Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article argues that cultural hegemony has been a central concept in game studies to describe, over the course of thirty years, how AAA videogames have reproduced sexist, racist, capitalist, postcolonialist, militarist, US-Americanocentric worldviews as ‘natural,’ in which male, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied subject positions are presented as the ‘default;’ but that nothing much has changed as a consequence of this descriptive scholarly project. Secondly, it argues that cultural hegemony is subject to historical change, and that it should be understood in the political and economic context of its time. Thirdly, that the political and economic context of the past three decades have led increasingly fewer game companies to become increasingly more incentivized to reproduce what Adorno and Horkheimer called ‘sameness.’ Fourthly, that the political and economic context of cultural hegemony is likely to change in the coming decades, and that videogames will be one of the first cultural spheres in which the increased relevance of Chinese players and their state’s policies will affect the cultural-hegemonic representations which we have become used to observing (and powerlessly critiqueing). Finally, that it would be a mistake to understand such change as counter-hegemonic rather than co-hegemonic. Early examples of changes to videogames’ hegemonic representations suggest that Western hegemony is not so much resisted nor replaced, but that, (for the time being), it is stretched to make place for Chinese hegemony alongside it.
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7167290663
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