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 Fallout 3 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. 
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 Rajneeti and Satyagraha 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 book, Narrative Gravity. 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. 

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:



And here's a fun summary from the hosts:

As Aiden Pearce in that irritatingly repetitive but nevertheless entertaining game called Watch-Dogs, 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 Watch Dogs. Or GTA or Mafia 2 and you will certainly struggle to find me a name. No women police officers in videogames? Why, I wonder.

Maybe, in  games like Mafia: City of Lost Heaven or L.A. Noire 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 Mardaani (which received mixed reviews from feminists in India) and Tabu is all set to star as a tough cop in the forthcoming film, Drishyam. While I was writing all this, I've had a couple of people correct me on Facebook: Shantam Basu reminds me of Mia in Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Arno Görgen  says that the 'only one I remember is a undervover cop in Deus Ex: Human Revolution'.  So there.


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 'it 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 No One Lives Forever) kick ass, then why not have women police officers?

Well,  just a thought developers ... In any case, this could be seen as symptomatic of a broader (and more serious) issue. 

I much admire Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak although I haven't had much to do with her in my area of work barring my recent paper on empire and videogames. I did read her translator's introduction to Of Grammatology and, like many grad students before me, almost gave up on Derrida. Subsequently, I have read essays by her such as 'The Rani of Sirmur' (courtesy my partner's interest in these) and joined the band of Spivak-fans.

So it was to hear Spivak speaking at the Netaji Memorial Lecture (where I had heard Edward Said speak quite a few years ago) that I went. The talk was intriguingly titled 'Freedom after Independence?' and the question-mark was probably the most important part of the entire proceedings. However, as Spivak worked through the tangles of the conceptions of subaltern leanings towards freedom in a post-colonial world, she also had to bring in the digital. She had to. The digital is everywhere - as the purported solution par excellence and ergo the object of much criticism and fear. After criticising MOOCs, e-learning tools and their pedagogy, the great pedagogue (she said that she might not be a great intellectual but that she was the real thing) declared that the digital should be kept on tap and not on top.

So how does this represent the digital? The digital on top is the patriarchical (or 'top-archical') figure almost smacking of sexual dominance. Dominating productivity, dominating creation - the digital as the thing-on-top, the ding-an-oben (as opposed to the ding in sich). From the hierarchy of the database and the digital tool that is used to organise pedagogy and structure the way in which education is disseminated, the digital dominates how we think and produce. The digital-on-top is also imposed on us postcolonial subjects and it silences the subaltern non-digital modes of pedagogy. Now that is a very compelling image.

Spivak's suggestion is the 'digital-on-tap'. Does she mean a water tap where the flow can be regulated or 'on-tap' as in 'under pressure'? Or is it that she wants to tap away impatiently on her table waiting for the digital to behave itself? Let us stick to the 'digital-under-control' option. So you have an essence called the digital and every now and then you can regulate the flow of this using a proverbial stop-cock. Procreation under control. On tap.

Ostensibly, there's nothing wrong with this image. The man who was on top is now kept on tap. The digital, therefore, also needs to be kept on tap. What I was surprised about is that such a comment could come from Spivak. From the perspective of 'originary technicity', the concept proposed by Derrida, there's a problem with such a 'top-heavy' or 'tap-heavy' approach. Technicity is intrinsic and human; rather than being the prosthetic tool, it is that dangerous supplement. This, of course, is in contravention to the Aristotelian idea of technology. As Tim Clarke describes it:

The traditional, Aristotelian view is that technology is extrinsic to human nature as a tool which is used to bring about certain ends. Technology is applied science, an instrument of knowledge. The inverse of this conception, now commonly heard, is that the instrument has taken control of its maker, the creation control of its creator (Frankenstein’s monster). (Clark, 2000: 238)

Clark, in his essay on Derrida and Technology (in the collection edited by Nick Royle), uses Marvin Minsky's SF short story The Turing Option to illustrate his point.  This is an early morning blog post and I am feeling lazy so I'll use Federica Frabetti's summary as a shorthand:

In order to regain his cognitive capacities after a shooting accident has severely damaged his brain, the protagonist of the novel, Brian Delaney, has a small computer implanted into his skull as a prosthesis. After the surgery he starts reconstructing the knowledge he had before the shooting. The novel shows him trying to catch up with himself through his former notes and getting an intense feeling that the self that wrote those notes in the past is lost forever. Clark uses this story as a brilliant figuration of the fact that no self-consciousness can be reached without technology. (Frabetti 2011)

Clark's point is that '[n]o thinking – no interiority of the psyche – can be conceived apart from technics in the guise of systems of signs which it may seem to employ but which are a condition of its own identity.' (Clark, 2000: 240) Let us turn now to the digital. The digital as a form of technology has already figured in our discussion of technicity. Digitality, or call it what you will, does not work outside the human. As a supplement, it alters the centre, threatens it and is also part of it. Top, tap or whatever, it ain't something that is separate from what you are becoming.

2014 started with yet another visit to Delhi. I was invited to be part of the keynote panel on Indian videogaming, together with Dr Padmini Ray Murray from the University of Stirling. It was great to be back at JNU and I had some productive discussions, especially with the team from the University of West Virginia and Siddhartha from the JNU team. It was a pleasure to meet Dr Lyle Skains after over three years now (we met in Bangor in 2010) and to skype with Dr Astrid Ensslin about LOTRO MOOC and its relevance to higher education. Dr Sandy Baldwin of UWV spoke on how his team played out (pun intended) Samuel Beckett's Endgame  within CounterStrike 2 and the artistic and philosophical implications of such theatrical interventions in the game-world. Dibyoduti Roy impressed me with his take on the experience of the quotidian in videogames. I felt that he has something new to contribute to how we think through gameplay. His colleague, Kwabena, spoke on WoW but I was more interested in what he had to say about gaming in Ghana (and in other African countries) when we had some time to chat over coffee. At the JNU end, I liked a paper on postcolonial representations in videogames  - something I've worked on recently (for my paper at Bergen). Sid, who was presenting the paper, focused on Far Cry 2 and Assassin's Creed and pointed at racial and imperial stereotypes made by Ubisoft. I did come to Ubisoft's defence though, as I seriously believe that the Ubisoft games are mostly fairly nuanced and good at problematising issues.  I shan't use this space to go into a sustained argument on this but I am happy to defend my position, any time.

I am getting into the habit of writing my conference reports rather late and as such, my memory plays tricks with me. The highlight of my stay was my meeting Quicksand, one of the most 'thinking'game developers I've met in India so far. These are the guys who made Meghdoot, which Murray describes thus:

Meghdoot: Using new technologies to tell age-old stories is a project that will be based around a prototype of a game Meghdoot that was developed in the first phase of the Unbox Fellowship. Meghdoot draws on features of Indian culture such as gestural movements from Indian dance in gameplay and is inspired by using narrative structures drawn from Indian mythology, making a conscious choice to move away from Anglo-Saxon linear sequences in the game's design and deploys an aesthetic that is inspired by Indian heritage artefacts but does not resort to usual tropes of the exotic or the oriental. Meghdoot will fall into the increasingly popular category of ‘serious art game’

I left Quicksand after making them promise that they would visit Calcutta and that some of the bylanes in Chitpore would feature in their next game (about which, mum is the word). Time to get away from fun and games and back to work.

Subhayu Mazumder is easily one of my oldest friends. We started in the same section at kindergarten, continued together throughout our schooldays and then went on to read English Lit together at university. We don't meet often but he's one of those people you have on your thoughts even during a random bus ride through this busy city and then, out of the blue, he's on the phone nattering away at breakneck speed, providing unnecessary explanations and spewing ideas (with which you might not always agree but then again, there's no deterring him). Together with Sanjay Banerjee, we had started our school's first (arguably) literary wallpaper, 'My Back Pages'  and had those many adventures that only extremely curious and creative (or so I'd like to think) teenagers can possibly have. Looking back now, they seem other lives, other videogames.

So Subhayu wanted me to write an article on gaming for The Times of India and I said I'd bite. Readers of Ludus Ex will know that I've been doing everything I can to push the importance of games research to the Indian academia, the videogame industry and the policymaking gods. The article itself needed a Kolkata focus so after saying the usual and making my case about the potential of gaming here, I remembered another old friend. A virtual one this time - Cate Archer from No One Lives Forever 2. NOLF seems to have disappeared even from the second-hand markets as Emil Hammar was telling me when we were in Bergen last month. NOLF is the only videogame I know with a direct Calcutta connection. So this is an excerpt from what I wrote: