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This chapter explores the ways in which the portrayal of children in Palestinian screen content compares with the positioning of children in leading pan-Arab children’s channels. Using critical discourse analysis, it compares the definition and representation of childhood in three Arabic language texts (two magazine shows and one animation), and examines the ways in which the texts construct narratives of childhood and whether they reproduce or challenge hegemonic definitions of childhood. The chapter analyses the language used to address the child audience and the ways in which adult–child relations are depicted. The chapter concludes that while there are some characteristics unique to Palestinian programming, the positioning of children and the “modes of address” are similar in all three programmes, and there are common assumptions and idealizations of childhood. However, there is some evidence that the Emirati animation analysed challenges dominant (adult-generated) definitions of childhood present in Arab societies by presenting childhood as a dynamic space of empowerment

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 explores a game-making programme for 14 Latin American migrants aged 13-18 in London/UK, carried out between October/2017-January/2018, where I investigated the relationships between game conventions, platforms and personal preferences in the curation of fluid identities through game production. Participants presented varying levels of affinity with games linked both to access issues and to other specific elements (e.g. perception of games in contemporary culture, gender). Questionnaires, observations, unstructured/semistructured interviews and gaming archives were employed to explore this participatory initiative and data was analysed through Multimodal Sociosemiotics. Findings remarked how shared understandings about digital games can find their way into platforms and act as “cultural-technical gatekeepers”, supporting or hindering the engagement with game-making of those often perceived as outsiders to gaming culture. This gatekeeping happens when there are “creative dissonances” between, for example, personal preferences and platforms aligned to normative/mainstream genres. These dissonances, however, can end up fostering subversive designs, contravening gaming conventions and potentially challenging traditional gaming boundaries. This insight is relevant for understanding “cultural-technical constraints” and subversive/non-mainstream game-making, especially in relation to innovation and appropriation of game-making resources/strategies by non-mainstream groups.

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 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.

Thatgamecompany’s 'Journey' (2012) is a videogame like no other. This serene atmospheric game came out at a time when fast-paced, aggressive, AAA games were (and still are) the norm. Soon after the game’s release in 2012, thatgamecompany’s courage and hard work started getting the appreciation it deserved. 'Journey' has won several ‘Game of the Year’ awards and received several other awards and nominations, including a ‘Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media’ nomination for the 2013 Grammy Awards. For this Game Studies India Adda Talk, I will be discussing (read: gushing over) this game’s brilliant visual and auditory art, wordless storytelling techniques, and one-of-a-kind multiplayer experience. Please join me on this talk and let's take a ‘journey’ like no other. Pun intended. Thank you and I hope you all have a wonderful new year. 🙂 Here’s the game trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie4iz...

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 second podcast where we interview Satyajit Chakraborty, a game developer, game designer and researcher. He also founded Flying Robots Studios in 2012 and has made various unique games. Here he talks about his first experiences with gaming in India.

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.

The transition to digital television referred to as the Digital Switchover (DSO) process or Digital Migration is an agreement of member countries of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the Geneva Conference in 2006. The agreement requires changes to national spectrum allocation and redefines national participation in the global digital television and mobile telephony market. While the decision of most African states to embark on the digital migration programme remains independent, the policies and approach to the implementation were influenced by two dominant economic orthodoxies, the neoliberal free market (Becchio and Leghissa 2016; Johnson 2011; Overbeek and Apeldoorn 2012; Peters 2011) which promotes a media environment mainly driven by market imperatives and the Chinese State capitalism (Bremmer 2008; Gu et al. 2016; Lyons 2007; Szamosszegi and Kyle 2011; Xing and Shaw 2013) which is the economic ideology that drives the interventions of the Chinese government in the region’s digital migration.

Until recently, the South African television industry was dominated by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), etv, and Multichoice. The SABC and etv are free to air while Multichoice provides a satellite subscription service through its DSTV bouquet. This status quo was broken with the emergence of subscription video on demand (SVOD). While Multichoice launched its SVOD service, Showmax, in 2015, greater disruption happened in January 2016 when the current most successful global company in SVOD, Netflix, simultaneously launched in 130 countries including South Africa. The coming of Netflix to South Africa was reportedly greeted by excitement as viewers embraced choice of access to premium television entertainment. Considering that prior to this development, Multichoice had had a near monopoly in provision of premium television content through its DSTV and Showmax, the reported excitement came as no surprise.

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.

2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come.

Colonisation bequeathed classical education, among others, to the African continent. The post-colonial utility, function and status of such a knowledge system have been questioned and resisted, and African knowledgebased institutions are making efforts to decolonise such systems. The decolonial project has also impacted popular culture in the sense that African identity and self-presentation are being interrogated using various methods. Adaptations and productions of classical myths are implicated in this discourse. Implicated adaptations serve as platforms for allegorical cross-cultural conversation on shared experiences of a people group, perhaps of an earlier generation with the assumption of partial or absolute continuities. Continuity discourse is problematic when two cultures are implicated, particularly, when one is a colonial culture and the other colonised. The unity of discourse is either affirmed, violated or reconstituted.

The internet has impacted on how media organisations do journalism. Many media organisations both print and broadcast now have an online presence to reach out to fragmented audiences that have migrated to online platforms. Television stations have increasingly embraced the use of digital (online) media to gain better access to their audiences in terms of content distribution and audience engagement. The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have given journalists and media organisations the ability to reach their audiences immediately, with the added benefit of audience responses which come almost immediately. The use of new digital media has created platforms for news stations to share digital clips of news items or excerpts of news programmes to keep the audiences informed or enticed by the highlights.

This chapter makes an empirical contribution to challenges the developing economies, often referred to as the global south, face when it comes to digital migration. This challenge has citizens of what were previously regarded as ‘third world countries’ having to rely on predominantly state and to a limited extent, public broadcast media for current news and information. This contribution, in making a seminal contribution on digitisation in Zimbabwe, demonstrates the challenges the country faces as to allow citizens access to more diversity and not just plurality. Conceptually, digitisation is defined as the conversion of analogue content and production processes into digital format (Manzuch 2009). Seabright and Weeds (2007, 1) observe that digitisation has to do with ‘replacing analogue signals with digital format economises on processing, storage and transmission capacity, reducing costs and expanding capabilities’. Seabright and Weeds (2007) submit that moving from analogue to a digital space brings changes in digital recording and production techniques, digital compression in transmission, proliferation in transmission platforms (terrestrial, cable, satellite and broadband); digital set-top boxes and encryption technologies; and digital personal video recorders. These interventions contribute to lowering of costs, improving of picture quality and improving speed in news gathering and dissemination (Koss et al. 2013). Other than the financial and technical imperatives that come with digitisation, the transition comes with certain cultural and political implications (Gripsrud 2009).

The year 2015 was set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for most of its member states globally to switch from analogue to digital terrestrial broadcasting. Digital television broadcasting is generally implied as transmission of broadcast content signals in the form of binary data, specifically 0 s and 1 s. Digitisation of television merges broadcasting, computing and telecommunications to transform both the way television content is made and consumers interact with content (Chalaby and Segell 1999). Referring to digital content, Flew (2004) suggested that digitisation of media and communication content grows “informatisation” of society.

There has been a hype regarding the benefits of digital migration, which refers to switchover from analogue to digital broadcasting. Commonly referred to as digital migration, the switchover emanates from a decision made at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 2006 to release a valuable spectrum, which can be used for other services. Other benefits of digital TV include good sound and picture quality and availability of more channels giving viewers more choice. It has also been said that digital broadcasting will save the broadcasting stations’ cost, as transmitting content via digital platforms is less costly than transmitting via the analogue platform (Muthomi 2012). This implies that media houses can capitalise on this migration as a competitive advantage. Countries across the world have been undergoing this necessary switchover from analogue to digital platforms, with varying degree of success. While the merits of digital television are clear, it is not clear how this digitisation will realistically help in bridging habitual inequalities in developing countries.

This chapter explores the extent to which Zimbabwe’s single public service television station (as of 2019), ZBC, employed hate language on its online news broadcasts during the 2008 presidential rerun election. Anchored on discourse theory and utilising discourse analysis, this chapter explores hate discourses on Zimbabwe’s online television news during the 2008 election. It seeks to answer the question: To what extent did the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation Television (ZBC TV) online news rhetoric constitute hate discourses?

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the digitization of television has impacted the architecture of television content generation, dissemination consumption in Kenya. Its key motivation is to answer two main questions: How has the digitization shift in Kenya’s television impacted the trends in production, dissemination, reception and consumption of television content; what is the effect of digitization on viewer satisfaction; and how has this shift transformed the role of television medium in the country? The chapter, therefore, answers these questions focusing on the television channels under study, namely, Citizen TV, Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) and Nation TV (NTV).

Audiovisual news media are compelling texts to study when it comes to how mass media shapes an audience’s perspective of the world (White 1998). This is due to the pivotal role these forms of media play in creating an informed citizenry as mediums that transmit information from news creators and news sources to the public as a mass audience (McQuail 1987). Even more significant than this is the function of audiovisual news media as constructors of reality and ideology because of their pervasiveness in society (McLuhan and Fiore 1967; Hughes 1942). The advent of digital media has been touted as a means of diluting the influence of traditional mass media formats, such as television, with digital news media being forecast to take audiences away from these traditional media platforms (Lotz 2014).