyone loves to root for the underdog. The underdog is an archetypal figure that has a charming allure in its struggle against forces seemingly powerful than itself. However, that struggle sweetens the victory of the underdog all the more – the underdog’s success seems to represent the sheer tenacity of the individual put in that very position, the triumph of the will over all odds. This is a victory of agency. While the underdog usually refers to a more specific competitive setting, the sequence of history can be seen in terms of the perennial back and forth between underdog and the powerhouse – the subaltern against the hegemonic. While the struggle between the subaltern and the hegemonic takes places across many different planes, cultural texts represent one of the most important sites of contestation – here, the folklore of the archetypal underdog is created, and through it, the possibility of resistance enters the imagination. Two such texts – Louis Erdrich’s novel, Love Medicine, and the popular multi-platform videogame, Bioshock – offer such narratives of the subaltern resisting the colonial coercion of those in power. In Love Medicine, the Native American Kashpaws struggle with the indelible imprint that colonialism has left on their tribe. In these circumstances, two members of the tribe – Lyman Lamartine and Lipsha Morrissey – offer two different methods of resistance. Lyman operates within the colonial culture of capitalism by appropriating it with gambling casinos, while Lipsha uses trickery to escape the bounds of the dominant system. While evaluating the strengths of each form of resistance, I will also consider the narrative of resistance in the newer medium of the video game, Bioshock. The very nature of Bioshock will present the conflict of postcolonialism, where the player as participant is bound within the control of outside forces, both in the form of the game and in the content of the game in its plot. Bioshock, by presenting a series of moral decisions, presents a binary that embodies the values of colonialism. However, by deconstructing the binaries in Bioshock, the binary of Lipsha and Lyman also falls under scrutiny, and I argue that a synthesis of their two expressions of resistance (and how that is also manifest in Bioshock) will provide the best model of resistance to dominant culture.

Love Medicine follows the family of the Kashpaw and Nanpush tribes, with postcolonialism haunting their family in the decline and degradation of its members, seen most clearly in one of the patriarchs, Nestor Kashpaw. As Nector points out, “Our family was respected as the last hereditary leaders of this tribe” (Erdrich 122). While Nector is making a claim to representative leadership of his native people, he simultaneously undermines this claim by continuing to say, “But Kashpaws died out around here, people forgot” (Erdrich 122). Already, the effects of colonialism are at work. Although Nector possesses a hereditary claim to leadership, the historical invasions that led to the deaths of the Kashpaws meant that the “people forgot” this Kashpaw status, indicating that colonialism caused Nector and the Kashpaws to lose control of their own identity within the tribe.

Such a rewriting and amnesia of history is also evident in the life progression of Nector himself. Early on in the novel, his granddaughter Albertine explains the general history of Nector’s life:

[Rushes Bear] had let the government put Nector in school, but hidden Eli…Nector came home from boarding school knowing white reading and writing, while Eli knew the woods. Now, these many years later…my Great uncle Eli was still sharp, while Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild…His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds” (Erdrich 19).

From the outset, Rushes Bear had to “let the government put Nector in school,” demonstrating that the Kashpaws did not choose to enroll Nector in schooling themselves, but simply acquiesced to the government’s demand. Nector, in the process, acquires “white reading and writing,” an education definitively marked by its relation to the dominant culture. This of course occurs in contrast to Eli, hidden away, and his alternatively Native American education of “the woods” and of nature. But Nector’s life could be a microcosm of Native Americans under white, colonial influence – after being subject to white education, not only does he become embedded in their system, becoming “an astute political dealer” (Erdrich 19), he eventually loses his mind, a forgetting that is symbolic of the Native American amnesia of their ancestral and cultural heritage as it becomes whitewashed by white education. Yet, this stage of forgetfulness is complicated by the naturalistic terms that describe it. Albertine says that “Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild” as if it was an animal fleeing for its freedom into the wilderness. Not only “wild,” she goes on to say that “his thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing under reeds” as if it had retreated into the shelter of nature, which Eli represents as the Native American home in opposition to the hegemonic government. However, this simply shows that Nector was so socialized by the government educated that he could only revert to his natural roots by fully forgetting everything that he knew, that the entirety of his mind had been corrupted by colonial teachings.

The extent of this corruption is clear in an earlier chapter of his life, “The Plunge of the Brave.” As a young man, Nector succumbs to the explicit desires of white wealth, even when it comes at personal cost. When he encounters the “old rich woman” (Erdrich 123), he explains:

She wanted to paint me without a stich on, of course. There were lots of naked pictures in her barn. I wouldn’t do it. She offered money, more money, until she offered me so much that I had to forget my dignity. So I was paid by the woman a round two hundred dollars for standing stock still in a diaper (Erdrich 123-124).

 Although Nector initially refuses her offer, “she offered money, more money” until he “had to forget” his dignity, literally selling out his body so that the woman could reproduce it in her own artistic vision. Of course, once this is done, Nector must model “in a diaper,” becoming infantilized under the control of this wealthy woman’s patronizing patronage. Inevitably, this painting produces a particular image of Native American identity, as Nector further comments,

I could not believe it, later, when she showed me the picture. Plunge of the Brave, was the title of it. Later on, that picture would become famous. It would hang in the Bismarck state capitol. There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death. Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well from my dealings with whites I would add to that quote: “The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse” (Erdrich 124).

The very name of this painting – “Plunge of the Brave” – serves as the title of the chapter, and the plunge symbolizes the general downward trajectory that Native Americans have suffered under colonialism, as well as the particular downward trajectory of Nector as he sells out his dignity. Interestingly enough, this depiction shows Nector himself “jumping off a cliff” into his death in the river, as if it is of his volition (after all, he is the “Brave”). Such a picture portrays the destruction of Native Americans as one of self-destruction, brought by themselves. Although Nector cites Custer and refers to the “interesting Indian” as “dead” or “dying by falling backwards off a horse,” nowhere does he refer to the causes that killed them. And yet, behind these images of Indian death is the white painter.

But with the later passing of Nector, it falls unto the newer generations to deal with the lingering effects of colonialism, and Lyman follows in Nector’s path by assimilating into the dominant system. He succeeds Nector’s position of leadership in tribal politics, and follows much of the same route that Nector did. As Lyman explains “I was up to my neck in the very same project that she had in mind to torch. It was a proposal to take up where Nector Kashpaw had left off, to set into motion a tribal souvenir factory, a facility that would produce fake arrows and plastic bows, dyed-chicken-feather headdresses for children, dress-up stuff” (Erdrich 303). He literally resumes control over the same project that Nector had begun. And just as Nector sold his Native culture for profit, Lyman sells Native American culture through the sale of “tribal souvenirs” such as “fake arrows” and “plastic bows.” In doing so, Lyman explicitly acknowledges that “it was [his] turn to walk in the tracks that Kashpaw had left…by taking over his factory” (Erdrich 309). However, this time, instead of a white painter reproducing a fake version of Native American culture, it is the Natives themselves. At the same time, this arrangement implodes in the self-destructive battle of Native against Native in the factory, an affirmation of the image in the Plunge of the Brave, with the Native bringing his own death. This assimilation thereby reflects the flaw of such a process, where it internalizes the very values and images that the hegemonic structure imposes upon the subaltern that reproduces this relationship of power.

Part of the underlying tension in that internal conflict, nevertheless, resulted from Lyman’s conflict with an alternative approach to resisting hegemony, which manifests itself in Lipsha. After all, Lyman determines the Tomahawk Factory’s self-destruction when he “assumed a judge’s solemnity and brought the fake tomahawk down on the table with the crack of a sentencing gavel” (Erdrich 319). Lipsha can pronounce judgment on Lyman because, just as Lyman parallels Nestor, Lipsha parallels Lulu in her opposition to Nestor’s project of assimilation. Lipsha explains this connection to Lulu:

She scared people after the bandages came off her eyes, because she seemed to know everybody else’s business. No one understood that like I did. For you see, having what they call the near-divine healing touch, I know that such things are purely possible. If she had some kind of power, I wasn’t one to doubt (Erdrich 333).

He asserts that “no one understood” Lulu’s mysticism the way that Lipsha did, as he, too possesses “the near-diving healing touch.” As such, the two are bonded by their possession of latent Native American powers, an embrace of Native authenticity in unfathomable powers that lie beyond the calculable realm of capital. Their connection is further strengthened by Lipsha’s adoption of Lulu’s card conning techniques. He later meets with his half-brother, King, while on the run from the military police for fleeing from military duty, and here, he employs Lulu’s lessons: “I shuffled carefully. I saw the patterns of it happen in my mind. I dealt the patterns out with perfect ease, keeping strict to Lulu’s form” (Erdrich 358). But the cards and their game also serve to represent Lipsha and the assumption of his Native cause. It was a game with “a marked deck. For the marked men” (Erdrich 353): marked cards because he was cheating, marked men because he was running from the law. In both cases, Lipsha is operating outside of the system and its rules. Rather than assimilating like Lyman, he rejects rules with his personal touch.

Lipsha’s resistance, of course, occurs through his manipulation of a game – but the very idea of the game, as symbol for postcolonial rules and the agents therein, poses an interesting perspective for postcolonialism. When evaluating the methods of Lyman and Lipsha, the two share the fundamental characteristic of resisting within a literary medium. However, the alternative medium of the video game offers a unique study of how readers interact with a text and its cultural influence, since a significant portion of a video game’s significance is not within the game itself, but in the broader possibilities of how a player might interact with that text. As Steven E. Jones writes in The Meaning of Video Games:

The meaning(s) of video games are constructed and they are collaborative. They are made by social interactions of various kinds rather than found in the software and hardware objects themselves. The meanings of games are not essential or inherent in their form (though form is a crucial determinant), even if we define form as a set of rules and constraints for gameplay, and certainly not in their extractable “stories” (though the fictive story world matters in most games), but are functions of the larger grid of possibilities built by groups of developers, players, reviewers, critics, and fans in particular times and places and through specific acts of gameplay or discourse about games (Jones 3).

In short, the video game as cultural text contains meaning in the intersection of the game itself and the interaction of the player, and when postcolonial criticism concerns itself with the question of agency in relation to dominant culture, the relationship between Lipsha and card game and the relationship between player and video game become parallel models for reading how players exercise their autonomy. For the purposes of this paper, I will address the video game Bioshock. In addition to being rated “Game of the Year 2007,” the aggregate review site Metacritic evaluated Bioshock to be one of the most highly rated game of all time (Metacritic). As mentioned by Jones, interpretation of video games should consider, among several significant factors, form (in terms of the rules and constraints that govern gameplay), story, and the larger grid of possibility built by a game and the people who interact with it.

Beginning with its setting, Bioshock offers a world shaped by postcolonial ideology, particularly the spirit of capitalism. Set in the underwater metropolis of Rapture, its decaying dystopian ruins are modeled after the objectivist ideal of a free market, libertarian world. Its creator (one of two leading antagonists of the game) Andrew Ryan exclaims, “I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful in each of us, a combination of our efforts, a great chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interests that the chain pulls society in the right direction” (Bioshock). Already, there is the guise of the postcolonial narrative, that there is independence in acting “in our own interests,” yet this is a system that “pulls society” – a chain that pulls all of it (of course, the image of the chain implying slavery rather than freedom). In terms of the game’s general form, it operates as a first person shooter. The player therefore sees the entirety of this world – its rules, its villains, its themes – directly from the eyes of the players’ in-game avatar and character.

As Bioshock’s plot unfolds, the power politics of its narrative make it a particularly apt text for a postcolonial interpretation. Initially, the player stumbles upon this strange city and first encounters the helpful radio communication of a concerned citizen, sharing the players’ desire to escape. This helper, named Atlas, provides instructions on how to first begin your journey, with tips for equipping yourself and learning your capabilities. He also provides guidance on the game’s objectives, instructing the player where to go and what to do to navigate the city and accomplish their mutual goal of freedom. Once the player confronts the antagonist, Ryan Andrews, however, his or her illusion of freedom is shattered: Andrews reveals that the player has been under the brainwashed control of Atlas the entire time (also known as Frank Fontaine, Ryan Andrews’ rival in the power struggles over Rapture). Fontaine’s control over the player immediately embodies a form of colonial authority, where he directly commands the players’ actions. Moreover, the player learns that they had originated from the city of Rapture, sent out of the city brainwashed, and summoned back when needed. This relation clearly bears resemblance to the core-periphery tie of postcolonialism, where the colonial authority would draw the colonized back into the gravity of its grip. Andrews also reveals that Fontaine had been employing a trigger phrase, “would you kindly,” which would force the player to cooperate with any demand. The phrase “would you kindly,” seemingly a courtesy, obscures a directly coercive force, which mirrors the postcolonial understanding that the dominant discourse often subtly manipulates the colonized by socializing them with values that they accept on their own. “Would you kindly” presents the illusion of the self having agency and responding to a request, when it in fact masked the influence of the colonizer. Within the frame of the game, Andrews demonstrates this coercive force by invoking this controlling phrase of the player – while the player maintains their first person perspective, they lose all control, which now rests in Andrews’ command.

As this revelation is given, the player’s vision flashes back to every game objective they accomplished while under the instruction of Fontaine – here, the form of the game and its narrative intersect in a significant way. The illusion of freedom in Bioshock’s narrative reflects the illusion of freedom in the form of the game – while the player’s avatar may have subconsciously been forced to comply with Fontaine’s demands, the player is subconsciously forced to comply with the limits of the video game, unable to stray from the created bounds of the software and game. Fontaine later adds, “I had you built! I sent you topside! I took you back, showed you what you was, what you was capable of! Even that life you thought you had, that was something I dreamed of and tattooed inside your head! Now if you don’t call that family, I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS!” (Bioshock). Just as the video game character began with an imaginary conception of a family background (which the game represents with flashbacks to a black and white family photo prior to the character’s crash and subsequent arrival at the city of Rapture) and life, the video game developer shapes the fictitious life of the character, and the postcolonial narrative shapes the ideology of those under its reign. Bioshock, in other words, presents a metanarrative on the nature of gameplay, one that links with postcolonial control and questions of freedom given the presence of dominant culture and how it manifests itself in game design and the fixed path of a player’s character.

Yet, even within the confines of the video game, the player possesses a degree of choice. Along its journey, Bioshock presents the player with a series of moral choices in encounters with Little Sisters, children who have been genetically modified for the purposes of the city. The player can choose either to save the Little Sisters, restoring their humanity, or harvest the Little Sisters, absorbing their powers; the choices made will influence the ending of the game. While it is a choice offered, it certainly represents a particularly problematic choice. The helpless female figure invokes a frequently seen video game trope, the “damsel in distress” (Sarkeesian). Not only that, the player must first defeat each Little Sister’s guardian, their “Big Daddy.” The male avatar rescuing a female from another male protector corresponds to Gayatri Spivak’s criticism of postcolonial discourse, which often involved “white men, seeking to save brown women from brown men” (Spivak). It is the reproduction of colonial attitudes, where the recognition of a certain group as colonized obscures the fact that those giving recognition may also fall under the sway of dominant discourse as a colonizer, too. And of course, the endings produced by the players’ decisions are couched in absolute: if the player harvests even a single Little Sister, they receive a negative ending, requiring a purist to save all Little Sisters and to be the hero. Given the colonial connotations of such “morality,” this binary is problematic.

Given this reminder of the pitfalls in binaries, it becomes necessary to deconstruct the original binary posed between Lyman and Lipsha. Lipsha, though resistant to the system, inevitably still operates within it, as signified by the card game. As Gerry points out, “What is fair? … Society? Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can” (Erdrich 357). Even though Lipsha may manipulate the cards through his cheating, he still must play the game; his cheating is simply a form of manipulating the rules in order to “play as best” as he could. And although Lyman moves on to another monetary venture after the Tomahawk Factory’s failure, he pursues gambling, just as Lipsha does in the card game. After all, “Gambling fit into the old traditions, chance was kind of an old-time thing” (Erdrich 326). Though seemingly oppositional, Lyman and Lipsha both overlap in their methods of resistance to the hegemonic system.

Instead of privileging either method of resistance over the other, by identifying the similarity between the two, both can be synthesized in a way to mutually complement the other. Bioshock helps illustrate how this becomes possible. Though the protagonist learns of their subjugation under Fontaine’s control, the player begins to mount a campaign of resistance. Though Fontaine initially guided the player in acquiring weapons and powers to accomplish Fontaine’s own ends, the player eventually acquires the independence to utilize these very tools against his original colonizer. Similarly, Lyman performs this act of resistance by turning capitalism upon itself, making “a money business out of money itself,” selling capitalist culture back to itself. And in the fulfillment of Bioshock’s positive moral ending, the player escapes the city of Rapture and creates a new life with the Little Sisters whom he saved. The narrator at the end concludes: “And in the end, what was your reward? You never said, but I think I know. A family” (Bioshock). Paralleling this end, Lipsha, too, reunites with his father and his mother (through the avatar of the car), enacting his sleight of hand in cards in a way that “dealt [him]self a perfect family” (Erdrich 358)[1]. In the end, that defines the purpose of resistance: the formation of a family, to unite among people who feel at home together, valued as individual and community. The realization of this end does involve means that incorporate the dominant culture – Lyman’s casinos, for example. Spivak certainly warns that “the subaltern cannot speak” (Spivak) because it can only do so in a way that incorporates the language of the dominant culture. However, Spivak’s cautionary note is only the reminder that power relations always persist, even in the perspective of the so-called subaltern who resist against power relations. But in this particular model of resistance – where the tools of the dominant culture are turned against itself with the end of preserving the particular agents’ most intimate social grouping, the family – this resistance fundamentally invokes a power relation for one benign purpose: to keep a family together.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Bioshock. Irrational Games. 2K Games. 21 August 2007. 17 April 2013.

Erdrich, Louis. Love Medicine. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Print.

Gayatri, Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 1998. 19 April 2013. Web.

Jones, Steven E. The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies. New York:

Routledge, 2008. Print.

Metacritic. “Bioshock.” 19 April 2013. Web. <http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/bioshock>

Sarkeesian, Anita. “Damsel in Distress: Part 1 – Tropes vs Women in Video Games.” 7 March

  1. Youtube. < http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q>

[1] As noted previously, the Bioshock model of family may have its imperfections. It may be troubled in the sense that the “family” established may continue a patriarchal structure with the male character saving “little sisters” – while this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the “little sisters” end up saving the protagonist at the end from the final boss, the precise structure of a family – eg how traditional models of family might relate to dominant power structures like patriarchy –might be further topic for discussion.

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