I confronted that old ghost yet again: that ever worrying question ‘What is Digital Humanities?’ Like any spectre, this one too is substance-less yet present. It is like the proverbial trace – the mark that remains when the thing itself is not there.

A spectre is haunting us; the spectre of (the) Digital Humanities. Is it here to replace the Humanities or to take away the primacy of the Sciences? The spectre never ceases to scare.  At IISc Bangalore, scholars from all over the country (well, almost) met for a ‘consultation’ on designing curricula on the Digital Humanities. It is here that the spectre rose again. For those interested in a more objective account,  Sara Morais of CIS has taken detailed notes of the entire proceedings and these should be available on the CIS website. This blog post, however, is about my subjective and often impressionistic engagement with the spectre that I mention.

There was much discussion about the very origin of research on digital media and its use in India.  Ravi Sundaram of SARAI spoke about the Sarai mailing list, that excellent and incessant (later somewhat annoyingly so) resource that filled up my mailboxes with news of cutting-edge research that would have been impossible without Sarai funding. He spoke of Media Nagar, where contributors published and posted online and of his experience, in the early days of digital archiving, with the Labour History archive. Questions were asked about how we can set up collaborative networks and research writing through text culture. Nishant Shah of CIS, on Skype from Germany and after suffering the travails of the digital incompetence of the Indian passport office, expressed skepticism at the growing enthusiasm about DH.  According to him, in a world which considers data the sole reality, the time-honoured close-reading that is part of the Humanities is about to suffer a sad end. This met some stiff opposition from respondents (including yours truly) who saw close-reading as always have gone hand in hand with data analysis. Indeed, think of the concordances and unique tools that have been used since time immemorial by scholars close reading literary texts.

Messing up the order of the presentations somewhat, I think I need to mention one of the most hands-on papers of the day. Tanveer and Asha presented on their four-year project of bringing ICT closer to less privileged children from schools and colleges in different states in India. It was interesting how, according to their research, the children and their teachers were quick to dissociate the digital from the Humanities and how the less privileged children took to the Humanities easier than those who were more affluent. A quick point to note here is that the Humanities experience of these children was digitally mediated anyway (via Facebook, Youtube etc) so the distinction does not really hold. It is perhaps indicative of a mindset that takes to a watertight categorisation more easily because of the comfort that such fixed and finite parameters posit. Ashish of IISc spoke about Digital Ecosystems, using the Indian Government’s UID (Universal Identity ) or aadhar project as his key example. Jim Nye, of Loyola University, Chicago reiterated the need to teach people how to handle analogue material before allowing any digitisation initiatives to be started. He cited the instance of the destruction of invaluable of archival material in Urdu due to the ignorance of the team that attempted to digitise these texts. Nye also expressed the need for DH initiatives in India to link with those elsewhere on the subcontinent.

However, the major ‘find’ for me was Arun Menon – a fellow game studies scholar when I had lost all hope in finding a kindred soul in India (can you believe it!) and someone who, like me, ekes out his living doing other things while secretly remaining committed to the cause of bringing gaming to academia. Arun and I will have many occasions to disagree, especially when it comes to the telos in videogames and suchlike things. However, there is much synergy in our work and it is heartening to see people like Arun braving all odds and correcting Masters papers on videogames written by students from English departments. Arun’s paper was on the potential risks of digital humanities. He sees in DH initiatives an intense need to legitimise the Humanities by inserting or adding-on a statistical rigour and a faux scientism (my phrase). He sees as some kind of last-ditch response of a Humanities that is in crisis. Because of DH, it is possible that the traditional Humanities will be taken to task and the support that could have come to the Humanities as such will shift to DH. Again, a spectre.

I do not agree with such a conclusion but I think I understand where this is coming from. Here is some brave and plain speaking that needs to be respected for what it is. The statistical fetish that DH has shown since its recent birth and the beeline that many Humanities scholars who still cannot tell the difference between Excel and excellence have made towards DH, is indicative of the fact that DH is the ‘in’ thing today. Suddenly my research on gaming has become respectable and even newspapers are writing about me; shouldn’t I be a happy boy now! Educational bodies and research councils have started moving their lumbering girths towards a digital starry-eyed future. Arun is right: the reason behind the sudden focus on DH is a problem. However, as he half apologetically says, DH escapes disciplinarity. So what the heck is going on?

Before I attempt an answer, I will need to bring in another person into this gameplay. Amlan Dasgupta’s contribution to DH in India (together with that of Sukanta Chaudhuri) is of phenomenal import and the recent Bichitra project or the online Tagore variorum, completed at Jadavpur University, is perhaps the single largest such DH project in the world. How they managed to get this done I do not know  … or maybe I do know – my few trips to the School of Cultural Texts and Records revealed how extremely dedicated and smart their team was. But I digress – Bichitra deserves a much more thorough analysis in a separate space of its own.  I was about to mention a few key points that Sir  raised in relation to the future of DH in India.  First, he stressed the importance of teaching Digital Humanists how to handle analogue material (so that no more archives get messed up!); secondly, he insisted on the importance of developing and tweaking tools to suit specific operations in DH and finally, he agreed with me and stated in no uncertain terms that DH is not a discipline but is rather an ‘indiscipline’ or non-discipline. Arguing that DH has entered its third-wave, he wondered aloud about digital surrogacy. So, is the  Bichitra archive a digital surrogate? I would think not but the question intrigues me still. The other major point that Sir made was about the incompleteness of the archive – the archive is always being added to and there is no single heroic authorial character here. It is a community at work. Through and through. And of course, it is not possible to ask whether you are digital or whether you are a humanist.

(Fig) My Presentation

I will not dwell on what I had to say as I have discussed my thoughts many times on ‘Ludus Ex’. Suffice it to say that I made a strong claim that DH is not a discipline and that its fun lies in its being a (non) discipline. It is possible to teach it as a discipline if one is after convincing funding bodies but then that’s like creating a Theory discipline in the same way that we have Film Studies or Cultural Studies. DH, is for me, a research modality and not a discipline. Whatever it is, it certainly does not mean digital archiving alone; if it did, we would have called it so. I stressed the importance of Digital Culture, introduced Game Studies and showed everyone the splendid microfiction that Presidency students have been creating on Facebook. I ended with a Youtube of an Indian bureaucrat vehemently insisting that having data on the Cloud was disastrous as vital datasets could be lost when the cloud started raining! The moral was plain: DH teaching and research needs to take into account digital and web 2.0 processes and technology seriously. An old-guard luddite turned sudden digital humanist will struggle if he or she is not able to engage with technology. I’m not a techie can be an excuse for a few days at most but if we want to do DH, then as the Digital Humanities Manifesto says, ‘Let’s get our hands dirty.’ That is the only way in which I can face the spectre: by engaging with DH and doing so smartly.

‘It is the Ajaib-Ghar, the Wonder-House’, Kim replied

(Rudyard Kipling, Kim)

The Indian Museum in Calcutta (now Kolkata) has always been the Ajaib-Ghar for me. Nowhere as big as the famous museums in the United Kingdom, the United States or even India, this is nevertheless one of the most important in the country if one is to try to make sense of how our erstwhile colonial masters, the British, wished to preserve our history and exactly what kind of history this could be. Postcolonial ruminations, however, are a fairly new and post-University phenomenon for me – my critical faculties become puny in comparison to the wonder and amazement that somehow returns from my childhood memories every time I stand inside the colossal entrance of this Wonder-House.

So I was not surprised to see the same expressions of wonder on the faces of a group of children, of ages six
to sixteen and from mostly from deprived sections of society, when I met them at the Indian Museum. This time I was there to speak about videogames. Nothing different there but last Sunday, I went to teach children about the Roman Empire using the videogame,Rome: Total War. This talk or presentation (someone even called it a ‘performance’) was part of ‘Jadughar Jamjamat’ (or the Museum Magic), a two-day programme by the museum authorities to reach out to children and to promote their interest in the study of history and culture.

Here I was, inside Kim’s ajaib-ghar again, introducing the Roman Empire and videogames to kids who probably knew little or nothing about either. It was a daunting experience for me as I had to speak in a mix of Bengali and Hindi and to jettison the academic inside me altogether so that I spoke less gobbledegook to the wide-eyed audience in front of me. After a mini history lesson on ancient Rome (in which I tried to sneak in some anti-Empire feeling), a short video of Obelix walloping the Romans and a longer video from the History Channel’s Decisive Battles series showing the Battle of Pharsalus (between Caesar and Pompey), I started the Rome game. The Decisive Battles series shows these key battles as simulations produced via the technology used for the Rome: Total War game – in effect, all of the major battles shown here look like gameplay from Rome. So little wonder I chose this as an introduction: it was a history lesson using videogames and therefore, not very different from what I was doing myself.

Rome: Total War was launched and volunteers were invited. Two very young Roman generals came onstage and each led Caesar’s army against the Gauls. Total War controls aren’t easy for first-timers and certainly less so if you are ten years old and have a gallery full of other kids checking out what you do.  Point, click and strategise. I had just explained how the Roman legions fought and coincidentally or otherwise, both the children who volunteered kept their armies in formation and beat back the swarming hordes of the Gaulish warband. The Gauls had a reserve army, however. Soon the Roman legions were routing and their general was dead.

This was the first time I tried to teach so very young children using videogames. I’ve used Assassin’s Creed 2 to introduce university students to the Renaissance before this and Rome to talk about empire and biopower (about which I should blog sometime). However, this was different and I think a post-mortem is needed. First, I will know better than to do this in one hour.  Maybe, teaching the controls first or having a sheet describing the controls would be a good idea. I also need to cut the background and the talk down to half its length. The point is to get more kids up on stage and ask them to play.  Given that in India, I am yet to come across workshops which provide participants with individual workstations and that most of the time you end up watching what others do on a screen, I guess some participatory activity (such as get help from the audience etc) needs to be devised to keep the audience involved as well. And oh yes, this time it’ll have to smaller groups.

All said, however, I enjoyed doing the event and I hope the kids liked it. For many of them, this was the first time they had seen a videogame. Some were, of course, pros although the child who played the game onstage had never used a laptop (as his father later told me). I thank, Sayan Bhattacharya, the extremely bright and enterprising educational officer of the Indian Museum for inviting me. I will do more of these things. All said and done, being able to share one’s favourite RTS game with a gang of kids is a pleasure in itself. And of course, to teach them to criticise Empire in all its forms  - playfully.

I am one of those (very few, I imagine) gamers whose gaming repertoire hasn’t seen much of the GTA (or Grand Theft Auto) series in it. GTA, for the uninitiated,  is a game about gang wars, drugs, guns and fast cars. For the regular GTA buff, even those who aren’t high on tablets or coke, the game is soma. Drive around New York (Liberty City in the game) or Los Angeles (called San Andreas) and kick ass. GTA does seem to have an endless flair for attracting controversy – whether it is for portraying in-game sex, containing heavy duty violence and gore, valourising crime and showing issues connected to substance abuse.  I’m not a squeamish player  and although I do not particularly fancy GTA , I’ve completed a reasonable section of San Andreas. While I have been mulling over whether to install GTA IV on my pc for the past two years, my interest in GTA as a phenomenon hasn’t really disappeared. So I was reading this book on the game: Jacked. That is where I discovered ‘Gouranga.’  

The word 'Gouranga' can be traced back to the early Victorian settlement of Saltburn, on the North East Coast line. It is said to originate from the 'code phrase' that the famous smuggler and vagabond, Oliver Kitson used when arranging meeting points for his booty to be transported. Today, this phrase lives on as people daub bridges with Kitson's phrase 'Gouranga!'

However, the Lucy Norcliffes apart, although most people the world over might not know what the word exactly means, many know of its Hare Krishna connection. Many also know of its GTA connection. On the same forum as Ms Norcliffe, someone else points out that ‘[i]n the infamous-at-the-time computer game Grand Theft Auto the award for successfully running down an entire group of Krishna followers was known as the 'Gouranga bonus'. Kushner describes Gouranga in GTA as follows:

The inspiration came from his own real-life travels. Whenever he passed through London airport, he always got hassled by Hare Krishnas, urging him to be happy. "Gouranga!" they'd say, a Sanskrit expression of good fortune. Baglow hated it. Then a lightbulb went off over his head.

Back at BMG, a new build of the game arrived. King slipped it into his PC and began to play. As he tore down the road, he could see a line of small orange-robed figures moving down the street. The closer he came, the louder he could hear them chanting and drumming. Holding down his forward arrow, he careened toward them, plowing down each one as a point score floated up above them. As he smashed the last one, a bonus word flashed onscreen: "Gouranga!"

"Dude!" King exclaimed, "I'm running over Hare Krishnas!"

In GTA: Vice City, the word ‘Gouranga’ unlocks the cheat mode. Gouranga! Very loosely interpreted as the bliss of unlocking all the cheats in the game. Incidentally, a Youtube search for ‘Gouranga’ gives you this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZe9M6DD-wI. You can watch the blue car (the player) run over six tiny pixelated orange figures and some people clearly love it as the comments below the video tell you. Some people find it ‘hilarious’. You run over peaceful characters chanting a religious mantra and looking different in their orange dresses. Gouranga!

Gouranga!

The point I am trying to make? Am I to laugh at the hilariousness of the ‘Gouranga’ episodes, or am I to feel uncomfortable and play on – after all it’s just a game! So how do I respond ethically?

A while ago, I wrote an article on ethics in videogames and even earlier, one on violence in videogames. In both, I spoke of having an open mind. I spoke of morality versus ethics and instead of defining good and bad within a moral system, I preferred Spinoza’s ethics, I said, ‘Even though the moral systems may seem to be based on binarisms such as good-evil, human-inhuman and right-wrong, these categories often collapse and give rise to complex possibilities that are characterised by ambiguity.’ Morality is characterised by transcendent values whereas Ethics is the typology of immanent modes of existence.  Ethics exists as an immanent relationship based on the continuous relations between different actions. Good and bad, for Spinoza, have a primary objective meaning and also one that is relative and partial. Expounding Spinoza’s immanent ethics, Gilles Deleuze states that ‘the good is when a body directly compounds its relation with ours, and with all or part of its power, increase ours’ and the bad is what when it combines ‘decomposes our body’s relation [...] as when a poison breaks down our blood’.  For Spinoza, the act itself is not bad or good; it is the relationship between the act and what it does to the environment that constitutes badness or goodness.  Badness or goodness are not tied to the essence of a particular person or a particular act but rather to the person at a particular moment  and place. I referred to Spinoza’s famous responses to the querulous grain merchant Blyenbergh’s letters about the nature of evil to come up with the following formulation for videogame ethics:

The player can only choose within the extent of his or her capability within the game system. According to the framework of immanent ethics, the mode of the game in relation to the mode of the player-subject will form the basis of evaluating his or her actions. If the player’s decision creates relationships that compound his or her power in the game as well as that of other elements in the game, or if it increases the potential for action, then it is ethically a good choice.  Anything that breaks down or destroys relationships and diminishes the potential for action will be an ethically bad choice. The ethical description of the choice will obviously depend on the situations of the game and the player at that particular moment of choice.

I had written this to comment on the infamous ‘No Russian’ level in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 where you infiltrate the Russian mafia and get involved (unwillingly) in an operation where people are gunned down in a Moscow airport.  It is a gruesome scenario where you are expected to shoot harmless people who were reading their newspapers or complaining about delayed flights. When you leave the scene it is a bloodbath. The game lets you skip the level by warning you that what follows might be disturbing for you. Of course, you can also choose not to fire any bullet and remain a silent witness to the crime. I tried to shoot one of the bad guys (my teammates in this level) and the others killed me immediately and the game ended. The ‘No Russian’ level, I had argued, wasn’t immoral. This is a risky comment but one that allows for a context-dependent judgment. The role of the player is limited and at the same time it puts one in the position of the people who commit such acts. Could you ever do this? Do you not feel your hands shaking and the trauma of such an action? In Spinozist terms, the action is bad because it decomposes the relationship between one’s idea of peace and sustenance of life when one kills so many people indiscriminately albeit in a game; on the other hand, for some people (and dependent on the situation) the action can recreate a real life trauma and problem so that they can better understand the value of the sustenance of life and of peace. I felt traumatised when I played this level and maybe the designers wanted me to be. I had lost a few people I had known in a similar massacre in Bombay. Wonder what the people who were the killers in Bombay would have made of the ‘No Russian’ level! In Spinozist terms, even if they considered themselves morally correct (as per their systems of morality), they would still be ethically bad because of the decomposition of relationships and life – these scenes in a film or a game might act as a heightened warning but real life mass murder itself does not have a constructive angle.

Anyway, so when we run over the tiny Hare Krishna figures and the game exults with us saying ‘Gouranga’ what are we to make of the scenario in terms of ethics? The sentences ‘Whenever he passed through London airport, he always got hassled by Hare Krishnas, urging him to be happy. "Gouranga!" they'd say, a Sanskrit expression of good fortune. Baglow hated it[…]’ are interesting. So if I hate their chanting should I run those people over ? I was playing yet another Rockstar game yesterday, Max Payne 3 (not their original franchise, I agree), and as Max Payne, I was in a nightclub complaining about the techno music. So should I have shot the people around me and blasted the high power speakers with my double berretta pistols? The game would have ended and anyway it was unnecessary violence in terms of a game where otherwise violence is the norm and you kill over 30 bad guys in two minutes on an average. In terms of immanent ethics, I would be breaking down the relationship between myself, my actions and the surroundings but there would be no constructive corresponding result. For example, I tell a lie to save a person’s life – I have done something very bad but ethically I win as the good offsets  the bad by sustaining someone’s life and peace. I tell a lie and get people killed because they trust me and there is nothing that supports the life-forces in my action.

In the instance of the ‘Gouranga’ event (I prefer this phrase), running over the orange-pixel ISKCON monks is unnecessary in game terms. I mean this is not even you being clumsy and driving over pixel pedestrians. It is you wilfully destroying / decomposing (to use the Spinozist term) the forces of life and their relationship to you and there is no positive build-up of these forces in any other sense. This kind of action, Spinoza says to Blyenbergh, is characterized by badness. What I object to this otherwise almost forgotten game event is that it celebrates the destruction of a certain community although this does not contribute in developing our very precious human relations in any way. My problem is not with the killing: I have killed more realistic-looking pixel figures in videogames than I can bother to count. I do not think videogames make us violent (pace research this way or that); they make us more acutely aware of the trauma of violence so much so that people might want to eschew it. My problem is with the blasé shout, ‘Gouranga’ to signal eternal bliss after killing those people who were shouting the same thing but to foster peace and life. Yes, it is virtual and little pixels that we destroyed but they stood for people and peace. The problem according to Spinoza would still be one of badness. Let the reader/ player decide when to say ‘Gouranga!’

(Disclaimer: The author does not have any link with the Hare Krishna movement or with Rockstar and although he does happen to live about 120 kilometres from Mayapur, the ISKCON headquarters, he is not much of a visitor to religious places. He also happens to be a strict non-vegetarian and has not yet thought out the Spinozist implications of this; the Hare Krishnas , of course, strongly disapprove of eating meat. )

Just found this while clearing my Dropbox junk. Fresh from the UK and with a lot more enthusiasm than I have now, I framed these questions for an academic at one of the famous 'centres' of research in India who had requested such a list. The said academic never replied. Wonder why.

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Possible areas of research on the Indian gaming and animation industry

India has been the sleeping giant of the videogame industry for over a decade.  With a billion strong population , India’s image as a potential market for the industry is strong both within the country and abroad.  International players such as Sony,  Ubisoft  and Zynga  are setting up units and testing labs here.  India also has a large number of experienced programmers, creative artists and animators – all three of these being key roles in the videogame industry. Not many academic and training institutions, however, make the connection between animation, programming and the creative arts with the videogame industry. Those that do so concentrate more on either the animation or the programming aspect of game design and they generally do not focus on the sociocultural aspect of gaming that the industry needs to stay informed about; further, they do not take into account the concerns of the Indian gaming industry as such. More traditional academic disciplines also do not engage with the videogame industry in the country. A few key questions, relevant for both businesses and academia, keep arising and remain unanswered. Any academic research on the subject should take into account the following: