Another Christmas Day gone by. Am getting used to spending Christmas by myself. It seems easier than it used to be. Took the day off from reading what I've written and instead, in a very Christmassy gaming mood , installed Fallout 3 on my pc. The graphics are absolutely brilliant and the plot (which I have read about almost everywhere) is already quite interesting. I was looking forward to checking out Liam Neeson's voice acting in the game: not sure whether it was him I heard in the very first scene. My only gripe so far is the Microsoft Live system and the fact that the installer was claiming that I had no sound card installed (what a lie - ask my neighbours about my soundcard).

I bought the game in London, last month - an early Christmas present. I simply had to buy it: the price had gone down, my pocket had two crisp notes freshly obtained from a cash machine and someone had told me that Fallout 3 would not be available in India. All three seemed perfectly valid reasons to buy it and buy it, I did. The third reason, however, is the subject of my posting. Microsoft has decided not to market the game in India. Apparently, it contains a mutant animal ( a two-headed cow) called Brahma: enough reason, thinks Microsoft, to enrage the Brahmans or the Hindu priestly caste. The 'cultural sensitivities' bar, however, reveals its typical Western cultural ignorance. Brahmini bulls are actually a species of cattle and no one seems to object to their being named thus (the cow and the bull are holy animals for Hindus). Secondly, Brahma is the name of the God of Creation; perhaps, that link could be cause for umbrage. it might, however, be noted that Brahma himself is said to have four heads (as do some other Hindu gods) and that Hindu gods often take the shape of animals. Finally, whoever told Microsoft that Brahmins are not gamers. Surely, no one even remembered to ask yours truly (after all being born a Brahmin, I have some claim to the title, however small). Anyway, I could go on and on and maybe even write an essay on this; suffice it to say that I'm not quite in agreement with the Microsoft Gamer's Guide to Hinduism. A deeper reading than this might even expose the layer of orientalism at work here.

Thank God (the Hindu trinity, perhaps) that I'm in the UK and MS doesn't consider me Hindu enough. Don't like to imagine being Id'd at the GAME till and not being sold Fallout because it would offend my cultural sentiments. Well, the game is on my pc and my profile has been created. You will hear more of my adventures in Fallout very soon, religion (or the lack of it) notwithstanding.

The other reason why I'll be plugged into the game is because I suddenly have a little more time
on my hands. My contract with my employers has run out and I am jobless again. I'll sorely miss the hours spent in training and troubleshooting and I'll miss my friends at work. I don't have a clue as to how I'm going to fill in this 'vacuum' in my quotidian activities. My former colleagues obviously know me more than I do myself: they have given me a voucher from GAME as a farewell present. Looks like its more games again, as the year turns the corner and disappears.

'And now another cup of the generous! and a merry New Year, and many of them, to you all, my masters!'

I gave a lecture called 'The Many Faces of Solid Snake' for some postgrads in NTU. In it I focused on the problems that videogames experience as global media and how, arguably, they even exhibit this in a more accentuated manner than earlier media. I spoke of the global nature of videogames being describable as 'rhizomatic' in the Deleuzoguattarian sense. The global, however, is not 'smooth' in the case of videogames. Koichi Iwabuchi's concept of 'cultural odorlessness' of Japanese games describes the problem well: non-Japanese perceptions of Pokemon as a 'cool' Japanese product may actually differ from the perceptions in Japan itself thus complicating the global network into something beyond a simple series of universal linkages. I'm probably ending up simplifying this too much. Anyway, i enjoyed the lecture and the research into what was a comparatively little-trodden area for me.

Every night, I check the feeds on gaming-related blogs all over the world. That done, I then read the news. I am doing the same tonight; just like last Wednesday. Only I couldn't sleep last Wednesday and haven't been able to sleep much since. I do not want to describe what happened that night in Bombay ... I cannot describe shock and I do not have words to express the continuous anguish that I have felt since.

For those of you who don't know it, Bombay is a bright, vibrant and friendly city. It rarely sleeps and almost always puts up a merry smile despite the trials and tribulations that mark my entire country. I loved it second to my beloved home city Calcutta. For me, it even has a videogame connection: I storyboarded my first games there.

Last week's events had left me asking myself a question i did not know how to frame. Yesterday, at a lecture I gave in my university, a student exclaimed, 'but videogames make you violent'. At other times, I would have parried this with clever repartee or shielded myself with the Byron report. Yesterday, however, that dull persistent feeling of shock made me ask a question in return. How about religion, then? How about fanaticism, frustration and hatred? Videogames can be blamed easily; violent videogames can be censored and banned. Religion cannot - at least, in democratic and civilised nations. Perhaps, we need to look somewhere else for the root of our aggression - into ourselves, first and foremost.

As usual, I am doing my rounds of the gaming blogs tonight. Mine will probably be the only one to say anything about this. Then again, I guess you have to be in the game to know its bosses. In this case, i hope you never are.

Following my friend Andrew Armstrong's blog I came upon the glorious house of Jimius. They say Rome wasn't built in a day. I say there was never one Rome and never one day. Check out the exploits of the Romans under the Jimean dynasty. http://houseofjimius.wordpress.com/.

Alternate history using Rome: Total War. Simply amazing. Ave.

Mosale Seto, 24th November, 2008: I am in this almost unknown African country, beset with a malarial epidemic and civil war and it seems I've got a long stay ahead. Came to kill the arms-dealer called 'The Jackal' but on the two occasions when i met him, I was either sick or half-dead and surprise of surprises, he actually saved my life and disappeared into nowhere. Who is this man? What does he want? I know for sure that I'm getting embroiled in the conflict of the APR and the UFLL because of the Jackal's war-mongering and arms-dealing. I started my hunt for the Jackal with the UFLL; 'Doctor' Leon Gakumba seemed a reasonable man, a politician with a vision ... I thought he would lead me to the Jackal and his country to a great future. While I was taking out his enemies, Gakumba betrayed me - God has truly forsaken these people. I killed Gakumba while he was lecturing his men. A Dragunov shot from a hilltop: I saw the bullet burst his skull. I am a hunted man now and only Nick Greaves and his APR masters can save me. I am doing missions for them and they pay me with diamonds. I am a shadow that all the men here are afraid of. They think I am an army but I am just Souvik ... sorry, or is it Warren.

Everybody is afraid but not that one man- him whom I am to kill. Because of whose machinations, my life is at stake every minute. Yet, twice he saved me. My saviour , my killer: this strange Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness ... shall I press the trigger (left mouse button) when I see him in my telescopic sights (right mouse zoom in) ... shall I kill him, or shall I stop because my sniperscope is now a mirror?

............................................

More episodes of my experience with Far Cry 2 will follow.

This year's LINK conference for PhD students from Leicester, Loughborough and NTU was held at NTU, last Wednesday. As already mentioned on Ludus Ex, I presented a paper on identity in videogames. The paper addressed identity as what games criticism commonly views it as a simple and direct process of 'being a character', based on a rather simplified reading of the FPS, which is for some reason taken as the representative of all videogames. Through a close reading of the STALKER games, my paper tried to illustrate how even in the FPS, identity was a complex entity and how even the first-person or the 'I' that is assumed by the player is constantly undercut by many not-I's or not-not-I's that the game highlights, in the various aspects of the gameplay. In this paper, I am still playing with some ideas that I had after a long chat with Mark Butler on a Berlin train. The audience was entirely literary and I thought the most obvious example of this from earlier media that occurred to me would be quickly picked up by them. So it was: I spoke of the doppelganger in Wilfred Owen's poem 'Strange Meeting' and compared it to the 'egoshooting' in the FPS. Owen's protagonist speaks through the 'enemy you killed, my friend'. The main purpose of the paper, however, was to illustrate to a non-gaming literary audience how videogames do further complicate the nature of textuality and how they need to be read as doing such, rather than being seen as a medium that differs in essence from earlier media in providing an entirely 'new' form of participation. The paper and the slideshow are going to be uploaded to my website soon. It is always a challenging experience to present a videogaming paper to a non-gaming audience and this time was no easier. I was extremely happy with the range of the questions though. Besides the obvious Manhunt and violence issues, there were observations about how people felt like Lara Croft in real life, on whether videogames illustrate the Barthesian 'death of the author' or on whether the subversive music in GTA IV complicate perceptions of identity.

Besides a panel discussion on teaching after/ during a PhD, there were three other very interesting papers. One of these was a study of the cleft-palate (commonly called 'hare-lip') and the development of perceptions about it in Early Modern literature and another was a study of memory in the poems of the Victorian poetess, Augusta Webster. My personal favourite was 'The Re-read Tent', a gender studies analysis of Anita Diamant's novel The Red Tent, which the speaker analysed as an alternative reading of the Bible where the patriarchal bias was highlighted and overturned. The women's tent and the concept of the daughter regarding all the women there as her 'many mothers' seemed to remind me of the Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic rhizomatic structure. Oops ... didn't I promise not to bring them in, this time...

My paper's called 'First-Person Shooting: Identity and I-Problems in Videogames'. Self evident - isn't it?

Yet another excuse to talk to academics about STALKER.

Lorenzo, the computer on which i wrote my PhD is now with its new owner (in faraway India). Can't say that I'm not struggling not to think about it. Lorenzo's replacement is here now: Lorenzo 2 is an Asus eee pc. Virtually no gaming but should be very useful for research.

plus, it gives me a good reason to experiment with Linux. Open-source all the way.