Game Studies India Adda to DiGRA India
Suniti Chattopadhyay, in his 1913 article ‘Hostel Life in Calcutta’, describes adda as 'a social activity or a space for a carefree talk with boon companions'. In Games Studies, because of the nature of the area, things are much more flexible and easygoing than in most other academic circles. Bringing Games Studies to India has always been my dream. Or at any rate, it has been for the past twenty years. What better mode of bringing Game Studies scholars in India together than an adda. A carefree chat about games without the fear of being shushed. And in a country that has one of the largest and most diverse gaming populations yet is not on the games research and development radar, it was necessary to get the conversation going. Especially when there are so many who have such fantastic ideas about games and gamers. In 2019, when I organised the GamesLit conference in Kolkata (arguably the first international Games Studies conference in India), the high quality of the papers from India impressed not just me but also my colleagues from abroad. It was Espen Aarseth who asked me why I was not setting up something whereby we could have a games research community in India. The thought remained with me and during the pandemic, I decided to take the plunge by roping in some talented young researchers who I thought would be able to carry on the discussion, giving it a local flavour (through the adda mode) while also participating in the international network.
Today, after ten months of our existence as Games Studies India, we have been recognised as a chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). We are now DiGRA India. It is a dream come true for me that after two decades, digital games studies now has a platform for debate and discussion in India. DiGRA India, in its earlier avatar, Games Studies India Adda, has featured talks by eminent scholars and industry experts from both India and abroad. These can be accessed on our YouTube channel, here. As DiGRA India starts functioning we hope that we can connect the research on India's gaming culture to the rest of the world.
Check out DiGRA India on our website: https://digraindia.com/
Chess and Death
Covid-19 has left its indelible dark mark over my family. My dad-in-law, Gautam Sen, passed away recently felled by that dread disease. He was a polymath - a chartered accountant, a traveller and someone with a deep interest in history. As his daughter says, he has now gone to visit 'the unknown country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. For me, he will remain the embodiment of the ludic, a chess-player par excellence and an enthusiast in the digital. He was forever battling Fritz and other computer programs often beating them or drawing the game. I had tried to introduce him to strategy games - Napoleon: Total War, specifically, because of his interest in Bonaparte. That didn't quite work out but Chess remained a lifelong passion with him. He had been instrumental in bringing the Soviet grandmaster and former World Champion, Vasili Smyslov, to Calcutta and gave up a potential chess-playing career for family necessities. Every now and then, I would see him sitting in his office and watching chess matches on YouTube. A chess enthusiast myself, I have never had the patience to watch chess games but he would analyse them with much care and consideration.
I will not have those conversations about chess again when I am at home and I doubt anyone else here will beat Fritz 7; not me, certainly. The shelves are, however, filled with books on Chess. Yes, these remain. Memories.
------
(This is a personal post and although I refrain from posting about anything other than my research, Covid-19 and the damage it did to my family is certainly an exceptional scenario; hence this post.)
Speaking on Board Games for the Indian Museum's Stories of World Cultures series
Here's me presenting on boardgames in episode number 29.
The Looting of the Ganj i Sawai and Uncharted 4
![]() |
Nathan Drake discovers the treasures of the Great Moghul in Uncharted 4 |
Games and Literary Theory Conference, Kolkata November 2019
![]() | |
The GamesLit 2019 team: GamesLit pioneers
|
![]() |
Keynote Diane Carr responding to a question from Prof Sumit Chakrabarti |
![]() |
Anirban Ray on games from ancient Egypt |
![]() |
Game scholars from the world over. (From left): Tomasz Majkowski, Me, Yue-Jin Ho, Pavel Grabarcyk, Olli Leino, Poonam Chowdhury, Espen Aarseth, Samuel Heine. |
My Arctic Adventure - Tromsø 2018
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.
![]() |
The LEGO house in Tromso |
![]() |
Mural from the more Leftist days |
![]() |
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.
Visiting Kyrat!
Like the Maoist struggle in Nepal of not-so-long ago, Kyrat is experiencing civil strife. The government is under the dictator, Pagan Min - strangely, the name is the same as that of the Burmese emperor whom the British hounded out of Burma after committing gross acts of aggression in the Second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852. The key architect of that war was Lord Dalhousie, governor-general of India and arguably, also responsible in part for the events of 1857 in India. Now why the villain of Far Cry 4 should have the same name as a Burmese king who opposed British colonialism is something that eludes me. There is an obvious inference that one can make though: the powers that defy the European rules of the game, are to be cast as villains and the name Pagan also, of course, has distinct non-Christian echoes. In the game, Min has seized power after the fall of the country's royal dynasty and now styles himself the king of Kyrat.
The player will most likely join the Golden Path (there is a possibility of choosing otherwise but of that later), which is the armed resistance to Min's government and was founded by his father Mohan Ghale. The two leaders of the Golden Path have sharply contrasting world-views. Sabal, the traditionalist is described by the Far Cry Wiki thus:
He sees great value in his heritage, race, culture, history and legacy and believes that Kyrat needs the stability of traditions to bring peace to its people. Sabal often seeks moral guidance from the religious texts and teachings of Kyra. He is also smart enough to know how to use religion as a political tool. These views are in direct conflict with Amita's world view.
With tensions rising between the two leaders, Amita is now head to head with Sabal over the installation of Bhadra as the next Tarun Matara. Amita sees the practice as superstitious, old, and ultimately sexist, objectifying young women and robbing them of autonomy, a good education, and social life. She believes that intellectual, social, and financial progress is the only way to ensure a stable future for Kyrat.
The Tarun Matara, in the game, is the daughter of the God Banashur who is embodied in a living child selected by the community for this purpose. Those unfamiliar with local traditions will fail to see the clear similarity to the Kumari in Kathmandu, Nepal, who is still worshipped as a living goddess. The Kumari puja is a longstanding tradition among Hindu communities across the Indian subcontinent and it is popular among all sections of society. Indeed, the abolition of the tradition as a way of upholding women's rights might be considered problematic even in South Asian Feminist discourses. For example, here is an alternative point of view:
Chanira Bajracharya, a 19-year-old Nepalese student, was a Kumari of Patan, a city within Kathmandu Valley. Fulfilling the role from age five to 15, she says she still looks up to the goddess: "I feel I'm blessed and a lot of my success comes from those blessings." She says the tradition encourages respect for women in a male-dominated society. (for the full article, click here).
Anyone who knows the history of Nepal would recognise in Pagan Min's usurpation of power a reference to the end of the Nepali Royal Family (the Shah dynasty) that ruled the country for centuries until in the previous decade, the Crown Prince gunned down his entire family and the country ended up facing civil war involving Maoist rebels and government forces in the years after. This also effectively closed the country to tourists for a long time. A BBC report from 2003 states "While the Maoists are not targeting tourists, the war has started directly hitting the tourism sector - Nepal's most important industry." Ajay is also shown as entering Kyrat at a time when tourism has all but closed down. While reflecting the recent history of the region, the Kyrati civil strife also helps the designers to set the context for the adventures in the gameplay of Far Cry 4.
The parallel history that Ubisoft constructs is intriguing on many other counts. There is a conscious attempt at thinking through the history of South Asian nations and Kyrat is a composite of the cultures of Nepal, India, Burma and even parts of China. As mentioned earlier, the developers, however, managed to completely ignore the fact that the Nepali people have their own language, which is somewhat different from Hindi, the language spoken in Far Cry 4 . Hindi is spoken in large sections of Northern India and is also the popular language of Bollywood - no wonder the Nepali fans of the videogame were left dismayed at the developers' decision to make the Kyrati population speak Hindi in a setting that largely resemble Nepal. Maybe Bollywood has to be the stereotype for all things South Asian. There are other stereotypes too - all the villains in the story are foreigners. Pagan Min is Chinese and so is his chief general and adopted sister, Yuma Lau. His other governors, Noore and Paul Harmon "de Pleur"are both foreigners and they are both people who came to Kyrat either as tourists or as human rights workers. There is also a corrupt CIA agent and a couple of hippie drug-dealers. Ajay Ghale himself seems to be an American citizen but besides him, Kyrat does not seem to have any outside influence on its political climate. The UN, the USA and even the nearby powers such as India and China seem happy to leave it alone. Finally, the outlook on the country's and indeed, the region's history is bleak. If the player supports Sabal and let's him take over the government, a series of pogroms against the other faction begins and the country goes back to its orthodox religion that deprives women of their rights. If the player hands over the government to Amita, eventually Kyrat becomes a drug-producing state, where all the energies of its population go into cultivation narcotics and in building an army. Just as Far Cry 2 sees no happy ending for the nameless African country it is set in, Far Cry 4 too has the same fate in store for Kyrat. Another formerly-colonised country doomed to a continuing state of confusion and suffering. Clearly, the people aren't capable of looking after themselves after the European colonial powers leave. Once again, the game characteristically attempts to present plurality and complexity but ends up with extremely predictable stereotypes that seem to hint that things were better off under colonial rule. Resistance either creates villains like Pagan Min (as his real-life Burmese namesake might have seemed to the British East India Company) or confused bigots and ideologues such as Sabal and Amita, all of whom lead the country to destruction.
The crab-rangoons, for me, are quite important because they symbolise how the local culture is treated in the game. Just like the dish is a mix of many Asian cuisines and at the same time, a very North American fabrication, Kyrat in Far Cry 4 is kind of similar. With its hotch-potch of South Asian and Western influences, the game seems to struggle with representing an unfamiliar (to the West) and exotic part of the Orient and to end up with a very Western notion of the place. Kyrat itself is like a crab rangoon - a Western impression of a mix of South Asian cultures. Although most would like their money's worth and play out the game battling Min's forces, the hidden message is that whatever heroics Ghale performs, Kyrat is doomed anyway and perhaps the best way is to let Min continue his rule and keep supplying the West with heroin and slaves. Eating the crab rangoons and opting for the status quo would mean not rocking the boat at all - it would also mean accepting a very Orientalist (in the sense Edward Said uses the term) notion of South Asia, where the next best thing to colonialism is the perpetuation of colonial codes within the so-called postcolonial nation-states. As for me, I do not like crab-rangoons much so I naturally ended up upsetting the apple cart (or the plate of crab-rangoons, as it were). Then again, I guess there are a lot of people who'd prefer the crab-rangoons. Who knows!
Another book. More on Postcolonialism.
Videogames and Post-colonialism: Empire Plays Back
This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism.
Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience – including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.