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In 2017, the American game designer Momo Pixel released the single-player, browser-based game Hair Nah. In this game, you play as Aeva, a Black woman taking trips to locations that include Osaka, Havana, and the Santa Monica Pier. As you move through levels on your journey—taking a taxi ride, traversing airport security, sitting on an airplane—you must slap away increasingly aggressive white hands that reach into the frame to touch your hair. Though Hair Nah taps into the genre of a casual button-mashing game, this interactive experience also explores the topic of microaggressions via unwanted hair touching. If you slap away enough hands on your travels, you reach a screen welcoming you to your destination with the message “YOU WIN!” but the caveat, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue that black women face daily. So a note to those who do it STOP THAT SHIT.”

This article discusses the popular video game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) by Rockstar Games, which follows Arthur Morgan, a white outlaw, during the decline of the “Wild West” in 1898 and 1899. Taking up conversations of fugitivity in critical ethnic studies, this article maintains that fugitivity operates as a rhetorical trope that stands in for racial identity where the logic of postracialism denies investments in race. Analyzing the narrative, spatial, and kinesthetic elements of the game, this article argues that Morgan, and by extension the player, is aligned with historically and geographically racialized others through a fugitive relationship to space. While Rockstar, as a video game studio, may not see itself explicitly intervening in a racialized and racializing political imaginary in its fictional worldbuilding, the kinesthetic, narrative, and cartographic strategies the studio employs respond to a set of cultural assumptions rooted in the rhetoric of postracialism. As such, Red Dead Redemption 2 serves as a multifaceted text through which to interrogate the dynamics of that rhetoric as it is mobilized in representations of fugitivity and identity.

This article considers the cultural politics of frustrated potential for diverse representation in games by examining developer comments on the 1995 digital game I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, adapted from Harlan Ellison’s 1967 science fiction story of the same name. While Ellison’s story featured a gay man named Benny among the protagonists, the game developers adapted Benny without his original sexual identity. In a 2012 Game Informer magazine article, however, the developers reflected on their version of Benny as a “lost opportunity” for exploring gay identity. Rooted in discussion of this frustrated potential for a gay in-game Benny, this article interrogates a logic of lost opportunity for diverse representation present in game-development discourse, which manifests in a longing for more diverse characters that could have been but never came to be. This logic suggests particular ways that developers might conceive of diverse representation as simply a design issue under neoliberal logics of economic opportunity, commercial risk, and fetishized innovation—without meaningful consideration of political significance. Opposing this instrumentalization of frustrated diverse representation, this article draws on queer game studies and speculative design and literature to explore the possible contours and implications of diverse characters that never were more seriously than such comments typically do. Doing so demands more than romanticized longings for lost opportunities for diverse representation that treat this longing as the end in itself.

This paper argues that video games expose the presumptions separating “Asian America” and “Asia” in the traditional senses of isolation, origination, and presumed distance. It does so by focusing on the most “Asiatic” genre of video games today, the North American visual novel, which offers a counterdiscourse to normative modes of play and attempts to offer utopic spaces to reflect upon the “real” genres of race and neo–Cold War geopolitics. Using theories of performance from Dorinne Kondo and others, the author shows how queer indie visual novels are primarily aspirational, in that they build queer, utopic, and seemingly anti-racist worlds through the Asiatic space of the visual novel form. In so doing, they also allow players to explore the Asiatic as a means of repairing the traumas and distances of American imperial cultures. The article analyzes four visual novels to make this argument: three by non-racially-identifying North American designers—Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017) by Dan Salvato, Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love, and Heaven Will Be Mine (2018) by Aevee Bee—and Butterfly Soup (2017), a game by the queer Asian/American designer Brianna Lei. If games make the boundaries of Asia and America irrelevant, visual novels explore this irrelevance through Asiatic irreverence.

This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph’s “straight version” of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.”

This article examines Indigenous video games that critique mainstream environmental politics at the level of mechanics. An analysis of video games’ influences on ecological values requires looking beyond the representational to the mechanical relationships between player and software. As a cultural–computational medium, video games are embedded with ethics of interaction that inflect this representational dimension by requiring that players generate the text as participant. With the recent visibility of Indigenous rights movements, developers have embedded Indigenous cultural protocols in the mechanical interactions (or technical protocols) of gameplay. In the context of critique, their integration produces “critical protocols,” configurations of gamic action that encourage players to evaluate their treatment of real-world environments. Critical protocols emerge between the technical and cultural, where scripts for interaction in algorithmic spaces intervene in affirmative game design and work as an analog beyond the game. Indigenous developers call for new ways of computing and critiquing settler digitality through play. These games aim toward representational as well as computational sovereignty.

When Rivers Were Trails is a 2D adventure game wherein The Oregon Trail meets Where the Water Tastes Like Wine through an Indigenous lens. The game depicts a myriad of cultures during the player’s journey from Minnesota to California amidst the impact of land allotment in the 1890s. Initiated by the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, the game was developed in collaboration with the Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab at Michigan State University thanks to support from the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians and the many Indigenous creatives who contributed design, art, music, and writing. Uniquely, When Rivers Were Trails is a sovereign game, meaning that it was directed and informed by Indigenous creatives who maintained the role of final decisions during development. Merging design research and close reading methods, this study sets out to describe the game’s design, development process in regards to the game writing, and the resulting themes which emerged as a result of engaging Indigenous writers in self-determined representations.

Playing Dystopia: Searching for the Neganthropocene in Papers, Please and Orwell The way we play games and the way games play us is constantly changing. The physical shrinking of space can no longer be compensated by expansive gamescapes which otherwise provided a reprieve from diminishing access to space in 20th and 21st century childhood (Mayra, An Introduction to Game Studies). Gamescapes, increasingly, are becoming neo-explorations of “other people simulators” characterized by a suffocating hypernearing of the experience of the dystopia (Lucas Pope). Often ‘mundane’ mirrors of real-life situations, these dystopian games place the player in movement-limiting, choice-limiting challenging scenarios from where a fulfilling ending is more often than not impossible. I look at two of these dystopian games that offer covertly disruptive gameplay through alienating, often disembodied, simulation as a strategy for playing dystopia: Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and Osmotic Studios’ Orwell. Closely engaging with issues of surveillance, digital governance, neurotechnology, illegal profiling, and ultimately, survival in a dystopia of technics, these games with their multiple endings caused by the smallest, seemingly most insignificant of differences in gameplay become crucial in their playing out of the possibilities of the neganthropocene.

Speaking to the 'Missing' Player: Subaltern Poetics in Indian Videogames The degree of interactivity and agency of the player-character in videogames is often a moot question in Games Studies discourses (Atkins 2002 , Juul 2004, Salen and Zimmerman 2001). The assumption is that whether illusory or real, agency is an important element that drives the plot of digital games. To assume this, however, is to argue from a position of privilege and some videogames use their in-game mechanics to emphasise this. The assumption of a selfhood by the player while playing a digital game is the precondition to the experience of agency. Such a precondition is hardcoded into the gameplay on the basis of a default notion of empowerment and entitlement. What happens, however, in the case of the character that does not provide this sense of agency or for the game wherein such an experience of selfhood may not be possible? Using a well-worn but very relevant term from Postcolonial discourses, one could ask what happens where the game is about the Subaltern. Considering videogame studies from non-Western and South-South perspectives, such a default assumption of selfhood or agency may be challenged. Elsewhere (Mukherjee 2017), I have cited examples from the Cameroon, Indonesia and India that begin to address this challenge. Here, I wish to take two games from India as my texts for close-reading (or close-play) and show how a different poetics operates; indeed, my primary objective is to enquire into how the videogame as a narrative medium, which is by default apparently premised on agency, functions for the subaltern.

First Person Encounters is a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India. This our third podcast where we interview Xenia Zeiler, an associate professor of South Asian studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research is situated at the intersection of digital media, religion, and culture, with a focus on India and the worldwide Indian community.

Indigenous peoples and their cultural heritages, their ways of knowing and living, are tied to land. As Mishuana Goeman states,“Land is foundational to people’s cultural practices, and if we define culture as meaning making rather than as differentiation and isolation in a multicultural neoliberal model, thanby thinking through land as a meaning-making process rather than a claimed object, the aspiration of Native people are apparent and clear,” (Goeman, 73).Goeman asserts here that land is not limited to physical space, and that land locates a group of people physically, culturally, spiritually, intellectually,etc. and provides them with both an internal and external locus of understanding for and within broader society. When digital representations of Indigenous peoples are completely removed from any meaningful connection to their land, anerasure of culture occurs. Moreover, the physical removal of Indigenous peoples from the virtual representations of their lands is another form of dispossession and the enactment of digital Manifest Destiny. This paperutilizes a decolonial Indigenous framework to analyze the dispossessions that take place within the digital realm of the video game, why they occur so frequently, and why they are so harmful.

En 2007, le monde du jeu vidéo est secoué par une violente polémique au sujet du jeu vidéo Resident Evil 5. Ce dernier est accusé de faire commerce du racisme, en invitant à se glisser dans la peau d'un américain blanc body-buildé, missionné dans une région africaine anonyme, et tuant des dizaines d'hommes et de femmes noires présentées comme de dangereux zombies infectés du virus T. Depuis, la communauté des joueurs et joueuses de jeux vidéo interpelle régulièrement les créateurs et créatrices des jeux sur les questions du racisme et du sexisme.Dans son ouvrage, Mehdi Derfoufi analyse les rapports de force qui structurent l'industrie du jeu vidéo, dévoilant comment le racisme se niche parfois insidieusement au cœur de scénarios de jeux vidéo à succès. Il nous invite à nous questionner. Quels sont les pays qui pèsent sur les milliards d'euros du marché mondial du jeu vidéo ? Qui sont les game designers et auteurs des jeux ? Comment les représentations racistes sont-elles véhiculées à travers les personnageset les imaginaires vidéoludiques ? L'auteur nous dévoile avec brio les logiques racialisantes à l’œuvre au sein d’un marché économique très concurrentiel où des stéréotypes exotisants servent régulièrement à faire vendre un jeu. Il nous montre aussi comment la division internationale du travail et la hiérarchie économico-politique Nord/Sud pèse sur le marché du jeu vidéo et ralentit l’émergence de nouvelles représentations. Pourtant, de nombreux espoirs, notamment dans les pays du Sud participent au renouvellement de la culture geek : face aux violences racistes, la riposte s’organise.

The educational video game, When Rivers Were Trails, was launched in 2019. The purpose of the game is to teach players about Indigenous perspectives of history, US federal allotment policies affecting tribal nations, and some of the effects of these policies on Indigenous peoples. This article explores tribal college student experiences playing When Rivers Were Trails in hopes that it provides the basis for further research into how tribal college faculty may be able to teach the game within their own classrooms. Tribal colleges and universities were created by tribal nations to provide for the higher education needs of their citizens. Using phenomenological research methods, seven college students volunteered to participate in a brief study about their experiences playing the video game. Upon transcription and analysis of the interview data, three themes were developed that capture how these students define their experience with When Rivers Were Trails: feelings of representation, histories of land dispossession, and resilience of communities.

Hitman 2’s Mumbai mission, just like the film Extraction, looks at the oriental space in a similar ‘diseased’ yellow filter which is akin to the Mexico of Breaking Bad. Here, we have the perfect orientalist reduction of a culture. By digitising Mumbai and creating it into a gamic world, it produces a rather lazily translated and racialised appropriation of this particular South Asian space. The essential orientalist gaze thus reinforces the binary between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’: where the ‘I’ is the foreign Agent 47 and the ‘other’ are the yellow dwellers of Mumbai. The NPCs react to Agent 47 in awe as if a white man is a miracle of nature which they have never seen before. Not only that, but they also interact with themselves in a very essentialist way. The tea shops/kiosks are literally written as 'Chaye Dukan' (which is a direct translation for 'Tea Shop'). Not only does this point at a lack of research but also a lazy design. No matter how inferior a place is, no one names their establishment in a direct translation to their colonial/capitalist overlords. It becomes nothing but a city ‘lost in translation’. In this paper, I will read the Mumbai mission of Hitman 2 as a cultural artefact where the game scape becomes a techno-orientalist commodity. Like any other Literary text which fetishizes the ‘other’, Hitman 2 also becomes such a ‘digital/ludic’ text which manages to define the ‘Indian’ in its own myopic way. The discourse propagated thus reinforces the idea of ‘India’ or the ‘Orient’ as the literal plaything of the West. Thus, I will expand by elaborating on how the creators become a part of the greater orientalized theatricality by indulging in a form of ‘identity tourism’ (Nakamura ’96), where the autonomy of creating a cultural space takes the form of an essentialist fetish. About Samya : Samya Brata Roy (He/Him) is currently in the final semester of his M.A in English Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Mainly his interests lie in and around the modalities of Digital Narratives, which he also tries to create at thepenarchist (wordpress.com). He is associated as a SIG facilitator with DHARTI (dhdharti.in), as a transcriber with The Canterbury Tales Project and as database contributor with Electronic Literature Knowledge Base | ELMCIP. He works in the field of Disability Studies by assisting in research. He is also passionate about teaching and inclusion and pursued it by teaching slum kids.

Unreal City: Expressions of Tokyo in Video Games Abstract: Games today, with advancements in graphic design and capability of the platforms on which they can be played, are almost akin to interactive films- in which the player not only consumes the movie-like storyline, but becomes an active participant in the narrative and its outcomes. Worldbuilding in video games has strong connections with the approaches contained in semiotics, as it is not with the images on the screen that players interact, but rather the world that is represented by the images. I intend to examine Tokyo as a virtually constructed game world in three separate texts – Atlus Studios’ Persona 5, Sega’s Yakuza series and Square Enix’s The World Ends with You. The fictionally created cityscapes of contemporary Japan have become ideal spaces for the video games to propagate, their construction in the texts can be seen a form of techno-orientalism that is simultaneously rooted in both Eastern and Western imagination. Each of these texts constructs its own version of Tokyo that, while being recognisable through the use of specific semiotic markers, is also sufficiently different enough to make it a virtual, unreal, space. However, what must be noted is that this space only exists in its entirety when it is interacted upon by the player. Using Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of social space into spatial practice, representations of space and representational space, this paper seeks to look at how the construction of the digital city is not merely a 3D representation thereof, but points where interactivity and narrative coincide. It is through the locus of these two elements that the player comprehends and navigates game narratives. My purpose will therefore be to look at the constructions of Tokyo within video games as data visualisations of spaces that become places through interactivity and comprehension of the player. About Laxmi: Lakshmi Menon is Assistant Professor of English at VTM NSS College, Trivandrum, and a PhD candidate at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where her thesis is a study of Harry Potter slash fanfiction and fan communities. She is currently researching Boys Love fan cultures in South Asia, while her wider research interests also include digital humanities, popular culture and queer literature.

Counter-Hegemonic Representations of Japanese Cultural Icons in Sekiro Abstract: Through fictional or non-fictional narratives, media representations of the past communicate specific interpretations, which lets users negotiate the past's prospective meanings. Additionally, these cultural constructions of the past are produced and disseminated in the present. Hence, the existing hegemonic power relations influence the depiction and recognition of cultural communities in the construction of the past. Therefore, the approach to framing cultures in pop-culture representations becomes a preponderating factor in how people perceive such cultures and periods. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, at first glance, can be considered as a game that follows the same vein of exploiting the western craze for the ninja archetype, as seen in its predecessors like the Onimusha and Tenchu series. However, it takes a bold stance against the persisting ‘self-Orientalist’ framework by reclaiming the ninja myth from marketized exoticization. Borrowing from Said’s theory of Orientalism, I would first like to analyze the existing self-Orientalism in depicting and marketing Japanese cultural icons. I would then like to highlight how this game is not an exoticized cultural artefact and further discuss the implications of such a portrayal in the contexts of representation and authenticity. I conclude that by undercutting innate stereotypes and using inherently Japanese characters, the game reappropriates the agency to depict Japanese cultural icons, from a non-Oriental, non-exoticized viewpoint. Thus, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice becomes a stand-out in the video game industry in this respect. Bio: Geoffrey Fernandez is a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Pilani campus. His doctoral research examines the use of culture, mythology, and folklore in video games.

Recent research has started focusing on the representation of history in videogames. Such representation is almost always of mainstream history and usually presented from a Western perspective. Set in a fictitious Himalayan kingdom in South Asia, Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4 is arguably a crucial example of how history is represented using Western and even colonial frameworks and where the narratives that do not emerge from conventional written history are almost always rendered invisible. Using the frameworks of Subaltern Studies and “border-thinking,” this essay attempts to unpack issues of Orientalism and “colonial difference”; it then engages with postcolonial digital humanities and postcolonial game studies to comment on how history is represented in videogames and how the neglected gaps and silences in the game are important in constructing the historiography in videogames. In the process, the essay engages in a debate with current notions of videogame-historiography.

Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play.

Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures. A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry. Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.

In Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games author Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. Regardless of its historical significance however, this revolution has become less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history. Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the US, France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made. In addition to studying cinema, this book also breaks ground in examining video games, a pop-culture form long neglected by historians. Sepinwall scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series that have reached millions more players than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the revolution, Slave Revolt on Screen calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.