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This thesis analyzes and discusses the complexities of digital representations involving Indigenous peoples through video games. Connecting both Game Theory and Native Studies, I analyze how digital games incorporate identity, culture, and relationships in diverse and intellectual ways and provide new spaces for Indigenous agency and semiotics. Beginning with an analysis of several historical and negative representations of Indigenous peoples, I then compare those tropes to projects within today’s environment and mainstream video game companies, independent companies, and educational service providers. I assert that while some digital media representations of Indigenous cultures are stereotypical and problematic, others facilitate a sense of cultural continuance and survivance. Lastly, some video games display both stereotypical and cultural continuance within them.

In interviews the comedian Wanda Sykes describes being a successful black, openly gay woman in Hollywood as akin to being a unicorn. Clearly Sykes is majestic. Yet her joke hinges on a bitter truth: the mainstream media industry grants few women, not to mention lesbians of color, access to power. Despite shifts in the cultural imaginary around civil rights, Hollywood continues to maintain an embarrassing lack of diversity in its labor force, especially at decision-making levels. To battle this long-standing reputation, studios have developed diversity-hiring programs.

Burn the Boards (Causa Creations, 2015) portrays the life of an Indian worker who recycles electronic waste in a precarious environment. Phone Story (Molleindustria, 2011) simulates the journey and process of production and consumption of mobile phones, from Congo and China to Pakistan. Whereas Phone Story is described as ‘an educational game’ that addresses the player directly as a consumer, Burn the Boards is a resource management puzzle that creates compassion through role playing. These games bring to the fore a hidden reality of the everyday that is ingrained in historical relationships and power dynamics, drawing attention to what Michael Rothberg has recognized as ‘exploitation in an age of globalized neo-liberal capitalism’ (2014: iv).  This article explores how these games denounce the smartphone industry by using that same technology. For this purpose, we refer to Game Studies theory on procedural rhetoric; values and ethics; and the role of the player, combined with questions of (neo)colonization, globalization, and neoliberalism drawn from Postcolonial Studies. Our analysis shows the complicity of users and their confrontation with the extreme vulnerability of others, emphasizing how the coloniality of power works in our global consumer society. Thus we study the power relationships described and established by these games, the affective reactions which they seek to trigger, and their potential to transform players from passive observers into ethical players and consumers.

Interview With Ben Joseph P. Banta, Founder Of Ranida Games

Interview with With Kurt Prieto, Games Designer Of Boo! Dead Ka! Game

Interview with Ryan Sumo, Lead Artist/Business Developer at Squeaky Wheel Studio

"Although the fields of media studies and digital humanities are both well established, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving students, scholars, and media studies practitioners a cutting-edge guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersection of digital humanities, computing, and culture. Topics covered include: networks; interfaces; media and culture at scale; procedures, programming, code; memory, digitization, and new media; and hacking, queering, and bending."--Provided by publisher

It is the twenty-first century, and there is a black lesbian director and producer making pornography! Porn, a genre of film and media that in the last quarter of the twentieth century many black feminist lesbians viewed as capable only of representing and manifesting violence, abuse, and shame. In this essay I examine one of the early works of the black lesbian filmmaker Shine Louise Houston, In Search of the Wild Kingdom (2007), to explore how and why we have arrived at what is a transition from Blues Legacies and Black Feminisms to Pink and White Productions, and from New

This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological projects with respect to race have supported or conflicted with the industry's incentive to maximize profits or consolidate power. Sasha Torres examines the complex relations between the television industry and the civil rights movement as a knot of overlapping interests. She argues that television coverage of the civil rights movement during 1955-1965 encouraged viewers to identify with black protestors and against white police, including such infamous villains as Birmingham's Bull Connor and Selma's Jim Clark. Torres then argues that television of the 1990s encouraged viewers to identify with police against putatively criminal blacks, even in its dramatizations of police brutality. Torres's pioneering analysis makes distinctive contributions to its fields. It challenges television scholars to consider the historical centrality of race to the constitution of the medium's genres, visual conventions, and industrial structures. And it displaces the analytical focus on stereotypes that has hamstrung assessments of television's depiction of African Americans, concentrating instead on the ways in which African Americans and their political collectives have actively shaped that depiction to advance civil rights causes. This book also challenges African American studies to pay closer and better attention to television's ongoing role in the organization and disorganization of U.S. racial politics.

Interview with Avinash Kumar, Creative Director & Co-Founder, Quicksand Design Studio, India.

Interview with Avichal Singh, Founder and Game Designer of Nodding Heads Games, Pune, India.

Interview with Zainuddeen Fahadh, Founder of Ogre Head Studio, Hyderabad, India

Film and Television Culture in China gives a provocative analysis of film and television culture in China. The author first gives a panoramic picture of Chinese culture in which film and television was born and shaped. He then delineates the definition, composition, and basic relations in film and television culture. Also discussed are the two traditions in Chinese film and television culture--the worldly spirit and the poetic style. The two traditions are deeply rooted in Chinese Confucianism and Taoism, and have influenced Chinese film and television from the start. The author provides in-depth and original readings of the phenomena in Chinese film and television culture, such as: the reform films and the reflection films; the character and mission of television documentary; and a dialogue between the mainland and Taiwan. Film and Television Culture in China will be an essential guide to understand the film and television culture in China, from early screen to the present day.

Although gamers of color constitute a large part of the digital gaming player base in the US, they are systematically and enormously underrepresented by in-game characters in AAA titles. To extend these findings to indie games, we examine 80 titles and show that the pattern of lack of racial diversity holds. We discuss implications for the industry and players, and present challenges that must be addressed to increase diversity in racial representations of characters in games.

Today’s explosion of Swedish films made by and about transgender people is sometimes considered in a vacuum. This article explores the long history of cross-gender performance in Swedish cinema and the relationship of these new films to older traditions. In this article, I will outline the contours of cross-gender performance in Swedish films from the 1908 to today, using some exemplary films to display the variety of styles, genres, and meanings that can be found: the short dance film Dances Through the Ages ( Skilda tiders danser , Walfrid Bergström, 1909); the swashbuckler Lasse-Maja (Gunnar Olsson, 1941); the romantic comedy Up With Little Märta ( Fram för Lilla Märta , Hasse Ekman, 1945); the dramatic art film The Magician ( Ansiktet , Ingmar Bergman, 1958); the recent romantic comedy Cockpit (Mårten Klingberg, 2012); and the trans art film Everything Falls Apart ( Nånting måste gå sönder , Ester Martin Bergsmark, 2016). I will show that the two main shifts in Swedish cinema’s representation of cross-gender performance occurred in the mid-1950s and in the 1990s, due to social changes and changes in the structure of the Swedish film industry. In Swedish cinema, as elsewhere, cross-dressing has never meant any one thing, so we must attend to the specific contexts of its expression in order to understand what it meant.

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.

Women and racial/ethnic minorities account for a growing percentage of video game players in the USA. The economic future of the video game industry may, in part, depend on the industry's ability to adapt marketing efforts to appeal to the growing female and racial/ethnic markets. Contrary to these efforts, however, is advertisers' reliance on stereotypes in advertisements to quickly establish a common understanding and wide appeal to a mass audience. This study investigates how race and gender intersect in the stereotypical character depictions used to market video games to consumers. A systematic content analysis was carried out of 383 US magazine advertisements of console, mobile, and PC video games. Stereotyping and intersectionality literatures were used as theoretical guides for this research. Findings reveal that the marketing of video games in the USA upholds some longstanding media stereotypes of minorities and women, including that of the White male hero, submissive sexualized female, Asian ninja, and deviant Black male. The potential social and economic implications of the video game industry's reliance on character stereotypes for the marketing of video games are discussed.

"The Routledge Companion to Media and Race serves as a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, and media professionals who seek to understand the key debates about the impact of media messages on racial attitudes and understanding. Broad in scope and richly presented from a diversity of perspectives, the book is divided into three sections: first, it summarizes the theoretical approaches that scholars have adopted to analyze the complexities of media messages about race and ethnicity, from the notion of 'representation' to more recent concepts like Critical Race Theory. Second, the book reviews studies related to a variety of media, including film, television, print media, social media, music, and video games. Finally, contributors present a broad summary of media issues related to specific races and ethnicities and describe the relationship of the study of race to the study of gender and sexuality"--Provided by publisher.

This book seeks to interrogate the representation of Black women in television. Cheers explores how the increase of Black women in media ownership and creative executive roles (producers, showrunners, directors and writers) in the last 30 years affected the fundamental cultural shift in Black women’s representation on television, which in turn parallels the political, social, economic and cultural advancements of Black women in America from 1950 to 2016. She also examines Black women as a diverse television audience, discussing how they interact and respond to the constantly evolving television representation of their image and likeness, looking specifically at how social media is used as a tool of audience engagement.