For his article Decolonizing Gaming, Thomas Widlok (Project C05 “Framing Futures”) received the Best Paper Award at the 2025 Games and Learning Alliance (GALA) Conference. GALA Conference is an yearly conference, aimed at providing an international forum for the dissemination and exchange of scientific information on theoretical, technical, and applied areas of serious games.
In his article, Widlok challenges the colonial assumptions embedded in mainstream game design. He proposes rethinking dominant structures—such as the hero’s quest and logics of conquest—by embracing alternative narratives, shared practices, and marginalized play traditions, with serious games playing a key role in driving this transformation. The article was presented at GALA Conference 2025 by Silja Borchert (Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne).
Decolonizing Gaming
By Thomas Widlok (Project C05 “Framing Futures”).
Abstract
Decolonizing gaming is not only about including more participants from the Global South to increase diversity among gamers and game designers. It is also about overcoming limitations that a colonial mindset continues to hold with regard to mainstream gaming and game design. This contribution explores new opportunities that arise from a decolonial revision of key aspects of gaming: Enriching the dominant hero’s quest by including ambivalent trickster characters, replacing the logic of conquest, extraction and accumulation by exploring a logic of sharing, diversifying game environments by including ways of playful imagination and practice that are hitherto marginalized. In this process serious games play a particularly important role as they can have a decolonizing impact on gaming grounded in social science research on playfulness beyond “the West”.
Reference
Widlok, T. 2026. Decolonizing Gaming. In: Bakkes, S., Bellotti, F., Dondio, P., Ninaus, M., Wanick, V., Bucchiarone, A. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 16307. Springer, Cham. DOI
