tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76563106911793386642024-03-22T08:02:41.414+00:00Ludus Ex MachinaSouvik Mukherjee's blog on Computer Games research and life behind the screen.Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13280573263886446082noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-3737708238612319662023-03-18T14:04:00.006+00:002023-03-18T14:50:22.733+00:00Boal and Videogames Revisited: A Paper I Want to Write Someday <p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj4FFk8zIEkzLqS7w7mnJ2W3-BGvGHcV9e7DyBcmWgYPNgXnbjO-kdxoFXF6M0yrimJNwL98HubRJjMadoHtl6WPcml9lNa2v2_GpnRdIPWT8X0srRQzFdepMy4s8xNE_A426EEsQhO6bIFc6_Acf5o0NWFDvxfMPNlQjfMte_wbml8B82jzm1ibrtN9g" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="1360" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj4FFk8zIEkzLqS7w7mnJ2W3-BGvGHcV9e7DyBcmWgYPNgXnbjO-kdxoFXF6M0yrimJNwL98HubRJjMadoHtl6WPcml9lNa2v2_GpnRdIPWT8X0srRQzFdepMy4s8xNE_A426EEsQhO6bIFc6_Acf5o0NWFDvxfMPNlQjfMte_wbml8B82jzm1ibrtN9g" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><p>I've been toying with returning to Gonzalo Frasca's work on Augusto Boal for a while now. Recently, I was able to visit Badu in Madhyamgram thanks to my colleagues in CSSSC and meet Sanjoy Ganguly, the founder of the theatre group <i>Jana Sanskriti, </i>which Boal had worked with closely. Speaking to Sanjoy babu, I was reminded of the many synergies between Boal's ideas and videogames, something that Frasca focused on in his Masters' thesis but which has been largely forgotten in recent years. In my PhD years, I had looked at Boal's <i>Games for Actors and Non-actors </i>and had always wanted to return to it in connection to videogame narratives and Frasca's excellent Masters' research. So here's the very rudimentary beginnings of an idea, something that I hope to turn into a paper. I did write a little on Boal, Aristotle and videogames in a recently published <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003354246-19/journeying-heroes-souvik-mukherjee?context=ubx&refId=2356d6cf-97ca-4efe-a3ae-fdcd7b603c8f" target="_blank">book chapter</a> (in <i>Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India </i>eds. Nishat Zaidi and Sean Pue) but I want to do something more detailed on Boal and games. Let me know if you are interested.</p><p><br /></p>Tentative title: Videogames for Actors and Non-actors: Reading Augusto Boal in Videogame Poetics<br /><br /><br />Videogame narrative theories started off with a distinctly Aristotelian poetics with Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre and other ensuing research. Such analyses were based on the assumption of a protagonist endowed with agency and the primary concern with understanding videogame narratives vis-a-vis Aristotle was multiple endings of these games and therefore, the deviation of the ‘beginning, middle and end’ model in Aristotle. The ultimate aim of the game narrative still remained Aristotelian in the sense that it was supposed to be cathartic, in a process variously considered to be a purging or a purification of emotions. Going beyond how videogames may modify the thinking around the narrative telos, this paper will re-examine how videogames play or can be played (in the theatrical sense) and whether there can be videogames where player agency is not considered paramount. Indeed, some earlier scholars have already commented on the ‘illusion of agency’ in videogames; here, a concomitant but different model is being considered. What happens when videogames represent the oppressed and those who do not feel enabled or lack the agency to effect a change of fortune (even if it is from good to bad, as Aristotle posits as the basis of tragedy)? <br /><br />Writing about the videogames of the oppressed, Gonzalo Frasca introduced the work of the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal to game studies way back in 2001 in his Masters’ thesis submitted to the Georgia Institute of Technology. Boal has famously called the catharsis-based thinking behind Aristotelian tragedy as ‘coercive tragedy’ and sees the political in the way such tragedy is thought through. Frasca in his Master’s thesis writes:<br /><blockquote>This thesis examines the potential of videogames as a medium for fostering critical thinking and discussion about social and personal problems. [...]Therefore, videogames have the potential to represent reality not as a collection of images or texts, but as a dynamic system that can evolve and change. After studying how the process of interpretation functions in simulations, I propose to adapt the basic elements of the work of drama theorist Augusto Boal into videogame design. Boal created a set of techniques for participative theatre that raises the spectators awareness about their reality and encourages personal and social change. (Frasca 2001)</blockquote>To my knowledge, Frasca’s early work on Boal and videogames has not been followed up in game studies discussions and if it does critically examine the agency and catharsis based thinking of the poetics of videogames through the Boalian lens, then the fuller implications of such thinking need to be made clear. In this paper, I intend to address Boal’s concept of the ‘spect-actor’ in videogames, developing on the earlier research by Frasca and clarifying how it disrupts the agency-based thinking in videogames as the player is seen as both a spectator and actor. In the process, it will also question the catharsis-based model as well as the ever-popular ‘Hero’s Journey’ of Joseph Campbell that is a favourite among games researchers and designers. The spect-actor concept, in itself, is not without its flaws as Boal’s critics have pointed out but instead of only focusing on his better known Theatre of the Oppressed, this paper will also include the ludic activities that Boal envisaged for his theatre in his Games for Actors and Non-actors. Boal’s ludic theatre has found a niche far away from his homeland - in the remote village of Badu in West Bengal, India. As Sanjoy Ganguly, the director of Jana Sanskriti, which extensively uses Boalian techniques claims: ‘the exercises require the participants to create images and the initial stages of scenarios, and it is clear that these are derived from the personal experience of the performers’ (). Ganguly also goes on to explain how Boalian theatre can directly affect the living scenarios of those who feel oppressed: ‘Forum theatre can lead them to understand that it is not a question of a family, it is not a problem between a man and a woman: it is the problem of patriarchy’(). Frasca has already addressed the connect between Forum theatre and the way in which videogames resemble it through his mods of The Sims. This paper will examine further examples, from both mainstream and lesser known games, such as Papers, Please!, 80 Days and Undertale come to mind. It will address the games that Boal designed for his theatre and examine possibilities of analogues in videogames in order to challenge and unsettle entitled, agency-based and cathartic conventions prevalent in current thinking around the poetics of narrative games.<br /><br />Indicative Bibliography<br /><br />Boal, Augusto. 1993. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. McBride. Tcg ed. edition. New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc.,U.S.<br /><br />— 2002. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Translated by Adrian Jackson. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.<br /><br />Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library.<br /><br />Frasca, Gonzalo. 2004. ‘Videogames of the Oppressed’. Electronic Book Review. <a href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/Boalian">http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/Boalian</a>.<br /><br />Ganguly, Sanjoy. 2020. From Boal to Jana Sanskriti: Practice and Principles. Edited by Ralph Yarrow. 1st edition. New York: Routledge.<br /><br />Laurel, Brenda. 2013. Computers as Theatre. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison Wesley.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-6300567232283213002022-09-10T08:08:00.012+01:002023-05-28T14:42:38.647+01:00Gautam Sen Memorial Boardgame Museum<p> </p><h1 style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Amatic SC;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMiQQOOiyzHYZubRAZNTf4qTlHOJ21B2f9jggqdiWss_Sum4cdZ-gNQODZfC8nRLCbg7Mj36Q1IHftML9GS9p7qQpip_b_RtlOeR3er45z_1IZ6CfB2raXf0UWXKHd6t3QgFzsY1m0G1dNMOjxePzLA85gx_IKNNdAw4lCpSSw3sXZsFKSq2Kd7w1dZA/s359/logo%20boardgames%20museum.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="359" data-original-width="304" height="135" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMiQQOOiyzHYZubRAZNTf4qTlHOJ21B2f9jggqdiWss_Sum4cdZ-gNQODZfC8nRLCbg7Mj36Q1IHftML9GS9p7qQpip_b_RtlOeR3er45z_1IZ6CfB2raXf0UWXKHd6t3QgFzsY1m0G1dNMOjxePzLA85gx_IKNNdAw4lCpSSw3sXZsFKSq2Kd7w1dZA/w118-h135/logo%20boardgames%20museum.jpg" width="118" /></a></div>Gautam Sen Memorial Boardgames Museum</span></h1><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; text-align: left;">Trying to address the lack of any public resource on ancient boardgames in Kolkata, the Gautam Sen Memorial Boardgame Museum has been started as a modest venture to create an awareness of the rich culture of boardgames among the general public, researchers and enthusiasts. <a href="http://travelswithgautamsen.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Mr Gautam Sen</a>, my father-in-law, whose untimely demise we mourn was a chess-player par excellence and it is fitting that Amrita and I dedicate our joint efforts in building this museum to his memory. As one of the first few visitors to what is a fledgling project we seek your blessings and bid you welcome. </span></div></div><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">The museum hosts a collection of boardgames both ancient and modern, ranging from the oldest ever boardgame, <i>The Royal Game of Ur </i>to current games such as <i>Settlers of Catan </i>and <i>Grizzled. </i>On display are mainly the older games from different parts of the world with a focus on Indian games, of course. You will find games such as Go, Mancala and Senet here as well as a collection of Ganjifa cards and chess sets from all over the world. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;">The museum is an entirely non-profit and private space and </span><b style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;">entry is by invitation or prior appointment only</b><span style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;">. It is still a very small effort and we encourage only those who are really interested in boardgames to visit. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;">The timings are 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on weekdays and from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m on weekends.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;">There is no charge for visiting the museum.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here is our new website with details of how you can visit: </span></span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/kolkataboardgamemuseum/home" style="font-family: verdana; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">https://sites.google.com/view/kolkataboardgamemuseum/home</span></b></a></p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb1L-ivSeQqEdLmZrDMh6Pybu6ZlSoLxabFWlQ_zIFoDD5hlRdQZIepR2mPnRp38ONiHfQOcuRebvzZE9iqCbNQuu0xXBkr26hRdVMYDmzmU39Y_la79RQYm-K1bvm3FfmdWy9Wq_lBTT4cookhaBMheDCo2DeplWagXByypEaY9m3ttQmh5LRmUNDeQ/s4160/chessboard%20(2).jpg" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: small; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3120" data-original-width="4160" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgb1L-ivSeQqEdLmZrDMh6Pybu6ZlSoLxabFWlQ_zIFoDD5hlRdQZIepR2mPnRp38ONiHfQOcuRebvzZE9iqCbNQuu0xXBkr26hRdVMYDmzmU39Y_la79RQYm-K1bvm3FfmdWy9Wq_lBTT4cookhaBMheDCo2DeplWagXByypEaY9m3ttQmh5LRmUNDeQ/s320/chessboard%20(2).jpg" width="320" /></a></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small; text-align: justify;">We request you not to touch the exhibits and while the museum is also open to children, we encourage supervised visits. Also, the boardgames are not available to play unless you obtain special permission. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">Browsing the museum is easy and there are three ways to go about it:</span></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">You could use the museum’s mobile devices to scan the QR codes (on the exhibits for detailed information. We have tried to consult authoritative sources and in most cases the codes will direct you to the Ludii Portal, which is one of the authoritative research sites on boardgames. Where the Ludii website does not have the information, we have referred you to similar academic forums. </span></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">You could also use this index and read the entries following the numbered exhibits. </span></li></ul><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">If you are feeling chatty and want an adda over a cup of tea, just ask me about an exhibit and I will jog my memory for information and of course, anecdotes.</span></li></ul><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">Finally, some of the games are available as apps and are installed on our mobile devices. There are also printed copies of some of the game-boards. You are most welcome to play! </span><div><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Once again, Welcome to the Gautam Sen Board Games Museum!!!</span><br /><br /></span><p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;"><br /></p></div>Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.comKolkata, West Bengal, India22.572646 88.363895000000014-5.7375878361788466 53.207645000000014 50.882879836178844 123.52014500000001tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-18163371922485548722022-09-01T06:58:00.002+01:002022-09-20T08:09:44.700+01:00My new book<p> So my new book is out. You can get it on the Bloomsbury website: <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/videogames-in-the-indian-subcontinent-9789354356919/">https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/videogames-in-the-indian-subcontinent-9789354356919/</a></p><p>Here's what it is about:</p><div class="product-detail-description" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 1px solid rgb(191, 196, 222); box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 50px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 3rem;"><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #474d66; font-family: tiemposheadline; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 3rem; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Description</span></h3><div class="product-detail-description__body readmore" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3b3f54; font-family: tiempostext; letter-spacing: -0.09px; line-height: 2.4rem; margin: 0px 0px 2.5rem;"><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations</i> explores the gaming culture of one of the most culturally diverse and populous regions of the world-the Indian subcontinent. Building on the author's earlier work on videogame culture in India, this book addresses issues of how discussions of equality and diversity sit within videogame studies, particularly in connection with the subcontinent, thereby presenting pioneering research on the videogame cultures of the region.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />Drawing on a series of player and developer interviews and surveys conducted over the last five years, including some recent ones, this book provides a sense of how games have become a part of the culture of the region despite its huge diversity and plurality and opens up avenues for further study through vignettes and snapshots of the diverse gaming culture. It addresses the rapid rise of videogames as an entertainment medium in South Asia and, as such, also tries to better understand the recent controversies connected to gaming in the region In the process, it aims to make a larger connection between the development of videogames and player culture, in the subcontinent and globally, thus opening up channels for collaboration between the industry and academic research, local and global.</p></div><div class="row d-none d-md-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; flex-wrap: wrap; margin-left: -12px; margin-right: -12px;"><div class="col-12 col-lg-8" style="box-sizing: border-box; flex: 0 0 66.6667%; max-width: 66.6667%; padding-left: 12px; padding-right: 12px; position: relative; width: 399.333px;"></div></div></div><div class="product-detail-description" style="background-color: white; border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 1px solid rgb(191, 196, 222); box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; font-family: "open sans", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 50px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 3rem;"><h3 style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #474d66; font-family: tiemposheadline; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 3rem; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Table of Contents</span></h3><div class="product-detail-description__body readmore-toc" style="box-sizing: border-box; max-height: none;"><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent</i><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Section One: Development</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />1 Digital Technology and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: An Attempted History<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />2 The Videogame Industry in the Indian Subcontinent: The Current Scenario<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Section Two: Cultures</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />3 Diverse Subcontinent, Ludic Cultures: The Non-Digital Game Cultures as Context<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />4 Digital Gaming Cultures in the Indian Subcontinent<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Section Three: Representation</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />5 Representations of the Subcontinent in Videogames Global and Local<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />6 Absent Discourses in Game Cultures: The Case for Diversity<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" />7 What Wakens the Sleeping Giant?<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Bibliography</i><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Appendix One: Timeline</i><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Appendix Two: Survey</i><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Glossary</i><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /><i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Ludography</i></div><div class="product-detail-description__body readmore-toc" style="box-sizing: border-box; max-height: none;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkcKPnjQ8Vz8lijcvOwL01wG3k6TICacZWplyKMC0bMCf-dXLRuWOcZMpZFV9tGYRk0AkoQHy8WAR7VaTX8iJI-00zoNcGT0kC-rgVvwcK8Cbhi8jDK8mx19_JGAimEeQahsjfHQ6b4dFQilWWPP8fJg7rhX-Fsx9p7mkD_Rb0lNIerN9DXvXlU-uljw/s581/9789354356919.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="581" data-original-width="360" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkcKPnjQ8Vz8lijcvOwL01wG3k6TICacZWplyKMC0bMCf-dXLRuWOcZMpZFV9tGYRk0AkoQHy8WAR7VaTX8iJI-00zoNcGT0kC-rgVvwcK8Cbhi8jDK8mx19_JGAimEeQahsjfHQ6b4dFQilWWPP8fJg7rhX-Fsx9p7mkD_Rb0lNIerN9DXvXlU-uljw/s320/9789354356919.jpg" width="198" /></a></div><br /><i style="box-sizing: border-box;"><br /></i></div></div><p><br /></p>Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-53178516272452424892021-08-05T21:01:00.004+01:002021-08-05T21:04:48.739+01:00Game Studies India Adda to DiGRA India<p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Suniti Chattopadhyay, in his 1913 article ‘Hostel Life in Calcutta’, describes <i>adda</i> 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 <i>adda </i>mode) while also participating in the international network. </span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZmVpN06UI3Q/YQxDP2gQUQI/AAAAAAAAYPI/3ehmy4j8Bkoanu1A0Zl2LEaJUsQEz7eVACLcBGAsYHQ/s1880/Screenshot%2B%2528104%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="767" data-original-width="1880" height="164" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZmVpN06UI3Q/YQxDP2gQUQI/AAAAAAAAYPI/3ehmy4j8Bkoanu1A0Zl2LEaJUsQEz7eVACLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h164/Screenshot%2B%2528104%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">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 <a href="https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UCf82q61WODQgsTVeLQk8-Hw/videos/upload?filter=%5B%5D&sort=%7B%22columnType%22%3A%22date%22%2C%22sortOrder%22%3A%22DESCENDING%22%7D" target="_blank">YouTube channel, here.</a> As DiGRA India starts functioning we hope that we can connect the research on India's gaming culture to the rest of the world.</span></p><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Check out DiGRA India on our website: <a href="https://digraindia.com/">https://digraindia.com/</a></span></p><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p><span face=""Segoe UI Historic", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #050505; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p>Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-73619593903120005552020-10-06T10:22:00.002+01:002020-10-06T17:18:40.313+01:00Chess and Death<p style="text-align: justify;">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 <i>par excellence </i>and an enthusiast in the digital. He was forever battling <i>Fritz </i>and other computer programs often beating them or drawing the game. I had tried to introduce him to strategy games - <i>Napoleon: Total War, </i>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, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Smyslov" target="_blank">Vasili Smyslov</a>, 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.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I will not have those conversations about chess again when I am at home and I doubt anyone else here will beat <i>Fritz 7; </i>not me, certainly. The shelves are, however, filled with books on Chess. Yes, these remain. Memories.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J95Zhneigos/X3yYxdOUHtI/AAAAAAAAXqw/hKEaeb-75VUHjgQlZB4hCoPvjLdNtMfWwCLcBGAsYHQ/s750/ChessHomeDecor13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="412" data-original-width="750" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J95Zhneigos/X3yYxdOUHtI/AAAAAAAAXqw/hKEaeb-75VUHjgQlZB4hCoPvjLdNtMfWwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/ChessHomeDecor13.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: justify;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: justify;">------</p><p style="text-align: justify;">(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.)</p>Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-40116610182445461962020-06-24T23:00:00.002+01:002020-06-24T23:00:54.089+01:00Speaking on Board Games for the Indian Museum's Stories of World Cultures series<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
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Here's me presenting on boardgames in episode number 29.<br />
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-54528212995450019802020-05-30T00:47:00.001+01:002020-05-30T07:48:44.235+01:00The Looting of the Ganj i Sawai and Uncharted 4<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Returning to <i>Ludus Ex </i>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 <i>Uncharted 4</i>and my first brush with Nathan Drake. <i>Uncharted 4</i>, 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 <i>Uncharted </i>game.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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 <i>Ganj i Sawai </i>and was escorted by another ship, the <i>Fateh Mohammed. </i>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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Nathan Drake discovers the treasures of the Great Moghul in <i>Uncharted 4</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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 <i>Uncharted 4</i>, 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,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">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: </span><a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Long_Ben"><i><span style="color: #1e6eb8; text-decoration: none;">The Ballad of Long Ben</span></i></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"> and </span><i><a href="https://archive.org/details/kingofpiratesbei00defo"><span style="color: #1e6eb8;">The King of Pirates</span></a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"> by Daniel Defoe, to mention just a few. In the earliest, </span><i><span style="color: #333333;">The life and adventures of Capt. John Avery</span></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"> 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)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">He also features in Howard Pyle’s <i>Book of Pirates </i>(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 <i>Treasure Island</i>and the more recent <i>Pirates of the Caribbean. </i>Mughal (and other oriental) treasure has been the key driver for many other nineteenth-century narratives such as Conan Doyle’s <i>The Sign of Four </i>(the Great Agra treasure) and Wilkie Collins’s <i>The Moonstone </i>(a diamond brought back from India after the defeat of Tipu Sultan).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The story of the <i>Ganj i Sawai </i>is not told in <i>Uncharted 4 </i>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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What remains untold is the Indian side of the story. Contemporary Muslim historian Khafi Khan writes in his <i><span style="color: #333333;">Muntakhab al-lubāb</span></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"> how brutal the attack by Avery was and how it was not an isolated incident:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">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.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-34599369281481970452020-03-21T16:43:00.001+00:002020-05-30T08:11:14.401+01:00Games and Literary Theory Conference, Kolkata November 2019<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Call for Papers</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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. </span></div>
Conference <a href="https://gameslit2019.wordpress.com/conference-programme/conference-programme/conference-programme-2/" target="_blank">Programme</a><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The GamesLit 2019 team: GamesLit pioneers<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Hajo Backe and Tomasz Majkowski with many new members and Debanjana Nayek, the ever-efficient co-convener.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keynote Diane Carr responding to a question from Prof Sumit Chakrabarti</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anirban Ray on games from ancient Egypt</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Game scholars from the world over. (From left): Tomasz Majkowski, Me, Yue-Jin Ho, Pavel Grabarcyk, Olli Leino, Poonam Chowdhury, Espen Aarseth, Samuel Heine.</td></tr>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-37832962203694139982018-03-03T08:58:00.000+00:002018-03-04T11:27:01.982+00:00My Arctic Adventure - Tromsø 2018<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I was in <span style="background-color: white; color: #6a6a6a; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-weight: bold;">Tromsø</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> </span>, 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.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cA8uOXuDzrc/WppgkqSqEvI/AAAAAAAAUzA/07PpeYtJf5gdoeOoUaaEtllwTURStP5WwCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6135.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cA8uOXuDzrc/WppgkqSqEvI/AAAAAAAAUzA/07PpeYtJf5gdoeOoUaaEtllwTURStP5WwCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6135.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">Beautiful is an understatement: Tromso from my hotel.<br />
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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 <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px; white-space: nowrap;">Pötzsch</span>, 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 <i>Kingdom Come!</i>) 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 <i>Downfall</i> 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.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-P48ZY6ByXO0/WppfvQ3ZvgI/AAAAAAAAUy4/Pjvjqwr2EPEPOAReO6KLYSsh2rGBRZEpQCLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6085.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-P48ZY6ByXO0/WppfvQ3ZvgI/AAAAAAAAUy4/Pjvjqwr2EPEPOAReO6KLYSsh2rGBRZEpQCLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6085.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px;">The northernmost games studies PhD scholar is on his way with flying colours<br />
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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.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The LEGO house in Tromso</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mural from the more Leftist days</td></tr>
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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 <i>Civilization </i>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, <i>Battlefield One</i>. 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 <i>Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back.</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QAHpPOxwdcs/WpphqNZqNYI/AAAAAAAAUzM/z_CGI3_fLoMZjxcXG8_JlrYwplqpQ3W9ACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_6127.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QAHpPOxwdcs/WpphqNZqNYI/AAAAAAAAUzM/z_CGI3_fLoMZjxcXG8_JlrYwplqpQ3W9ACLcBGAs/s320/IMG_6127.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gandhi ji outside the Peace Studies Centre where I gave my talk.</td></tr>
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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 <i>Gyan Chaupar</i>. So I was able to move the discussion from the simple race game that was about a straightforward <i>telos</i> 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?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Persian translations underneath the Sanskrit terms on this Gyan Chaupar board.</td></tr>
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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.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sami Game Jam </td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sami drum</td></tr>
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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 - <a href="https://itch.io/jam/sami-game-jam">https://itch.io/jam/sami-game-jam</a>.<br />
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I hope I can go back again and learn more about the Sami culture.<br />
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-31272068244337829642017-12-04T20:25:00.001+00:002020-03-21T19:05:57.931+00:00Visiting Kyrat!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>deja vu</i> this. This was Kyrat - the little mountain-country that is the locale of Ubisoft's videogame, <i>Far Cry 4. </i>Later, in the course of my journey I would spot many similarities between the sites of Nepal and Kyrat - the <i>chorten </i>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 <i>Far Cry 4. </i>The name Kyrat, I was soon to realise, is no figment of the Ubisoft story writers' imaginative powers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In Sanskrit, <i>Kyrat </i> 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, <i>Kiratarjuna</i>, 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 <i>Far Cry 4</i> has combined all of them into one people living in a country that resembles Nepal in more ways than one. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>Far Cry 4 </i>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.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><a href="https://icdn3.digitaltrends.com/image/pagan-min-2-510x0.jpg?ver=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="242" data-original-width="381" height="203" src="https://icdn3.digitaltrends.com/image/pagan-min-2-510x0.jpg?ver=1" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Pagan Min in <i>Far Cry 4 </i>shares his name with a former king of Myanmar</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. </span><span style="font-family: "\22 georgia\22 " , "\22 times new roman\22 " , serif;">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. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 </span><i style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', serif;">Far Cry Wiki</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> thus:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #3a3a3a;">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 </span><a class="new" href="http://farcry.wikia.com/wiki/Kyra?redlink=1&action=edit&flow=create-page-article-redlink" style="border: 0px; color: #cc2200; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Kyra (page does not exist)">Kyra</a><span style="color: #3a3a3a;">. He is also smart enough to know how to use religion as a political tool. These views are in direct conflict with </span><a href="http://farcry.wikia.com/wiki/Amita" style="border: 0px; color: #be680c; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Amita">Amita</a><span style="color: #3a3a3a;">'s world view.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Amita has a different agenda:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #3a3a3a;">With tensions rising between the two leaders, Amita is now head to head with Sabal over the installation of </span><a href="http://farcry.wikia.com/wiki/Bhadra" style="border: 0px; color: #be680c; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Bhadra">Bhadra</a><span style="color: #3a3a3a;"> as the next </span><a href="http://farcry.wikia.com/wiki/Tarun_Matara" style="border: 0px; color: #be680c; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Tarun Matara">Tarun Matara</a><span style="color: #3a3a3a;">. 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.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>asura </i>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, 'w<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3a3a3a;">hich 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.</span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3a3a3a; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3a3a3a; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumari_(goddess)" target="_blank">Kumari </a></i>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:</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #3a3a3a;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures;">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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/mar/05/india-hinduism-goddesses-feminism-global-development" target="_blank">here</a>).</span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 "<span style="background-color: white;">While the Maoists are not targeting tourists, the war has started directly hitting the tourism sector - Nepal's most important industry." </span>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 <i>Far Cry 4. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>Far Cry 4 . </i>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 <i>Far Cry 2 </i>sees no happy ending for the nameless African country it is set in, <i>Far Cry 4 </i>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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Crab rangoons!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>Far Cry 4. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">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 <i>Far Cry 4 </i>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!</span><br />
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-47153359748745538472017-08-04T10:17:00.001+01:002017-08-04T10:18:06.819+01:00Another book. More on Postcolonialism.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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:<br />
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</span><span style="color: rgb(0.000000% , 13.300000% , 33.300000%); font-family: "myriadpro"; font-size: 13.000000pt; font-weight: 700;">Videogames and Post-colonialism: </span><span style="color: rgb(0.000000% , 13.300000% , 33.300000%); font-family: "myriadpro"; font-size: 9.000000pt; font-weight: 600;">Empire Plays Back
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<span style="color: rgb(0.000000% , 13.300000% , 33.300000%); font-family: "myriadpro"; font-size: 10.000000pt; font-weight: 600;">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. </span><br />
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<span style="color: rgb(0.000000% , 13.300000% , 33.300000%); font-family: "myriadpro"; font-size: 10.000000pt; font-weight: 600;">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. </span><br />
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-65385357813507998222017-07-21T22:44:00.000+01:002017-08-25T17:58:15.137+01:00Darmok and Jalad at DiGRA: Keynoting at DiGRA 2017 in Melbourne<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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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.<br />
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Those of you who are unfamiliar with the Darmok episode of <i>Star Trek </i>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 <i>Enterprise </i>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 <i>Enterprise</i>), 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.<br />
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Melbourne is beautiful and fun</div>
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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 <a href="http://digra2017.com/static/Full%20Papers/124_DIGRA2017_FP_Consalvo_Indie_Game_Developers.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. 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 <a href="http://digra2017.com/static/Extended%20Abstracts/59_DIGRA2017_EA_Glas_Lets_Play.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. 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 <i>Total War: Rome 2 </i>and the fantasy world of <i>Total War: Warhammer. </i>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 <i>Missing</i>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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But to return to the keynote. Yes, it worked out despite the huge stress that I was under. Here's a description of <a href="http://digra2017.com/keynotes/" target="_blank">both the keynotes</a>. To be a DiGRA keynote speaker - it was a dream come true. Veritably. <span style="font-family: "cidfont f3";"><span style="font-size: 17px;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "cidfont f3";"><span style="font-size: 17px;">So here's how I started. And the beginning will give you an idea of what followed: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">Everyone here except diehard Star Trek fans is probably thinking that I am insane.<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">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.</span></blockquote>
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</span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">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.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">
</span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">History, in the form of metaphor, serves as a language here. The episode serves<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f1"; font-size: 10.000000pt;">1. </span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">To remind us of the different ways in which history can be perceived<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f1"; font-size: 10.000000pt;">2. </span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">And tell us how this multiplicity of perceptions is important to comprehend<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">what we think of as different, Othered, alien and even monstrous.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "cidfont+f3"; font-size: 13.000000pt;">It is with these two points in mind that I have called my talk ‘Playing Alternative
Histories’</span></blockquote>
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So I was talking about how videogames represent histories and especially, certain types of history. I emphasized the need for understanding other(ed) patterns of narrative constructions and the potential for videogames for doing so. I spoke about how even though some of the real-time strategy games provide the opportunity to play out alternative and counterfactual histories, their main premise is the hardcoded notion of imperial expansion. Whether the British are conquering India or vice versa, it is the same logic! I also said in passing that the code for these games could have a bias in that most of the triple-A games are manufactured in Europe and the U.S.A - but this was just a passing thought and needs more research. Is code influenced by cultures? Something to think about.<br />
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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 <i>80 Days </i>and Dhruv Jani's (Studio Oleomingus) <i>Somewhere </i>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.<br />
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Here's the full slideshow:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="485" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/aNQxEdsCrWw7uK" style="border-width: 1px; border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;" width="595"> </iframe> <br />
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<strong> <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/secret/aNQxEdsCrWw7uK" target="_blank" title="Digra 2017 keynote Playing Alternative Histories Mukherjee">Digra 2017 keynote Playing Alternative Histories Mukherjee</a> </strong> from <strong><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/prosperoscell" target="_blank">Souvik Mukherjee</a></strong> </div>
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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:<br />
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LEGO MCG Stadium</div>
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Sir Don in the Sports Museum</div>
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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 <i>Tempest </i>and <i>Pong</i>; for the first time (can you believe it!) played <i>Pro Evolution Soccer </i>and then got my very own bullet-time sequence capture.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="485" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="https://timeslice.acmi.net.au/timeslice/Timeslice.htm?file=ts-20170708-7077a5ac61aa3df4768f177d15b84a15.flv" style="border-width: 1px; border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;" width="595"></iframe>
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On the more retro side, I also got to see a zoetrope and to make some cool scary shadows of myself a la <i>Nosferatu. </i>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:<br />
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Someone has written this in the visitor's book for a wishlist of the future: 'Playing computer games using your mind to control characters.'</div>
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Straight out of <i>Star Trek. </i>Maybe we'll get there someday. And it might be worth remembering the Darmok episode, then.<br />
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Just check the Twitter feed for DiGRA where @adrishaw says '<a class="twitter-hashtag pretty-link js-nav" data-query-source="hashtag_click" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/digra17?src=hash" style="color: #1c94e0; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none; white-space: pre-wrap;">#<span style="color: inherit;"><strong>digra17</strong></span></a><span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was easily my favorite DiGRA'. I totally agree. Great work by Marcus Carter and everyone else in his organising team.</span><br />
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-3412352412546554352017-02-12T21:16:00.001+00:002020-03-21T16:46:04.470+00:00Games and Literary Theory Conference, Krakow Keynote<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-147bfd6f-3428-dbab-9278-2b0e66d6d765" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The jet-lag has not yet left me and although I’ve been jostling crowds in the overly busy Calcutta streets and ‘invigilating’ at exams in my university, I still keep seeing the beautiful disproportionate spires of the St. Mary’s Church in Krakow and waiting in anticipation for the trumpeter to emerge from the tower windows to announce the hour with his melodious but incomplete notes. The story goes that one of his ancestors was shot in the throat by Tatar invaders as he was announcing the arrival of the enemy. The interrupted note is what tells Krakow the time each hour. There’s something about this city, I thought, as I headed towards my conference venue with my hands full of gifts for home. A brisk walk took me to Golembia Street and the Department of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University. On the way, plaques announced illustrious alumni such as Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) and Nicholas Copernicus. Once inside the medieval-looking gate, I was in the welcoming zone of the Games and Literary Theory Conference 2016, organised ably by the inimitable Tomasz Majkowski and his sterling group of students. I am quite tired of fighting old battles in Game Studies all over again but mark my words, this generation of Polish game scholars are going to change the field. </span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-147bfd6f-3428-dbab-9278-2b0e66d6d765" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The welcome (further accentuated by a delectable spread of Polish food) was lavish and in stark contrast to the extremely cavalier treatment that I received from the Polish embassy in New Delhi who wouldn’t deign to respond to my emails or take my calls. Anyway my getting to Poland was a major victory for both Tomasz and me in that I had never faced so much trouble in getting a visa to a European country before. I haven’t said why I was there in the first place: I was one of the two keynote speakers at the conference. The other keynote did not have as many problems in getting there as I did but when she did get to the venue, I met one of the most sensible Game Studies scholars in my career. Joyce Goggin left us spellbound and simultaneously tickled by bringing up questions of the literary and ludic yet again. No, the other disciplines aren’t out to colonise us (they often don’t even know we exist) and if you throw me a ball, then that it doesn’t tell a story. But then there are different ways of looking at colonisation, throwing balls and telling stories. Now that’s not exactly what Joyce said - her keynote was much more erudite, with references to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Finnegan’s Wake </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(by another Joyce), stories with multiple endings and close readings of Huizinga.</span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-147bfd6f-3428-dbab-9278-2b0e66d6d765" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other highlights for me were the discussion of a herstorical (yeah, you read right: Her Story as opposed to HiStory) board game by Piotr Szerwinscki, another one on an environmental board game, one on the quotidian and commonplace occurrences in videogames, Daniel Vella’s romantic analogy for (some) videogames, Sebastian Moering’s introduction to his upcoming work on existentialism and care in videogames and Darshana’s brilliant reading of Pynchon vis-a-vis videogames. I loved hearing about games and ecology; a brilliant analysis of the quotidian in games and a survey of videogame periodicals in the U.S.A and Canada. Daniel Vella brought back memories of my Romanticism lectures (I had to teach Shelley not so long ago) with his references to M.H. Abrams’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Mirror and the Lamp</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-147bfd6f-3428-dbab-9278-2b0e66d6d765" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My own keynote was on post colonialist themes in videogames (or rather the lack of these). After having thanked the British, our former colonial masters, for giving me the language to present academic papers in (some members of the audience got the Caliban reference) and compared my visa-predicament to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Papers, Please! , </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 8.5pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I managed to bring to the table postcolonial theory and the discomfort many of us have with the insensitively colonial approach of the global games. My position is not a popular one and the problem is that such an obviously glaring issue has been hitherto ignored. One of the interesting takeaways for me was that many members of the audience started debating the role of Poland as coloniser/colonised; the other was a comment that Sebastian (who has been a friend since 2008) made: he said he thought this was my most personal talk ever and I was gratified. I think I spoke my mind and people listened with sympathy - nay, empathy. With the world changing as it is now, all this needed to be said.</span></b></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-90666470102751780232016-08-08T15:37:00.001+01:002020-03-21T19:04:38.222+00:00DiGRA in Dundee<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: justify;">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</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: justify;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: justify;">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.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: justify;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">The Tay Bridge, Dundee</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">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 <i>80 Days</i> 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 <i>Empire: Total War </i>, 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 <i>Games and Culture </i>(and earlier, a paper presented at Meaningful Play 2014).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Gandhi and games: me talking about the representation of Indian history in videogames</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">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!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">William Huber (centre) supervises the takeover of Guthrie Castle by game researchers at the Gala Dinner</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">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 <i>Bagh Bakri </i>(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.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">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. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">William Robinson demo-ing his Jewish Labour game.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">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 <i>Grand Theft Auto </i> but I guess I was too carried away thinking about my own paper on karma and <i>gyan chaupar. </i>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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">I spoke about <i>Gyan Chaupar </i>and karma in games. This was a draft of a paper I am writing at the moment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the last day of the conference, I </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">had to </i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">The Howff, Dundee. The name means 'meeting place'.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">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 <a href="http://readinggamesandplayingbooks.blogspot.in/2016/08/shush-hushed-note-on-postcolonialism.html" target="_blank">dissonance on post-colonialism and diversity</a> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irn-Bru" target="_blank">Irn-Bru</a> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_Mars_bar" target="_blank">wikipedia</a> is recommended. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">'Oor Wullie' can be seen everywhere in Dundee</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Soon it was time to leave the city with its ancient and grim buildings and its very bright <a href="http://www.oorwulliebuckettrail.com/" target="_blank">Oor Wullie</a> (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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Jute: Calcutta's link with Dundee.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The rest of the journey is a tired blur. I am back in Calcutta now, preparing for other journeys.</span></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-11994175927686131832016-04-14T09:27:00.002+01:002020-03-21T19:05:44.070+00:00The Buddha Does Not Play Dice <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Einstein, unhappy about claims of an uncertain universe, famously said 'God does not play dice.' The scientist, later proved wrong, was referring to dice as an aleatory game that he certainly could not see God playing. Moving over from monotheism to the Hindu pantheon, the story is different. Apparently, the universe and everything in it is the product of the divine game of dice that paintings all over India depict Shiva and his consort, Parvati, playing. Here's an extreme contrast, however: the Buddha not only does not play dice, he is against playing almost <i>anything at all. </i>A while ago now, Jesper Juul, who has been besides an authority on many aspects of game studies, a very perceptive thinker on the history of games, raised the question about why the Buddha took such a stand. Way back in 2007, Juul asked the following question in his blog, <i>The Ludologist</i>:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Why wouldn’t he play them? Without going into theology I know nothing about (and without offending anyone), my understanding is that Buddha could not have been a sore loser, so it must have to do with the more formal properties of the games themselves. Neither rules ( board games sized 8 or 10), fiction (toy windmills), nor ilinx escape criticism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">So this I’d like to know: which games <em style="box-sizing: inherit;">would </em>he play, and why?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I met Jesper for the second time shortly afterwards while I was presenting a paper on Indic philosophy's treatment of Karma and how it relates to videogames. He asked me about the roots of ancient Indian games and I realised that I knew very little about my own culture, courtesy my very colonial education. The Buddha's attitude to games was something that I stumbled upon in Juul's blog and it has bothered me since. Today, after Paolo Pedercini tweeted the same question nine years later, there are many posts on my Facebook feed about the Buddha and games. Some are flippant and some are genuinely curious. After all, it is difficult to imagine the 'cool' notion of the ever-tolerant Buddha (whether depicted as laughing or sombre) to be against the very principle of play. Look on the discussion forums and you are certain to come across Buddhists asking whether it is wrong for them to play videogames because of the violence in some of them (that is against the Buddhist <i>Ahimsa </i>or non-violence). To stop play altogether, though? Now that's a tough one. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[<i>Buddhas Playing a Game</i> by Willie Kendrick III, <a href="http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/11160/buddhas_playing_a_game">http://www.digitalartistdaily.com/image/11160/buddhas_playing_a_game</a>]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">To answer Juul's question (and everyone else's), the key thing to consider the full import of what the Buddha says. The writer of an article on this in Wikipedia quotes the <i>Brahmajjala Sutta </i>(Sutras are the holy and philosophical texts of Buddhism - the Heart Sutra is one of the more commonly discussed ones in the West). The Buddha states the following about boardgames:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"Or he might say: "Whereas some honorable recluses and brahmins, while living on food offered by the faithful, indulge in the following games that are a basis for negligence:<a class="noteTag" href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html#fn-1" id="fnt-1" style="border: 0px; color: #1e3478; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="The explanations of these games are drawn from the commentary.">[1]</a><i>aṭṭhapada</i> (a game played on an eight-row chess-board); <i>dasapada</i> (a game played on a ten-row chess-board); <i>ākāsa</i> (a game of the same type played by imagining a board in the air); <i>parihārapatha</i> ("hopscotch," a diagram is drawn on the ground and one has to jump in the allowable spaces avoiding the lines); <i>santika</i> ("spellicans," assembling the pieces in a pile, removing and returning them without disturbing the pile); <i>khalika</i> (dice games); <i>ghaṭika</i>(hitting a short stick with a long stick); <i>salākahattha</i> (a game played by dipping the hand in paint or dye, striking the ground or a wall, and requiring the participants to show the figure of an elephant, a horse etc.); <i>akkha</i> (ball games); <i>paṅgacīra</i> (blowing through toy pipes made of leaves); <i>vaṅkaka</i> (ploughing with miniature ploughs); <i>mokkhacika</i> (turning somersaults); <i>ciṅgulika</i> (playing with paper windmills); <i>pattāḷaka</i> (playing with toy measures); <i>rathaka</i> (playing with toy chariots); <i>dhanuka</i> (playing with toy bows); <i>akkharika</i>(guessing at letters written in the air or on one's back); <i>manesika</i> (guessing others' thoughts); <i>yathāvajja</i> (games involving mimicry of deformities) — the recluse Gotama abstains from such games and recreations.'</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">That's a long list of games, everyone has commented. So why does he not like them? The truth is that the Wikipedia list does a half-job of it all. What the Buddha says is more like this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is, monks, <i>for elementary, inferior matters of moral practice that the worldling would praise the Tathágata. </i>And what are these elementary, inferior matters for which the worldling would praise him? <span style="color: #111111;">[...] </span>Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins … remain addicted to <i>attending such shows as dancing, singing, music, displays, recitations, hand-music, cymbals and drums, fairy-shows, acrobatic and conjuring tricks, combats of elephants, buffaloes, bulls, goats, rams, cocks and quail, fighting with staves, boxing, wrestling, sham-fights, parades, maneuvers and military reviews</i>, the ascetic Gotama refrains from attending such displays. Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to such games and idle pursuits as eight- or ten-row chess, chess in the air, hopscotch, spillikins, dicing, hitting sticks, 'hand-pictures', ball-games, blowing through toy pipes, playing with toy ploughs, turning somersaults, playing with toy windmills, measures, carriages, and bows, guessing letters, guessing thoughts, mimicking deformities, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such idle pursuits.<br /><span style="color: black;">Whereas some ascetics and Brahmins remain addicted to high and wide beds and long chairs, couches adorned with animal figures, </span><span style="color: black;"> fleecy or variegated coverlets, coverlets with hair on both sides or one side, silk coverlets, embroidered with gems or without, elephant-, horse- or chariot-rugs, choice spreads of antelope-hide, couches with awnings, or with red cushions at both ends, the ascetic Gotama refrains from such high and wide beds. [...] </span><span style="color: black;"><i>There are, monks, other matters, profound, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond mere thought, subtle, to be experienced by the wise, which the Tathágata, having realized them by his own super-knowledge,</i> proclaims, and about which those who would truthfully praise the Tathágata would rightly speak. (My italics)</span></span></blockquote>
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The full comment is often ignored. The Buddha isn't talking about hating a few games and listing them; he's saying that it is worldly people who praise him from abstaining from these games just as they praise him for not going to dances or boxing matches. Let's get one thing clear. The Buddha doesn't have a special grudge against board-games. As the prince Siddhartha in Kapilavastu (in modern Nepal), we know that he did let loose an arrow in an archery contest (something he has purportedly criticised in his list of games). What he <i>is </i>saying something very different. </div>
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The world may think that the Buddha doesn't play games because they are immoral and cause people to neglect their work but the Buddha is not everyone else. That much we can agree to, certainly, right? In fact, the moral rectitude that the worldly people might praise him for is the least of their problems that the Buddha points out. They also wonder about the mutability of the self, the finiteness and the infiniteness of the world and things thought to be profounder than whether not playing games also means not neglecting your work and being morally correct. </div>
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<span style="color: #111111;">What the Buddha is all about is what he states at the end of the long and complex discourse in the <i>sutra</i>: </span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">There are, monks, other matters, profound, hard to see, hard to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond mere thought, subtle, to be experienced by the wise, which the Tathágata, having realized them by his own super-knowledge, proclaims, and about which those who would truthfully praise the Tathágata would rightly speak.</span></blockquote>
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In the beginning of the text, he hears two of his monks defending him against the fierce criticism of someone who does not believe in his teachings. In this long and detailed answer, the Buddha expresses the nature of Buddhahood: something that is beyond thought and part of his own super-knowledge. The understanding of the Buddha or the <i>Tathagata </i>(literally 'he who has come' or 'he who has gone', the name the Buddha refers to himself by) transcends all of these. The Buddha is at perfect peace and 'h<span style="background-color: #fffeff; font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">aving understood as they really are the origin and the passing away of feelings, their satisfaction, their unsatisfactoriness, and the escape from them, the Tathāgata, bhikkhus, is emancipated through non-clinging.'</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fffeff; font-size: 14px;">The Buddha, or the Enlightened One, is beyond games but only because he is beyond anything worldly. There are accounts where boardgames are a major part of Buddhist learning. Consider, for example, the Buddhist monk Sakya Pandit's creation of the Tibetan Game of Liberation to teach the notion of karma to his co-religionists. Jens Schlieter has an essay on the game that I'd strongly recommend. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fffeff; font-size: 14px;">In a recent talk that I plan to turn into a paper, I plan to explore this with a few discoveries that will potentially add to Schlieter's research and make clearer links with game studies. For that, I will have to tell you about my adventures in Rochester - in the next blog post, perhaps. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fffeff; font-size: 14px;">* I've been a bit lazy with the citations but the quotes have been taken from the translation (from Pali) by Bhikkhu Bodhi (available here: </span></span><a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html">http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html</a>) and another translation that is available here; <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html">http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html</a>. </div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #fffeff; font-size: 14px;">** I am grateful to Annika Waern and Mohini Freya Dutta for raising this in their respective Facebook posts.</span></span></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-89353379133853840042016-02-17T19:10:00.001+00:002020-03-21T19:03:48.711+00:00Article in Games and Culture: Videogames and the Subaltern<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">My article '<span style="color: #403838;">Playing Subaltern: </span><span style="color: #403838;">Video Games and Postcolonialism' has been published in <i>Games and Culture</i>. Here's the abstract:</span></span></div>
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The postcolonial has still remained on the margins of Game Studies, which has now incorporated at length, contemporary debates of race, gender, and other areas that challenge the canon. It is difficult to believe, however, that it has not defined the way in which video games are perceived; the effect, it can be argued, is subtle. For the millions of Indians playing games such as <em style="border: 0px; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Empire: Total War</em> or <em style="border: 0px; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline-style: none; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">East India Company</em>, their encounter with colonial history is direct and unavoidable, especially given the pervasiveness of postcolonial reactions in everything from academia to day-to-day conversation around them. The ways in which games construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics, and society are often deeply imbued with a notion of the colonial and therefore also with the questioning of colonialism. This article aims to examine the complexities that the postcolonial undertones in video games bring to the ways in which we read them.</blockquote>
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The full article is available at : <a href="http://gac.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/09/1555412015627258.full">http://gac.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/09/1555412015627258.full</a><br />
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-24018859489627460832015-12-07T00:34:00.003+00:002017-08-04T10:28:30.767+01:00On Fallout 4: My Article in The Times of India<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So here's my take of <i>Fallout 4 </i>from my column in the <i>Times of India. </i>The title is the handiwork of my friend and editor Subhayu Mazumder and I like it a lot. There is, of course, a lot more that I could have said about the choice mechanisms and the context of the videogame. In response to some of the comments I received on my statement that the game involves the player making choices that shape his/her identity in the game, I have a few points to add:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #141823;">Returning to the choice issue, when we see it in terms of formal gameplay construction, you have a point. However, the game is premised on a typical branching of ethical positions - almost too clear-cut although you could move back-and-forth a bit. So </span><span style="color: #141823;">if you stick to the mission sequences (I don't), it boils down to Army / Government, Academia / Science , Resistance / Left-wing and Citizens / Commonwealth. Of course, you can't play as a super-mutant or a ghoul or a synth although you can have people of these 'races' / social groups as your partner. Nevertheless, making decisions like having to fight the son you were seeking (or not) are difficult ones. Absalom, Absalom! methinks. Likewise, the decision to side with any faction is one of taking a moral position and at the same time accepting the constraints of gameplay associated with this.</span></span></blockquote>
Anyway, after starting <i>in medias res</i>, here's my article:<br />
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2277: An Apocalyptic Odyssey</div>
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<br />
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War never changes. A previous article in this column had
reviewed <i>Fallout 3 </i>and promised a
further visit to the war-ravaged post-apocalyptic America that is featured in
the series. In <i>Fallout 4</i>, we are in Boston, known as the Commonwealth in 2277,
where the few survivors of nuclear war have set up their homes in what remains
of the once famous metropolis – some now live inside a former baseball stadium
and others live in scattered settlements that grow irradiated crops and are
constantly under threat from raiders, supermutants and animals that live in the
wasteland around them. Besides these, there are ghouls, described as ‘necrotic
posthumans’ by the <i>Fallout </i>wiki, the
reminders of what excessive radiation can do to humans. Some of them have lost
their abilities to reason and turned ‘feral’ or zombie-like. Besides the usual
denizens of the <i>Fallout </i>world <i>Fallout 4 </i>is a fitting sequel to the
former games and the journey from the Capital Wasteland (erstwhile Washington)
and New Vegas seems another worthwhile venture in reflecting on the horrors of
what nuclear war can do while having another go at saving humankind in this
alternate-reality universe.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Commonwealth is a huge world to explore and can easily
provide over a week’s gameplay if not more, depending on which faction you join
and what you do in the game. The Karma system from the earlier game is missing
although your companions change their attitude towards you depending on how you
act. The factions in the game have obvious intended present-day parallels. The
Brotherhood of Steel is what remains of the army and they return from the
earlier games with their crusade against the misuse of technology and their
goal of establishing peace among humanity. Woven into their plans, however, is
their clear rhetoric of racial cleansing – mutants, ghouls, androids and indeed
anyone who is ‘other’ than ‘human’ needs to be eliminated. They possess
state-of-art pre-apocalypse military technology including a giant robot called
Liberty Prime, which destroys everything in its path while alternately spewing
anti-communist slogans and lines from Robert Frost. Opposed to them is the
Institute, whose resemblance to MIT is easy to spot (it is located underneath
the Commonwealth Institute of Technology) and who are committed to improving
the world by building ‘synths’ or synthetic humans. Despite their purportedly
glorious aims, they are a terror to the Commonwealth residents and their synths
are often used against humans rather than to aid them. Among the other
factions, the most prominent are the Minutemen, so named after their historical
antecedents who fought against the British in the American War of Independence
and whose stories, like the poetry of Frost, are deeply connected with the
local lore of New England, where the game is set. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As with its predecessors, <i>Fallout 4 </i>is not just about playing a shooter game - it is also about who you are and wish to
be. A web of moral choices determines your path towards the many possible
endings and some of them are fairly difficult to make. For example, when you
find out that the Director of the Institute is none other than your son whom
you have been looking for since the game started. Or when you realise that the
easiest and quickest way to finish the game is to side with the Brotherhood of
Steel and ‘save’ the world from their problematic perspective and racial
agenda. Also, personally speaking, having to witness a nuclear explosion
conducted for the ‘noble’ cause of destroying the Institute was less than
comfortable. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This does not mean any less of the usual though – boss
fights are as challenging and the player will have a hard time fighting the
legendary Deathclaw, the Mirelurk Queen
or the Legendary Sentinel Robot. The game also allows you to craft your own
weapons and build settlements so if you see junk around you in your many
travels, be sure to pick it up for future use. The missions around protecting
the settlements tend to get repetitive after a time. Other than that the heavy
system requirements (needs high-end graphic cards on PCs and does not play on
the older consoles such as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) and the high price for
all the platforms will surely dampen the enthusiasm of many Indian gamers. All
said though, a trip to the Commonwealth is not to be missed - the system upgrade that you had been putting
off and the wait until prices come down, notwithstanding. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Rating: 5 out of 5.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Genre: First / third-person shooter,
role-playing game (RPG), open-world game</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-71865939857252482702015-12-03T08:40:00.000+00:002020-03-21T19:06:52.897+00:00An Encounter with Tipoo’s Tiger: A Post-colonial Toy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">I have, of late, been thinking a lot about games and post-colonialism. </span><i style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">JGVW </i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">(</span><i style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">Journal of Games and Virtual </i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">Worlds) very kindly published one of <a href="http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=20421/" target="_blank">my articles on cartography and empire in videogames</a>. This isn’t a new thing for me, though. Anybody who cared to listen would have heard me harp on about how </span><i style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">Bhagat Singh </i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">is the world’s first postcolonial videogame. Recently, however, with the release of </span><i style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry </i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">and some other titles, I’ve been thinking more about this. This post is, however, not about videogames per se. It is about a very famous toy. One that led me to think about the postcolonial and videogames. During my recent visit to London, I managed to run away for a bit to the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the object that has fascinated me for years. It is called Tipu’s Tiger.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: left;">Tipu Sultan or ‘The Tipoo’, who was the cause of much worry for the East India Company and was defeated in the famous Siege of Seringapatnam, where Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) was one of the commanders, is now a controversial figure in India. When I was a kid, the Indian national TV channel showed a multi-part TV-series called the </span><i style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: left;">Sword of Tipu Sultan </i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px; text-align: left;">that portrayed the Sultan as a national hero who fought the evils of colonialism and was a popular ruler among his subjects, both Hindu and Muslim. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f1f1f1; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultan by Henry Singleton</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">It was here that I learnt that ‘the Tippoo’, as the British called him, had taken the title of the ‘Tiger of Mysore’. The French called him Citoyen Tipu and the new Republic (and later Napoleon) were allies in his battles with the British. For the British, Tippoo Sahib was a formidable enemy and the London papers often voiced panic about the potential dangers of a liaison between Napoleon and the Tipu. Until his defeat in 1799, Tipu had formed alliances with and against the neighbouring kingdoms, both Hindu and Muslim, to fight the British. He </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">was accused of barbarism by the British and is now claimed by some as the champion of Islam. Bernard Cornwell’s hero, Richard Sharpe, is depicted as killing the barbaric and pudgy Tipu Sultan and then looting his treasures. Wilkie Collins’s </span><i style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">The Moonstone </i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">is about a cursed gem that was part of the British loot after Tipu’s fort fell. The looting of Seringapatnam resulted in the East India Company gaining around a billion pounds in today’s currency and as historian Maya Jasanoff comments, the plunder and rape that followed exceeded imagination. To view Tipu a supporter of radical Islam too does not sit very easily as while he carried out forced conversions of Hindus, he also endowed Hindu temples and employed Hindus among his chief courtiers. While his politics and his religious bent are clearly more complex than they are made out to be, what is quite undoubtedly evident is his legacy in British colonial memory as the dangerous ‘other’ of colonialism. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Tipu’s toy tiger, described as ‘man-tyger-organ’ by the poet John Keats who portrayed it as the plaything of an Eastern despot, was one of the first objects exported from India to England for public display. While Tipu’s swords, books and jewels ended up with private collectors (including Sir Walter Scott), the toy Tiger was exhibited at the East India Museum. As Jonathan Jones writes in his <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/sep/25/heritage.art" target="_blank">article</a> in the <i>Guardian</i>:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The most famous exhibit was the most macabre. It is still the most popular Indian artefact in London, and the very quintessence of a “curiosity". In 1814 a young woman from the provinces visited London. She went to the museum at East India House, one of the capital's attractions. There she shuddered to hear a dreadful moan, as of a man dying. She came face to face with a painted wooden tiger in the act of devouring its white-faced, red-coated victim. As the curator worked it, she had to be escorted from the museum "pale and trembling".</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">This toy that the frightened woman must have encountered is described in the <a href="http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/tippoos-tiger/" target="_blank">V & A website</a> as a life-size 18th century semi-automaton of a tiger devouring a prostrate British soldier. The website goes on to describe the Tiger thus:</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Concealed in the bodywork is a mechanical pipe-organ with several parts, all operated simultaneously by a crank-handle emerging from the tiger's shoulder. Inside the tiger and the man are weighted bellows with pipes attached. Turning the handle pumps the bellows and controls the air-flow to simulate the growls of the tiger and cries of the victim. The cries are varied by the approach of the hand towards the mouth and away, as the left arm - the only moving part - is raised and lowered. […] Another pair of bellows, linked to the same handle, supplies wind for a miniature organ of 18 pipes built into the tiger, with stops under the tail. Its structure is like that of European mechanical organs, but adapted for hand operation by a set of ivory button keys reached through a flap in the animal's side. The mechanism has been repaired several times and altered from its original state. It is now too fragile to be operated regularly.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The exhibition of the Tiger, argue historians, was more a matter of propaganda for the Company - making it a symbol of power over subject nations that would replace its earlier image of a trader in indigo and spices. The Seringapatna Medal, to commemorate the victory, was cast in the image of Tipu's Tiger - only this time, the British lion is rampant over the tiger. If Tipu had ever played with the idea of a triumph over British imperialism was, the story now was reversed and only his toy tiger remains one of the few symbols of his political ambitions. The toy contains a further level of complexity: the wooden tiger might have been crafted in India but the mechanism inside is French. Then again, the exhibition of the tiger in the East India Museum (and later as the prize object of the V & A) must have been absolutely fundamental to the metaphorical establishment of victory over both of these threats to the Honourable Company: the combined bogeys of Napoleon and Tippoo Sahib.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Tiger, however, seems to have fought back for centuries. Now placed among thousands of extremely valuable objects brought to Britain from its former colonial possessions, the Tiger rampant on a British soldier still challenges the ideal of British colonialism and fragile as its condition may be, the appeal of winding up the automaton is much too strong still. The video, above, of the V & A staff shows the toy in action. In a country where much of the tiger population now graces the colonial trophy rooms and where entire jungles have been replaced by a colonial apparatus of human settlements, the toy tiger, nevertheless, embodies the dangers faced by the colonial mechanism. Tigers are dangerous creatures after all and Tipu’s Tiger is modelled on a real-life incident - the death of a Lieutenant Hugh Munro who had gone out shooting in the forests of Bengal. The young Munro was the son of the hero of Buxar, Sir Hector Munro. The victory at Buxar brought almost the whole of North India under the Company’s rule. Sir Hector was, however, defeated by Tipu’s father, Hyder Ali, and </span></span><span style="font-family: "\22 trebuchet ms\22 " , sans-serif;">in Tipu’s toy tiger, </span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">the unfortunate death of Munrow junior was used as a metaphor for a possible reconquering of lands and the expulsion of a foreign power. One crucial detail </span>about the<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> tiger, however, remains unknown: whether Tipu himself ever played with the tiger is not mentioned by the historians and how important it might have ever been to him is not clear. To me, therefore, what gives the tiger its unique role as a post-colonial toy is, ironically, the status accorded to it in British India and in England even today. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The Tipu's iTiger app is available for iPhone and iPod Touch</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Most people in India, even the many who revere the complex and controversial Sultan as a national hero, do not know about the toy tiger and they certainly haven't seen it in its home in faraway London. As a toy, its appeal is that it allows us to play with an alternate reality to that of British colonialism. I suspect that same appeal could not have escaped the would-be colonial masters of India when they brought it over to London. For them, here was a powerful emblem of anti-British sentiment to be played against itself. However, the tiger itself remains - a constant replaying of an alternate history to colonialism. In fact, even for the Company, despite its attempt to 'replay' as their symbol of victory, the toy tiger was a dangerous plaything - Lord Wellesley is said to have wanted it locked up the Tower of London. From John Keats to Richard Sharpe, iconic Britishers, whether real or fictional, highbrow or otherwise, have stood in awe of the tiger-toy. In fact, even the experts who demonstrate how to use the tiny organ inside the tiger seem to need to impress on us its colonial predicament: at the end of the video (see above) you hear them playing 'Rule Britannia'! *</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Indeed, it is because of this colonial obsession with the tiger that I am intrigued by it. There have been many copies of the tiger-toy - a ceramic version (called <i>The Death of Munrow</i>) can be found in the V & A itself. The many copies and inversions of the tiger image symbolise for me the colonial power’s struggle to come to grips with its ‘other’ possible alternate realities and meanwhile, the original remains where it is - both a disturbing reminder of colonialism and a threat. That dangerous supplement - moved outside the borders of the Indian empire but into the heart of colonial London. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">For those who are interested, Susan Stronge’s authoritative book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tipus-Tigers-Susan-Stronge/dp/1851775757"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;"><i>Tipu’s Tigers</i></span></a>, is available on Amazon <i>Prime. </i>Richard Davis in his <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Indian-Images-Richard-Davis/dp/8120816927/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=" target="_blank">Lives of Indian Images</a> </i>describes how the choice of the tiger image would have resonated well with both Hindus (whose gods have tigers as their <i>vahanas</i> or ‘vehicles’) and Muslims. He also discusses other important aspects of the tiger image in Tipu’s court. Maya Jasanoff’s <i><a href="https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=fx3obJai0RMC&rdid=book-fx3obJai0RMC&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read&pcampaignid=books_booksearch_viewport" target="_blank">Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 </a></i>contains a detailed discussion of Tipu’s Tiger and the aftermath of the siege of Seringapatna. Jonathan James article in <i>The Guardian </i>can be found here: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/sep/25/heritage.art"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: normal;">http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2003/sep/25/heritage.art</span></a> and there are a couple more interesting blog posts on the Tiger that I found online.</span></span></div>
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* I am grateful to Dr Amrita Sen for having pointed out the 'Rule Britannia' part.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">As some of you know already, my book <i>Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books </i>was published in September 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. Here is the blurb from the publisher’s website:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Grand Theft Auto IV </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: left;">saw more copies being sold than the latest superhero blockbusters or the last </span><i style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif; text-align: left;">Harry Potter</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: left;"> novel. Most of its players and critics commend its storytelling experience; however, when it comes to academic analysis, mainstream humanities research seems confused about what to do with such a phenomena. The problem is one of classification, in the first instance: 'is it a story, is it a game, or is it a machine?' Consequently, it also becomes a problem of methodology – which traditional discipline, if any, should lay claim to video game studies becoming the moot question. After weathering many controversies with regards to their cultural status, video games are now widely accepted as a new textual form that requires its own media-specific analysis. Despite the rapid rise in research and academic recognition, video game studies has seldom attempted to connect with older media and to locate itself within broader substantive discourses of the earlier and more established disciplines, especially those in the humanities. </span><i style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif; text-align: left;">Video Games and Storytelling</i><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; text-align: left;"> aims to readdress this gap and to bring video games to mainstream humanities research and teaching. In the process, it is also a rethinking story versus game debate as well as other key issues in game studies such as time, agency, involvement and textuality in video game-narratives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #555555;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">(For more info, such as the Table of Contents and ordering, see the publisher's website: </span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Video-Games-and-Storytelling/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137525048">http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Video-Games-and-Storytelling/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137525048</a>)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For those inclined towards electronic editions, a Kindle version is also available now. Here’s the link: </span><span style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Storytelling-Reading-Playing-ebook/dp/B017DQ7J3E/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1/276-1064401-1083624">http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Storytelling-Reading-Playing-ebook/dp/B017DQ7J3E/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1/276-1064401-1083624</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">What I don’t say in the blurb but feel I should here is that the book comes with a few warnings. There’s quite a bit of Deleuze in there (as there has been and will be in my work) and there’s my obsession with the now extinct THQ Studio’s hallmark game series <i>STALKER. </i>Predictably, of course, there’s Tarkovsky, Lewis Carroll and PKD rubbing shoulders inside discussions on videogames. My interest in paratexts and walkthroughs takes the form of a chapter-length discussion and of course, time, agency and involvement (called ‘immersion’ by some) figure importantly in what I have to say. Finally, I end with a discussion of eggs and which end to break them on. Ludology vs. Narratology has turned into the egg-endian debate that the Lilliputs in <i>Gulliver’s Travels </i>consider so sacrosanct.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here's the email address for those wishing to request a review copy: <a href="mailto:reviews@palgrave.com" style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;" target="_blank"><span class="il">reviews</span>@<span class="il">palgrave</span>.com</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Finally, I love the book cover. Thanks especially to Palgrave Macmillan for all their help and patience. </span></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-86153340627881740362015-10-02T15:42:00.000+01:002016-08-08T15:47:36.077+01:00Shush! A Hushed Note on Postcolonialism and Diversity<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Again, regarding postcolonialism, some of the things I heard around me (besides much enthusiasm for having it in game studies) were rather worrying. The broad concerns that I have are that postcolonialism does not seem to be researched beyond the older theories of Said, Bhabha and Fanon. people believe that these do not apply to nations such as China and to world literature. Here is, I think, a great deal to be done in terms of increasing the awareness of games researchers to how notions of post colonialism remain current. Also I need to do a lot more reading for my own upcoming book on the subject. More recent work by Pheng Cheah, David Damrosch, Emily Apter, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Spivak herself is important in countering views that we are now post-race and that post-colonialism is a thing of the nineties. It’s not like that the problems of empire have all said goodbye (even with Hardt and Negri’s grand hope in the potential of the multitude). Videogames and games research have had a longish disconnect with scenarios of post colonialism (despite early work by some scholars such as Barry Atkins and Sybille Lammes) and this needs to be addressed.</div>
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I am also part of the diversity committee for DiGRA and on a happier note, I was part of a meeting where much fruitful discussion took place. The recommendation of lower fees for delegates and especially students from lower-income countries is extremely welcome. As is the survey of people coming from various diversity groups. I strongly believe, though, that diversity goes far beyond ticking boxes - all the many levels of exclusive discourse need to be thought through and given due recognition. And it doesn’t hurt to try; it <i>has </i>hurt for long because I haven’t tried - again, I’m speaking for myself. Next DiGRA will see a diversity workshop happen and I’m looking forward to it. I also spoke to a promising young scholar on Gamergate on how some women also adopt the Gamergaters’ avatar Vivian James and play out their discourse. So in thinking about diversity, one needs to be wary of falling into stereotypes. Here’s an example. I was horribly treated by the immigration officer at Heathrow this time and my Facebook post had many people commenting on it with the assumption that that person were a white male. She was most probably Asian - hailing (an earlier generation of hers did) from my own country or our neighbours. It’s complex and it hurts but there is so much more to be done. A book that is on the top of my reading list is Adrienne’s <i>Gaming at the Edges</i> - I think it will teach me a lot and I’m super-disappointed that I missed her book launch event in Dundee. </div>
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DiGRA 2015 started us off on diversity in games and the diversity committee has been very actively working on some of the key issues that have been relevant in the community. DiGRA 2016 has seen a greater interest in diversity and 2017 promises a workshop to bring the key problems to the table for a discussion amongst the community. </div>
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(The inspiration for the title is Barry Atkins's blog 'Shush! Speaking Quietly about Videogames')</div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-88796869030384802682015-07-06T11:43:00.001+01:002015-07-06T11:45:38.041+01:00Times of India Article on Reviving Gyan Chaupar and Golok Dham<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It was a whim that I pursued about finding storytelling elements in ancient games - just to prove that the point I was making in my book was vindicated by aeons of human history. It was Jesper Juul who put me on to it - he asked me at a conference (where I was presenting on <i>Karma </i>in videogames) what ancient Indian games and game theory had to say about play cultures. Jesper knew about the <i>khel </i>/ <i>lila </i>concepts and I wasn't surprised given the thorough scholar that he is. However, what he set me thinking about was <i>Pacheesi </i>or <i>Chaupar </i>and <i>Chaturanga. </i>Now, as many know, I'm a Deleuzian at heart and although my attempts to connect Deleuze with Indian philosophy have been resisted by some, I couldn't help connecting the Deleuzian notion of the 'Divine Game' (see <i>Difference and Repetition</i>) to Indian philosophy. Somewhere from my childhood, I remembered tales of Shiva and Parvati playing a divine game of dice. As I was writing my book (<i>Videogames and Storytelling </i>to be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year), I thought I simply had to find out. With my research, I stumbled on <i>Gyan Chaupar. </i>I also found scholars who had already worked on it. Typically, videogame studies does not seem to have connected with them.<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N8T6bZu_GPU/VZpblikkd8I/AAAAAAAARk4/vTOrklsgM6o/s1600/Gyan_chaupar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-N8T6bZu_GPU/VZpblikkd8I/AAAAAAAARk4/vTOrklsgM6o/s320/Gyan_chaupar.jpg" width="238" /></a></div>
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Gyan Chaupar board in the National Museum, New Delhi</div>
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My friend, Subhayu Mazumder, of <i>Times of India </i>said he liked the idea. And off I went to do more research. The first fruits of this has appeared in an article in <i>ToI </i>and I have plans to do more with this. Here's an excerpt of the article:<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">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 <i>Gyan Chaupar, Gyan Bazi </i>or <i>Moksha Pat, </i>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. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">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 <i>Gyan Chaupar.</i> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For the rest of the article, click here: </span><a href="http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812&articlexml=WEEKEND-FOCUS-Board-Of-Life-04072015006006" style="text-align: left;">http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812...</a></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-21886209998659727542015-07-03T20:24:00.000+01:002015-07-03T20:32:43.523+01:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">As the Indian summer raged at its worst in Calcutta and the monsoons were somewhere down South still and tantalisingly close but not yet there, I received a more than welcome invitation that was to take me to Bombay to participate in a discussion on the scope of fiction. As I stepped out of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport and climbed into the waiting taxi, the driver told me that I was in luck. The rains came pouring down soon enough and shortly afterwards, I met my hosts Jyothi and Rajat in their flat. I was here to be part of Syntalk, a weekly talk show based on themes and notions of all kinds where speakers with very disparate perspectives to offer on a topic are brought together to participate in an unrehearsed discussion. What you say (then and there) is what you get. To give you an idea as to the diversity of the topics, the one prior to ours was on poison and the next week, we were told would be the episode on water. Just water. Well, water fascinates me (as readers of an earlier post on </span><i style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">Fallout 3 </i><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">might remember) and I must listen to that episode soon. All the episodes are available for free as podcasts on Soundcloud; the aim that the couple have is ambitious - they wish to record as many aspects of human thought as they can, for the future.</span><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Ask me to speak on the scope of fiction and I can go on for weeks on end. Fortunately, the other speakers were the eminent authority on narrative theory, Professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Anjum Rajabali, Bollywood scriptwriter of <i>Rajneeti </i>and <i>Satyagraha </i>fame and they had their unique takes on fiction. I have worked under Professor Nair at IIT Delhi and there is much that I agree with in her<i> </i>book, <i>Narrative Gravity. </i>She started the conversation with Daniel Dennett’s comment that human beings build stories as birds build nests and then raised the question of narrative versus fiction as well as how the individual related to narratives. Anjum is the first film scriptwriter whom I have met and it was indeed very interesting to hear him speak about how he constructs his stories and to compare in my head the storyboards for games with the scripts that he writes for films. </span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The SynTalk organisers have already summarised our discussion so I shall content myself with a copy-paste from their web space. The talk itself is on SoundCloud and is a free podcast. Do have a listen. I am sure you will have as much fun as I had in being a part of it. As the reader, are you also not the writer … and the player? Well, here’s what the three of us had to say:</span></span><br />
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And here's a fun summary from the hosts:<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">SynTalk thinks about narratives & stories, while constantly wondering whether it is the stories that ‘make us up’ and give us our self-hood. We delve into the worlds of literature, film making, video games, philosophy, cognitive sciences, and linguistics to explore why & how we tell & understand stories. The concepts are derived off / from Aristotle, Coleridge, Diderot, Georges Polti, Hitchcock, Labov, E M Forster, Lumière brothers, de Beauvoir, Augusto Boal, Chomsky, Salim-Javed, David Lodge, & Dennett, among others. How identity, time, memory, & emotions are knotted together by fiction. Is story telling like a flight simulator, with most of the rewards but none of the risk? How narratives however, are not synonymous with fiction and, cover both fact & fiction. Do we remember narratively, & create causal links (with mnemonic durability) between the past, present and the possible futures? The difference of a story from a (film) script, & the importance of the dramatic centre? Is narrative experience a (playful) exploration of the space of possibilities – i.e., is all fiction a game? How incompleteness is also a valid possibility in narratives. Why are morals so critical in any satisfying story? How important is it to have a sense of the ending, & how can one return the narrative time to the present? And, in the face of the crisis of our death, is our life more like episodic TV serials, rather than a Greek tragedy? Is lying or cheating a related ability to telling stories? Are stories (video games) more about tying (dying) and untying (undying)? Are there cultures without stories? How there are real physiological reactions and a willing suspension of disbelief on seeing (say) a film in a dark theatre. How can a screenwriter be moved to tears by her own story? Why can’t there be stories without characters or emotions? Are there only a finite number of plots or narratives? What do you see when you look into the mirror in a first-person shooter game? Is there a serial killer inside you? The links between ‘queen died’, 36, spect-actor, chaos, Gilgamesh, Spiderman, Flower, Lagaan, Alzheimer’s, Max Payne, jumping over the chair, alienation, Psycho Mantis, & cheat codes. How are we able to create stories, but are not able to count the number of words in our head? Is social reality the most fictionalized, & is monologue always secondary to collaborative dialogue in story telling? Why aren’t video games laugh-out-aloud funny, & does it have anything to do with the fact that you can’t tickle yourself? Is the future of fiction likely to involve a range of affects & small scale emotions? Can the story strike back at the player (or the reader)? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (game studies, literature, Presidency University, Kolkata), Prof. Rukmini Bhaya Nair (linguistics, narrative theory, IIT Delhi, New Delhi), & Anjum Rajabali (screenwriting, Mumbai).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: #323333;">So what do you think? In case you are interested, here's SynTalk's channel: </span></span>https://soundcloud.com/syntalk. I'm about to listen to the latest episode on 'The Meanings of Information'.</div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-39311447325136179962015-05-31T21:17:00.003+01:002015-06-27T23:18:37.691+01:00No Women Police Officers in Videogames?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As Aiden Pearce in that irritatingly repetitive but nevertheless entertaining game called <i>Watch-Dogs</i>, I have killed many policemen and escaped from many others. In squad cars, helicopters and motor-boats they came after me and either shot me dead or got punished big time. But they were all men! As far as I know, women police officers are not that uncommon in the United States. Indeed, I see many of them even on Calcutta streets and certainly loads more at the airport here than I did back in them days. I trained a group of policemen in English language skills quite a while ago and as I hung around with them quite a bit, so I should know. Strangely, however, there are no women police officers in <i>Watch Dogs</i>. Or <i>GTA </i>or <i>Mafia 2 </i>and you will certainly struggle to find me a name. No women police officers in videogames? Why, I wonder.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Maybe, in games like <i>Mafia: City of Lost Heaven </i>or <i>L.A. Noire </i>that are set in the late 40s and early 50s, there would be less of a chance of expecting them but by and large, the police in videogames are male. Obviously, this is a stark contrast to films. Hollywood movies are full of them and I remember Rani Mukherjee as a police officer in <i>Mardaani </i>(which received mixed reviews from feminists in India) and Tabu is all set to star as a tough cop in the forthcoming film, <i>Drishyam. </i>While I was writing all this, I've had a couple of people correct me on Facebook: Shantam Basu reminds me of Mia in <i>Need for Speed: Most Wanted </i>and Arno<span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.0" style="color: #141823; line-height: 16px;"><span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.0.0.0"><span style="background-color: #f6f7f8;"> </span><span style="background-color: white;">Görgen</span></span></span><span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1" style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 16px;"><span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.0"> says that the '</span><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.$end:0:$text0:0">only one I remember is a undervover cop in Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. So there.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #141823;"><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 16px;"><i>Bollywood film star Tabu as a police officer in the film Drishyam</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1" style="background-color: white;"><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".f2.1:4:1:$comment10100255220430238_10100255222945198:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1.$comment-body.0.$end:0:$text0:0"><span style="color: #141823;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Undercover, yes, but what's the problem with depicting women police officers in uniform. Is it discrimination or just a sense of bad form (which, for me, might be a similar thing)? Arno suggests in his Facebook comment that 'i</span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141823;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">t seems easier to implement women as soldiers than as police officers. Maybe the morality of police work in games is related to 'masculine' values like honour or 'heroism' while military shooters are amoral and therefore more open to female characters?' Maybe so. But then it is a privileging of 'honour' and 'heroism' that is reversed in movies such as the ones I've mentioned. So if we can have a female archaeologist (Lara Croft is that and much else) and a female spy (Cate Archer of <i>No One Lives Forever</i>) kick ass, then why not have women police officers?</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #141823;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Well, just a thought developers ... In any case, this could be seen as symptomatic of a broader (and more serious) issue. </span></span></span></span></div>
Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-69907642850819760412015-05-20T11:11:00.001+01:002015-07-08T08:32:25.949+01:00DiGRA 2015 in Lueneberg<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Much has happened in these many days when I have been away from ‘Ludus Ex’. I write a (fairly) regular column in the <i>Times of India</i>, Kolkata edition and that has given me another non-academic outlet for my thoughts. A blog, however, has its own sense of freedom and flow. So here I am.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Here I am sitting on the upper floor of a cafe in Luneberg in Germany and telling you about it. Luneberg is a fairy-tale town with its houses seemingly made of chocolate and liquorice. Medieval German houses dating back to the 12th century and two huge solid churches that were ringing their bells when I entered the cafeteria. The many towers and turrets of these old houses are proper <i>Assassin’s Creed </i>territory and one expects that Ezio or Altair will be leaping off them and hiding in the haystack below. It is 10:30 a.m now and the streets are still empty. Germany is on holiday today - not sure, why. I am here for DiGRA 2015. By a quite strange quirk of fate, I have three presentations to make here. DiGRA begins this afternoon and I will be part of Mark Wolf’s panel on <i>Videogames across the World</i>. Mark himself is not here and the panel will be led by the eminent Dutch videogames scholar, Joost Raessens. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I arrived yesterday and as I was taking in the sights and sounds of this very pretty toy-town and trying to survive conversations with my now very rusty German, a bunch of very varied English accents greeted me: DiGRA early arrivals had hit town. They had also hit the local brew - Heidegeist. With its deceptively After-Eightish taste, the minty Heidegeist was mighty enough to fell a couple of conference participants. Amongst the survivors and abstainers, too, one could feel that the DiGRA spirit was equally potent. </span></div>
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[The organisers of DiGRA pulled off their game with so much poise and balance. Back centre:Mathias, the magister ludi, in front of him: Sonia Fizek, in that athletic position: Niklas Schrape and far to the left: Nina Cerezo]</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just before I met the others, Matthias (Fuchs), the main organiser of this DiGRA, popped out of one of those toy houses and said hello. The last time I had met him was in Calcutta when he visited in 2011. I also met Tanya Krzywinska and Doug Brown shortly afterwards - I had last seen them in 2006 at Brunel University, I think.This DiGRA looks like its going to be one for reunions and I’m already walking down a mesh of many memory lanes and by-lanes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Being at heart always the flaneur, I had signed up for a city tour organised by the hosts, Leuphana University. Bylanes again. This time, however, these were real lanes through which we were taken around by our very capable student-guide, Ann-Kathrin Wagner. Excessive salt-mining in the Middle Ages had caused random subsidences in the town and the houses looked like prototypes for Hundertwasser’s designs. Apparently Heinrich Heine had lived here, Bach had practised on the organ at St. Johannes Kirche and the composer of a very famous German song (something with the moon in it) was born here. After an hour of time-travel around horse-drawn carriages, medieval cranes and a fascinating board-games shop, it was time for DiGRA 2015.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">[The Johannis Kirche: Bach learnt to play here (the organ and not videogames!)]</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I started DiGRA with a panel on the present and future of Game Studies consisting of Frans Mayra, Sebastian Deterding, Joost Raessens and other Game Studies luminaries. The debate was around whether Game Studies could be expanded to include everything. The Humanities focus of Games Studies was duly noted (‘Does that make Game Studies a Humanities discipline? Should universities award a B.A in Games Studies?’ - these were the questions that came to mind then) and someone compared it to early media studies. There was a claim that gamification could be seen as exploding that temporal dispositif. Instead of focusing on the versus, as in choice versus play, rails versus sandbox, new ways to future-proof games research were called for. Someone used that magic word ‘assemblage’ and although I’m not sure whether it was used in the Deleuzoguattarian sense, I couldn’t help feeling smug.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The ‘Videogames around the World’ panel went well although I wish there were more people attending. I learnt a lot about the gaming situation in Finland, the Netherlands, Australia and Venezuela. What I missed was more on how the local culture influenced the game design as this is something that I am interested in given the Indian context (as I said in my own presentation). Frans Mayra did mention how the Norse legends were used in some Finnish games and how an Americanised version of the Norse legends was used in <i>Max Payne </i>(remember the Ragnarok Club). Tom Apperley gave a very lucid account of the scenario in Australia and Venezuela - apparently, in the latter, videogames are mostly only available through torrents. Especially, if they show the same weapons that are used by the army and the police. Another, albeit slightly lesser, surprise came when Joost (Raessens) exclaimed ‘Shah Rukh Khan’ when I showed an image from <i>Ra-One</i>. Bollywood and its ubiquitous fame. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first keynote was next. Tanya was at her best and the Gothic in gaming came alive again. As she linked up the Gothic in gaming to the history of the genre in ‘Monk’ Lewis, Radcliffe and later writers and moviemakers, she identified the five coordinates of the genre as: character / story-patterns, mise-en-scene and style, emotional modality, function and entropy (and the sublime). She describes the Gothic as a ‘grammar … and too complicated to call a genre.’ In a much-tweeted about academic twist, she redefined gamification as a form of genre remediation as she examined the links between Gothic videogames and their generic ancestors in earlier media.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Day One ended with a Gothic descent into the cellars of Lueneburg’s Maelzer pub where keeping one’s head unbumped against the low medieval ceilings was the ultimate test of sobriety. Despite the adventures that ensued, I was up early and ready for Astrid Ensslin’s talk on ‘Unnatural Narratology’. After this, more on lit and gaming in Inderst and Goergen’s talk on utopia and Feng Zhu on the ‘Implied Player’. Had a fairly long conversation with Feng on ‘minor literature’ and also my problems with Iser and reader-response. Bear in mind though that this was how I came to Game Studies in the first place! Because of my clumsiness with finding things, I missed part of Rudolf’s presentation which he co-authored with Arno Groegen. Have much to discuss re: utopia with Rudolf. However, we missed each other again this time as he is in faraway Canada.</span></div>
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[I used the example of <i>Thralled - </i> game based on slavery that Shailesh Prabhu told me about. A Brazilian delegate at the conference told me that Isaura is based on a real-life character]</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then there was my own paper on slavery in videogames. Kind of in the spirit of Tanya’s use of ‘gamification’, I had framed it as a remediation of the slave narrative via the computer game medium. In the paper, albeit still in its early stages, I stress the ambiguity of the slave-narrative - that is the experience of the total lack of agency and the simultaneous ‘illusion of agency’. This, according to me, emerges even more clearly in the videogame than in earlier media. The other point that I half-raised but that was taken up by Sonia Fizek (postdoc at Gamification lab and a longtime friend) was regarding how the slave’s non-agency and trauma could be seen as a metaphor for rethinking agency in games. She mentioned Stefano Gualeni’s game (Stefano was there in the audience, by the way!), <i>Necessary Evil</i>, as an illustrative example. I’ll have to play it to know. However, all thanks to Sonia, I will now explore the agency/ illusion of agency from the point of unfreedom and ambiguity. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sonia’s own paper followed mine. Presented together with CERN anthropologist Ann Dippel's paper, her work looks at using games to make people perform scientific work (especially involving participation in experiments) and then analysing the big data. Sonia and Anne came up with the concept of ‘labourisation’ instead of gamification in an article they wrote together. The following two papers were on videogames in Eastern Europe. Jaroslav Svelch presented on how videogames were used for subversive protest against the repressive Communist regime. <i>Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square</i> is one of the games that I remember from this presentation. Svelch’s earlier work on adventure games that address problems in Czech history an be found here (<a href="http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/Svelch_MiT7.pdf"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/Svelch_MiT7.pdf</span></a>). Pyotr Sterczeweski, another new face at DiGRA, presented on construction of the notion of the political in Polish board games using Chantal Mouffe’s theory of the agonistic versus the antagonistic. I was surprised and impressed to learn that board-games in Poland are so deeply connected to their national history. </span></div>
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[Wenceslas Square: Indiana Jones cometh!]</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">From history board-games, I moved to an entire panel on games and history with Adam Chapman, Esther Macallum-Stewart and Tom Apperley. This was one of the highlights of the conference for me. The opportunity to hear Esther meld her knowledge of the First World War and videogames through her analysis of </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Valiant Hearts </i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">was pure pleasure. She argued that there has been a certain stereotypical representation of the war in European historiography and that videogames too have taken that on. In contrast the comic / graphic novel such as </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Charley’s War </i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">are perhaps more realistic models that any such presentation of history could consider. Adam also focused on how a particular type of presentation of history was privileged in the triple-A games and how it seemed to back up the ‘great men’ approach to history. Tom’s paper focused on the alternative reality aspect of history games and he started with a challenge to the Marxist historian Edward Hallett Carr. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After this, of course, there was three-sided football, beer and barbecue. And there was the young game designer from Copenhagen, Sabine Harrer, asking me to play her game (modelled on a similar thing created by a Feminist theorist) which involved colouring images of female genitalia. It also uses the C-word in its title. While this was, I admit, quite a shock to me at first, watching the reactions of all the others who played was really really interesting.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I also got to meet Chris Bateman with whom I hope to have many more conversations and also perhaps play the Royal Game of Ur someday. The night ended at around 2:30 a.m for me with a walk from the University to town through a rather spooky bridge and a park full of chairs. After catching up with friends such as Sebastian Moering, Rune Klevjer and Emil Hammar, it was time to call it another day.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Karen Palmer’s keynote ‘Is Hacking the Brain the Future of Gaming?’ was a breath of fresh air in that it pointed at possibilities for videogames using her neuroscience-based aids to games. Her syncself game of Parkour is aimed to provide players an environment where they can explore the concept of self. She calls it ‘not just art, not film but a whole trend towards mindfulness’. Palmer also discussed the example of <i>Nevermind , a </i>biofeedback-enhanced adventure horror game -exactly what I conceptualised in NTU with Russell Murray.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After this, I went for the session that I was waiting for for months - Mia Consalvo and Chris Paul on teaching videogames. The takeaways were many: from Conway’s game of life on paper to writing prompts on playthroughs there were many suggestions across the board. I was quite happy to see that I use the same initial texts that were recommended by Mia. Hanli Geyser from South Africa said she used African board games to get gaming across to students who are unable to access games technology. This is similar to my situation here in India although unlike in South Africa, I rarely have university computers available for my students. Recommendations came in from all around: Marsha Kinder’s <i>Playing with Power</i>, the first issue of <i>Games and Culture </i>and Ian Bogost’s ‘Here is How Games Persuade’ are some that I noted. I have much more in my notes but I feel that this session requires a separate post sometime. My only regret was that I had a paper to present in a parallel session afterwards and therefore, missed the discussion on setting assignments. All in all, a great takeaway from a great conference.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My own paper on minor literature as a framework for reading games comes out of my earlier work. Here’s Claire Colebrook on what it means for Deleuze and Guattari:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A minor literature, also, does not appeal to a standard but creates and transforms any noFon of the standard. If I seek to write a film script that is just like the popular and financially successful Star Wars (appealing to the spirit and tradiFon of American science ficFon), then this is a major work. But if I aim to produce a film that criFcs may not even recognise as a film, or that will demand a redefiniFon of cinema, then I produce a minor work. For Deleuze and GuaTari all great literature is minor literature, refusing any already given standard of recogniFon or success. (Colebrook 2002, 25)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In my paper, by looking at paratexts of videogames as exemplary of the ‘minor’ character of the games, I raise questions about the very distinction of the text and paratext (by the way the latter was a popular word in this DiGRA) as leading to the basis of narrativity in games. This paper is going to be out as a much reworked version in my forthcoming book, <i>Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. </i>The other paper in the session that I attended was on the use of Genettian focalisation in videogames. Interesting but something that could be expanded as a framework, perhaps.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The conference party at the Salon Hansen was nice. There was videogame art on the walls and I got to do something that is one of my main reasons behind going to conferences: speak to younger researchers. There was Ea (like in EA Sports she said she challenged everything) putting up a spirited defence of Espen Aarseth’s take on gaming and others who disagreed. After a relatively productive networking time when I also got to see some eminent names in game studies charging up the dance floor, I thought I’d beat a retreat after realising that the shots in my hand were jaegermeisters!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eros and Thanatos - the creation and destruction of everything human. DiGRA was coming to an end and Tom Apperley was there to see that the world of game conferences was to be shaken up. Speaking on ‘nerdcore’ or representations of porn in videogames, Tom managed to shock quite a few people in there with a couple of photos of pin-up models wearing videogame gloves (and nothing else, just in case you had doubts). Making a case for viewing this as an excessive projection of masculinity, he highlighted the archiving and the legitimising characteristics of nerd core. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Tom’s talk was followed by the thanatos part - Markus Rautzenberg’s keynote on uncertainty and death was entertaining and thought-provoking. Some of this, I felt, connects to my own work on death (<a href="https://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/back_issues/Vol.%202.1/Mukherjee/62762gp.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">https://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/back_issues/Vol.%202.1/Mukherjee/62762gp.html</span></a>) although I connect more to the uncertainty and the temporal multiplicity of death in videogames and not so much the psychological experience. Bringing in a whole group of philosophers, such as Lacan, Bateson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Deleuze, Rautzenberg provided a deep, dense and thought-provoking angle on uncertainty. They video recorded the talk and I must watch it whenever they have it online.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I also need to quickly mention Olli Leino and Sebastian Moering's paper on applying existentialist philosophy in videogames. The talk left me with me many questions but I am only going to say that someone finally decided to bring up Sartre in Game Studies. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All conferences are about missed connections and papers that you really wanted to hear but couldn’t. My biggest miss was Niklas Schrape speaking on Georg Klaus and games. Also Emil Hammar on ethical diversity, the panel with Jesper Juul in it and of course, the second session of Teaching Game Studies were big misses. I didn't know William Huber was at the conference until today when I started looking at the Twitter feeds more carefully. However, because I didn't bother too much with Twitter this time, I also missed the GamerGate trolls - happily.</span></div>
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Lueneberg memories</div>
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I can still hear the bells of Johanniskirche and see the huge organ when I close my eyes. Living in the 150-year old house owned by the Dartennes was a treat in itself. Finally, the dark beer at the Pons pub and the nice sushi at the bizarrely-named Pearl Harbour restaurant with my new-found friends are memories to cherish. And for once, I held the chopsticks right!</div>
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[A Sushi restaurant called Pearl Harbour: the name kinda shocked me into holding my chopsticks right - a feat that I've never managed elsewhere]</div>
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As I sit in Calcutta now, listening to the endless sea of traffic outside, it's time for that game called university teaching and exam-invigilations (labourisation, someone?). The next DiGRA is to be held in Dundee, Scotland. Strangely, I was in Dundee less than two weeks ago - so Reload!</div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7656310691179338664.post-43729637187958533992014-09-09T18:45:00.004+01:002015-06-28T19:46:59.303+01:00Rediscovering Gaming at Khoj<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My second time at Khoj. The place of discoveries. In the middle of an area called Khirkee - the door to no one knows what. No doubt there was a gate here or a door there in the days of yore. Now, the landscape is a heap of broken images - very wasteland, post-apocalyptic almost. on entering you pass a huge garbage heap where cows, horses and humans on charpoys are equally at ease with each other and the rubble around them. It has rained and the mud pools make the contrast with the swank mall opposite so much more sharp. The community in Khirkee, they tell me, is a mix of the migrant poor and expats from the not-so-rich countries. The walls are full of bizarre graffiti - the Buddha with a gas mask ( which was there last year too) and another which the words 'red', 'pink' and 'green' on a whitewashed wall. Behind it, a huge house lies derelict and has opened its innards for the world to see. In front, a man is busy making samosas on top of a hand-cart. Kind of breaking into my reverie, there was this game called Home. I'll come to it in a moment. For now, it is the hotel where I lived that must speak of ... Flourish Inn, an intelligent pun on the purpose for which it has been built. Apparently, it serves those who come to India for health tourism as I found out later ( to some trepidation I admit). The Max hospital is close by. The doorbell rang and I answered it to find a Central Asian looking woman with a hijab standing at the door. Seeing me she vigorously shook her head - wrong country. In the hallway I heard someone speaking some unknown language. A dark man with dreadlocks was on the phone. Why Khirkee and its environs form such a multicultural hub I do not know but in the general assumption that one has of the ever assimilating and welcoming India, this diversity is almost a given and one wouldn't blink really to see foreign and unfamiliar faces in the middle of the capital city. Recent events, however, have changed things drastically with a political leader encouraging acts of racism against two African residents.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The story of Indians being deported from Africa is not new. My friends who escaped Amin's regime will have many stories. The reverse, however, albeit unknown until now, might well have its seeds being sown: Home, the game is about one's sense of belonging especially when one is uprooted from what one thinks one belongs to. Set in the Delhi of the future, in the aftermath of race riots and the consequent preventive deportation by the government, the game describes the dream that a Senegalese girl has about the place where she grew up and from where she has been deported. Sent back 'home' is what the governments call it though. She tells her brother about Khirkee where she lived and went to school. But she can only describe it in her dream. Set in the bloodshot red background of a future -day Khirkee, the game shows that maze of narrow lanes where I keep losing my way. The two swank malls on the other side of he road have disappeared in the game's landscape. Instead you have huge billboards with scraps of text from the letters she wrote to her brother. You encounter no passers-by - only paramilitary personnel walking by in twos. Auto-ricks haws and cars whiz by and you can cross the road and enter the maze of Khirkee. As you look for your home you find cut up pieces of the letters that you wrote and your journey within that red dream that you are having is your identity. Home is the creation of Vinit, who is an architect by profession and a game designer only sometimes. I played the game only when it was being set up and thereafter, I kept going back to watch others play. Yes, watch other get lost in the bylans of Khirkee and feel my head swimming as I too lost the bearings of identity. Especially when I remembered my own rootlessness or maybe 'hiraeth' that Welsh word for longing for a home that is not your home, when I had to leave Nottingham after those seven years when I felt I had finally had a home. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">'It's Khirkee that does things to people'. Shraddha was on her smoking break when I walked into her 'installation'. Although it's not one but many installations and you will still find them in unexpected corners of Khirkee long after the four-day exhibition is over. Did I tell you that the Khoj Artists' Residency ends on Monday. Do go and visit if you are in Delhi. So Shraddha has been painting game boards and leaving them for people to use and it is fascinating for her to see random people, adults even, gather at odd times to play a game of Bagh Bakri or Parcheesi on the streetside makeshift boards that she builds for them. In the extremely male world of nighttime Khirkee, to look at the huddles of tired textile workers suddenly coming to life over painted boards of all those games that we learn in childhood and then spend the rest of our lives forgetting. So as parts of Khirkee spring into action to become game boards at random points of time, I move on to the others designers at Khoj. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mohini Freya Datta is Bengali expat and lives in New York designing indie games. Very much on the Indiecade scene, Mohini now has had a good look at the Indian Indie developers. I look forward to a connect between Indiecade and the Nasscom GDC. Mohini's game board is a city but it's a city that becomes itself only when you decide so and how you decide so. It's a game space that is all about negotiating the game rules for yourself. Mohini has a slew of interesting games in her kitty and you can find out about them here: . From Mohini's installation, and after a couple of cigarettes, I went over to look for Krishnarjun, who has this uber-cool board game where four mythical creatures each from a different cultural mythos, tries to become real. The game, a three and half hour board game played with 159 cards, had the players engrossed for over three hours and it was fun to see the flailing arms and the general mayhem around the game board. Krishnarjun has also written a book on an alternate reality Jadavpur University and I’m looking forward to visiting my alternate-reality alma mater. My own talk was on the broad and rather ambitious topic of videogames in India. A bit stats heavy (I was trying to make some sense of the industry with Padmini Ray Murray), it might have been a tad daunting for those who came for a more artistic discussion. I did introduce a few problem ideas about how India is (mis)represented in videogames and also how <i>karma </i>and <i>avatar </i>are words that are so loosely used in gaming parlance without exploring their roots.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a very interesting mix of people milled around the passages of Khoj, I took a walk down Khirkee looking for those game boards that Shraddha has placed. A casual stroll turned into a memory-lane walk as I stood face-to-face with the Buddha of the gas mask.</span><br />
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<i>Keynoting at Khoj</i></div>
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Souvikhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08094119647182783480noreply@blogger.com0