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This article examines the response of minority gamers as they adopt new innovations in Xbox Live. Using diffusion of innovation theory, specific attention is given to gamers’ rate of adoption of the new Xbox Live environment, which was a recent update to the Xbox Live interface. By employing virtual ethnography, observations, and interviews reveal that gaming duration and gender are significant factors in identifying a gamer’s successful rate of adoption of the new innovation. Female participants reveal that Xbox Live intentionally targets males as the default gamer and enact changes based on their needs. The research concludes with a plea to Xbox Live to acknowledge minority gamers such as women to incorporate their needs within the decision-making process of new innovations.

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.

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.

From #Gamergate to the daily experiences of marginalization among gamers, gaming is entangled with mainstream cultures of systematic exploitation and oppression. Whether visible in the persistent color line that shapes the production, dissemination, and legitimization of dominant stereotypes within the industry itself, or in the dehumanizing representations often found within game spaces, many video games perpetuate injustice and mirror the inequities and violence that permeate society as a whole. Drawing from the latest research and from popular games such as World of warcraft and Tomb raider, Woke gaming examines resistance to spaces of violence, discrimination, and microaggressions in gaming culture. The contributors of these essays identify strategies to detox gaming culture and orient players toward progressive ends, illustrating the power and potential of video games to become catalysts for social justice

The demand for minority representation in video games often focuses on proving that members of marginalized groups are gamers. In turn, it is asserted that the gaming industry should focus on appealing to these players via targeted content. Being targeted as a gamer, however, does not a gamer make. Identity as a gamer intersects with other identities like gender, race, and sexuality. Negative connotations about gaming lead people to not identify as gamers, and even to not play video games. This article concludes, based on interview data, that those invested in diversity in video games must focus their attention on the construction of the medium, and not the construction of the audience as such. This shift in academic attention is necessary to develop arguments for representation in games that do not rely on marking groups as specific kinds of gaming markets via identifiers like gender, race, and sexuality.

In this essay I examine one particular feature of the films, the song-and-dance sequences, as they draw attention to the fractious nature of the postcolonial nation while simultaneously attempting to construct a space for the articulation of a consolidated national identity.

"Examining a wide range of Japanese videogames, including arcade fighting games, PC-based strategy games and console JRPGs, this book assesses their cultural significance and shows how gameplay and context can be analyzed together to understand videogames as a dynamic mode of artistic expression. Well-known titles such as Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Street Fighter and Katamari Damacy are evaluated in detail, showing how ideology and critique are conveyed through game narrative and character design as well as user interface, cabinet art, and peripherals. This book also considers how Japan' has been packaged for domestic and overseas consumers, and how Japanese designers have used the medium to express ideas about home and nation, nuclear energy, war and historical memory, social breakdown and bioethics. Placing each title in its historical context, Hutchinson ultimately shows that videogames are a relatively recent but significant site where cultural identity is played out in modern Japan. Comparing Japanese videogames with their American counterparts, as well as other media forms, such as film, manga and anime, Japanese Culture Through Videogames will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese culture and society, as well as Game Studies, Media Studies and Japanese Studies more generally."-- Provided by publisher.

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.

Every form has its own structure. Technically, though there is a difference between computer games and literature, but structurally both reflect same modes of the presentation which is carried out by certain codes. The present paper looks into the structural analysis of computer games with technical aspect as well as literature aspect with special reference to Far Cry 3, a first person action adventure computer game which received several awards and critically acclaimed for its graphics, story line, features etc. Besides this paper relocate Vladimir Propp’s theory of narrative function in Far Cry 3 and decode how the computer game with the help of certain binary opposition and codes have become one of the fundamental tools of getting entertained in the popular imagination.

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.

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.

Hitman 2’s Mumbai mission, just like the film Extraction, looks at the oriental space in a similar ‘diseased’ yellow filter which is akin to the Mexico of Breaking Bad. Here, we have the perfect orientalist reduction of a culture. By digitising Mumbai and creating it into a gamic world, it produces a rather lazily translated and racialised appropriation of this particular South Asian space. The essential orientalist gaze thus reinforces the binary between the ‘I’ and the ‘other’: where the ‘I’ is the foreign Agent 47 and the ‘other’ are the yellow dwellers of Mumbai. The NPCs react to Agent 47 in awe as if a white man is a miracle of nature which they have never seen before. Not only that, but they also interact with themselves in a very essentialist way. The tea shops/kiosks are literally written as 'Chaye Dukan' (which is a direct translation for 'Tea Shop'). Not only does this point at a lack of research but also a lazy design. No matter how inferior a place is, no one names their establishment in a direct translation to their colonial/capitalist overlords. It becomes nothing but a city ‘lost in translation’. In this paper, I will read the Mumbai mission of Hitman 2 as a cultural artefact where the game scape becomes a techno-orientalist commodity. Like any other Literary text which fetishizes the ‘other’, Hitman 2 also becomes such a ‘digital/ludic’ text which manages to define the ‘Indian’ in its own myopic way. The discourse propagated thus reinforces the idea of ‘India’ or the ‘Orient’ as the literal plaything of the West. Thus, I will expand by elaborating on how the creators become a part of the greater orientalized theatricality by indulging in a form of ‘identity tourism’ (Nakamura ’96), where the autonomy of creating a cultural space takes the form of an essentialist fetish. About Samya : Samya Brata Roy (He/Him) is currently in the final semester of his M.A in English Literature from The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Mainly his interests lie in and around the modalities of Digital Narratives, which he also tries to create at thepenarchist (wordpress.com). He is associated as a SIG facilitator with DHARTI (dhdharti.in), as a transcriber with The Canterbury Tales Project and as database contributor with Electronic Literature Knowledge Base | ELMCIP. He works in the field of Disability Studies by assisting in research. He is also passionate about teaching and inclusion and pursued it by teaching slum kids.

Playing Dystopia: Searching for the Neganthropocene in Papers, Please and Orwell The way we play games and the way games play us is constantly changing. The physical shrinking of space can no longer be compensated by expansive gamescapes which otherwise provided a reprieve from diminishing access to space in 20th and 21st century childhood (Mayra, An Introduction to Game Studies). Gamescapes, increasingly, are becoming neo-explorations of “other people simulators” characterized by a suffocating hypernearing of the experience of the dystopia (Lucas Pope). Often ‘mundane’ mirrors of real-life situations, these dystopian games place the player in movement-limiting, choice-limiting challenging scenarios from where a fulfilling ending is more often than not impossible. I look at two of these dystopian games that offer covertly disruptive gameplay through alienating, often disembodied, simulation as a strategy for playing dystopia: Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and Osmotic Studios’ Orwell. Closely engaging with issues of surveillance, digital governance, neurotechnology, illegal profiling, and ultimately, survival in a dystopia of technics, these games with their multiple endings caused by the smallest, seemingly most insignificant of differences in gameplay become crucial in their playing out of the possibilities of the neganthropocene.

Speaking to the 'Missing' Player: Subaltern Poetics in Indian Videogames The degree of interactivity and agency of the player-character in videogames is often a moot question in Games Studies discourses (Atkins 2002 , Juul 2004, Salen and Zimmerman 2001). The assumption is that whether illusory or real, agency is an important element that drives the plot of digital games. To assume this, however, is to argue from a position of privilege and some videogames use their in-game mechanics to emphasise this. The assumption of a selfhood by the player while playing a digital game is the precondition to the experience of agency. Such a precondition is hardcoded into the gameplay on the basis of a default notion of empowerment and entitlement. What happens, however, in the case of the character that does not provide this sense of agency or for the game wherein such an experience of selfhood may not be possible? Using a well-worn but very relevant term from Postcolonial discourses, one could ask what happens where the game is about the Subaltern. Considering videogame studies from non-Western and South-South perspectives, such a default assumption of selfhood or agency may be challenged. Elsewhere (Mukherjee 2017), I have cited examples from the Cameroon, Indonesia and India that begin to address this challenge. Here, I wish to take two games from India as my texts for close-reading (or close-play) and show how a different poetics operates; indeed, my primary objective is to enquire into how the videogame as a narrative medium, which is by default apparently premised on agency, functions for the subaltern.

Thatgamecompany’s 'Journey' (2012) is a videogame like no other. This serene atmospheric game came out at a time when fast-paced, aggressive, AAA games were (and still are) the norm. Soon after the game’s release in 2012, thatgamecompany’s courage and hard work started getting the appreciation it deserved. 'Journey' has won several ‘Game of the Year’ awards and received several other awards and nominations, including a ‘Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media’ nomination for the 2013 Grammy Awards. For this Game Studies India Adda Talk, I will be discussing (read: gushing over) this game’s brilliant visual and auditory art, wordless storytelling techniques, and one-of-a-kind multiplayer experience. Please join me on this talk and let's take a ‘journey’ like no other. Pun intended. Thank you and I hope you all have a wonderful new year. 🙂 Here’s the game trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie4iz...

Playing back to the Empire, in videogames, is rife with tensions. The imperialist sentiment inherent in reverse-colonist discourse featured in most strategy-based videogames like Europa Universalis IV, where the player could conquer Europe playing for the Marathas, has been noted by Souvik Mukherjee (2017) as playing into the colonial logic while futilely trying to challenge it. Studio Oleomingus, an Indian two-man game studio, is one of the few involved in a different experiment. Their mythical game Somewhere, chronicling a postmodernist search for identity and narrative in the forgotten city of Kayamgadh, has generated significant spin-offs into its universe. With attention to one such spin-off, I will focus critical attention on the issue of the postcolonial gaming of the Museum in A Museum of Dubious Splendors. I will examine the New Museological implications of A Museum of Dubious Splendors, keeping in mind Museologist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s assertion of museums embodying “the power to name, to represent common sense, to create official versions, to represent the social world, to represent the past” (Hooper-Greenhill 2001: 2). Oleomingus’ own description of A Museum, as an adaptation of edited, mangled, contested short stories by a fictional Urdu writer, Mir Umar Hassan, eschews the linear narrative production of the colonial museum for a game of meanings, where the player enters rooms according to his choice and constructs his/her own “quiet game about prosaic objects and spurious histories.” ("A Museum" 2018) The paper would take this into account and examine the reconceptualization of the museum space with respect to James Clifford’s sense of museums being “contact zones”: A Museum’s lack of any curator, with its curious blend of colonial and native tales and banal objects defamiliarised by “spurious histories” lends itself to questions of playing the Empire back according to a different episteme, through subaltern histories that the colonial museum space silenced. Paying close attention to the question of postcolonial spatiality in this game, I will analyze the historiographical implications of these identity-scatterings and recuperations at constant play in the structure of the game. Keywords: Museum Studies, Thing Theory, Game studies, Marginal identity, Postcolonial Studies

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.