Mission Objective: Carry the White Man’s Burden to Outer Space–The Gamification of Colonization in Dead Space
Mission Objective: Carry the White Man’s Burden to Outer Space–The Gamification of Colonization in Dead Space

Summary/Abstract: Survival horror video games were recognized in the late nineteen-nineties for their cumbersome gameplay determines by complicated controls and inefficient core mechanics. After 2005, survival horror games started to move away from their traditional game design and to show more openness to the dominant game design norms of the action genre. The new survival horror games sought to eliminate the hypermedia elements that had characterized their predecessors and offer gamers an immersive gameplay experience similar to that of AAA1action games. In this article, I look at the survival horror game Dead Space (EA, 2008) and analyze the way in which the game naturalizes its ludic function in order to strengthen the illusion of immersion and how the illusion of immersion strengthens the ideology of white supremacy embedded in the remediated colonial discourse of the game. In keeping with Jesper Juul’s approach (“On Absent Carrot Sticks”) to the relation between the game’s fiction and the game’s rules, I show that in the case ofDead Space traditionally antimimetic elements of video games such as the heads-up display are implemented into the fictional text-actual-world. As a result, conventionally extradiegetic game mechanics such as the inventory now become intradiegetic elements that no longer draw the player away from the story world. The realism of the story world works in favor of a naturalization of the colonial tropes that the video game remediates.

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