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This chapter explores the ways in which the portrayal of children in Palestinian screen content compares with the positioning of children in leading pan-Arab children’s channels. Using critical discourse analysis, it compares the definition and representation of childhood in three Arabic language texts (two magazine shows and one animation), and examines the ways in which the texts construct narratives of childhood and whether they reproduce or challenge hegemonic definitions of childhood. The chapter analyses the language used to address the child audience and the ways in which adult–child relations are depicted. The chapter concludes that while there are some characteristics unique to Palestinian programming, the positioning of children and the “modes of address” are similar in all three programmes, and there are common assumptions and idealizations of childhood. However, there is some evidence that the Emirati animation analysed challenges dominant (adult-generated) definitions of childhood present in Arab societies by presenting childhood as a dynamic space of empowerment

What/Who is playing Cyborg: An investigation of the 'Gamer' as a figure - Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy The current talk is an exploration into the question as to whether the gamer figure that emerged in India in the 1990s can be thought of as a cyborg and if so, then what kind of cyborg is the gamer? Can one think of the gamer-cyborg as a posthuman liberatory figure or is the gamer-cyborg still all too human? The intent of the paper in asking these questions and problematizing the figure of the Gamer is to launch an investigation into the more pressing question that one encounter in the wake of the cyber/information-turn, that is, how does one contemplate, comprehend, and articulate the 'new' in the identities that are formed and acquired with the advent of what has been identified as the cyber/information turn in culture? Can the connection between biological and technological be the sole basis for considering figurations like the Gamer as something new? Can they be thought of as a new subjectivity, a new politics, a new relationship to power? Is this 'new' democratic, free of discrimination and based on an egalitarian principle or is the 'new' an optimization of old and existing structures and modes of oppression? Bio: Prabhash Ranjan Tripathy was born in Odisha, India. He completed his B.A. (Hons) English, M.A. in English literature and M.A. in Comparative Indian Literature from University of Delhi. He is currently a PhD scholar at the school of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Has submitted his MPhil dissertation titled ‘Playing Cyborg: A study of the Gamer in the Videogame Parlours of Delhi and Mussoorie’, following which was a doctoral fellow at the International Research Centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures” and is currently working on his PhD dissertation titled ‘Between WorkStation and PlayStation: The Cultural Location of Videogames in India’. Interest areas include Superhero comic books, Anime, Video Games, Combat Sports, and Mythology. He is fascinated by felines and loves to trek, read, write, click and play.

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.

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.

This article examines a terrain in which gender inclusion remains a challenge: competitive esports. In the male-dominated sphere of esports, the underrepresentation of women and nonbinary people often leaves these marginalized groups invisible, with a significant lack of women and nonbinary people competing in top-tier tournaments. We highlight the experience of Wang ‘BaiZe’ Xinyu, a Chinese Hearthstone player who became the first woman to compete in a Hearthstone Championship Tour event in the game’s 3-year history. The narrative surrounding BaiZe’s participation largely focused on her gender and ignored the achievements that led her to qualify for the event. We argue that BaiZe’s entrance to the championship scene was received negatively by both competitors and spectators, reinforcing barriers that exclude women and nonbinary people from entering this male-dominated space. The discrimination faced by these esports competitors reinforces sexism inherent not only in Hearthstone but also in esports in general.

The transition to digital television referred to as the Digital Switchover (DSO) process or Digital Migration is an agreement of member countries of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) at the Geneva Conference in 2006. The agreement requires changes to national spectrum allocation and redefines national participation in the global digital television and mobile telephony market. While the decision of most African states to embark on the digital migration programme remains independent, the policies and approach to the implementation were influenced by two dominant economic orthodoxies, the neoliberal free market (Becchio and Leghissa 2016; Johnson 2011; Overbeek and Apeldoorn 2012; Peters 2011) which promotes a media environment mainly driven by market imperatives and the Chinese State capitalism (Bremmer 2008; Gu et al. 2016; Lyons 2007; Szamosszegi and Kyle 2011; Xing and Shaw 2013) which is the economic ideology that drives the interventions of the Chinese government in the region’s digital migration.

En 2007, le monde du jeu vidéo est secoué par une violente polémique au sujet du jeu vidéo Resident Evil 5. Ce dernier est accusé de faire commerce du racisme, en invitant à se glisser dans la peau d'un américain blanc body-buildé, missionné dans une région africaine anonyme, et tuant des dizaines d'hommes et de femmes noires présentées comme de dangereux zombies infectés du virus T. Depuis, la communauté des joueurs et joueuses de jeux vidéo interpelle régulièrement les créateurs et créatrices des jeux sur les questions du racisme et du sexisme.Dans son ouvrage, Mehdi Derfoufi analyse les rapports de force qui structurent l'industrie du jeu vidéo, dévoilant comment le racisme se niche parfois insidieusement au cœur de scénarios de jeux vidéo à succès. Il nous invite à nous questionner. Quels sont les pays qui pèsent sur les milliards d'euros du marché mondial du jeu vidéo ? Qui sont les game designers et auteurs des jeux ? Comment les représentations racistes sont-elles véhiculées à travers les personnageset les imaginaires vidéoludiques ? L'auteur nous dévoile avec brio les logiques racialisantes à l’œuvre au sein d’un marché économique très concurrentiel où des stéréotypes exotisants servent régulièrement à faire vendre un jeu. Il nous montre aussi comment la division internationale du travail et la hiérarchie économico-politique Nord/Sud pèse sur le marché du jeu vidéo et ralentit l’émergence de nouvelles représentations. Pourtant, de nombreux espoirs, notamment dans les pays du Sud participent au renouvellement de la culture geek : face aux violences racistes, la riposte s’organise.

The worlds of games are important places for us to think about time, as demonstrated by historical game studies in evaluating the past, but there is a role for games to help us consider the future as well. Because games are, to some extent, systems, they facilitate a systems thinking approach that connects the material to the immaterial. Because games also tend to be action-based, they allow thinking through of acts as well as representations. Games allow us to think about a time and place that is different from the present and how it might operate as a system that we could live in. I argue that a post-autonomist method of game analysis requires an explicitly political interpretation that is focused on trying to imagine a political future through experiments in gaming.

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.

Unreal City: Expressions of Tokyo in Video Games Abstract: Games today, with advancements in graphic design and capability of the platforms on which they can be played, are almost akin to interactive films- in which the player not only consumes the movie-like storyline, but becomes an active participant in the narrative and its outcomes. Worldbuilding in video games has strong connections with the approaches contained in semiotics, as it is not with the images on the screen that players interact, but rather the world that is represented by the images. I intend to examine Tokyo as a virtually constructed game world in three separate texts – Atlus Studios’ Persona 5, Sega’s Yakuza series and Square Enix’s The World Ends with You. The fictionally created cityscapes of contemporary Japan have become ideal spaces for the video games to propagate, their construction in the texts can be seen a form of techno-orientalism that is simultaneously rooted in both Eastern and Western imagination. Each of these texts constructs its own version of Tokyo that, while being recognisable through the use of specific semiotic markers, is also sufficiently different enough to make it a virtual, unreal, space. However, what must be noted is that this space only exists in its entirety when it is interacted upon by the player. Using Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of social space into spatial practice, representations of space and representational space, this paper seeks to look at how the construction of the digital city is not merely a 3D representation thereof, but points where interactivity and narrative coincide. It is through the locus of these two elements that the player comprehends and navigates game narratives. My purpose will therefore be to look at the constructions of Tokyo within video games as data visualisations of spaces that become places through interactivity and comprehension of the player. About Laxmi: Lakshmi Menon is Assistant Professor of English at VTM NSS College, Trivandrum, and a PhD candidate at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where her thesis is a study of Harry Potter slash fanfiction and fan communities. She is currently researching Boys Love fan cultures in South Asia, while her wider research interests also include digital humanities, popular culture and queer literature.

Counter-Hegemonic Representations of Japanese Cultural Icons in Sekiro Abstract: Through fictional or non-fictional narratives, media representations of the past communicate specific interpretations, which lets users negotiate the past's prospective meanings. Additionally, these cultural constructions of the past are produced and disseminated in the present. Hence, the existing hegemonic power relations influence the depiction and recognition of cultural communities in the construction of the past. Therefore, the approach to framing cultures in pop-culture representations becomes a preponderating factor in how people perceive such cultures and periods. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, at first glance, can be considered as a game that follows the same vein of exploiting the western craze for the ninja archetype, as seen in its predecessors like the Onimusha and Tenchu series. However, it takes a bold stance against the persisting ‘self-Orientalist’ framework by reclaiming the ninja myth from marketized exoticization. Borrowing from Said’s theory of Orientalism, I would first like to analyze the existing self-Orientalism in depicting and marketing Japanese cultural icons. I would then like to highlight how this game is not an exoticized cultural artefact and further discuss the implications of such a portrayal in the contexts of representation and authenticity. I conclude that by undercutting innate stereotypes and using inherently Japanese characters, the game reappropriates the agency to depict Japanese cultural icons, from a non-Oriental, non-exoticized viewpoint. Thus, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice becomes a stand-out in the video game industry in this respect. Bio: Geoffrey Fernandez is a PhD candidate at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Pilani campus. His doctoral research examines the use of culture, mythology, and folklore in video games.

Extant research on e-sports has focused on the growth and value of the phenomenon, fandom, and participant experiences. However, there is a paucity of e-sports scholarship detailing women’s experiences from marginalized communities living in various conservative Muslim countries. This shortage of literature remains despite different radical Islamic groups’ consistent demand for banning several online video games and the Muslim youth’s resistance to these calls. This study aimed to understand the motives and lived experiences of Muslim women e-sports participants from Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. The authors collected data via observations of online video games and in-depth interviews. The study participants revealed that they use e-sports as a vehicle for an oppositional agency and personal freedom from the patriarchal system. The findings also suggest that participants are facing systematic marginalization and grave intrusion of post-colonization. The study contributes to the limited scholarship concerning Indian subcontinent Muslim women’s e-sports participation.

La production de fictions sérielles turques est en constant développement. Ces fictions ont un très grand succès au niveau local (Tanriöver, 2011 ; Öztürkmen, 2018), avant d’être exportées au-delà des frontières turques depuis les années 2000, d’abord dans des pays sous l’influence culturelle de l’ancien Empire ottoman (à savoir les Balkans et le Moyen-Orient, puis au-delà (en Amérique latine, en Chine, au Pakistan, en Inde, au Bangladesh, etc.), faisant de la Turquie un leader mondial en matière de production et d’exportation. La Grèce est devenue un grand consommateur de fictions sérielles turques et les forts taux d’audience que ces dernières y réalisent ont conduit certains chercheurs à débattre du soft power turc. Plus précisément, en se basant sur les activités des fans des feuilletons en question (comme le tourisme en direction de la Turquie), certains ont soutenu que le visionnage des feuilletons turcs entraîne une amélioration des relations gréco-turques (Paris, 2013). En parallèle, de nombreux articles journalistiques, aussi bien en Grèce que dans d’autres pays, analysent le succès de ces feuilletons auprès du public grec comme une réussite diplomatique du gouvernement turc (Moore, 2013 ; Dimitrakopoulos, 2020).

This multidisciplinary collection probes ways in which emerging and established scholars perceive and theorize decolonization and resistance in their own fields of work, from education to political and social studies, to psychology, medicine, and beyond

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 chapter analyzes the reflections of Turkey’s neoconservative and neoliberal politics of gender on daytime television. The focus is on Bridal House, a popular daytime TV show in Turkey which interpellates women as domestic subjects competing with other women to prove their domestic abilities, particularly the ability to navigate the etiquette of domestic consumption. Hierarchies are instigated among women through symbolic battles on “tasteful” consumption, and the marital household surfaces as a space of constant regulation where women strive to be ideal housewives. By analyzing Bridal House through a Bourdieusian framework, this chapter traces the representations of the “ideal female subject” along neoconservative and neoliberal lines, and demonstrates the ways in which symbolic violences are enacted on women in contemporary Turkey’s daytime TV culture.

This book examines the phenomenon of prime time soap operas on Indian television. An anthropological insight into social issues and practices of contemporary India through the television, this volume analyzes the production of soaps within India’s cultural fabric. It deconstructs themes and issues surrounding the "everyday" and the "middle class" through the fiction of the "popular". In its second edition, this still remains the only book to examine prime time soap operas on Indian television. Without in any way changing the central arguments of the first edition, it adds an essential introductory chapter tracking the tectonic shifts in the Indian "mediascape" over the past decade – including how the explosion of regional language channels and an era of multiple screens have changed soap viewing forever. Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, the book traces how prime time soaps in India still grab the maximum eyeballs and remain the biggest earners for TV channels. The book will be of interest to students of anthropology and sociology, media and cultural studies, visual culture studies, gender and family studies, and also Asian studies in general. It is also an important resource for media producers, both in content production and television channels, as well as for the general reader.

The marriage show was a popular reality show format that invited people to find their soulmate and marry on live television in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork which took place in the show’s studio between 2011 and 2012, this chapter explores female participants’ investment of their trust in the show. While being reluctant about finding a spouse on television, women take on registers of safety, familiarity, and secrecy to navigate the show as a safe venue. This endeavor also involved women’s safeguarding of themselves on their way to marriage. The fragility of trust in the show, therefore, indicates how women foresee risks and yet strive for securing happiness and safety in marriage in general. This affective tension, at a larger scale, is related to the increased sense of insecurity at a global scale, and the systematic failure of the family to provide the safe living environment it promises in the Turkish context.