Showing posts with label Slider. Show all posts

Souvik Saturday, December 27, 2025 , , , No comments

 

Indian Boardgames, Colonial Avatars: Transculturation, Colonialism and Boardgames

My latest book is out now. Although I haven't yet got my hands on a copy yet, my yuletide celebrations have started on a high note.

How did an Indian game meant to teach the process of rebirth change into the children’s race-game, Snakes and Ladders? Why does the Bengali language use Dutch loan-words for the suits of cards? How do the rules of Chess change in India and Europe? The answers to these and other related questions can be obtained after examining in depth the relationship of colonialism to boardgames.



Focusing on Indian boardgames and their European versions, this book explores how the British Empire's appropriation of ancient games had a signal effect on identity and culture in the formerly colonized countries of the Global South.

My new book

Souvik Thursday, September 01, 2022 , , , , No comments

 So my new book is out. You can get it on the Bloomsbury website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/videogames-in-the-indian-subcontinent-9789354356919/

Here's what it is about:

Description

Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations 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.
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.

Table of Contents

Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent
Section One: Development
1 Digital Technology and Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: An Attempted History
2 The Videogame Industry in the Indian Subcontinent: The Current Scenario
Section Two: Cultures
3 Diverse Subcontinent, Ludic Cultures: The Non-Digital Game Cultures as Context
4 Digital Gaming Cultures in the Indian Subcontinent
Section Three: Representation
5 Representations of the Subcontinent in Videogames Global and Local
6 Absent Discourses in Game Cultures: The Case for Diversity
7 What Wakens the Sleeping Giant?
Bibliography
Appendix One: Timeline
Appendix Two: Survey
Glossary
Ludography



Game Studies India Adda to DiGRA India

Souvik Thursday, August 05, 2021 , , No comments

Suniti Chattopadhyay, in his 1913 article ‘Hostel Life in Calcutta’, describes adda as 'a social activity or a space for a carefree talk with boon companions'. In Games Studies, because of the nature of the area, things are much more flexible and easygoing than in most other academic circles. Bringing Games Studies to India has always been my dream. Or at any rate, it has been for the past twenty years. What better mode of bringing Game Studies scholars in India together than an adda. A carefree chat about games without the fear of being shushed. And in a country that has one of the largest and most diverse gaming populations yet is not on the games research and development radar, it was necessary to get the conversation going. Especially when there are so many who have such fantastic ideas about games and gamers. In 2019, when I organised the GamesLit conference in Kolkata (arguably the first international Games Studies conference in India), the high quality of the papers from India impressed not just me but also my colleagues from abroad. It was Espen Aarseth who asked me why I was not setting up something whereby we could have a games research community in India. The thought remained with me and during the pandemic, I decided to take the plunge by roping in some talented young researchers who I thought would be able to carry on the discussion, giving it a local flavour (through the adda mode) while also participating in the international network.


Today, after ten months of our existence as Games Studies India, we have been recognised as a chapter of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). We are now DiGRA India. It is a dream come true for me that after two decades, digital games studies now has a platform for debate and discussion in India. DiGRA India, in its earlier avatar, Games Studies India Adda, has featured talks by eminent scholars and industry experts from both India and abroad. These can be accessed on our YouTube channel, here. As DiGRA India starts functioning we hope that we can connect the research on India's gaming culture to the rest of the world.

Check out DiGRA India on our website: https://digraindia.com/



The Looting of the Ganj i Sawai and Uncharted 4

Souvik Saturday, May 30, 2020 , , No comments
Returning to Ludus Ex and gaming after a long absence, I have many stories to tell. Of the Covid-19 pandemic and being locked down for two months, of my continual travails of being (a most unwilling) departmental head and of the super-cyclone that almost wrecked our house, there is too much to be said. Some of it is too personal to be recounted in a blog. So of that the less said the better. And I am also fed up with writing academic prose; ergo, here’s an essay in Dr Johnson’s manner, a ‘loose sally of the mind’. I’m going to write about Uncharted 4and my first brush with Nathan Drake. Uncharted 4, the last in the series, is a PlayStation game and PC gamers might not know much about it. In fact, in my nineteen years of reading Game Studies, this is the first time I got to play an Uncharted game.

The game is a monorail-narrative experience; one that takes the player on a treasure-hunt. Nothing original in the idea and the gameplay mechanics are borderline-sadistic, punishing the player with constant button-mashing as one grabs rock-ledges, swings from branches and shoots baddies with no respite. The promise of success is the famous treasure looted by the pirate Henry Avery and stored in the fabled city, Libertalia (modelled on the legendary pirate-colony, Libertatia, founded by Captain Henri Mission). While I was intrigued by the concept of a pirate colony, what interested me most was the source of the treasure and also what I view as distinct colonial overtones in the storyline. 

In 1695, at the zenith of the Mughal Empire, a self-styled pirate captain, Henry Every (also known as Jack Avery and Benjamin Bridgeman), looted a heavily-armed Mughal ship returning to India with Hajj pilgrims and considerable riches. The ship was called the Ganj i Sawai and was escorted by another ship, the Fateh Mohammed. Both were attacked by a pirate fleet and looted; Avery’s men would go on to rape the many women in the ship, both old and young, some of whom committed suicide by jumping into the sea. The Mughal emperor, Aurungzeb, was furious and demanded reparations worth 325,000 pounds (some recordssay that he demanded double the amount) and swiftly showed his wrath by imprisoning the British East India Company officials in Surat. The EIC, too, was alarmed and launched a worldwide manhunt for Jack Avery, the first of its kind. Avery remained at large and his fortunes are not known although the game shows that he died in a swordfight with the Rhode Island pirate Thomas Tew, as both killed each other over the treasure.
Nathan Drake discovers the treasures of the Great Moghul in Uncharted 4

What intrigues me, however, is the game writers’ choice of the Ganj i Sawai narrative. The whole incident is referred to as the ‘Gunsway Heist’, of course – the Indian / Persio-Arabic name is never mentioned. In the game, Henry Avery is a character almost to be admired and is (wrongly) described as the chief founder of Libertalia. With an unmistakable Western bias, Avery the bloodthirsty pirate is to be glorified as a ‘prince of thieves’ and a champion of liberty. One of the protagonists actually believes that he brings freedom to the oppressed and if it is at the cost of Eastern wealth, then that is because he had no choice. The Orient is a place to be robbed and the proceeds, of course, go towards rescuing the poor and disenfranchised – I meant Europeans, of course. I was asked at a recent interview whether I was not overstating the colonial bias of games; after all, the whole idea of the hero is someone who performs deeds that rescue those in distress. Nathan Drake faces dire adversity in order to rescue his brother (in fact, the penultimate chapter is called ‘Brother’s Keeper’) and B.J. Blazkowicz or the nameless space-marine do the same to save the world. The world, however, is mainly America and Europe. Naturally, the writers of Uncharted 4, see no need for even a passing comment on what happened on the Ganj i Sawai. Avery’s career as a slave-trader is also glossed over. This is in no way surprising as after his dastardly deeds, Avery was celebrated at home as a hero. According to Ursula Sims-Williams,

Meanwhile Avery became a household name in 18th and 19th century Britain, synonymous with the spirit of adventure and life at sea. Numerous fictional and semi-biographical accounts of his life were published: The Ballad of Long Ben and The King of Pirates by Daniel Defoe, to mention just a few. In the earliest, The life and adventures of Capt. John Avery written by a pseudonymous Adrian van Broeck and published in 1709 (see below), Captain Avery seized not only Ganj-i Sawai’s treasure but the Emperor Aurangzeb’s granddaughter who happened to be on board. They married and sailed away to Madagascar where they lived happily (almost) ever after. (Sims-Williams 2013)

He also features in Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (written in 1921) and I remember having adored the famous pirate after reading of him in my English reader (primer) as an eight-year old child, much later of course. Avery was one of the main influences (together with Captain Kidd and Blackbeard) behind tales such as Treasure Islandand the more recent Pirates of the Caribbean. Mughal (and other oriental) treasure has been the key driver for many other nineteenth-century narratives such as Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (the Great Agra treasure) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (a diamond brought back from India after the defeat of Tipu Sultan).

The story of the Ganj i Sawai is not told in Uncharted 4 because it goes against the centuries-old notion of the ‘orient’ as the othered locale that is to be stripped of its wealth. In a sense, the East India Company, although assiduous in its efforts to rid the seas of freebooters, is itself invested with the same idea of exploitation and conquest. The lone operators such as Avery needed to go (as did the privateers who messed up the Company account-books) so as to make room for the larger project of colonialism. One does not know what happened to Avery. Despite the professedly huge manhunt, he was never found. Instead, he remained at large and loomed large as the worthy inspiration for the grand project of European colonization of the East. Even in what is arguably the newest narrative media, the legend of Jack Avery’s Great Gunsway Heist is to be celebrated by gamers the world over.

What remains untold is the Indian side of the story. Contemporary Muslim historian Khafi Khan writes in his Muntakhab al-lubāb how brutal the attack by Avery was and how it was not an isolated incident:

The source of the remaining unstable income of the English is the plunder and capture of the ships going to the House of God. At intervals of one or two years, they attack these ships, not at the time when, loaded with grains, they proceed to Mukhkhah and Jeddah, but when they return, bringing gold, silver, Ibrāhīmis and riyāls.

Avery’s attack created a major diplomatic incident and almost cost the EIC its right to trade in India. History, however, has turned out differently and I was able to celebrate the finding of the Great Gunsway Treasure with Nathan Drake. It could have been Lara Croft or Indiana Jones for all I care.



Games and Literary Theory Conference, Kolkata November 2019

Souvik Saturday, March 21, 2020 , , , No comments
It was a dream come true for me when the leading games scholars from all over the world came to my city, Kolkata, to discuss games and literary theory. The topic, too, was dear to me: videogames at the margin. Here's the CfP and the Conference Programme:

Call for Papers
Videogames have grown into a global socio-cultural phenomenon and are now a primary concern of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as the Social Sciences. In a medium that sweeps across geographies (including virtual ones), however, the discourse usually privileges a certain section when it comes to the representation of identity. In a medium, where roleplaying and playing in character is of prime importance, such an ignoring of the marginal and the diverse is indeed problematic.

In one of the first books on the subject, Adrienne Shaw says ‘Teaching classes on minority representation in games, I heard this refrain repeated yet again by my students. Video games are a niche medium; they are fantasy environments; and they are designed for a narrow market. Of course games are not diverse—so what? […] I realized that I recognized myself in my participants’ responses. After all, I too grew up playing a medium for which I was not the primary market and media in which only certain aspects of my identity were ever shown’ (Shaw 2015). Shaw’s concern is an urgent one and recent events related to racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination in the videogame industry and in the content of the games, highlights the importance of academic dialogues around gaming ‘at the margins’, as it were.
These concerns, of course, echo much older debates on diversity and difference in Literary and Cultural Studies. Identity and indeed, even the body, are constructs in the Foucauldian framework of biopower and beyond the actual control of individuals. Thinkers such as Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva and bell hooks point out how the the body is marginalised based on gender, race and class. Similarly, the constructedness of the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Oriental’ in colonial discourse as shown by Edward Said and also how the colonial system also renders certain groups of people ‘subaltern’ and how this affects the discourse of diversity as Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak and Homi Bhabha make evident. Often, the discourse of diversity and the margins pervades games as well although the connection is not often made evident in the older and more traditional disciplines.
Recent games scholarship has started addressing issues of diversity in games through the new Diversity Group that is now part of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), books on gender, race and colonialism (Shaw 2015; Murray 2018; Mukherjee 2017) as well as edited journal issues and panel discussions. As crucial to discussions of both games and literary theory, these issues form the main theme of this year’s Games and Literary Theory Conference, being held in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. 
Conference Programme
The GamesLit 2019 team: GamesLit pioneers
Hajo Backe and Tomasz Majkowski with many new members and Debanjana Nayek, the ever-efficient co-convener.


Keynote Diane Carr responding to a question from Prof Sumit Chakrabarti

Anirban Ray on games from ancient Egypt
Game scholars from the world over. (From left): Tomasz Majkowski, Me,  Yue-Jin Ho, Pavel Grabarcyk, Olli Leino, Poonam Chowdhury, Espen Aarseth, Samuel Heine.

My Arctic Adventure - Tromsø 2018

Souvik Saturday, March 03, 2018 , , , , No comments
I was in Tromsø , Norway for just two days and the shift back to 25 degrees centigrade from a good -10 is still quite something to adjust to. Short as the visit was, it was one to remember. It is not often that one from the so-called Global South ventures this far north to examine a PhD proposal. Again, a PhD topic that relates so deeply to the issues raised in the South-South interactions - namely, the postcolonial, the subaltern, the Othered et al.

Beautiful is an understatement: Tromso from my hotel.

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

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


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

The LEGO house in Tromso

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


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

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

Sami Game Jam 

Sami drum



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

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

Another book. More on Postcolonialism.

Souvik Friday, August 04, 2017 , , , , No comments
So my second book has now been published. I have a lot of people to thank for it and although this project was a bit off-piste for me, I thought there was a huge research gap and the work needed to be done soon:



Videogames and Post-colonialism: Empire Plays Back

This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. 

 Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience – including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses. 

Darmok and Jalad at DiGRA: Keynoting at DiGRA 2017 in Melbourne

Souvik Friday, July 21, 2017 , , , No comments

DiGRA 2017 is over and many participants are by now already home either in lovely Australia, where it was hosted, or in other parts of the world. This DiGRA was different for me, it will always remain special because I was one of the two keynote speakers. Melanie Swalwell, whose work archiving and preserving videogames and digital heritage needs no introduction, was the other keynote speaker. I, however, spoke on a different kind of preservation and another perspective on archiving. It was time I had to speak on Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Those of you who are unfamiliar with the Darmok episode of Star Trek will think I am raving but watch the episode you must if you are to learn the secret. The Darmok episode is about a superior alien species establishing contact with the starship Enterprise and even the ship's super-advanced universal language translator is unable to parse what the Tamarians mean to say. The words are clearly translated but the meaning is beyond the wildest guesses of the crew: 'Darmok and Jalad in Tanagra'. Only later, through a test of faith and cooperation between the Tamarian captain and Captain Picard (of Enterprise), is it established that the Tamarians use a different system of signification - one where there culture and history form the basic units of communication. 'Darmok and Jalad in Tanagra', then means 'friendly cooperation' just as was found between the Tamarian historical heroes Darmok and Jalad on the planet of Tanagra. Kind of like saying Achilles and Patroclus in Troy to indicate loyalty and friendship. There were two reasons for my using the Darmok example: I was talking about the plurality of history and how history itself can become a way of talking about a people; I was also talking about the impossibility of representing the history of a culture using one unified and inflexible system. Those who know my recent work on postcolonialism and videogames will have guessed it. Here's me bringing subaltern studies (and historiography) to game studies. And the feedback was encouraging, I'm happy to say.

Melbourne is beautiful and fun

Before I say more about my keynote-talk, let me first say a bit about some of the fascinating talks that I managed to attend. Mia Consalvo and Chris Paul spoke on 'value-crafting' and indie games  - something I need to share with my Indian indie developer friends to see what they think. The paper is available here. I also enjoyed the presentation on indie and dojin games by Michael Fiadotau - the dojin culture in Japan was unknown to me. As was the fascination with Pachinko (Ozu has a movie about Pachinko) that was discussed in another paper. Similarly, it was fascinating to hear of Maria Garda's work on the videogaming practices as reflected in the archives of Communist-Poland. Rene Glas and Jesper Vught's paper on using Let's Plays in the classroom reminded me of the class exercises that I had for my games and storytelling course in Oklahoma City. You can find an extended abstract here. I chaired a session where Espen Aarseth and Pawel Grabarczyk spoke on the game-identity of the games that are ported as well as of other kinds of iterations of the game. This was followed by Marcus Carter and Adam Chapman's intriguing analysis of truth and authenticity in Total War: Rome 2 and the fantasy world of Total War: Warhammer. Darshana Jayemanne, Antonio Zarandona and Adam Chapman presented an interesting enquiry on the destruction of built-heritage in videogame worlds. Again, something that my own work on digital archives of colonial cemeteries speaks to. Finally, I was also part of Phillip Penix-Tadsen's wonderful panel on the Global South and videogames, where I spoke on India and learnt a lot about game curation in Argentina, game development in Brazil and Nigeria, as well as games education in South Africa. In my own talk, I highlighted the key problems and promises of the Indian industry, the Western stereotypes and our own lack of innovative designs but I also projected the genius of some of the leading game designers from India. People were particularly interested in hearing about Missing, the serious game about child-trafficking in Bengal. There were many papers that I would have loved to hear but couldn't due to the lack of time and the parallel sessions (after all I don't have the time-turner). I did get a lot out of the doctoral consortium run by Steven Conway and the diversity workshop run by Adrienne Shaw and organised by Darshana Jayemanne. Highlights from the doctoral consortium  - a project on narratives by Arseniy, Mahli-Ann Butt's PhD proposal on self-care in games, Kiona Niehaus's project on how racial characteristics are represented in game design, Lars de Wildt's project on comparative studies of religious representation in games and Marcus Toftedahl's work on videogames in India and China.

Besides all the networking and attending presentations, I had the wonderful opportunity to catch up with James Manning and continue somewhat our debate from almost eight years ago - on storytelling in videogames. Chatting with Nick Webber on games and history (he had presented on the Britishness of games) and with Peter Nelson about Chinese notions of spatiality and Le Corbusier were other hghlights of the trip. I met the fantastic Laura Crawford, who in between serious discussions on postcolonial identity squeezed in advice on where to get marmite and veggie mite. Last but not least, I got a full-day tour of Melbourne courtesy my friend, Tom Apperley and his daughter Lyra. And I also got to see the MCG and pose beside a statue of Sir Don himself.

But to return to the keynote. Yes, it worked out despite the huge stress that I was under. Here's a description of both the keynotes. To be a DiGRA keynote speaker - it was a dream come true. Veritably.  

So here's how I started. And the beginning will give you an idea of what followed:
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. 
Everyone here except diehard Star Trek fans is probably thinking that I am insane.
But I wanted to begin with these words from a rather strange episode of Star Trek where Captain Picard meets an alien spaceship captain who speaks to him in a language with familiar words but which remains incomprehensible despite the Enterprise’s universal translator machine.
After an almost deadly confrontation, Picard is able to figure out that the semantics in this alien language is not connected to individual words but to the knowledge of the entire history of the alien culture.
History, in the form of metaphor, serves as a language here. The episode serves
1. To remind us of the different ways in which history can be perceived
2. And tell us how this multiplicity of perceptions is important to comprehend
what we think of as different, Othered, alien and even monstrous.

It is with these two points in mind that I have called my talk ‘Playing Alternative Histories’
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.

In formerly colonised nations, there is often a trend to have a nationalistic reaction after independence. Whether or not bordering on jingoism, such a reaction also replicates a similar logic to that of Empire. Somebody has to be controlled and if that's not possible, what people remember also has to be controlled. Instead of such a portrayal that almost reflects the logic of empire, I posited the multiplicity of videogames as being a fitting platform for the plurality of historical narratives - especially, the unheard and the voiceless histories that subaltern historians have attempted to represent. Meg Jayanth's work on the dialogues in 80 Days and Dhruv Jani's (Studio Oleomingus) Somewhere were the examples I used. This was the alternative history possibility that I wanted to highlight in videogames - just like in the Darmok episode, here is a situation where we need to reexamine our historical framework and be open to other forms of representation.

Here's the full slideshow:




I had two more days two explore Melbourne after the conference. With the last libations and farewells over, I set out for the two ludic attractions that I had planned to visit. The first one was a cricket-lover's pilgrimage (I mean the game and not the insect) to Melbourne Cricket Ground and the second was to ACMI or Australian Centre for the Moving Image. At the MCG, I was totally enthralled by the Sports Museum and especially its Cricket section. Here's a Lego version of MCG (seen in a departmental store) andof course, a statue of the Don in the MCG Sports Museum:


LEGO  MCG Stadium

Sir Don in the Sports Museum


ACMI, too, was a real revelation and I liked the displays ranging from the magic lantern to the latest VR technology. I got to play some very old games such as Tempest and Pong;  for the first time (can you believe it!) played Pro Evolution Soccer and then got my very own bullet-time sequence capture.



On the more retro side, I also got to see a zoetrope and to make some cool scary shadows of myself a la Nosferatu. My friend, Tom Apperley and his little daughter, Lyra, were supposed to come and pick me up for a visit to the zoo so I stopped making scary shadows and headed towards the exit. On the way out I saw these messages left in the ACMI by people (mainly kids) from all over the world saying what the future will be about:

Someone has written this in the visitor's book for a wishlist of the future: 'Playing computer games using your mind to control characters.'


Straight out of Star Trek. Maybe we'll get there someday. And it might be worth remembering the Darmok episode, then.

Just check the Twitter feed for DiGRA where @adrishaw says ' was easily my favorite DiGRA'. I totally agree. Great work by Marcus Carter and everyone else in his organising team.




Games and Literary Theory Conference, Krakow Keynote

Souvik Sunday, February 12, 2017 , , , , No comments

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.



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 Finnegan’s Wake (by another Joyce), stories with multiple endings and close readings of Huizinga.
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 The Mirror and the Lamp.
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 Papers, Please! , 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.

My Book Is Out at Last!

Souvik Thursday, December 03, 2015 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , No comments
As some of you know already, my book Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books was published in September 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. Here is the blurb from the publisher’s website:


Grand Theft Auto IV saw more copies being sold than the latest superhero blockbusters or the last Harry Potter 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. Video Games and Storytelling 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.

(For more info, such as the Table of Contents and ordering, see the publisher's website: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/Video-Games-and-Storytelling/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137525048)

For those inclined towards electronic editions, a Kindle version is also available now. Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/Video-Games-Storytelling-Reading-Playing-ebook/dp/B017DQ7J3E/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1/276-1064401-1083624

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 STALKER. 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 Gulliver’s Travels consider so sacrosanct.

Here's the email address for those wishing to request a review copy: reviews@palgrave.com

Finally, I love the book cover. Thanks especially to Palgrave Macmillan for all their help and patience. 



Times of India Article on Reviving Gyan Chaupar and Golok Dham

Souvik Monday, July 06, 2015 , , , , , No comments
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 Karma in videogames) what ancient Indian games and game theory had to say about play cultures. Jesper knew about the khel / lila concepts and I wasn't surprised given the thorough scholar that he is. However, what he set me thinking about was Pacheesi or Chaupar and Chaturanga. 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 Difference and Repetition) 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 (Videogames and Storytelling to be published by Palgrave Macmillan this year), I thought I simply had to find out. With my research, I stumbled on Gyan Chaupar. I also found scholars who had already worked on it. Typically, videogame studies does not seem to have connected with them.

Gyan Chaupar board in the National Museum, New Delhi



My friend, Subhayu Mazumder, of Times of India said he liked the idea. And off I went to do more research. The first fruits of this has appeared in an article in ToI and I have plans to do more with this. Here's an excerpt of the article:

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


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

For the rest of the article, click here: http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31812...

DiGRA 2015 in Lueneberg

Souvik Wednesday, May 20, 2015 , , , , , , , , No comments
Much has happened in these many days when I have been away from ‘Ludus Ex’. I write a (fairly) regular column in the Times of India, 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.

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 Assassin’s Creed 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 Videogames across the World. Mark himself is not here and the panel will be led by the eminent Dutch videogames scholar, Joost Raessens. 

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. 

[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]


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.

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.
[The Johannis Kirche: Bach learnt to play here (the organ and not videogames!)]


DiGRA Day One

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.

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 Max Payne (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 Ra-One. Bollywood and its ubiquitous fame. 

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.



DiGRA Day Two


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.

[I used the example of Thralled -  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]


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!), Necessary Evil, 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. 

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. Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square 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 (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/papers/Svelch_MiT7.pdf). 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. 

[Wenceslas Square: Indiana Jones cometh!]

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 Valiant Hearts 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 Charley’s War 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. 

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.

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.


DiGRA Day Three

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 Nevermind , a biofeedback-enhanced adventure horror game -exactly what I conceptualised in NTU with Russell Murray.

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 Playing with Power, the first issue of Games and Culture 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.

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:

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)

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, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. 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.

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!


DiGRA Day Four

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. 

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 (https://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/back_issues/Vol.%202.1/Mukherjee/62762gp.html) 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.

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. 

DiGRA Things-that-I-missed

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.

Lueneberg memories

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!

[A Sushi restaurant called Pearl Harbour: the name kinda shocked me into holding my chopsticks right - a feat that I've never managed elsewhere]

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!


Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Followers