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This article investigates the relationship between young people’s game-making practices and meaning-making in videogames. By exploring two different games produced in a game-making club in London through a multimodal sociosemiotic approach, the author discusses how semiotic resources and modes were recruited by participants to realize different discourses. By employing concepts such as modality truth claims and grammar, he examines how these games help us reflect on the links between intertextuality, hegemonic gaming forms and sign-making through digital games. He also outlines how a broader approach to what has been recently defined as the ‘procedural’ mode by Hawreliak in Multimodal Semiotics and Rhetoric in Videogames (2018) can be relevant for promoting different and more democratic forms of meaning-making through videogames.

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.

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 talk with Poornima Seetharaman. She is the first Indian to be inducted in the Women in Games (WIGJ) Hall of Fame and is also the lead game designer at Zynga. Hear as we talk about her foray in the world of gaming.

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.

Playing back to the Empire, in videogames, is rife with tensions. The imperialist sentiment inherent in reverse-colonist discourse featured in most strategy-based videogames like Europa Universalis IV, where the player could conquer Europe playing for the Marathas, has been noted by Souvik Mukherjee (2017) as playing into the colonial logic while futilely trying to challenge it. Studio Oleomingus, an Indian two-man game studio, is one of the few involved in a different experiment. Their mythical game Somewhere, chronicling a postmodernist search for identity and narrative in the forgotten city of Kayamgadh, has generated significant spin-offs into its universe. With attention to one such spin-off, I will focus critical attention on the issue of the postcolonial gaming of the Museum in A Museum of Dubious Splendors. I will examine the New Museological implications of A Museum of Dubious Splendors, keeping in mind Museologist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s assertion of museums embodying “the power to name, to represent common sense, to create official versions, to represent the social world, to represent the past” (Hooper-Greenhill 2001: 2). Oleomingus’ own description of A Museum, as an adaptation of edited, mangled, contested short stories by a fictional Urdu writer, Mir Umar Hassan, eschews the linear narrative production of the colonial museum for a game of meanings, where the player enters rooms according to his choice and constructs his/her own “quiet game about prosaic objects and spurious histories.” ("A Museum" 2018) The paper would take this into account and examine the reconceptualization of the museum space with respect to James Clifford’s sense of museums being “contact zones”: A Museum’s lack of any curator, with its curious blend of colonial and native tales and banal objects defamiliarised by “spurious histories” lends itself to questions of playing the Empire back according to a different episteme, through subaltern histories that the colonial museum space silenced. Paying close attention to the question of postcolonial spatiality in this game, I will analyze the historiographical implications of these identity-scatterings and recuperations at constant play in the structure of the game. Keywords: Museum Studies, Thing Theory, Game studies, Marginal identity, Postcolonial Studies

Computer Science education research establishes collaboration among students as a key component in learning, particularly its role in pair programming. Furthermore, research shows that girls, an underrepresented population in computing, benefit from collaborative learning environments, contributing to their persistence in CS. However, too few studies examine the role and benefits of collaborative learning, especially collaborative talk, among African-American girls in the context of complex tasks like designing video games for social change. In this exploratory study, we engage 4 dyads of African-American middle school girls in the task of designing a video game for social change, recording the dyads' conversations with their respective partners over an eight-week summer game design experience during the second year of what has now become a six-year study. Qualitative analysis of dyadic collaborative discussion reveals how collaborative talk evolves over time in African-American middle-school girls.

Redefines games and game culture from south to north, analyzing the social impact of video games, the growth of game development and the vitality of game cultures across Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, Oceania and Asia.

Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. The issue of equality transcends the current focus in the field of Game Studies on code, materiality, and platforms. Journalists and bloggers have begun to hold the digital game industry and culture accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged behind. Contributors to this volume examine portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

Computational algorithmic thinking (CAT) is the ability to design, implement, and assess the implementation of algorithms to solve a range of problems. It involves identifying and understanding a problem, articulating an algorithm or set of algorithms in the form of a solution to the problem, implementing that solution in such a way that the solution solves the problem, and evaluating the solution based on some set of criteria. CAT is an important scaffolded on-ramp as students develop more advanced computational thinking capabilities and apply computational thinking to solve problems that are more constrained and require greater expertise. Supporting Computational Algorithmic Thinking (SCAT) is both a longitudinal between-subjects research project and a free enrichment program supporting and guiding African-American middle school girls over three years as they iteratively design a set of complex games for social change. This article explores Scholars' reflections about the difficulties they faced while using CAT capabilities as they engaged in collaborative game design for social change over those three years. We particularly focus on how these difficulties changed over the course of three years as well as new difficulties that emerged from year to year as Scholars become more expert game designers and computational algorithmic thinkers.

El diálogo arte-tecnología en América Latina pone en foco litigios recurrentes: ¿tecnologías sustentadas por los discursos legitimantes de la modernidad o paradigmas diferentes y periféricos en la asunción e ideación de tecnologías en el contexto del arte? ¿Qué sucede con las prácticas que incorporan elementos biológicos, habitualmente uniformizadas bajo la categoría de “bioarte”? Las prácticas artísticas tecnológicas en Argentina en los últimos diez años alumbran zonas de pensamiento y praxis que ameritan ser revisadas: el diálogo arte/naturaleza desde perspectivas no-antropocéntricas, la configuración de discursos en los que subyacen representaciones, miradas y prácticas que se apartan de cánones normalizados y, por último, operaciones disruptivas en lo que respecta a los algo usuales criterios de funcionalidad, utilitarismo y efectismo tecnológico.

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.

Games and gaming have always been an important part of society and culture. Within the last 35 years, due to numerous technology innovations, electronic games in many formats have not only become ubiquitous in everyday recreational life but have also permeated many professional fields and disciplines for multiple purposes including teaching and learning.The Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education presents a framework for understanding games for educational purposes while providing a broader sense of current related research. Compiling over 50 groundbreaking research studies from leading international authorities in the field, this advanced and uniquely comprehensive reference is a must-have for academic and research libraries and for all those interested in expanding their theoretical and practical knowledge of the exciting field of electronic gaming.

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.

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.

According to the 2000 census, Latinos/as have become the largest ethnic minority group in the United States. Images of Latinos and Latinas in mainstream news and in popular culture suggest a Latin Explosion at center stage, yet the topic of queer identity in relation to Latino/a America remains under examined. Juana María Rodríguez attempts to rectify this dearth of scholarship in Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces, by documenting the ways in which identities are transformed by encounters with language, the law, culture, and public policy. She identifies three key areas as the project’s case studies: activism, primarily HIV prevention; immigration law; and cyberspace. In each, Rodríguez theorizes the ways queer Latino/a identities are enabled or constrained, melding several theoretical and methodological approaches to argue that these sites are complex and dynamic social fields. As she moves the reader from one disciplinary location to the other, Rodríguez reveals the seams of her own academic engagement with queer latinidad. This deftly crafted work represents a dynamic and innovative approach to the study of identity formation and representation, making a vital contribution to a new reformulation of gender and sexuality studies.