Beautiful is an understatement: Tromso from my hotel.

Emil Hammar, the co-editor on the forthcoming 'Videogames and Postcolonialism' special issue being published by the Open Library of Humanities, is probably the northernmost Game Studies PhD scholar in the world. He and his supervisor, Holger Pötzsch, are doing interesting stuff in faraway Tromso. Emil's work on postcolonialism in videogames and recently, on counterplay and the representations of race and diversity in the upcoming titles (such as Kingdom Come!) have already attracted attention. I was also fascinated by Holger's brief introduction to his work on the current digital 'remediated' perceptions of war where war, or iWar as he terms it, is personalised and even customised to preference. My day started with a class taken by Holger, Emil and their colleague, Juliana. Juliana spoke about the remediation in the movie Downfall and how history is reproduced in the remediated filmic medium and then on, even in memes that show Hitler ranting at a whole variety of things that we wish to laugh at. Emil's talk led to an exploration of who and what is the Other(ed) and how normative constructions affect our understanding of life around us.

The northernmost games studies PhD scholar is on his way with flying colours

The assessment procedure was pretty simple and friendly. I got a whole lot of very useful ideas from the discussion with Emil and Holger. I'm hoping that my two penn'orth of thoughts was of some use to them as well. The other highlight (and it was really high) was the cable car ride up to a mountain peak overlooking Tromso and our many slippery trysts with the ice. And then there was a fantastic three-course dinner. I usually reserve my opinions on things culinary for a different space but I can't help commenting on this one since this was a three-course grand affair with wines to match each course. Not something I'll get anywhere outside Europe. I'm sure.

I gave two talks. The first, my usual rant on the need to figure in postcolonial themes into the historiography that videogames engage in, took place in the Peace Centre - with Gandhi ji's statue right outside. As I spoke on how the terribly insensitive treatment of history in the depiction of Gandhi's nuclear rage in Civilization games upsets me, I believe Gandhi ji outside might just have approved. There has been some intense activity on how videogames represent history (but too little too late if you ask me) and that's a good thing. What I don't get is that the historians seem to have a European or North American bias. This is what I addressed in my discussion of subaltern history(ies) in videogames and the way these games can help us look beyond the archives (that are mostly created by those in a position of power and advantage). Some of the questions that I got were quite thought provoking. For example, one of the faculty members spoke about the Sami people and the lack of archives - how the Sami drum is not something that people really know about and how the Sami language had to be reconstructed from scratch in recent times. A student (who is clearly a gamer) asked me why the prevalent historical presentations in videogames are often so inaccurate - he used the example of the much-touted historical accuracy of the WW1 game, Battlefield One. Again, following E.H. Carr's famous description of history as a 'hard kernel of interpretations surrounded by facts' I spoke of history as constructed according to a certain preferred politics. This for me is the politics of Empire as I have discussed at length in Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back.

Gandhi ji outside the Peace Studies Centre where I gave my talk.

The second talk was on a very different topic - Indian boardgames as precursors to gamification. I had given this talk to a packed gallery in the Indian Museum (thanks to the efforts of the wonderful education officer, Sayan Bhattacharya) but I have never written about it. Here was a far smaller audience and certainly one that was unfamiliar with Indian boardgames and some had never even played Snakes and Ladders! The mechanics of the game is, thankfully, very easy to explain  because of how our former colonial masters simplified it from the original Gyan Chaupar. So I was able to move the discussion from the simple race game that was about a straightforward telos to the very complex and almost unending game of rebirth. Quite fulfilling to talk at length about karma and its complicated working through what is considered a children's game. Again, I was asked interesting questions about how during gameplay people start creating narratives of their own and also whether these games are more like simulations than games. One of my biggest takeaways, however, was the translation of the Persian text in one of the Gyan Chaupar boards. Azadeh Isaksen, who originally hails from Iran, was quick to spot almost literal translations of the Hindu terms into Persian in the bilingual Gyan Chaupar board that I showed in my slides. This has set me thinking - why translate it? and is it actually possible to translate the religious ideas?

Persian translations underneath the Sanskrit terms on this Gyan Chaupar board.

The stay in Tromso was all too short - just two days and I was on the plane again. All the way from Oslo to Dubai, I was sitting beside a Croquet player from Norway (there are only forty-five in the country) who was on his way to Cape Town for a Croquet World Championship. It was kind of hard to get through the hoops of the Croquet conversation (literally) and finally, fatigue and sleep took over.

Sami Game Jam

Sami drum

While I was in Tromso learning about Sami culture, my friend Shailesh Prabhu was attending a Sami game jam somewhere in Northern Finland. They have made some fantastic game prototypes representing Sami culture and the subaltern narratives that do not get represented in our majoritarian discourse. Here's the link to some of the games - https://itch.io/jam/sami-game-jam.

I hope I can go back again and learn more about the Sami culture.

I started writing this on my way to Heathrow Airport, having boarded a National Express bus that would take me there in ten hours. Enough time to reflect on and put down my thoughts on this year’s DiGRA. Five days have passed very quickly and while I would have loved to attend so many of those presentations, I had to make do with a far fewer number. What I heard, however, I liked very much. William Huber and his team (also including  Sonia Fizek and Darshana Jayemanne) have done a fabulous job with the organisation and I know that all of them will be looking forward to getting some of that well-earned sleep now. 

I will speak about the highlights of the conference for me. The first day’s workshop on videogames and history was one of them. Incidentally, my own paper  - on the representations of the Raj in videogames - was part of it. I loved Adam Chapman’s keynote talk on the role of history in videogames and vice versa. For those who haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend Adam’s book on the subject. Two other papers that I liked were one on how 80 Days  portrays history and another on the process of inclusivity and diversity in the history that videogames present. I spoke on how the counter-history created in empire games such as Empire: Total War , instead of being a postcolonial reaction, is one that co-opts the very logic of Empire that it claims to challenge. I also pointed out that the postcolonial reactions lay in the subaltern or the unexpressed and suppressed voices. This was a development on my article in Games and Culture (and earlier, a paper presented at Meaningful Play 2014).


Speaking of postcolonialism, I’m not sure what made me do it, but I ended up doing a ‘micro-keynote’  on the need for postcolonial thinking in games. This was to fill the time of the scheduled keynote talk of Lev Manovich (who couldn’t make it because of visa issues, it seems) and I was among many others who did an impromptu talk about their work. There was a vote for the best and it seems some kind people voted for me (Adrienne Shaw was among them) leading to a signal event that made this DiGRA memorable for me. I, who never usually win anything, got a bottle of 12-year old Glenfiddich. As William Huber (I believe) rightly remarked to Richard Bartle, I didn’t have any problems with carting it back home. Because some kindred souls and I finished most of the whisky in the next two hours!

Speaking of events and happy things,  I was very kindly invited to the gala dinner at Guthrie Castle and I came back with blurred but happy memories of Talisker, Dalwhinnie and Macallan (in addition to the abovementioned Glenfidditch). Somewhere, I remember playing Bagh Bakri (the ancient Indian game of tigers and goats) at dinner with the President of Abertay University who proved a very good player (much better than me when I play as the goats). I also got to say a brief hello to Jesper Juul and have a very short chat with William Huber. The bus-ride back to town was entertaining as some of the younger folk were singing the Pokemon song in a variety of accents and someone challenged them to sing the Japanese version.

Two other highlights for me were the panel on mapping and games and William Robinson’s talk on the game he has built to represent the history of Jewish labour in 1920s Montreal. In particular Sybille Lammes’s position paper about the relationship of maps and play and a fantastic paper on how the Metropolitan Police in London used a game to teach their officers how to control riots and how this game itself was based on practices previously not known in mainland Britain but common in the British colonies. As I saw how a mini Gravesend was created within the actual Gravesend as a game-board for the police to play at riot-control, all sorts of questions emerged in my head. Also, when I thought about maps and playing, I couldn’t help remarking about whose maps and who plays them - the surveying tools of colonialism that ostensibly kept the empire under the watchful eyes of its guardians, also were the playthings of Kim in Kipling’s eponymous novel. William’s talk opened up many avenues of thought and also raised many questions. His game is going to be an exhibit in Montreal’s Jewish Museum. I’m looking forward to hearing more from him. 

Of all the keynotes I’ve heard, I always enjoy Richard Bartle’s and it was the same this time. I didn’t expect such a lucid and thought-provoking parallel between theology and game design. Richard’s talk also created an excellent pathway for our panel on religion and games, led by the young and enthusiastic Lars de Wildt. I particularly liked Frank Bosman’s attempt to categorise the religious experience in games and Lars’s work featuring comments from players re: religion. To the latter, I thought of recommending my little post on player’s responses to the Govinda! experience in Grand Theft Auto   but I guess I was too carried away thinking about my own paper on karma and gyan chaupar. As a very initial draft of a longer work that I plan to present at a conference in the U.S., I was happy with the responses. The usual question about the statistical possibilities of snakes and ladders was asked and I explained that gyan chaupar with its possibilities of a zero progression move and of overshooting the final point was somewhat  different from snakes and ladders. And what people don’t seem to get is that the purpose of playing it wasn’t to finish a race - it was to be playing it again and again to figure out the meaning of life and karma. Chris Bateman highlighted all the key points that I made in his tweets, so I know that at least some people ‘got’ what I was saying. I am grateful to the people who attended my talk and gave me feedback. Thank you.



On the last day of the conference, I had to  visit the Howff Cemetery and once again, I met up with Tomasz Majkowski and his group. We had an extremely interesting cemetery visit and a long chat on narratives in games. I also got learn about a Polish theatre-director who uses digital media - must look him up. By the by, I am a keynote speaker at the Literary Theory and Games conference in Kracow this year and I so look forward to meeting this fantastic bunch of researchers again. Soon, we ended up at the conference venue and the keynote session was on the British games scene. I was impressed that the Brit game designers get tax breaks from the government and overall, the UKIE’s efforts in bringing the industry together has a lot of similarities with NASSCOM’s efforts in India. I’m surprised though that the UKIE hasn't focused much on ties with the Indian gaming industry. The DiGRA discussion that followed announced next year’s event in Melbourne (the Aussie’s won’t have to talk about jet lag and we get to meet Brendan Keogh, yay!) by the inimitable Marcus Carter and Dan Golding. Everyone joined in their thanks to William Huber and his team for making the first DiGRA-FDG a success. Some other notable presentations for me were Mathias Fuchs on the ruin-desire in games, Sonia Fizek on playbour, Gerald Farca on Wolfgang Iser and games and Rene Glas on paratextuality.

After the event, I had an excellent chat with peeps on plans for a diversity in games workshop in next year’s DiGRA. I've written a little note of dissonance on post-colonialism and diversity but you can always skip on past it to the end, where I talk of rainbows. We also chatted on whether we need to actually play the games we are writing about or whether watching Let’s Plays is enough. This connects to what I have written earlier in my chapter on paratexts (in my book) and there is much scope to extend my previous research from the discussion we had. Another blog post from me on this, perhaps. I also had a brief chat with Sian Beavers (do watch out for her work) on her empirical studies of player-experiences with the history games. And wonder of wonders, I found out that one can get Irn-Bru ice-cream and deep fried Mars bars together in this cafe we were at. Interesting culinary experience for the adventurous. If you don’t know what either of this is, I don’t blame you. A visit to wikipedia is recommended. 

Soon it was time to leave the city with its ancient and grim buildings and its very bright Oor Wullie (a local comic strip character) statues. I had arrived to the welcome of a full rainbow and my gracious host, Theresa Lynn (whose hospitality and local knowledge is ever admirable), commented that Dundee was indeed nice to me as it bid goodbye with yet another rainbow.

The rest of the journey is a tired blur. I am back in Calcutta now, preparing for other journeys.

There's a Calcutta Lane in Dundee!

Gyan Chaupar board in the National Museum, New Delhi

Imagine being told that whatever happens in your life is the result of a game that you have been playing. This is not the plot of a Hollywood thriller but rather the now much-neglected wisdom of ancient India. As you try to contain your incredulity, what if I tell you that this is no rare artefact that has been unearthed by archaeologists but that you probably even have it at home as you read this.  The game being referred to here is Snakes and Ladders, commonly translated as ‘Shap Ludo’ or Snake-Ludo in Bengali. Unknown to many of us, Snakes and Ladders is not a game that Indians learnt from the West; in fact, it is quite the other way round. Known variously as Gyan Chaupar, Gyan Bazi or Moksha Pat, the game with snakes and stairs (rather than ladders) was popular all over ancient India and even survives in various forms in Nepal and Tibet. Exported into England first in 1892, this complex and intricate game of moral teaching ended up as a childishly simple racing game that removed the element of learning and introduced competition. More research into this game revealed articles by a handful of scholars from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia and references to game-boards scattered across the world, only a few of them in different parts of India. Even Reverend Lal Behari De’s 1851 article on Bengali games and pastimes had nothing to say about games such as Gyan Chaupar. Strangely though, there is now much more hope for the revival of this ancient Indian tradition of play than one could ever expect and the story begins with an industrialist in Calcutta who quite accidentally stumbled upon this lost gem and since then, has been working non-stop to bring back Gyan Chaupar to our homes and our minds. 

Aman Gopal Sureka, one of the city’s information technology entrepreneurs, came upon Gyan Chaupar while looking for interesting Diwali gifts for his clients. In the process, he fell in love with the game and this has taken him around the world in his quest for Gyan Chaupar. 

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