As the Digital <i>Teocalli</i> Burns: Mesoamerica as Gamified Space and the Displacement of Sacred Pixels
Abstract
Intricately concocted temples—seemingly historically accurate down to the pixel—flash across the gamer’s screen, as the player-conquistador re-creates the downfall of the so-called “Aztec Empire,” circa 1521, a keyboard at hand instead of a cutlass. Playing the Spanish Conquest has never been easier or more exciting for the victor. Today’s recreational sundering of Indigenous-American sacred spaces and cultural monuments repeats disturbing patterns in colonialism and cultural imperialism from the Early Modern past (Carpenter 2021; Ford 2016; Mukherjee 2017). What are the lessons gamers learn by reducing digitized Mesoamerican temples, such as the grand teocalli of Tenochtitlan, to rubble? This article explores sacred landscapes, archaeology, and art relating to acts of conquest and sixteenth-century Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica. This study of Mesoamerican sacred environments supports my interpretation that careless approaches to early-modern contexts and virtual geographies created by game designers reduce the presence of Mesoamerican place-identity. I highlight empire-building games based on historical events and situate gaming experiences, old and new, as interventions in sacred architecture. The study draws in ethnospatial considerations of settings and ornamentation to furthering the recent Game Studies critiques on cartographies, narratologies, and play mechanics, here focusing on the geo-spiritual components of playing out aspects of Mesoamerica’s encounters with Spanish military and cultural conflict (Lammes et al. 2018). I reveal the importance of place attachment, ethnohistory, and archaeology in making more meaningful experiences and argue that current art history-adjacent gaming agendas create fun and profit at the expense of iconic structures of Mexico’s heritage, such as the Postclassic single- and double-topped teocalli (temple-pyramids). The final thoughts call for increased interventions from scholars upon developer-player negative feedback loops that repurpose inaccurate mythos from historiography of the “Spiritual Conquest” paradigm.
Keywords
place attachment; iconoclasm; Spanish conquest history; Aztec architecture; settler colonialism; videogames; digital games; Age of Empires (game); New World (game); spiritual conquest
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Rubinoff Junior Reserach Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge United Kingdom
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2154-0036
Joshua Fitzgerald is the 2020-24 Jeffrey Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow with Churchill College (University of Cambridge). He received his PhD (History) and Museum Studies certification from the University of Oregon in 2019 and, from 2019 to 2020, interned with the Getty Research Institute’s Director’s Office on the Florentine Codex Initiative, working as a content specialist, text encoder, and an education program coordinator with UCLA's Latin American Institute. His publications have focused on the theme of “art as a source of knowledge” in Colonial Mexico, especially education and learning modes used by Nahuas using ethno-spatial architecture studies. His research also explores representations of "Aztec" archaeology in Modern Art and video games, Indigenous amaranth seed dough rituals and edible arts, and gendered military history in the early-modern Nahua world. His current book in progress is titled An Unholy Pedagogy: Mesoamerican Art, Architecture, and Learningscapes under Spain. In Cambridge, he has also been teaching for History, Archaeology, and the Centre for Latin American Studies and working with museums to further Nahua Material Culture Studies. His is affiliated with the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research and is a member of the Royal Historical Society. His projects are funded by the Jeffrey Rubinoff Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, US Department of Education, Julie and Rocky Dixon Foundation, Oregon Humanities Center. He first pressed “start” on his enthusiasm for Mesoamerican art, Mexican heritage, and video games in the 1980s.
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