Gamic grammar: Manufacturing consent (to whiteness) in game studies

This article examines how game studies and the gaming industry collaborate to manufacture consent to whiteness, fostering a gamic grammar that normalizes whiteness as the default subjectivity in gaming. It begins by contextualizing gamic grammar against the backdrop of Gamergate 2.0, highlighting how this cultural moment reinforces long-standing exclusionary practices in video game culture. The article then critiques the early celebration of the ‘magic circle’ in game studies and argues that it helped codify whiteness as foundational to the discipline. Video game design is subsequently analysed as a process that conceals its ideological apparatus, and it argues that video games are helpful interlocutors for exploring the ‘manufacture of consent’. Drawing on the concept of ‘manufacturing consent’, this article contends that the collective apparatus of game studies and the gaming industry positions whiteness as the exemplary implied gamer and reifies a racialized hierarchy within gaming culture. Using the critical literature of The Stanley Parable as a case study, the article critiques how analyses of subjectivity and agency in game studies frequently overlook the racialized and gendered dimensions embedded in a game’s design. Finally, by foregrounding race in The Stanley Parable , the article not only disrupts this collective consent to whiteness but also advocates for a reimagined game studies that centres the racial, gendered and sociopolitical categories shaping video games and their broader cultural impact.