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People of color comprise a large proportion of the US player base, yet are systematically and grossly underrepresented in digital games. We constructed a survey to assess if players perceive this underrepresentation, how they experience these representations, and sample their beliefs about diversity and gaming. Mixed-methods analyses show significant differences between players of color and White players on perception of racial norms in gaming, effects on behavior, emotions, player satisfaction, engagement, and beliefs stemming from a lack of diversity. Players from all races-ethnicities overwhelmingly expressed a desire for greater diversity. We discuss reasons why our methodology shows higher dissatisfaction than previous research and discuss our findings in the context of industry's challenge to meet audience demands for greater racial diversity in games.

While the violent content of video games has caused wide concern among scholars, gender, and racial stereotypes in video games are still an understudied area. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a better understanding of the stereotypical phenomenon in video games. The book chapter first provides a comprehensive review of previous studies conducted upon gender-role and racial portrayals in video games. Then a small-scale content analysis on a sample of official trailers, introductory sequences and covers of 19 of the most popular video games is introduced. Finally, the implications of stereotype in video games and the possible social and psychological impacts on players, especially adolescent players, are discussed.

This research explores the ways different people experience the racial content of video games. Building on DeVane and Squire, this research speaks to content analyses literature that shows games as modern minstrelsies. Using Bonilla-Silva’s definition of Racial Ideology in conjunction with Winddance-Twine’s concept of Racial Literacy, I examined racial ideology and its role as an interpretative framework. I also used Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital to account for video game cultural knowledge. Data were collected through personal interviews where participants played the video game Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony for 30-50 minutes. A sample of 31 participants covering variation in gender, gaming experience, and race answered questions assessing their racial ideology, then played the game introduction, and finally, answered questions assessing interpretations of game content. Racially aware people with little gaming experience echoed the content analysis minstrelsy findings while colorblind racist non-gamers believed the content accurately represented the world. However, deeper familiarity with gaming and other mass media opened up a new interstitial space for challenging the racial status quo. Racially aware gamers saw the franchises as lampooning the shallow stereotypes in mainstream society. More importantly, with a more sophisticated media context, many colorblind racist gamers also saw racial representations as intentionally offensive. Gamers herein create inventive, non-threatening, but meaningful ways to address racialization across a spectrum of racial literacies. As a result, content analyses need a richer understanding of the experiences of video games for consumers.

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.

This essay examines the representation and consumption of Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2 as a site of catharsis, pleasure, and empowerment. Through not only its repre-sentation of white supremacy but its rendering of intervention and transformation as violence, Mafia III and Watch Dogs 2 offer a powerful inscription of gratification. In other words, offering both a space of oppositional gaze and a virtual reality invested in challenging gaze based in violence,Mafia IIIandWatch Dogs 2 reimagine the conventions of both video games and violence.

This article examines the response of minority gamers as they adopt new innovations in Xbox Live. Using diffusion of innovation theory, specific attention is given to gamers’ rate of adoption of the new Xbox Live environment, which was a recent update to the Xbox Live interface. By employing virtual ethnography, observations, and interviews reveal that gaming duration and gender are significant factors in identifying a gamer’s successful rate of adoption of the new innovation. Female participants reveal that Xbox Live intentionally targets males as the default gamer and enact changes based on their needs. The research concludes with a plea to Xbox Live to acknowledge minority gamers such as women to incorporate their needs within the decision-making process of new innovations.

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.

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.

The First Podcast in a series of podcasts presented by Games Studies India, about our first experiences with Games while growing up in India.

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.

Many of today's most commercially successful videogames, from Call of Duty to Company of Heroes, are war-themed titles that play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by recent news headlines or drawn from history. While such games are marketed as authentic representations of war, they often provide a selective form of realism that eschews problematic, yet salient aspects of war. In addition, changes in the way Western states wage and frame actual wars makes contemporary conflicts increasingly resemble videogames when perceived from the vantage point of Western audiences.This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from games studies, media and cultural studies, politics and international relations, and related fields to examine the complex relationships between military-themed videogames and real-world conflict, and to consider how videogames might deal with history, memory, and conflict in alternative ways. It asks: What is the role of videogames in the formation and negotiation of cultural memory of past wars? How do game narratives and designs position the gaming subject in relation to history, war and militarism? And how far do critical, anti-war/peace games offer an alternative or challenge to mainstream commercial titles?

The genre of history strategy games is a crucial area of study because of what is at stake in the representation of controversial aspects of history in popular culture. Previous work has pointed to various affordances and constraints in the representation of history, based on the framing of the game interface, the alignment of goals with certain strategies and textual criticism of the contents of the games. In contrast, this article examines these games from the perspective of the player’s experience of play in relation to a wider gaming community. It is in these counterfactual communities that players negotiate their individual experience with their knowledge of the history that is presented in the games that they play, indicating that the relationship between digital games, players and history is highly contextual. The relevant practices of players of history strategy games are illustrated with examples from the official and unofficial communities of the Paradox Interactive games Europa Universalis II and Victoria: Empire Under the Sun. The shared paratexts demonstrate how positions are negotiated in relation to the ‘official’ version of history presented in the games. These negotiations are made tangible through the production and sharing of paratexts that remix the official history of the games to include other perspectives developed through counterfactual imaginations. These findings indicate the importance of including perspectives from gaming communities to support other forms of analysis in order to make rigorous observations about the impact of digital games on popular history.

The in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays in Queer Game Studies use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. This volume reveals the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games, demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world and establishing an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture.

Seeking to address the general question, ‘Where is Digital Asia?’, this paper explores the various ways in which the digital and virtual realm interacts with the problematic and contested category of Asia. Beginning with a discussion of the relationship between Asia and Digital Asia, as both cartographic and ideological sites, it moves on to connect Digital Asia with the discourse of techno-Orientalism. Using the example of the videogame as an instance of a digital location that can be visited and explored, this article suggests that the gamic quality of interactivity adds a new, experiential dimension to the ideological structure of (techno-)Orientalism, hence positing the utility of a new form of ‘Gamic Orientalism’. Focussing on the ‘digital dōjō’ as the site of Gamic Orientalism and Digital Asia par excellence, this paper concludes with a discussion of the ways in which gamers represent their engagement with this site in a manner that echoes the way martial artists talk about the significance of their art as self-cultivation. Illustrated with texts from the bushidō canon and interviews with gamers, this playful and experimental piece posits the possibility of ‘virtual bushidō’ as the ultimate expression of Gamic Orientalism, suggesting that Digital Asia is finally located in an ideologically conditioned mode of engagement with the digital medium rather than in any cartographically defined space.

Video games have long been seen as the exclusive territory of young, heterosexual white males. In a media landscape dominated by such gamers, players who do not fit this mold, including women, people of color, and LGBT people, are often brutalized in forums and in public channels in online play. Discussion of representation of such groups in games has frequently been limited and cursory. In contrast, Gaming at the Edge builds on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity and draws on qualitative audience research methods to make sense of how representation comes to matter. In Gaming at the Edge, Adrienne Shaw argues that video game players experience race, gender, and sexuality concurrently. She asks: How do players identify with characters? How do they separate identification and interactivity? What is the role of fantasy in representation? What is the importance of understanding market logic? In addressing these questions Shaw reveals how representation comes to matter to participants and offers a perceptive consideration of the high stakes in politics of representation debates. Putting forth a framework for talking about representation, difference, and diversity in an era in which user-generated content, individualized media consumption, and the blurring of producer/consumer roles has lessened the utility of traditional models of media representation analysis, Shaw finds new insight on the edge of media consumption with the invisible, marginalized gamers who are surprising in both their numbers and their influence in mainstream gamer culture.

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.

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.

Telenovela shapes important and highly favorite section of the television productions. The T.V. series have moved out from their traditional structure with an entertaining aspect and have been divided into different types and scopes. Taking into consideration the time and the atmosphere of dissemination which the Telenovela programs hold in T.V. antenna, there is a need to conduct studies on sociology of Telenovela more than any other times in the past. This article is an attempt to review the two subject-matters of Telenovela and Narration and their connection with democracy through sociological sporadic studies. This will also present the significance of this genre in T.V. productions at local and international discourses. Observations, field researches and library study methods have been employed in this research.

Ce mémoire se penche sur la diffusion de l'art contemporain autochtone au Québec de 1967 à 2013. Grâce à un corpus constitué de 640 expositions comprenant au moins un artiste des Premières Nations, métis ou inuit s'étant tenues quelque part dans la province à l'intérieur de ces 46 années, il a été possible de dresser un portrait global raisonné de ce qui s'est fait – ou ne s'est pas fait – concrètement, au-delà des a priori maintes fois reconduits. Il démontre, par exemple, que la décennie 1990 n'a pas été si « désertique » qu'il n'y parait, mais que la période 2000-2013, malgré son apparente vigueur, cache plusieurs dynamiques à l'œuvre au Québec rendant la reconnaissance et l'intégration des artistes autochtones dans le grand réseau des arts contemporains encore difficile. Ce mémoire apporte un éclairage sur le rôle marquant joué par les réseaux parallèles dans la diffusion de l'art contemporain autochtone, celui, parfois novateur, joué par les musées d'histoire et d'ethnographie ainsi que par les musées au sein même des communautés autochtones, puis la fermeture bien visible des institutions d'art du Québec jusqu'au milieu des années 2000. Il met également en lumière la présence de solitudes existantes au Québec, c'est-à-dire celle qui opère une division entre les artistes autochtones francophones et anglophones, favorisant grandement ces derniers, ainsi qu'entre artistes autochtones versus allochtones, les deux se mélangeant encore difficilement au sein des expositions. Enfin, ce mémoire permet de constater qu'en quatre décennies, le nombre d'artistes autochtones pratiquant de manière professionnelle au Québec n'a cessé d'augmenter, que Montréal s'est inscrite de plus en plus comme une métropole pouvant attirer des artistes autochtones de calibre national et international, que certaines régions du Québec, comme le Saguenay et l'Abitibi, ont, contrairement à d'autres, fait preuve d'une ouverture certaine face à l'art autochtone, mais également qu'il y a eu – et qu'il y a peut-être encore – une corrélation entre événements festifs et expositions accrues d'art contemporain autochtone, ce qui a tendance à le garder dans le domaine du folklore au Québec, et nuire véritablement à la reconnaissance des artistes professionnels.