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In this article, I examine the Machinima film Finding Fanon II, by London-based artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, for what it can tell us about the relationship between video gaming and the postcolonial. Evoking Frantz Fanon, one of the most piercing voices of the decolonisation movement of the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), one of the most technologically advanced and, at the same time, scandalous video game series of the 21st century, Finding Fanon II amounts to a scathing critique of both the game series’ depiction of race and academic scholarship that has been defending the series on the grounds of its use of humour and irony. Shot in the in-game video editor of GTA V, Finding Fanon II lets this critique emerge from inside the game and as an effect of the artists’ engagement with it. By suspending the game’s mechanisms and programmed forms of interaction, the artwork brings their racialised logic to the fore, pointing towards the ways in which GTA V commodifies black men for the consumption of white players. This commodification has the effect of normalising and naturalising the precarious position of black people in Western society. What the artwork adds to this argument through its facilitation of a Fanonian perspective is a reminder that it is not only the gaming experience of white players that is framed in this way. Players with ethnic minority backgrounds might also accept the white gaze of the game as a given. Acts of self-commodification along the lines of a white Western rationality must thus be seen as a plausible new form of cultural imperialism promoted by the GTA series.

To date, game studies has largely undertheorized the co-production of postcolonial stories, exploration, and mapping in games. Furthermore, as has been noted before (Carr, 2006), the work that has been done on postcolonialism and play so far often leaves the player out of the equation, even sometimes as a theoretical construct. Yet player experience is crucial to understanding such games, as narratives are not only built on the ‘master’ level of game mechanics, but also through the personal stories players processually (Ash, 2009; Thrift, 2008) develop through their journey of touring and mapping, thereby developing spatial stories (De Certeau, 1984; Jenkins, 2004; Lammes, 2009) that may present us with conflicting spatio-temporal accounts. Through a comparative and collaborative auto-ethnographic analysis of Civilization VI (Sid Meier, 2016) – a turn-based strategy game – we want to push this discussion further and improve our theoretical understanding and analytical purchase of the triad relation between narrative and postcolonialism in games, thereby contributing to the field of postcolonial theory and game studies. Drawing on postcolonial geography, science and technology studies (STS), non-representational theory and game studies, we argue that games, through their playful, explorative and emergent qualities, are a powerful means of rethinking and reimagining colonial (hi)stories in this postcolonial era (Lammes, 2009, 2010) including issues of spatio-temporality, cartography and the hybrid relation between women and machines.

Burn the Boards (Causa Creations, 2015) portrays the life of an Indian worker who recycles electronic waste in a precarious environment. Phone Story (Molleindustria, 2011) simulates the journey and process of production and consumption of mobile phones, from Congo and China to Pakistan. Whereas Phone Story is described as ‘an educational game’ that addresses the player directly as a consumer, Burn the Boards is a resource management puzzle that creates compassion through role playing. These games bring to the fore a hidden reality of the everyday that is ingrained in historical relationships and power dynamics, drawing attention to what Michael Rothberg has recognized as ‘exploitation in an age of globalized neo-liberal capitalism’ (2014: iv).  This article explores how these games denounce the smartphone industry by using that same technology. For this purpose, we refer to Game Studies theory on procedural rhetoric; values and ethics; and the role of the player, combined with questions of (neo)colonization, globalization, and neoliberalism drawn from Postcolonial Studies. Our analysis shows the complicity of users and their confrontation with the extreme vulnerability of others, emphasizing how the coloniality of power works in our global consumer society. Thus we study the power relationships described and established by these games, the affective reactions which they seek to trigger, and their potential to transform players from passive observers into ethical players and consumers.

Video games are inherently transnational by virtue of their industrial, textual and player practices. Until recently, the focus of research on the social and cultural aspects of video games has been on the traditional centers of the video game industry consumption, while the international flows of digital gaming remained largely underexplored. This chapter analyzes the cultural dynamics and technological processes influencing both video game development and the gaming culture in the Middle East. It conceptualizes Middle Eastern video games as imaginary spaces that entangle diverse and contradictory processes: global cultural flows, media policies of nation states, visions and engagements of private entrepreneurs, and migration and appropriation of Western game genres and rule systems. By mapping out dominant trends, the chapter offers the opportunity to think about processes and flows influencing the video game industry in the Middle East during the first fifteen years of its existence

Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. The issue of equality transcends the current focus in the field of Game Studies on code, materiality, and platforms. Journalists and bloggers have begun to hold the digital game industry and culture accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged behind. Contributors to this volume examine portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

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.

Game studies has been an understudied area within the emerging field of digital media and religion. Video games can reflect, reject, or reconfigure traditionally held religious ideas and often serve as sources for the production of religious practices and ideas. This collection of essays presents a broad range of influential methodological approaches that illuminate how and why video games shape the construction of religious beliefs and practices, and also situates such research within the wider discourse on how digital media intersect with the religious worlds of the 21st century. Each chapter discusses a particular method and its theoretical background, summarizes existing research, and provides a practical case study that demonstrates how the method specifically contributes to the wider study of video games and religion. Featuring contributions from leading and emerging scholars of religion and digital gaming, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars in the areas of digital culture, new media, religious studies, and game studies across a wide range of disciplines.

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 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

In this article, I argue that digital games hold the potential to influence processes of cultural memory related to past and contemporary forms of marginalization. By bringing cultural memory studies into dialogue with game studies, I account for the ways through which digital games and practices of play might influence historical discourses and memory politics pertaining to marginalized identities. In order to demonstrate this, I conduct an analysis of Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry, a digital game which includes representation of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade and its racist systems. This analysis is then contrasted with statements by two critics, Evan Narcisse and Justin Clark, about how Freedom Cry highlights specific marginalized identities and represents the past through the game form. These statements, coupled with my game analysis, make the case for a concept that I term ‘counter-hegemonic commemorative play’. This makes visible a form of potentially cathartic power fantasy within a historical struggle, alongside emphasizing a form of designed recognition of marginalized identities within contemporary historical discourses and memory politics.

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.

Japan and China look back on a history of friendship as well as friction, particularly in recent decades. As the People's Republic of China's economy began to grow in the 1990s, so did its political weight within Asia and its economical relevance for Japan. Covering the years from 1989 to 2005, this book looks at Sino-Japanese relations through film and television drama in the crucial time of China's ascent to an economic superpower in opposition to Japan's own ailing economy. It provides an overview of how Japan views China through its visual media, offers explanations as to how oppositions between the two countries came to exist, and how and why certain myths about China have been conveyed.Griseldis Kirsch argues that the influence of visual media within society cannot be underestimated, nor should their value be lessened by them being perceived as part of 'popular culture'. Drawing on examples from a crucial 16 years in the history of post-war Japan and China, she explores to what extent these media were influenced by the political discourse of their time. In doing so, she adds another layer to the on-going debate on Sino-Japanese relations, bringing together disciplines such as media studies, history and area studies and thus filling a gap in existing research.

Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland.

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.

The western media has been eager to construct an apparent link between the so-called moral desensitization of soldiers in the 2003 Iraq War and their expe-rience of video game combat. Commentators assert that ‘games have avoided engaging the real-life issues to which they are responding’ (Zacny 2008), includ-ing the issue of combat trauma. Contrary to such positions, many video games already simulate the trauma in their gameplay experience; this article explores this concept from Brown’s definition of trauma as ‘outside the range of human experience’ (1995: 101). This evokes recent work in games studies on in-game involvement and identity-formation and raises questions about the role of moral-ity in gameplay, especially in multi-player combat games like Counter-Strike, Call of Duty 4 and America’s Army. Working from these hitherto overlooked aspects of trauma in gameplay experiences, this article challenges the oversim-plified association of video games with the desensitization of US troops in recent conflicts.

Extending Alexander Galloway’s analysis of the action-image in videogames, this essay explores the concept in relation to its source: the analysis of cinema by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The applicability of the concept to videogames will, therefore, be considered through a comparison between the First Person Shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Andrey Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. This analysis will compellingly explore the nature of videogame-action, its relation to player-perceptions and its loca-tion within the machinic and ludic schema.

This article presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented and represent themselves in video games. First, it analyses how various genres of European and American video games have constructed the Arab or Muslim Other. Within these games, it demonstrates how the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world have been flattened out and reconstructed into a series of social typologies operating within a broader framework of terrorism and hostility. It then contrasts these broader trends in western digital representation with selected video games produced in the Arab world, whose authors have knowingly subverted and refashioned these stereotypes in two unique and quite different fashions. In conclusion, it considers the significance of western attempts to transcend simplified patterns of representation that have dominated the video game industry by offering what are known as 'serious' games.

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.

Este texto analiza la transcendencia de la revolución feminista que se inició en los años 60 a partir del lema «Lo personal es político» y su influencia en la transformación del arte contemporáneo. En este contexto el trabajo desarrollado por las prácticas artísticas y la crítica feminista en relación a la denuncia de la violencia contra la mujer ocupa una posición destacada. A lo largo de estas últimas décadas no sólo ha evidenciado la violencia como un hecho continuado y global hacia la mujer sino que, además, ha iniciado nuevas narraciones que dan respuesta a un drama considerado socialmente como un irremediable «trágico final».

Postcolonialismo y feminismo utilizan conceptos comunes para el análisis y de/construcción de las narrativas dominantes. En países donde la colonización ha hecho estragos, las mujeres ponen en valor su empoderamiento como protagonistas de su destino. En esta línea las mujeres han aportado sus propuestas feministas para una nueva visión de lo colonial/postcolonial. Este trabajo pretende hacer un chequeo por aquellos trabajos videográficos de mujeres que, después de haber sido colonizadas, han realizado una descolonización cultural, situando su creatividad en varios continentes.