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.
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(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
So here's me presenting on boardgames and culture in the Indian Museum's Stories of World Cultures series. The series was started after the Museum had to be closed due to the Covid-19 crisis and still going strong, it has been a fantastic inspiration for many.
Here's me presenting on boardgames in episode number 29.
Here's me presenting on boardgames in episode number 29.
The Looting of the Ganj i Sawai and Uncharted 4
Returning to Ludus Ex and gaming after a long absence, I have many stories to tell. Of the Covid-19 pandemic and being locked down for two months, of my continual travails of being (a most unwilling) departmental head and of the super-cyclone that almost wrecked our house, there is too much to be said. Some of it is too personal to be recounted in a blog. So of that the less said the better. And I am also fed up with writing academic prose; ergo, here’s an essay in Dr Johnson’s manner, a ‘loose sally of the mind’. I’m going to write about Uncharted 4and my first brush with Nathan Drake. Uncharted 4, the last in the series, is a PlayStation game and PC gamers might not know much about it. In fact, in my nineteen years of reading Game Studies, this is the first time I got to play an Uncharted game.
The game is a monorail-narrative experience; one that takes the player on a treasure-hunt. Nothing original in the idea and the gameplay mechanics are borderline-sadistic, punishing the player with constant button-mashing as one grabs rock-ledges, swings from branches and shoots baddies with no respite. The promise of success is the famous treasure looted by the pirate Henry Avery and stored in the fabled city, Libertalia (modelled on the legendary pirate-colony, Libertatia, founded by Captain Henri Mission). While I was intrigued by the concept of a pirate colony, what interested me most was the source of the treasure and also what I view as distinct colonial overtones in the storyline.
In 1695, at the zenith of the Mughal Empire, a self-styled pirate captain, Henry Every (also known as Jack Avery and Benjamin Bridgeman), looted a heavily-armed Mughal ship returning to India with Hajj pilgrims and considerable riches. The ship was called the Ganj i Sawai and was escorted by another ship, the Fateh Mohammed. Both were attacked by a pirate fleet and looted; Avery’s men would go on to rape the many women in the ship, both old and young, some of whom committed suicide by jumping into the sea. The Mughal emperor, Aurungzeb, was furious and demanded reparations worth 325,000 pounds (some recordssay that he demanded double the amount) and swiftly showed his wrath by imprisoning the British East India Company officials in Surat. The EIC, too, was alarmed and launched a worldwide manhunt for Jack Avery, the first of its kind. Avery remained at large and his fortunes are not known although the game shows that he died in a swordfight with the Rhode Island pirate Thomas Tew, as both killed each other over the treasure.
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| Nathan Drake discovers the treasures of the Great Moghul in Uncharted 4 |
What intrigues me, however, is the game writers’ choice of the Ganj i Sawai narrative. The whole incident is referred to as the ‘Gunsway Heist’, of course – the Indian / Persio-Arabic name is never mentioned. In the game, Henry Avery is a character almost to be admired and is (wrongly) described as the chief founder of Libertalia. With an unmistakable Western bias, Avery the bloodthirsty pirate is to be glorified as a ‘prince of thieves’ and a champion of liberty. One of the protagonists actually believes that he brings freedom to the oppressed and if it is at the cost of Eastern wealth, then that is because he had no choice. The Orient is a place to be robbed and the proceeds, of course, go towards rescuing the poor and disenfranchised – I meant Europeans, of course. I was asked at a recent interview whether I was not overstating the colonial bias of games; after all, the whole idea of the hero is someone who performs deeds that rescue those in distress. Nathan Drake faces dire adversity in order to rescue his brother (in fact, the penultimate chapter is called ‘Brother’s Keeper’) and B.J. Blazkowicz or the nameless space-marine do the same to save the world. The world, however, is mainly America and Europe. Naturally, the writers of Uncharted 4, see no need for even a passing comment on what happened on the Ganj i Sawai. Avery’s career as a slave-trader is also glossed over. This is in no way surprising as after his dastardly deeds, Avery was celebrated at home as a hero. According to Ursula Sims-Williams,
Meanwhile Avery became a household name in 18th and 19th century Britain, synonymous with the spirit of adventure and life at sea. Numerous fictional and semi-biographical accounts of his life were published: The Ballad of Long Ben and The King of Pirates by Daniel Defoe, to mention just a few. In the earliest, The life and adventures of Capt. John Avery written by a pseudonymous Adrian van Broeck and published in 1709 (see below), Captain Avery seized not only Ganj-i Sawai’s treasure but the Emperor Aurangzeb’s granddaughter who happened to be on board. They married and sailed away to Madagascar where they lived happily (almost) ever after. (Sims-Williams 2013)
He also features in Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (written in 1921) and I remember having adored the famous pirate after reading of him in my English reader (primer) as an eight-year old child, much later of course. Avery was one of the main influences (together with Captain Kidd and Blackbeard) behind tales such as Treasure Islandand the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean. Mughal (and other oriental) treasure has been the key driver for many other nineteenth-century narratives such as Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (the Great Agra treasure) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (a diamond brought back from India after the defeat of Tipu Sultan).
The story of the Ganj i Sawai is not told in Uncharted 4 because it goes against the centuries-old notion of the ‘orient’ as the othered locale that is to be stripped of its wealth. In a sense, the East India Company, although assiduous in its efforts to rid the seas of freebooters, is itself invested with the same idea of exploitation and conquest. The lone operators such as Avery needed to go (as did the privateers who messed up the Company account-books) so as to make room for the larger project of colonialism. One does not know what happened to Avery. Despite the professedly huge manhunt, he was never found. Instead, he remained at large and loomed large as the worthy inspiration for the grand project of European colonization of the East. Even in what is arguably the newest narrative media, the legend of Jack Avery’s Great Gunsway Heist is to be celebrated by gamers the world over.
What remains untold is the Indian side of the story. Contemporary Muslim historian Khafi Khan writes in his Muntakhab al-lubāb how brutal the attack by Avery was and how it was not an isolated incident:
The source of the remaining unstable income of the English is the plunder and capture of the ships going to the House of God. At intervals of one or two years, they attack these ships, not at the time when, loaded with grains, they proceed to Mukhkhah and Jeddah, but when they return, bringing gold, silver, Ibrāhīmis and riyāls.
Avery’s attack created a major diplomatic incident and almost cost the EIC its right to trade in India. History, however, has turned out differently and I was able to celebrate the finding of the Great Gunsway Treasure with Nathan Drake. It could have been Lara Croft or Indiana Jones for all I care.
Games and Literary Theory Conference, Kolkata November 2019
It was a dream come true for me when the leading games scholars from all over the world came to my city, Kolkata, to discuss games and literary theory. The topic, too, was dear to me: videogames at the margin. Here's the CfP and the Conference Programme:
Call for Papers
Videogames have grown into a global socio-cultural phenomenon and are now a primary concern of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as the Social Sciences. In a medium that sweeps across geographies (including virtual ones), however, the discourse usually privileges a certain section when it comes to the representation of identity. In a medium, where roleplaying and playing in character is of prime importance, such an ignoring of the marginal and the diverse is indeed problematic.
In one of the first books on the subject, Adrienne Shaw says ‘Teaching classes on minority representation in games, I heard this refrain repeated yet again by my students. Video games are a niche medium; they are fantasy environments; and they are designed for a narrow market. Of course games are not diverse—so what? […] I realized that I recognized myself in my participants’ responses. After all, I too grew up playing a medium for which I was not the primary market and media in which only certain aspects of my identity were ever shown’ (Shaw 2015). Shaw’s concern is an urgent one and recent events related to racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination in the videogame industry and in the content of the games, highlights the importance of academic dialogues around gaming ‘at the margins’, as it were.
These concerns, of course, echo much older debates on diversity and difference in Literary and Cultural Studies. Identity and indeed, even the body, are constructs in the Foucauldian framework of biopower and beyond the actual control of individuals. Thinkers such as Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and bell hooks point out how the the body is marginalised based on gender, race and class. Similarly, the constructedness of the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Oriental’ in colonial discourse as shown by Edward Said and also how the colonial system also renders certain groups of people ‘subaltern’ and how this affects the discourse of diversity as Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak and Homi Bhabha make evident. Often, the discourse of diversity and the margins pervades games as well although the connection is not often made evident in the older and more traditional disciplines.
Recent games scholarship has started addressing issues of diversity in games through the new Diversity Group that is now part of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), books on gender, race and colonialism (Shaw 2015; Murray 2018; Mukherjee 2017) as well as edited journal issues and panel discussions. As crucial to discussions of both games and literary theory, these issues form the main theme of this year’s Games and Literary Theory Conference, being held in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India.
Conference Programme | |
The GamesLit 2019 team: GamesLit pioneers
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| Keynote Diane Carr responding to a question from Prof Sumit Chakrabarti |
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| Anirban Ray on games from ancient Egypt |
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| 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
I was in Tromsø , Norway for just two days and the shift back to 25 degrees centigrade from a good -10 is still quite something to adjust to. Short as the visit was, it was one to remember. It is not often that one from the so-called Global South ventures this far north to examine a PhD proposal. Again, a PhD topic that relates so deeply to the issues raised in the South-South interactions - namely, the postcolonial, the subaltern, the Othered et al.
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| 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 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.
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| 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.
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| The LEGO house in Tromso |
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| Mural from the more Leftist days |
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.
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?
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.
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.
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| 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?
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| 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.
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| Sami Game Jam |
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| 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!
In the past five years, I have travelled to many places. Each time, however, when there was a conference to attend, sightseeing and doing my own thing was limited to a rushed half-day after or before the conference. This time I decided to travel for the sake of travelling. A vacation, nonetheless. As the plane crossed over from India into Nepal and I saw the high Himalayas in the distance, I knew I had been here before. Not deja vu this. This was Kyrat - the little mountain-country that is the locale of Ubisoft's videogame, Far Cry 4. Later, in the course of my journey I would spot many similarities between the sites of Nepal and Kyrat - the chorten or small stupas that are scattered in the landscape, the winding Himalayan roads, the muted Buddhist chants, the little villages so characteristic of a third-world country and finally, even the ultralights that fly rich tourists towards vistas of the high mountain peaks all make their appearance in the Kyrat of Far Cry 4. The name Kyrat, I was soon to realise, is no figment of the Ubisoft story writers' imaginative powers.
In Sanskrit, Kyrat means 'crown' and Nepal and its neighbouring Indian state of Sikkim both have links to the historical and mythical Kyrat. Situated at the 'top of the world' in the high Himalayas, this claim to crowning glory comes as no surprise. In the 6th Century Sanskrit text, Kiratarjuna, the Pandav hero Arjun shoots a boar and then discovers that a Kirata man has also shot the animal. In the contest that ensues, Arjun is nonplussed at being unable to defeat the man and the tale ends with him discovering that the Kirata is none other than the God Shiva in disguise. The Kirateshwar temple in West Sikkim is said to mark the spot of their encounter. Arguably the same as the Kirata of the Indian epic, the Kirati people today comprise multiple tribes - the Limbu, Kaccha, Sonwar and others. Ubisoft's Far Cry 4 has combined all of them into one people living in a country that resembles Nepal in more ways than one.
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.
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.
Pagan Min in Far Cry 4 shares his name with a former king of Myanmar
Gamers in Nepal responded quite positively on the whole to the game's setting but complained that the Kyrati people speak Hindi instead of Nepali, which is a different language altogether. The Kyrati people are shown as following one religion, quite comfortably avoiding the multi-religious complexity of the region, where Hinduism and Buddhism co-exist. The people worship the god Banashur and his daughter, Tarun Matara, who is worshipped as a living goddess. As Ajay Ghale, the non-resident Kyrati who returns to Kyrat from the USA after his mother's death, the player-protagonist has a lot to take in. Not least among them is how the game's developers have introduced various complexities and hinted at a plural culture, only to end up perpetuating the set of oriental stereotypes that belie the initial potential of the game.
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:
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.
Amita has a different agenda:
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.
Ajay can let either of these two agendas prevail when he liberates Kyrat. There is also the more complex world-view of Pagan Min that seems outright evil at the outset but is complicated by his criticism of the practice of having a young girl consecrated as the Tarun Matara, exposed to the leering gaze of the gathering of men around her - exactly what Amita preaches. Min also continually points out problems with the religious practices in Kyrat and goes to the extreme of closing down the sacred Jalendu Temple and stopping religious worship altogether.
Although Min may have shut down the temples, he has barely dented the religious beliefs of Kyrati society. The role of religion in the game is one that game researchers have not focused on so far. Coming from a Hindu background myself, I was somewhat surprised at the amalgam of Hindu and Buddhist rites shown in the Kyrati religion. The importance of religion has already been underscored as one of the reasons behind the people's dissatisfaction with Min's rule and as the key factor in determining the events beyond the game's ending. Evidence of religion in practice abound all over the landscape with many locations showing shrines to some god and usually these places have fresh garlands and flowers on them. Many of them have religious names, especially connected to Banashur (incidentally an asura or demon in Hindu mythology who has, rather irreverently, been turned into a god in the game) and there is also the Chal Jama Monastery, where Ajay goes on a pilgrimage, 'which includes spinning a mani wheel, adding powder to fire, lighting a candle and lighting a stick of incense', hinting at a complex mix of Hindu and Buddhist religious practices. Adding to the controversy is the figure of the Tarun Matara - despite the disapproval shown through characters as disparate as Amita and Min.
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:
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).
There are many views on the status and role of the Kumari and they present a complexity that cannot be easily described. The straightforward option of choosing to ban the tradition by either siding with Amita or letting Min rule is way too simple if one believes that abolishing the Tarun Matara custom, will be a major pro-women reform. The game seems to suggest this as a solution but then again, like any open-world game, it leaves the final choice to the player.
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.
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.
Crab rangoons!
The best metaphor for describing the game's attitude perhaps lies in a faux-oriental dish that is part of American Chinese cuisine: as much an American invention as General Tso's Chicken, this is a type of fried wonton (Chinese dumpling) made with crab-meat or imitation crab-meat and is called Crab Rangoon. At the very beginning of the game, Pagan Min offers Ajay a plate of crab rangoons. Just like Min, the recipe also claims a dubious connection with Burma (hence the 'rangoon' in its name - Rangoon or Yangon is the capital of Myanmar). In a very strange gameplay device, the whole outcome of the game depends on what the player does with the crab rangoons. If the player ignores everything and sits for long enough eating the crab rangoons, the game takes a very different turn to its alternate ending where there is no meeting the Golden Path rebels, the player is able to immerse his mother's ashes and life goes on undisturbed under Min's rule. Not eating the crab-rangoons will lead to all the adventures and bloodshed that make up the gameplay of Far Cry 4.
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!
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.
So my second book has now been published. I have a lot of people to thank for it and although this project was a bit off-piste for me, I thought there was a huge research gap and the work needed to be done soon:
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.
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.
Darmok and Jalad at DiGRA: Keynoting at DiGRA 2017 in Melbourne
DiGRA 2017 is over and many participants are by now already home either in lovely Australia, where it was hosted, or in other parts of the world. This DiGRA was different for me, it will always remain special because I was one of the two keynote speakers. Melanie Swalwell, whose work archiving and preserving videogames and digital heritage needs no introduction, was the other keynote speaker. I, however, spoke on a different kind of preservation and another perspective on archiving. It was time I had to speak on Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Those of you who are unfamiliar with the Darmok episode of Star Trek will think I am raving but watch the episode you must if you are to learn the secret. The Darmok episode is about a superior alien species establishing contact with the starship Enterprise and even the ship's super-advanced universal language translator is unable to parse what the Tamarians mean to say. The words are clearly translated but the meaning is beyond the wildest guesses of the crew: 'Darmok and Jalad in Tanagra'. Only later, through a test of faith and cooperation between the Tamarian captain and Captain Picard (of Enterprise), is it established that the Tamarians use a different system of signification - one where there culture and history form the basic units of communication. 'Darmok and Jalad in Tanagra', then means 'friendly cooperation' just as was found between the Tamarian historical heroes Darmok and Jalad on the planet of Tanagra. Kind of like saying Achilles and Patroclus in Troy to indicate loyalty and friendship. There were two reasons for my using the Darmok example: I was talking about the plurality of history and how history itself can become a way of talking about a people; I was also talking about the impossibility of representing the history of a culture using one unified and inflexible system. Those who know my recent work on postcolonialism and videogames will have guessed it. Here's me bringing subaltern studies (and historiography) to game studies. And the feedback was encouraging, I'm happy to say.
Melbourne is beautiful and fun
Before I say more about my keynote-talk, let me first say a bit about some of the fascinating talks that I managed to attend. Mia Consalvo and Chris Paul spoke on 'value-crafting' and indie games - something I need to share with my Indian indie developer friends to see what they think. The paper is available here. I also enjoyed the presentation on indie and dojin games by Michael Fiadotau - the dojin culture in Japan was unknown to me. As was the fascination with Pachinko (Ozu has a movie about Pachinko) that was discussed in another paper. Similarly, it was fascinating to hear of Maria Garda's work on the videogaming practices as reflected in the archives of Communist-Poland. Rene Glas and Jesper Vught's paper on using Let's Plays in the classroom reminded me of the class exercises that I had for my games and storytelling course in Oklahoma City. You can find an extended abstract here. I chaired a session where Espen Aarseth and Pawel Grabarczyk spoke on the game-identity of the games that are ported as well as of other kinds of iterations of the game. This was followed by Marcus Carter and Adam Chapman's intriguing analysis of truth and authenticity in Total War: Rome 2 and the fantasy world of Total War: Warhammer. Darshana Jayemanne, Antonio Zarandona and Adam Chapman presented an interesting enquiry on the destruction of built-heritage in videogame worlds. Again, something that my own work on digital archives of colonial cemeteries speaks to. Finally, I was also part of Phillip Penix-Tadsen's wonderful panel on the Global South and videogames, where I spoke on India and learnt a lot about game curation in Argentina, game development in Brazil and Nigeria, as well as games education in South Africa. In my own talk, I highlighted the key problems and promises of the Indian industry, the Western stereotypes and our own lack of innovative designs but I also projected the genius of some of the leading game designers from India. People were particularly interested in hearing about Missing, the serious game about child-trafficking in Bengal. There were many papers that I would have loved to hear but couldn't due to the lack of time and the parallel sessions (after all I don't have the time-turner). I did get a lot out of the doctoral consortium run by Steven Conway and the diversity workshop run by Adrienne Shaw and organised by Darshana Jayemanne. Highlights from the doctoral consortium - a project on narratives by Arseniy, Mahli-Ann Butt's PhD proposal on self-care in games, Kiona Niehaus's project on how racial characteristics are represented in game design, Lars de Wildt's project on comparative studies of religious representation in games and Marcus Toftedahl's work on videogames in India and China.
Besides all the networking and attending presentations, I had the wonderful opportunity to catch up with James Manning and continue somewhat our debate from almost eight years ago - on storytelling in videogames. Chatting with Nick Webber on games and history (he had presented on the Britishness of games) and with Peter Nelson about Chinese notions of spatiality and Le Corbusier were other hghlights of the trip. I met the fantastic Laura Crawford, who in between serious discussions on postcolonial identity squeezed in advice on where to get marmite and veggie mite. Last but not least, I got a full-day tour of Melbourne courtesy my friend, Tom Apperley and his daughter Lyra. And I also got to see the MCG and pose beside a statue of Sir Don himself.
But to return to the keynote. Yes, it worked out despite the huge stress that I was under. Here's a description of both the keynotes. To be a DiGRA keynote speaker - it was a dream come true. Veritably.
So here's how I started. And the beginning will give you an idea of what followed:
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Everyone here except diehard Star Trek fans is probably thinking that I am insane.
But I wanted to begin with these words from a rather strange episode of Star Trek where Captain Picard meets an alien spaceship captain who speaks to him in a language with familiar words but which remains incomprehensible despite the Enterprise’s universal translator machine.
After an almost deadly confrontation, Picard is able to figure out that the semantics in this alien language is not connected to individual words but to the knowledge of the entire history of the alien culture.
History, in the form of metaphor, serves as a language here. The episode serves
1. To remind us of the different ways in which history can be perceived
2. And tell us how this multiplicity of perceptions is important to comprehend
what we think of as different, Othered, alien and even monstrous.
It is with these two points in mind that I have called my talk ‘Playing Alternative Histories’
In formerly colonised nations, there is often a trend to have a nationalistic reaction after independence. Whether or not bordering on jingoism, such a reaction also replicates a similar logic to that of Empire. Somebody has to be controlled and if that's not possible, what people remember also has to be controlled. Instead of such a portrayal that almost reflects the logic of empire, I posited the multiplicity of videogames as being a fitting platform for the plurality of historical narratives - especially, the unheard and the voiceless histories that subaltern historians have attempted to represent. Meg Jayanth's work on the dialogues in 80 Days and Dhruv Jani's (Studio Oleomingus) Somewhere were the examples I used. This was the alternative history possibility that I wanted to highlight in videogames - just like in the Darmok episode, here is a situation where we need to reexamine our historical framework and be open to other forms of representation.
Here's the full slideshow:
I had two more days two explore Melbourne after the conference. With the last libations and farewells over, I set out for the two ludic attractions that I had planned to visit. The first one was a cricket-lover's pilgrimage (I mean the game and not the insect) to Melbourne Cricket Ground and the second was to ACMI or Australian Centre for the Moving Image. At the MCG, I was totally enthralled by the Sports Museum and especially its Cricket section. Here's a Lego version of MCG (seen in a departmental store) andof course, a statue of the Don in the MCG Sports Museum:
LEGO MCG Stadium
Sir Don in the Sports Museum
ACMI, too, was a real revelation and I liked the displays ranging from the magic lantern to the latest VR technology. I got to play some very old games such as Tempest and Pong; for the first time (can you believe it!) played Pro Evolution Soccer and then got my very own bullet-time sequence capture.
On the more retro side, I also got to see a zoetrope and to make some cool scary shadows of myself a la Nosferatu. My friend, Tom Apperley and his little daughter, Lyra, were supposed to come and pick me up for a visit to the zoo so I stopped making scary shadows and headed towards the exit. On the way out I saw these messages left in the ACMI by people (mainly kids) from all over the world saying what the future will be about:
Someone has written this in the visitor's book for a wishlist of the future: 'Playing computer games using your mind to control characters.'
Straight out of Star Trek. Maybe we'll get there someday. And it might be worth remembering the Darmok episode, then.
Just check the Twitter feed for DiGRA where @adrishaw says '#digra17 was easily my favorite DiGRA'. I totally agree. Great work by Marcus Carter and everyone else in his organising team.
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