Rethinking Videogame Marketing in Freudian Reading of Cameroonian Folklore: Empire ‘Plays Back' in Postcolonial Digital Humanities

Abstract

Starting from the premise that postcolonial digital humanities is beset by the praxis/theory determinism particularly in its emphasis on techno-digitization to the detriment of the development of knowledge in the social and humanities spheres, this paper argues that the Cameroonian folklore can be re-designed to enrich videogames through new techniques of animation. The oral tale has artistic and literary beauty, but it also has auniversal philosophy based on the morality of the commons. From here, the paper suggests how a Freudian rethinking of videogames in terms of ideological and artistic creation can open up new prospects for re-tooling oral (African) tales in online projects.

Departing from the premise that functionalist readings of videogames are too technologically narrow and say pretty little about the evolutionary perspectives of the digital technology as ahumanistic and spiritual value, the paper applied a critical Freudian/Jungian approach to come up with a suggested road map for embedding Cameroonian oral tales as digital hypertexts with the objective ofre-moralizing the younger generation of online players. In this post-colonial model, the criticisms of technology can be supplemented by the new ‘oral way of doing things' such as the posting of video comments, blog responses, video postings as well as online conversations and creation of new video-texts. The videogame in this post-colonial model would stress less of violence and fear of the unknown, and more of a new engaged community culture, guided by a morale of peace.