The myth that justified the takeover of a continent lives on both in classrooms and popular media. Drawing from classroom observations in an urban primary school in Australia, this paper enters the technology in education conversation, more specifically through the use of videogames for learning. Based on classroom exchanges between teachers and students, we interrogate how the school's use of Minecraft, a best-selling commercial videogame, continues to reproduce myths of settler colonialism in the 21st century. Specifically, the curriculum mobilizes structures inherent to both Minecraft and modern Australia's treatment of its Indigenous populations. That is, both classroom and videogame interactions reproduced the myth of terra nullius: the doctrine that determined land, prior to colonization, was empty and unowned, and therefore available for settlement by the colonizer. We conclude that within videogames and classrooms, students' voices manage to interrogate the curriculum, resisting the reproduction of erasive coloniality in school.

This article explores the cultural appropriation of the term avatar by Western tech culture and what this implies for scholarship of digital games, virtual worlds, social media, and digital cultures. The term has roots in the religious tradition of the Indian subcontinent and was subsequently imported into video game terminology during a period of widespread appropriation of Eastern culture by Californian tech industries. We argue that the use of the term was not a case of happenstance but a signaling of the potential for computing to offer a mystical or enchanted perspective within an otherwise secular world. This suggests that the concept is useful in game cultures precisely because it plays with the “otherness” of the term's original meaning. We argue that this indicates a fundamental hybridity to gaming cultures that highlight the need to add postcolonial perspectives to how issues of diversity and power in gaming cultures are understood.

Lars de Wildt is a Ph.D.-candidate and lecturer at the Institute for Media Studies at KU Leuven. His research (inductive, multi-method) currently focuses on the ways in which videogame players and developers play with religion in a supposedly secular age. Lars has been

In contemporary ‘post-secular society’, videogames like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock Infinite or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious elements. Departing from a critique on studies perceiving such in-game representations as discriminatory forms of religious Othering, the main research question of this article is: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? The study is based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews held with 20 international players from different (non-)religious backgrounds. Rather than seeing religion in games as representations of ‘Othering’, the analysis demonstrates that players from different (non-)religious beliefs take on different worldviews while role-playing the (non-)religious Other. Atheists relativize their own position, opening up to the logic of religious worldviews; Christians, Hindus and Muslims, in turn, compare traditions and may draw conclusions about the similarities underlying different world religions. Other players ‘slip into a secular mindset’, gradually turning towards the position of a ‘religious none’. It is concluded that playing the religious Other in videogames provides the opportunity to suspend (non-)religious worldviews and empathize with the (non-)religious Other. The relevance of these findings is related to broader sociological debates about ‘post-secular society’ and the alleged increase of religious fundamentalism, conflict and mutual Othering.