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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.

The educational video game, When Rivers Were Trails, was launched in 2019. The purpose of the game is to teach players about Indigenous perspectives of history, US federal allotment policies affecting tribal nations, and some of the effects of these policies on Indigenous peoples. This article explores tribal college student experiences playing When Rivers Were Trails in hopes that it provides the basis for further research into how tribal college faculty may be able to teach the game within their own classrooms. Tribal colleges and universities were created by tribal nations to provide for the higher education needs of their citizens. Using phenomenological research methods, seven college students volunteered to participate in a brief study about their experiences playing the video game. Upon transcription and analysis of the interview data, three themes were developed that capture how these students define their experience with When Rivers Were Trails: feelings of representation, histories of land dispossession, and resilience of communities.

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.

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.

This book uncovers popular games' key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic - in short, the authority - behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference.

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.

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?

Scholars have documented how people of color experience gaming culture as violent, yet it is unclear how this violence shapes conceptualizations of gaming culture. Undertaking a cultural sociological approach that foregrounds meaning-making, I demonstrate that trash talk is a useful site to explore how social actors construct and negotiate gaming culture. Analyzing data from 12 qualitative interviews with men of color, I argue that trash talk is a practice of boundary-making that reproduces racism and sexism. Respondent narratives about gaming culture vis-à-vis trash talk thus show how gaming culture is socially constructed in everyday interactions, and bound to cultural repertoires and structural conditions that exist outside of gaming. This study provides a potential avenue to explore the socially constructed and dynamic nature of gaming culture and gamer identity.

Few gender-focused studies of video games explore the gameplay experiences of women of color, and those that do tend to only emphasize negative phenomena (i.e., racial or gender discrimination). In this paper, we conduct an exploratory case study attending to the motivations and gaming practices of Black college women. Questionnaire responses and focus group discussion illuminate the plurality of gameplay experiences for this specific population of Black college women. Sixty-five percent of this population enjoy the ubiquity of mobile games with casual and puzzle games being the most popular genres. However, academic responsibilities and competing recreational interests inhibit frequent gameplay. Consequently, this population of Black college women represent two types of casual gamers who report positive gameplay experiences, providing insights into creating a more inclusive gaming subculture.

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.

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.

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.

This study compared the effects of episodic framing of the Checkpoint scenario and the Military Raid scenario in Global Conflicts (2010), a computerized simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on developing impartial attitudes towards this conflict. The former presents a more human, individual and personal framing of the conflict than does the latter. Two hundred and ten Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian undergraduate students participated in the experiment. They filled in questionnaires measuring attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before and after playing the scenarios. Results suggested that participants playing the Checkpoint scenario became more impartial toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike those playing the Military Raid scenario. The results show that computerized simulations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be used for attitude change intervention, but the framing of the story in the game may be crucial in determining whether the players become impartial regarding the situation or not.

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.

How culture uses games and how games use culture: an examination of Latin America's gaming practices and the representation of the region's cultures in games. Video games are becoming an ever more ubiquitous element of daily life, played by millions on devices that range from smart phones to desktop computers. An examination of this phenomenon reveals that video games are increasingly being converted into cultural currency. For video game designers, culture is a resource that can be incorporated into games; for players, local gaming practices and specific social contexts can affect their playing experiences. In Cultural Code, Phillip Penix-Tadsen shows how culture uses games and how games use culture, looking at examples related to Latin America. Both static code and subjective play have been shown to contribute to the meaning of games; Penix-Tadsen introduces culture as a third level of creating meaning. Penix-Tadsen focuses first on how culture uses games, looking at the diverse practices of play in Latin America, the ideological and intellectual uses of games, and the creative and economic possibilities opened up by video games in Latin America—the evolution of regional game design and development. Examining how games use culture, Penix-Tadsen discusses in-game cultural representations of Latin America in a range of popular titles (pointing out, for example, appearances of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue in games from Call of Duty to the tourism-promoting Brasil Quest). He analyzes this through semiotics, the signifying systems of video games and the specific signifiers of Latin American culture; space, how culture is incorporated into different types of game environments; and simulation, the ways that cultural meaning is conveyed procedurally and algorithmically through gameplay mechanics. Source: Publisher

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.

Following the exportation of Japanese media products such as TV dramas, Japanese culture and products have swept across many Asian countries, especially Taiwan. Based on the historical background and unique characteristics of games, this study investigates the cultural effect of Japanese video games on players in Taiwan. This study also presents an analysis of the differences between TV and the video game as cultural vehicles. We used both quantitative and qualitative methods. Results indicate a relationship between game-playing behavior and the identification of Japanese culture. However, the relationship between video game playing and consumption was nonsignificant. This shows the power of video games in nation-building but not in nation-branding, in contrast with TV. This study presents a discussion of the findings to shed light on the cultural effects of video games.

In this investigation, the authors ask how media exemplars of Black masculinity influence the views of and intentions toward other Black men. An experiment compared the effects of exposure to Black video game characters fitting the exemplar thug or street criminal (e.g., Carl Johnson from GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS) versus exemplars of professional Black men (e.g., political leaders), on evaluations of an unknown and unrelated Black or White political candidate and on pro-Black attitudes. Results revealed significant interactions of exemplar type and candidate race on favorability and capability candidate ratings and on pro-Black attitudes. These data demonstrate the power of mass media exemplars of Black masculinity to prime meaningfully different outcomes in viewers. As the face of gaming evolves with advances in technology, so too should the characterization of race in games.