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You've heard the stories about the dark side of the internet -- hackers, #gamergate, anonymous mobs attacking an unlucky victim, and revenge porn -- but they remain just that: stories. Surely these things would never happen to you. Zoe Quinn used to feel the same way. She is a video game developer whose ex-boyfriend published a crazed blog post cobbled together from private information, half-truths, and outright fictions, along with a rallying cry to the online hordes to go after her. They answered in the form of a so-called movement known as #gamergate--they hacked her accounts; stole nude photos of her; harassed her family, friends, and colleagues; and threatened to rape and murder her. But instead of shrinking into silence as the online mobs wanted her to, she raised her voice and spoke out against this vicious online culture and for making the internet a safer place for everyone. In the years since #gamergate, Quinn has helped thousands of people with her advocacy and online-abuse crisis resource Crash Override Network. From locking down victims' personal accounts to working with tech companies and lawmakers to inform policy, she has firsthand knowledge about every angle of online abuse, what powerful institutions are (and aren't) doing about it, and how we can protect our digital spaces and selves.Crash Override offers an up-close look inside the controversy, threats, and social and cultural battles that started in the far corners of the internet and have since permeated our online lives. Through her story -- as target and as activist -- Quinn provides a human look at the ways the internet impacts our lives and culture, along with practical advice for keeping yourself and others safe online.

An exploration of how issues of race and ethnicity play out in a digital media landscape that includes MySpace, post-9/11 politics, MMOGs, Internet music distribution, and the digital divide.

"Featuring Females analyzes the portrayals of women in a variety of outlets, including reality television shows, films, print and electronic news programming, magazines, video games, and commercial advertising. A highly esteemed group of scholars and researchers provides informed, original psychological study, and their thought-provoking findings address the ways in which aging, race/ethnicity, body image, gender roles, sexual orientation and relationships, and violence are treated in the media. Featuring Females is a diverse volume, exploring images and characterizations of women young and old and inspiring discussion of the effects that these representations have on girls, women, and society at large"--

Notwithstanding the presence of extreme racialized tropes within the world of videogames, public discourses continue to focus on questions of violence, denying the impor-tance of games in maintaining the hegemonic racial order. Efforts to exclude race (andintersections with gender, nation, and sexuality) from public discussions through its era-sure and the acceptance of larger discourses of colorblindness contribute to a problematicunderstanding of video games and their significant role in contemporary social, political,economic, and cultural organization. How can one truly understand fantasy, violence,gender roles, plot, narrative, game playability, virtual realities, and the like without ex-amining race, racism, and/or racial stratification—one cannot. This article challengesgame studies scholars to move beyond simply studying games to begin to offer insightand analysis into the importance of race and racialized tropes within virtual reality andthe larger implications of racist pedagogies of video games in the advancement of Whitesupremacy.

In this era of big media franchises, sports branding has crossed platforms, so that the sport, its television broadcast, and its replication in an electronic game are packaged and promoted as part of the same fan experience. Editors Robert Alan Brookey and Thomas P. Oates trace this development back to the unexpected success of Atari's Pong in the 1970s, which provoked a flood of sport simulation games that have had an impact on every sector of the electronic game market. From golf to football, basketball to step aerobics, electronic sports games are as familiar in the American household as the televised sporting events they simulate. This book explores the points of convergence at which gaming and sports culture merge.

Profiles and problematizes digital games that depict Atlantic slavery and "gamify" slave resistance. In videogames emphasizing plantation labor, the player may choose to commit small acts of resistance like tool-breaking or working slowly. Others dramatically stage the slave's choice to flee enslavement and journey northward, and some depict outright violent revolt against the master and his apparatus. This work questions whether the reduction of a historical enslaved person to a digital commodity in games such as Mission US, Assassin's Creed, and Freedom Cry ought to trouble us as a further commodification of slavery's victims, or whether these interactive experiences offer an empowering commemoration of the history of slave resistance.

Feminism in Play focuses on women as they are depicted in video games, as participants in games culture, and as contributors to the games industry. This volume showcases women's resistance to the norms of games culture, as well as women's play and creative practices both in and around the games industry. Contributors analyze the interconnections between games and the broader societal and structural issues impeding the successful inclusion of women in games and games culture. In offering this framework, this volume provides a platform to the silenced and marginalized, offering counter-narratives to the post-racial and post-gendered fantasies that so often obscure the violent context of production and consumption of games culture.

From #Gamergate to the daily experiences of marginalization among gamers, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from the latest research and from popular games such as World of warcraft and Tomb raider, Woke gaming examines resistance to spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players toward progressive ends, illustrating the power and potential of video games to become catalysts for social justice

"Examining a wide range of Japanese videogames, including arcade fighting games, PC-based strategy games and console JRPGs, this book assesses their cultural significance and shows how gameplay and context can be analyzed together to understand videogames as a dynamic mode of artistic expression. Well-known titles such as Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter and Katamari Damacy are evaluated in detail, showing how ideology and critique are conveyed through game narrative and character design as well as user interface, cabinet art, and peripherals. This book also considers how Japan' has been packaged for domestic and overseas consumers, and how Japanese designers have used the medium to express ideas about home and nation, nuclear energy, war and historical memory, social breakdown and bioethics. Placing each title in its historical context, Hutchinson ultimately shows that videogames are a relatively recent but significant site where cultural identity is played out in modern Japan. Comparing Japanese videogames with their American counterparts, as well as other media forms, such as film, manga and anime, Japanese Culture Through Videogames will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well as Game Studies, Media Studies and Japanese Studies more generally."-- Provided by publisher.

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.

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...

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

Video gaming is one of the most popular hobbies in the world, with the gaming industry grossing more revenue than the movie and the music industry combined. The estimated number of gamers across the whole world as of August 2020 is 2.7 billion, which is more than one-third of the world population. The benefits of gaming, as cited by numerous researchers, include a boost in confidence, improved cognitive abilities, stress relief, improved problem-solving skills, enhanced social skills among dyslexic kids, and among many others. Even though video gaming as a hobby and career is slowly getting recognition in India, majority of the population still scoff at the activity, shunning gamers and game researchers alike, citing out-of-context and sometimes even false media propaganda. The challenges faced by a typical gamer in India include lack of information, budget limitation, lack of support from parents and teachers when it comes to teenage gamers, and the overall lack of gaming as a mainstream culture among countrymen. As for someone who wants to pursue Game Studies, there is currently little to no provision for that due to the tightly knit education system in the country and the utter lack of educational institutes offering courses on game studies. We go on to further discuss all of the above challenges and experiences faced by a gamer or someone who wants to pursue game studies in India, in our detailed talk that is scheduled on November 21, 2020.

Venba is a narrative cooking game, where you play as an Indian mom, who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branching conversations and explore in this story about family, love, loss and more. More on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/14.... Developer, Abhi, gives Game Studies India an exclusive preview talking about identity, nostalgia, memory and of course, food. In conversation with Poonam Chowdhury and Souvik Mukherjee.

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.

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.

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.

Remember localization! Game localization from an indie development perspective Abstract: The game industry is today a global industry, where digital storefronts are used to distribute the digital product you are developing. This presents a number of challenges for a small scale game developer and localization is one. The talk will focus on game localization from an indie game development perspective. The research is based on data from field studies in Sweden, China and India and is a part of a PhD project conducted at the Division of Game Development at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Bio: Marcus Toftedahl is a game researcher, developer and lecturer at the University of Skövde, Sweden. His main competences lies within game production, game localization and game design, from a practical and research perspective. Marcus has worked at the University of Skövde since 2009 and has since then co-developed the world's first full concentration game writing education at university level and is teaching game design and game production.

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.