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Venba is a narrative cooking game, where you play as an Indian mom, who immigrates to Canada with her family in the 1980s. Players will cook various dishes and restore lost recipes, hold branching conversations and explore in this story about family, love, loss and more. More on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/14.... Developer, Abhi, gives Game Studies India an exclusive preview talking about identity, nostalgia, memory and of course, food. In conversation with Poonam Chowdhury and Souvik Mukherjee.

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.

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.

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 essay considers how the experience of Black folk descended from slaves in North America helps us to rethink a definition of play that has been largely informed by scholars and philosophers working within a White European tradition. This tradition of play, theorized most famously by Dutch Art Historian Johan Huizinga, French Sociologist Roger Caillois, Swiss Psychologist Jean Piaget, and New Zealander Brian Sutton-Smith reads play in a mostly positive sense and asserts that certain practices, namely torture, are taboo and thus cannot be play. I argue that this approach to play is short-sighted and linked to a troubling global discourse that renders the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) invisible. In other words, by defining play only through its pleasurable connotations, the term holds an epistemic bias towards people with access to the conditions of leisure. Indeed, torture helps to paint a more complete picture where the most heinous potentials of play are addressed alongside the most pleasant, yet in so doing the trauma of slavery is remembered. In rethinking this phenomenology, I aim to detail the more insidious ways that play functions as a tool of subjugation. One that hurts as much as it heals and one that has been complicit in the systemic erasure of BIPOC people from the domain of leisure.

Repairing Play: Toward A Black Phenomenology of Play In this talk I offer the term "repairing play" or play that both repairs the damages wrought by colonialism, and is itself a form of reparations, in an effort to consider how we might advance an understanding of play that is inclusive of BIPOC people. I focus in on the Black American experience in order to better theorize a moment of repair, and consider how torture is memorialized in play through song. I also will draw on examples from Black artists and game designers in order to help show how their work in repairing play draws from the tradition of Black radical aesthetics. Bio: Aaron Trammell is an Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He writes about how BIPOC experience the games they play. Specifically, he is interested in how games and play further values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek culture. Aaron's work has been cited in Wired and featured on National Public Radio. It has been published in Game Studies, Games & Culture, New Media & Society, and G|A|M|E. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the Multimedia editor of the Sounding Out!

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.

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.

2019 marked ten years since the publication of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, which has become a seminal book in videogame cultural criticism. Ten years later, there is still a pressing need for cultural and materialist criticism of the politics of production within game studies. In putting together this special issue, our hope is to identify new developments in the game industry and academia that are emblematic of 21st-century capitalism. Just as Games of Empire popularised critical political-economic perspectives ten years ago, we encourage others, as the authors in this issue did, to continue and maintain investigations into questions of ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle. Such analyses are necessary not only to trace but also to open up new directions in game culture and academia for decades to come.

Recent research has started focusing on the representation of history in videogames. Such representation is almost always of mainstream history and usually presented from a Western perspective. Set in a fictitious Himalayan kingdom in South Asia, Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4 is arguably a crucial example of how history is represented using Western and even colonial frameworks and where the narratives that do not emerge from conventional written history are almost always rendered invisible. Using the frameworks of Subaltern Studies and “border-thinking,” this essay attempts to unpack issues of Orientalism and “colonial difference”; it then engages with postcolonial digital humanities and postcolonial game studies to comment on how history is represented in videogames and how the neglected gaps and silences in the game are important in constructing the historiography in videogames. In the process, the essay engages in a debate with current notions of videogame-historiography.

Independent Videogames investigates the social and cultural implications of contemporary forms of independent video game development. Through a series of case studies and theoretical investigations, it evaluates the significance of such a multi-faceted phenomenon within video game and digital cultures. A diverse team of scholars highlight the specificities of independence within the industry and the culture of digital gaming through case studies and theoretical questions. The chapters focus on labor, gender, distribution models and technologies of production to map the current state of research on independent game development. The authors also identify how the boundaries of independence are becoming opaque in the contemporary game industry – often at the cost of the claims of autonomy, freedom and emancipation that underlie the indie scene. The book ultimately imagines new and better narratives for a less exploitative and more inclusive videogame industry. Systematically mapping the current directions of a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly difficult to define and limit, this book will be a crucial resource for scholars and students of game studies, media history, media industries and independent gaming.

This contribution interrogates the figure of the perpetrator as it emerges in narrative videogames. First, we provide a brief outlook on some key characteristics of videogames, before we discuss how the specific affordances of this “new” medium offer unprecedented ways of approaching and dealing with perpetrators and perpetration. Finally, we offer concrete examples from three games to illustrate different possible configurations of the playerperpetrator nexus—Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012), 11 Bit Studio’s This War of Mine (2015), and Hangar 13’s Mafia III (2016). In contrast to other media, games enable an active exploration of, and participation in, a variety of possible offenses. Rather than merely witnessing evil deeds, players are immersed in simulated environments that demand constant evaluations of complex settings and require decision-making under systemic limitations. This performative aspect of play makes games a unique medium for learning and teaching about the intricate logics and innate dynamics of perpetrations.

"The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies provides the first comprehensive overview of this emerging interdisciplinary field in the humanities and social sciences. Featuring contributions by scholars from a wide variety of fields and disciplines, the Handbook charts the growth and development, foundations, key debates, core concerns, and frontiers of Perpetrator Studies. Focusing on genocide, terrorism, and other forms of political mass violence, this Handbook addresses questions of guilt and responsibility, definition, terminology, typology, motivations, group dynamics, memory, trauma, representation, and pedagogy. Offering a thematic and conceptual approach that facilitates a comparative analysis across historical, geographic, and disciplinary lines, the Handbook allows different disciplinary perspectives to confront one another. In so doing, this foundational volume presents contemporary perspectives on longstanding debates whilst also providing new contributions to the field. Written with an interdisciplinary readership in mind, the chapters provide an overview of existing work on a specific topic or issue, delineate current developments within the respective discipline or field, and make suggestions for further research. As such, the book will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines, including history, sociology, anthropology, criminology, law, philosophy, memory studies, psychology, political science, literary studies, film studies, cultural studies, art history, and education"-- Provided by publisher.

Where do computer games "happen"? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of "space", "place" and "territory" featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these.

In this article I argue that the structural conditions of global capitalism and postcolonialism encourage game developers to rearticulate hegemonic memory politics and suppress subaltern identities. This claim is corroborated via an application of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model to the Japanese-developed video game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. This case study highlights that the hegemonic articulations of colonial histories are not exclusive to Western entertainment products where instead modes of production matter in the ‘manufacturing of mnemonic hegemony’. I also propose that the propaganda model, while instructive, can be improved further by acknowledging a technological filter and the role of the subaltern. Thus, the article furthers the understanding of the relation between production and form in contemporary technological phenomena like video games and how this relation motivates hegemonic articulations of the past in contemporary mass culture.

Many of today's most commercially successful videogames, from Call of Duty to Company of Heroes, are war-themed titles that play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by recent news headlines or drawn from history. While such games are marketed as authentic representations of war, they often provide a selective form of realism that eschews problematic, yet salient aspects of war. In addition, changes in the way Western states wage and frame actual wars makes contemporary conflicts increasingly resemble videogames when perceived from the vantage point of Western audiences.This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from games studies, media and cultural studies, politics and international relations, and related fields to examine the complex relationships between military-themed videogames and real-world conflict, and to consider how videogames might deal with history, memory, and conflict in alternative ways. It asks: What is the role of videogames in the formation and negotiation of cultural memory of past wars? How do game narratives and designs position the gaming subject in relation to history, war and militarism? And how far do critical, anti-war/peace games offer an alternative or challenge to mainstream commercial titles?

Where do computer games "happen"? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of "space", "place" and "territory" featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these.