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This research examined the identity development of Korean adult players in the online game world. Q methodology was used to investigate the subjectivity of self-development in Mabinogi (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). Thirty-seven adult players sorted 57 behavior statements to reflect the changes in their behaviors from past to present. Three types of self-development were found: achievement-oriented development, control-oriented development, and relational development. The behavior patterns of these three types were compared to identify similarities and differences among them in terms of psychological meanings and values in the online game life. The results illustrate that the online game world can be defined as a new behavioral setting, made possible by digital technology, in which individuals are able to experience three different paths of identity development.

With special reference to the current scenario in West Bengal, this chapter argues that the rise and popularity of Bangla news channels like Star Ananda, 24 Ghanta, Kolkata TV, and Tara News have resulted in the emergence of a vernacular style of news broadcasting which is quite distinct from that of global or national news media. One major point in this chapter is how the vernacular news channels encourage particular forms of address — the emotional, the intimate and the melodramatic — and how close-ups and sound bites create particular kinds of telegenic political leaders who can use these formal characteristics to their advantage. This chapter explores the ways in which a distinctive kind of vernacular is reconfiguring the nature of political participation itself and hence the notion of citizenship and perhaps even the nature and functioning of the nation-state in India.

This chapter looks, in particular, at issues surrounding the trial of Mohammad Afzal Guru in 2006–7, but also with reference to the terrible Mumbai attacks of November 2008. Whilst tragic in multiple ways, these events are also made spectacular, emotive, and divisive, according to interpretation by television. The framing of television news in India could be several, but is often not. Pantomime terrors, extravagant formatting, phone-in trial reports seem to be the order of the day. The station ident, newsreader-presenter and video confession all contest for screen attention in the trial of Mohamed Afzal, and the ground for this was prepared long ago. This short history of a 24 hour news channel ends with ‘The Big Fight’ - a staged and theatrical mode of ‘infotainment’ that sacrifices intelligent reporting for ideological fit.

A unique confluence of technological, political and economic factors in the 1990s drove the transformative process that led to the battering down of the government’s monopoly over television. By the end of the 1990s, the growing strength of Indian capitalism after the liberalization of the Indian economy and the forces of what Thomas Friedman has called ‘Globalisation 3.0’ allowed Indian entrepreneurs to level the playing field. The Indian state, having embarked on economic liberalization, was forced to adapt to satellite television as an agent of global capitalism it certainly did not give up control over television easily or voluntarily. Operating at the junction of public culture, capitalism and globalization, satellite news networks have had profound implications for the state, politics, democracy and identity formation. Despite all their shortcomings and sensationalism, the emergence of satellite television news networks has enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy.

This chapter locates India, and broadly the post-colonial context, within the larger debates concerning television’s audiovisual form and mode of address. It tries to demonstrate that certain key traits in Indian popular performative traditions, representing an ‘alternative’ negotiation with modernity, are somewhat homologous with what western theorists have tried to specify (though in contradicting terms) as the features of televisual mode of address and ‘flow’. The chapter reads the specific imports of this correspondence in histories of Indian television with special reference to a somewhat novel way television has started imagining the nation after liberalization. The significance of the Indian popular film form as lending a major legacy to tele-viewership in India constitutes a major strand of argument.

Beneath many instances of ’sweeping’ change, both structural and representational, in the market-dominant, liberalized and privatized Indian televisual scenario there lies a hidden transcript of continuity insofar as the encoding of development issues, images and messages is concerned. In the periods of Doordarshan and later corporate channels, though with markedly different historical contexts, reference points, contents and styles — the encoding of ’development’ leaves little autonomy to the audiences. In a political slant indicating how the two televisual periods converge in contracting the space for public debate and civic engagement the essay seeks to make a departure from the dominant view which puts them in binary positions.

The exponential growth of television news in India – from one state controlled network until 1991 to more than 100 news channels in 2012 – has transformed broadcast journalism in the country. This proliferation of news networks has intensified competition for audience and advertising revenue, leading to excessive marketization of news, which increasingly veers toward infotainment. The chapter examines the challenges faced by Indian television news – focusing on economic and political dimensions of television news - and its implications for the world’s largest democracy.

Tamil television lends itself to some interesting initiatives in gender empowerment through its programming in 3 categories – fiction, reality, and talent shows. This chapter provides a glimpse into television programmes on leading Tamil channels over the last decade (2000–10) from a gender perspective. Focusing particularly on women and transgender characters/hosts, emotional and psychological quotients of the shows and their audiences, moments of dramatic intensity, the chapter demonstrates how the vernacular televisual representations were quite different from the stereotypical portrayals of the mainstream ‘national’ television, even though the programmes were produced, televised, and received within the broader patriarchal framework of Tamil cultural and political contexts. The chapter, as a whole, intends to look at the production, representation and identification of Tamil television soaps and reality shows as vehicle for spotlighting gender issues and alternative sexualities in the public domain.

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.

This study explores the globalization and liberalization that has occurred in Indian television over the two decades starting from 1990.

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual, and player practices. This collection includes essays from scholars from eight countries analyzing game cultures on macro- and micro-levels and investigates the growing transnational nature of digital play

Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.

Drawing on original research I conducted in the late 1980s, the book argues for a critical approach to the study of children and television. It begins with critical reappraisals of previous empiricist and interpretative studies to set the ground for a different theoretical inquiry which links biography with history. The situated activity of children's television viewing therefore has to be related to the broader historical and cultural formations in post-Mao China. By way of a methodological pluralism of questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews and observation, the book provides the reader with a thorough critical analysis of the rise of the new commercial ethic in Chinese society in general, and in the sector of media and communications in particular, at the very historical turning point of the late 1980s. Soon after that, Deng Xiaoping made his significant tour to south China, reckoning a big step forward towards further liberalization and started to form a brave new world in China ever since.

In this chapter, the creation of a value chain during the process of digital games development in Turkey is discussed using a critical political economy approach. This study claims to be the first of its kind that intends to examine the topography of the digital game industry in Turkey and gives a brief history and describes the present status of digital games production in Turkey. All the components of a value chain, namely, the industrial structure and development process, publishing and licensing, distribution and marketing structure, labor force, legal regulations, and governmental policies will be considered in that order to map out the present topography of the industry. The final part of the study will deal with possible solutions for further development in the industry. At this point, the study stresses the fact that all components of the value chain must be performed uninterrupted if the actors in Turkey’s digital game industry desire to position themselves as “producers” in global or local markets.

The writer frames his analysis of Kan Lume and Loo Zihan's feature length film Solos (2007) with a historical overview of the representation of queer sexualities in new Singaporean cinema. This approach also takes in the Penal Code Section 377A, arguing that not only do these repressive laws force queer sexualities to the margins of culture and society, but also that the State's censorship laws are a means by which it can reify ‘the Asian value system's supposed rejection of queerness’.

When scholars and policy makers contemplate the Arab “media revolution,” they mostly think of Al-Jazeera and its news competitors. They are guided by the assumption that all-news satellite television networks are the predominant, even the single, shaper of the Arab public sphere, a perspective exacerbated by the September 11, 2001 attacks. Drawing on a larger work (Kraidy, 2009, forthcoming), this chapter presents an alternative view, emphasizing instead the combined impact of Arab entertainment television and small media such as mobile phones on Arab governance. It explores how entertainment television is an active contributor to shaping what Arab publics discuss and do in both the social and political realms. As local (in this case regional/pan-Arab, reaching two dozen Arabic-speaking countries) adaptations of global television formats, Arab reality television shows exhibit a combination of signs and practices from several worldviews. As such, this chapter will show how Arab reality shows are open to multiple processes of appropriation and redeployment. Though numerous scholars have for years studied the differentiated “reception” of television texts in various contexts, this chapter focuses specifically on television formats in a context of growing media convergence and protracted political instability and social upheaval. Specifically, it focuses on reality television’s social and political impact, which stems primarily from its activation of new communication processes between a variety of information and media technologies creating what I call “hypermedia space.” In the new Arab information order, reality television activates hypermedia space because it promotes participatory practices like voting, campaigning and alliance building, via mobile telephones and related devices.

The issue of identity formation when playing an avatar in a video game has recently become perceived as both increasingly complex and contentious. Game critics argue both for and against the apparent seamlessness in the identity formation in video games. However, while the case against seamlessness builds up with respect to other gaming genres, first-person shooters (FPS) are often still singled out as best representing this first-person identification whereby players were supposed to be totally immersed in their avatars while they played the game. In the light of recent research, this chapter builds on earlier research to reveal further problems in assuming a seamless merging of identity even in the FPS. It argues that the very conception of subjectivity has always been problematized through the FPS, and that the genre itself self-consciously keeps pointing this out. As an example of the latter, the chapter focuses on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games to show how FPS games prompt players to question their in-game identity(ies) because the playing subject, instead of being a fixed entity, is hard-wired into the process of exploration that constitutes gameplay.

From Nausicaa to Sailor Moon, understanding girl heroines of manga and anime within otaku culture.

In recent years, Arab television has undergone a dramatic and profound transformation from terrestrial, government-owned, national channels to satellite, privately owned, transnational networks. The latter is the Arab television that matters today, economically, socially and politically. The resulting pan-Arab industry is vibrant, diverse, and fluid - very different, the authors of this major new study argue, from the prevailing view in the West, which focuses only on the al-Jazeera network. Based on a wealth of primary Arabic language sources, interviews with Arab television executives, and the authors' personal and professional experience with the industry, Arab Television Industries tells the story of that transformation, featuring compelling portraits of major players and institutions, and captures dominant trends in the industry. Readers learn how the transformation of Arab television came to be, the different kinds of channels, how programs are made and promoted, and how they are regulated. Throughout, the analysis focuses on the interaction of the television industry with Arab politics, business, societies and cultures.