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Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

The history of videogames has largely been imagined as a patrilineal timeline. Women, when they emerge as participants in the game industry, are typically figured as outliers, exceptions, or early exemplars of “diversity” in the game industry. Yet the common practice of “adding women on” to game history in a gesture of inclusiveness fails to critically inquire into the ways gender is an infrastructure that profoundly affects who has access to what kinds of historical possibilities at a specific moment in time and space. This contribution aims to shift the relevant question from “Where are women in game history?” to “Why are they there in the way that they are?” To do so, the essay strategically deploys Sierra On-Line co-founder and lead designer Roberta Williams as an exceptional case study on the problem of gender in videogame history. Drawing from both media archaeology and feminist cultural studies, this contribution first outlines the function Roberta Williams serves as a gendered subject of game history. The remainder of the essay is organized as three short, non-chronological vignettes about specific objects and practices in the biography of Roberta Williams. Attention to the contextual specificity of Roberta Williams and her historical moment produces an alternative genealogy for gaming centered around relations of intimacy and labor in domestic space. Rather than producing a chronology, the method of this essay illustrates a historical critique by sketching a contour that unsettles the presumptive logic of what we must account for when we write about the objects and subjects of game history.

From Nausicaa to Sailor Moon, understanding girl heroines of manga and anime within otaku culture.

Though research examining violence in video games (VGs) and its potential real-world effects has been a target of academic attention, content analysis of demographical marginalization in VGs has not been as prolific. What little research there is reveals a pronounced absence and stereotyping of women and racial or ethnic minorities but ignores queer content altogether. This work explores video game demographics through quantitative analysis of the demographic composition and stereotyping of characters from 30 popular VG titles. Findings of this study support that of past analyses, evidencing that the representation of women and racial minorities is both rare and stereotyped. Queer characters are also shown to be sparse and stereotyped. While past research has largely treated race and gender separately, this study shows that multiply marginalized groups, including queers, are even more underrepresented and stereotyped. The sociocultural implications of these findings are discussed and suggestions are made for future analysis and marketing.

Traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace.Deftly interweaving history, culture, and critical theory, Anna Everett traces the rise of black participation in cyberspace, particularly during the early years of the Internet. She challenges the problematic historical view of black people as quintessential information-age outsiders or poster children for the digital divide by uncovering their early technolust and repositioning them as eager technology adopters and consumers, and thus as coconstituent elements in the information technology revolution. She offers several case studies that include lessons learned from early adoption of the Internet by the Association of Nigerians Living Abroad and their Niajanet virtual community, the grassroots organizing efforts that led to the phenomenally successful Million Woman March, the migration of several historic black presses online, and an interventionist critique of race in contemporary video games. Ultimately, Digital Diaspora shows how African Americans and African diasporic peoples developed the necessary technomastery to ride in the front of the bus on the information superhighway.Anna Everett is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books include Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; and Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949.

This collection explores the relationship between digital gaming and its cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Encompassing key locations for global gaming production and consumption such as Japan, China, and South Korea, as well as increasingly significant sites including Australia and Singapore, the region provides divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies of specific games and gaming locales to macro political economy analyses of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows, this collection provides an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation, and consumption in the region.

Today’s media are vast in both form and influence; however, few cultural studies scholars ad-dress the video gaming industry’s role in domestic maintenance and global imposition of U.S. hegemonic ideologies. In this study, video games are analyzed by cover art, content, and origin of production. Whether it is earning more “powers” in games such as Star Wars, or earning points to purchase more powerful artillery in Grand Theft Auto, capitalist ideology is reinforced in a subtle, entertaining fashion. This study shows that oppressive hegemonic representations of gender and race are not only present, but permeate the majority of top-selling video games. Finally, the study traces the origins of best-selling games, to reveal a virtual U.S. monopoly in the content of this formative medium.

This paper is based on ongoing research into the gendered use of mobile convergent media in the Asia-Pacific region. In particular, what role does the cute have and how does it correlate with types of consumption? As a region, the Asia-Pacific is marked by diverse penetration rates, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. Two defining locations - Seoul (South Korea) and Tokyo (Japan) - are seen as both mobile centres and gaming centres which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Unlike Japan, which pioneered the keitai (mobile) IT revolution with devices such as i-mode, South Korea has become a centre for mobile DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadband) with the successful implementation of TV mobile phones (TU mobile) in 2005. One of the key features of mobile media technologies is the attempt by the industry to find the next killer application . One such application is the possibility of online multiplayer games accessed through mobile (broadband) telephonic devices such as MMO golf RPG Shot Online (a golf game for mobile phones). Amongst this frenzy of trend spotting and stargazing, Seoul as a mobile broadband and gaming centre provides a curious case study for the social and cultural intricacies informing the rise of gaming as an everyday practice for many Koreans.This article begins by outlining the game play and technoculture particular to South Korea and then explores the phenomenon of Kart Rider in South Korean gaming cultures - and its perception/ reception outside Korea - to sketch some of the issues at stake in playing it cute (particularly in the form of cute avatars), consuming Korea and the endurance of co-present communities. In particular, it contemplates the implications of current emerging online mobile gaming genres such as so-called female games such as the cute' Kart Rider in order to think about changing modes of game play and attendant social spaces.

Este texto analiza la transcendencia de la revolución feminista que se inició en los años 60 a partir del lema «Lo personal es político» y su influencia en la transformación del arte contemporáneo. En este contexto el trabajo desarrollado por las prácticas artísticas y la crítica feminista en relación a la denuncia de la violencia contra la mujer ocupa una posición destacada. A lo largo de estas últimas décadas no sólo ha evidenciado la violencia como un hecho continuado y global hacia la mujer sino que, además, ha iniciado nuevas narraciones que dan respuesta a un drama considerado socialmente como un irremediable «trágico final».

Postcolonialismo y feminismo utilizan conceptos comunes para el análisis y de/construcción de las narrativas dominantes. En países donde la colonización ha hecho estragos, las mujeres ponen en valor su empoderamiento como protagonistas de su destino. En esta línea las mujeres han aportado sus propuestas feministas para una nueva visión de lo colonial/postcolonial. Este trabajo pretende hacer un chequeo por aquellos trabajos videográficos de mujeres que, después de haber sido colonizadas, han realizado una descolonización cultural, situando su creatividad en varios continentes.

En este artículo, se aborda la temática del video como tecnología de género. El video es el medio de creación artística que algunas mujeres están utilizando para crear lo que se puede llamar imá genes en femenino. Se hace un acercamiento al discurso feminista y los presupuestos teóricos que se han tomado para el análisis del discurso videográfico de las mujeres. Se presenta un breve análisis de los trabajos de las videastas Pola Weiss y Pilar Rodríguez.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including where and how queerness is produced, the use of paratexts to expand and stop queer readings of films, and queers' non-reliance on mainstream media to produce queer stories.

Beyond Bollywood is the first comprehensive look at the emergence, development, and significance of contemporary South Asian diasporic cinema. From a feminist and queer perspective, Jigna Desai explores the hybrid cinema of the 'Brown Atlantic' through a close look at films in English from and about South Asian diasporas in the United States, Canada, and Britain, including such popular films as My Beautiful Laundrette, Fire, Monsoon Wedding, and Bend it Like Beckham.

This book provides a cultural history of queer representations in Chinese-language film and media, negotiated by locally produced knowledge, local cultural agency, and lived histories. Incorporating a wide range of materials in both English and Chinese, this interdisciplinary project investigates the processes through which Chinese tongzhi/queer imaginaries are articulated, focusing on four main themes: the Chinese familial system, Chinese opera, camp aesthetic, and documentary impulse. Chao's discursive analysis is rooted in and advances genealogical inquiries: a non-essentialist intervention into the "Chinese" idea of filial piety, a transcultural perspective on the contested genre of film melodrama, a historical investigation of the local articulations of mass camp and gay camp, and a transnational inquiry into the different formats of documentary. This book is a must for anyone exploring the cultural history of Chinese tongzhi/queer through the lens of transcultural media.

While expanding critiques of pinkwashing have drawn increasing attention to how queer issues in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories are perniciously mobilized by a network of lobby groups, Brand Israel initiatives, and international gay and lesbian organizations, these critiques often fail to consider how queer Palestinians mobilize and understand themselves. This article reports on an October 2011 panel and film screening at Yale University and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. “Queer/Palestinian: Critical Strategies in Palestinian Queer and Women's Filmmaking” uniquely focused on questions of queerness and Palestine through a program of eight new Palestinian visual productions. The program brought together Palestinian film scholars, filmmakers, visual artists, and curators for a discussion of queer and feminist artistic practice in relation to Palestinian strategies for resistance. Together, the “Queer/Palestinian” films suggest the urgency for Palestinian visual artists to persistently generate new means of expressing, embodying, and critiquing visions for Palestinian society. Films such as Victoria Moufawad-Paul's Nus Enssas/ صيصنصن (Canada, 2011) and Raafat Hattab's Hourieh (Palestine, 2011) explore issues ranging from queer diasporic solidarity politics and challenges to out/closeted binaries and to the creative reinscription of nakba narratives. Nadia Awad's Two Adaptations of the Same Novel (US, 2011), Suzy Salamy's 1982/2006 (US, 2006), and Moufawad-Paul's Rejoice, O My Heart / يبلق اي حرفا (Canada, 2011) suggest an irreverent queer strategy by undermining the narrative conventions and visual codes of mainstream news media and popular US and Egyptian cinema. Salamy's video, previously projected through mobile exhibition on city buildings, and Eli Rezik's online “web-movies” Living Alone without Me (Palestine, 2011) and Between Us Two (Palestine, 2011) compelled a panel discussion of alternative means of distribution and exhibition. Finally, Alaa AbuAsad's Masturbate bil beit (Palestine, 2011) rounded out the program with an explicitly erotic and unapologetically political version of the meeting of “queer” and “Palestinian.”

This book looks closely at some of the most significant films within the field of queer Sinophone cinema. Examining queerness in films produced in the PRC, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the book merges the Sinophone with the queer, theorising both concepts as local and global, homebound as well as diasporic.

In this essay, I aim to engage the growing body of scholarship that employs Indigenous feminist theories to understand and mobilize against the sexual and gendered violence committed against Native peoples. To accomplish this, I construct a Native feminist analysis of the 2010 Tribal Law and Order Act. I posit that despite the overwhelmingly positive characterizations of the legislation as “historic” in its potential to address violence against Native women and reduce crime in Indian country, a Native feminist reading of the Tribal Law and Order Act illuminates the degree to which the Act emerges from, engages with, and advances settler colonial and heteropatriarchal logics that cause violence against Native women in the first place. I suggest that although the Act does contain measures that have the potential to alleviate the experience of violence in Native women’s lives, it also diminishes tribal sovereignty, perpetuates the ongoing encroachment of tribal jurisdiction, regulates the boundaries of Native identity, and limits our ability to envision and enact practices of decolonization.

This paper analyzes the growth of gender studies in Latin America, despite facing resistance in the scientific field and from the advance of conservative policies on the continent. It also addresses the challenges that feminist research faces in colonized spaces. To develop our argument, we draw on the scholarship of feminist researchers in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina, such as Veleda da Silva and Lan (2007), Silva and Vieira (2014), Silva, César and Pinto (2015), Colombara (2016), Lan (2016), Veleda da Silva (2016), Ibarra-García and Escamilla-Herrera (2016), Zaragocin-Carvajal, Moreano-Venegas, and Álvarez-Velasco (2018), and Silva and Ornat (2019). This paper also examines the difficulties that Latin American feminist geographies face in establishing their own foundations in a globalized world where the geopolitics of global knowledge of geography is increasingly structured by the epistemological centralization of the Anglophone northern hemisphere.

This article attempts to review and synthesise the main debates in critical geography across both the Latin American and Anglo-Saxon traditions. By reviewing the main theoretical approaches including from political ecology, feminist geography, post-colonial and de-colonial approaches and the geography of motilities and migration, the aim of this article is to delineate a pan-Latin American approach to critical geography. We also consider why some approaches and topics have received greater or lesser attention in Latin American scholarship. Finally, we emphasize the importance of establishing a new transnational dialogue based on regionally situated critical research that questions and proposes new pathways in the production of knowledge from and about the region. We suggest this approach be nested in critical theory and committed to local political and territorial struggles.