New ZeMKI Working Paper No. 61 published
29. June 2026
The new ZeMKI working paper by Prof. Dr. Lars de Wildt, entitled “Cultural Hegemony in Videogames (and the rise of China)” is now available.
What is it about?
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 whatAdorno and Horkheimer called ‘sameness.’ Fourthly, that the political and economic con-text 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.