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Muslim members of the video game industry discuss the current state of Muslim representation within video games. This includes current problems with the way Muslims are represented and potential solutions. Our panelists come from all sides of the industry. From AAA, to indie, the panelists all have a unique voice and angle they would like to bring to the discussion. All panelists have grown up Muslim in western countries and have had to deal with certain adversities and challenges. It's through that experience that the panelists want to bring a lively discussion, backed with personal accounts and sources, that is not only engaging, but educational.

This article attempts to explore the popularization of Japanese console games in China in the past two decades, which reveals the tripartite relationship of the nation-state, transnational cultural power, and local agents.1 This study focuses on the formation and development of the console game industry in a non-Western context, where the society has undergone dramatic transformations and has been largely influenced by the globalization process. Encountering social anti-gaming discourse and cultural protectionism, the importation and distribution of Japanese console games did not get support from the state. However, it found its way to the audience and gained popularity through piracy, the black market, and the local agents’ appropriation, becoming an integrated part of many Chinese early gamers’ lives. This article draws upon the intersection of cultural globalization with game studies, calling for an investigation into the complexity of the game industry through its sociohistorical, political, and cultural environment.

It's about the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. The essays question the ways in which components of the reconciliation, such as apology and witnessing, have social and political effects for residential-schools survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics."-- Provided by publisher

This book examines the local, regional and transnational contexts of video games through a focused analysis on gaming communities, the ways game design regulates gender and class relations, and the impacts of colonization on game design. The critical interest in games as a cultural artifact is covered by a wide range of interdisciplinary work. To highlight the social impacts of games the first section of the book covers the systems built around high score game competitions, the development of independent game design communities, and the formation of fan communities and cosplay. The second section of the book offers a deeper analysis of game structures, gender and masculinity, and the economic constraints of empire that are built into game design. The final section offers a macro perspective on transnational and colonial discourses built into the cultural structures of East Asian game play

This article addresses the proliferation of images and appearances in the realm of e-sports culture in urban China. The author’s findings are based upon ethnographic research and participant observation of e-sports audience members, teams, and tournaments, including the 2010 E-sports Champion League tournament in Beijing, the 2012 and 2013 World Cyber Games Festivals in Kunshan, and a 2014 Starcraft II tournament in Shanghai. A comparison of these events leads the author to argue that live e-sports events in China are less about spectatorship than they are about creating a spectacle that presents a carefully crafted vision of Chinese politics, nationalism, and capitalist consumer culture. In these cases, the participants and audience members are not only commodities to be sold but also a means of masking contradictory and highly ambivalent discourses about China’s role in technological production, digital game culture, and the promotion of the discourse of Internet addiction.

"Qui était Zacharie Vincent, aussi connu, à l'époque, sous le nom de Tehariolin? Peu de gens le savent. Il s'agit pourtant d'une figure incontournable, considérée comme le premier peintre autochtone moderne. Le présent ouvrage, signé par l'historienne de l'art Louise Vigneault, lève donc le voile sur ce peintre et chef de guerre wendat, longtemps tombé dans l'oubli, qui a considérablement marqué le 19e siècle. Zacharie Vincent (1815-1886) a suscité la fascination, avec ses allures d'artiste bohème, sa dégaine de clochard mêlée à ses ornements d'apparat, la singularité de ses autoportraits. La légende entourant celui que l'on appelait le " dernier des Hurons " a attiré les regards sur la petite communauté de la Jeune-Lorette (aujourd'hui Wendake), pour ensuite révéler la fierté et la résilience du peuple wendat. Des peintres canadiens, tels Antoine Plamondon et Eugène Hamel, ont réalisé des portraits de Vincent, puis des photographes comme Louis-Prudent Vallée ont immortalisé son image. Zacharie Vincent : une autohistoire artistique nous plonge au cour de la vie et de l'ouvre d'un artiste énigmatique qui a laissé en héritage des témoignages essentiels sur sa nation, en équilibre entre la tradition et la modernité."-- Quatrième de couverture

From gold farmers and ‘100 million brain-damaged online gamers’ to the world’s biggest game company and more players than US citizens, China seems like the cabinet of curiosities for the whole world of digital gaming. This article focuses on news coverage around Chinese gaming and presents three phases of such journalism. China’s emerging games market was most prominently featured between 1999 and 2005, while 2006-2011 focused on extreme play behavior in China. Most recently, a discourse of vast business opportunities and stabilizing markets has been presented by Western news media. In total more than 853 news articles are explored in parallel to the theoretical concept of Sinological-orientalism. This article suggests significant historical changes in the ways in which knowledge of Chinese gaming has been produced in English language news media.

This article explores the ways game adaptations engage with existing popular culture constructions of race within the framework of commercial franchises. Its focus is on games which are part of the so-called “Frodo Franchise” based on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films. It considers the role played by licensing agreements, the conventions, and ludic elements of different game genres, the need for new characters and narratives to keep audiences engaged with an existing world, and the opportunity games offer for interactive exploration of a digital world, to illuminate both the challenges to and the opportunities for disrupting conventional representations of race and difference.

While the Indian indie game development scene is still relatively young, it has already lived through big changes. Like in many regions worldwide, indie game developers in India have to negotiate between practical issues, for example regarding market requirements and expectations, and committed ambitions, for example regarding creative aspirations in art design and game content. On the one hand and in order to persist in the ever extending industry, they need to acknowledge mainstream wants and practical demands from especially (though not exclusively) the Indian game market which at present is characterized by an overall dominance of mobile card and casino games. On the other hand, we see that especially Indian indie developers increasingly reflect on the role of Indian cultural heritage (including elements from history, architecture, music, etc.) for India produced games. This turn to own roots, to implement Indian cultural and historical heritage in games, is now visible in a number of games which have been recently Greenlit on Steam and are in the final production phases, such as Asura (2017 forthc.), Antariksha Sanchar (2017 forthc.), and others.

This article explores the attitudes of EVE Online players toward their Russian counterparts. Popular community opinion paints Russian players as aggressive, cliquish and hostile, and as cheats who exploit the game in order to make (real-world) money. The article also analyzes the ways in which Russian pilots challenge, subvert, and discuss these attitudes. Two key arguments are presented. First, that although perceptions of Russian EVE players are often negative, these discourses in EVE are complicated by the fact that aggression, organization, and tight player groups are prerequisites for success within the game. Second, the opinions and agency of Russian players are highlighted. By examining both Russian- and English-language discussions, we see that rather than being silent victims of discrimination, or economic migrants “ruining” the game for other players, Russian pilots inhabit a complex space in a community engaged in two-way dialogue about culture, ethnicity, and play practices in EVE.

The Paramilitary Hero on Turkish Television: A Case Study on Valley of the Wolves explores the representation and reception of nationalism and masculinity in Turkey through an examination of the popular television serial, Valley of the Wolves which has been aired on Turkish television since 2003. This detailed examination of the show demonstrates a particular discourse of nationalism, namely the Turkish Islam synthesis embedded in a gender-specific regime in which the paramilitary hero is placed at the centre. The study draws on thirty-seven in-depth interviews with viewers of the programme from different social backgrounds. These viewers read the serial from various perspectives in the light of their gendered experiences, suggesting that the relationship between text and audience is not necessarily predetermined by the former, but is rather constructed through an interdiscursive process. The book also examines the pleasures of the “contesting” readers of Valley of the Wolves, drawing on the audience interviews, and argues that critical approaches to a particular media text do not present a barrier to audience pleasures.

This paper will look at the convergence of the interactive free flow of video games and the questioning and revisioning of historical continuity using the example of the Assassin's Creed series by Ubisoft. With a story that exists simultaneously in the modern day and the 15th century, the games allow the player to take control of characters and alter, or make possible, events recognisable as historical fact. It plays with both history and memory and history as memory, as the life of the primary player character is being relived through the genetic memories of one of his descendants. Being highly narrative-bound, the Assassin's Creed games use, via the medium of the screen, the rift between history and memory as a central element of narrative, theme, and game design, which this paper will explore. Furthermore, using theories of convergence this paper will examine how video games provide a new, interactive mode of storytelling that is rapidly becoming representative of our age.

The kingdom of Bhutan drew the international spotlight in 1999 when it became the last nation on earth to introduce broadcast television. It was a deliberate and strategic move by a country that for centuries had chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the world, turning inward to nurture its own culture. The small Himalayan country, whose population in 2013 was estimated at just 733,000, 1 sits uneasily between two feisty behemoths  – China and India – each with over a billion people and an ongoing history of border disputes. Bhutan has long been wary of being swamped, either politically or culturally, by these larger neighbours, as well as the world beyond (Penjore  2004 ).

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.

Incisive analyses of mass media - including such forms as talk shows, MTV, the Internet, soap operas, television sitcoms, dramatic series, pornography, and advertising-enable this provocative third edition of Gender, Race and Class in Media to engage students in critical mass media scholarship. Issues of power related to gender, race, and class are integrated into a wide range of articles examining the economic and cultural implications of mass media as institutions, including the political economy of media production, textual analysis, and media consumption. Throughout, Gender, Race and Class in Media examines the mass media as economic and cultural institutions that shape our social identities, especially in regard to gender, race, and class.

Since their development in their current format in the early 1990s as a means to attract female viewers in their twenties, Japanese prime-time television dramas-known commonly as ‘ dorama ’ 1 —have featured working women. Even police procedurals, medical dramas, and serials based on ‘ shojo manga ’ (graphic novels for girls) depict women working outside the home. The dorama most watched by Japanese audiences older than age 25, and those that continue to attract global fans, present the daily lives of independent women working in Tokyo. The protagonists enact fantasies about female professionals while depicting real issues facing the larger generations they represent. Viewers may not want to be these characters, but they can see aspects of themselves in them.

Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within one of the largest virtual gaming communities—Xbox Live. Previous research on video games has focused mostly on violence and examining violent behavior resulting from consuming this medium. This limited scope has skewed criminologists' understanding of video games and video game culture. Xbox Live has proven to be more than just a gaming platform for users. It has evolved into a multimedia entertainment outlet for more than 20 million users. This book examines the nature of social interactions within Xbox Live, which are often riddled with deviant behavior, including but not limited to racism and sexism. The text situates video games within a hegemonic framework deploying whiteness and masculinity as the norm. The experiences of the marginalized bodies are situated within the framework of deviance as they fail to conform to the hegemonic norm and become victims of racism, sexism, and other types of harassment.

The construction of a problem, be it a crisis or a moral panic, is an attempt of policing and control, for the maintenance of hegemony and authority (Hall et al. 1978 ). A problem emerges as a problem only when it is out of its proper place, just like dirt becomes dirt only when it is not properly placed in the earth. The elimination of dirt is necessary in maintaining the cleanliness of the social order (Douglas 2002 ). In other words, it is the need for a particular social arrangement that constitutes the existence of a problem. Taiyu, the lingua franca of the Taiwanese, became a problem of dialect (called Minnanyu) to be eliminated when the KMT colonial regime moved to Taiwan, building it as a Chinese nation and instituting Mandarin as the national language. Television is central to the building of the Chinese nation. Taiyu serial dramas were broadcast soon after the fi rst network was established in 1962, but have been constructed as the most problematic and debased genre since the early 1970s when the second TV station, CTV (1969), and the third, CTS (1971), were established and used serial drama to compete for profi t. Accusations directed at the poverty of its quality and the vulgarity of the audiences have characterized mainstream criticisms and constructions of Taiyu serial dramas as problems from the 1970s to the present. This chapter investigates not only the how and what but also the why of this problem-construction, as an attempt to understand the power mechanisms at work in struggling for hegemonic control. It charts two historical moments – the 1970s and from the 1990s to the present – when language has played a signifi cant role in the articulations of serial dramas as problems and explores the changing political, economic and cultural forces that situate them as problems worthy of discussion. I argue that the history of this problem-making demonstrates the centrality of Chinese culture in political domination through cultural means, with ethnic/class politics playing a central role in the maintenance of a hierarchical social order. In the 1970s, Chinese culture was used to create ethnic/class divisions within Taiwan while simultaneously creating the illusion of a symbolic whole under the name of the Republic of China. However, since the 1990s, and intensifying after the 2000s, with the entanglement of democratization and neoliberalization in Taiwan and the rise of China, the ethnic/class tension is not just complicated by confl icted national identifi cations and Chinese culturepromoted by both the KMT Party’s Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, but also for unifi cation purposes. While democratization, which involved the search for Taiwanese identity, led to the rise of Taiyu-based Hsiangtu drama, the neoliberal defi nition of culture as economic resource, which consecrates Chinese culture through capital investment, facilitates this unifi cation process while creating further ethnic/class/national identity divisions within Taiwan. The result is a disparaging of Taiyu-based culture in general and, in particular, Taiyu serial drama as a problem to be reformed.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework with which to dis- cuss the critical engagement of media art projects in Second Life with racialized self-representation, fashion and ethnic dress. Ex- amining Montreal-based Mohawk artist Skawennati’s machinima series, TimeTravellerTM (2008-13), a project of self- determination, survivance and Indigenous futurity, it argues the critically-aware act of ‘virtually self-fashioning’ racialized born- digital identities, or virtual ethnicities, disrupts ways in which today’s vast proliferation of self-technologies enabling the crea- tion, recreation and management of multiple selves, would other- wise remain complicit with neoliberal colour-blind racism