Calling All Digital Conquistadors: Mobilizing the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica at Home and in the Classroom

In 2021, Amazon Game Studios released the New World (a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) a purposeful production timed to cash in on the quincentennial of the European-led invasion of mainland Mesoamerica (i.e. the “New World”) circa 1519-21. Set within an immersive, history-adjacent Atlantic continent called Aeternum, New World offered up hordes of indigenous undead and anthropomorphic beasts, loot-laden ruins, and exploitable flora and fauna. Players jumped into factions, competed for territorial dominance against other players, and exploited the landscape while avoiding its demonic, corrupting effects. Becoming too Indigenous meant becoming corrupt in Amazon’s New World. This gaming trope seems to ignore (or purposefully highlight) settler-colonial logics. The purpose of this paper is to further the study of Conquest-akin gaming experiences, gamer-purchaser awareness, and design studio visions all to help reconcile this branch of playable ethnohistory. I reveal some of the weaponized narratives that game designers and communities have employed since 1982’s Aztec. This includes popular history-themed strategy games (i.e. the Ages of Empires I – III) and recent culturally-responsive productions (i.e. Yaopan, 2021). I note games informed by primary sources, ethnography, and archaeology and explain some of their meaningful learning outcomes. I also examine the entanglements of industry ethics, design studio compromises, and player demands, showing some of the ways that in-game and online communities mobilize legions of Digital-Age conquistadors. These include targeted play testing, chatroom discourse cultivation, and software patching cycles, which combine to help manufacture a pastiche of the past that recreates settler-colonialism virtually. In fact, by tracking design studio mapping and player migration vectors I expose unnerving similarities to Iberian correspondence and legal decrees of the sixteenth century. I press for continued critical engagement with game studios and gamers, finding gamified classrooms to be productive grounds for studying contingency, complexity, and multiperspectivity.