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This paper is a brief summary of a preliminary exploration of certain aspects of independent video game development in Japan. Initial interviews were conducted with researchers and indie game developers over a two-week period in Tokyo. Independent game developers from Kamakura were also interviewed as part of the research. Initial fieldwork was geared primarily toward doujin level game development and distribution. My key research question focused upon the religious and spiritual dimensions of doujin games. However, after conducting interviews it became clear that developers did not consider the Western frame or classification of religion and spirituality in their development but rather incorporated aspects of tradition, culture and values within their work.

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.

This thesis analyzes and discusses the complexities of digital representations involving Indigenous peoples through video games. Connecting both Game Theory and Native Studies, I analyze how digital games incorporate identity, culture, and relationships in diverse and intellectual ways and provide new spaces for Indigenous agency and semiotics. Beginning with an analysis of several historical and negative representations of Indigenous peoples, I then compare those tropes to projects within today’s environment and mainstream video game companies, independent companies, and educational service providers. I assert that while some digital media representations of Indigenous cultures are stereotypical and problematic, others facilitate a sense of cultural continuance and survivance. Lastly, some video games display both stereotypical and cultural continuance within them.

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.

Thunderbird Strike, a 2D side-scroller developed by Elizabeth LaPensée, allows a player fly from the Tar Sands to the Great Lakes as a thunderbird protecting Turtle Island with searing lightning against the snake that threatens to swallow the lands and waters whole. The game encouraged players to learn about the indigenous culture, reflect on water protection and alternative energy sources, and gain awareness of risks posed by oil pipeline construction for the conveyance of tar sands.Thunderbird Strike was developed through residencies including O k’inādās Residency, The Banff Musicians in Residence Program, and Territ-Aur(i)al Imprints Exchange thanks to the 2016 Artist Fellowship grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.

Resident Evil 5is a zombie game made by Capcom, featuring a White Americanprotagonist and set in Africa. This article argues that approaching this as a Japanesegame reveals aspects of a Japanese racial and colonial social imaginary that are missedif this context of production is ignored. In terms of race, the game presents hybridracial subjectivities that can be related to Japanese perspectives of Blackness andWhiteness, where these terms are two poles of difference and identity throughwhich an essentialized Japanese identity is constructed in what Iwabuchi calls“strategic hybridism.” In terms of colonialism, the game echoes structures of Japa-nese colonialism through which Japanese colonialism is obliquely memorialized and a“normal” Japanese global subjectivity can be performed.

The postcolonial has still remained on the margins of Game Studies, which has now incorporated at length, contemporary debates of race, gender, and other areas that challenge the canon. It is difficult to believe, however, that it has not defined the way in which video games are perceived; the effect, it can be argued, is subtle. For the millions of Indians playing games such as Empire: Total War or East India Company, their encounter with colonial history is direct and unavoidable, especially given the pervasiveness of postcolonial reactions in everything from academia to day-to-day conversation around them. The ways in which games construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics, and society are often deeply imbued with a notion of the colonial and therefore also with the questioning of colonialism. This article aims to examine the complexities that the postcolonial undertones in video games bring to the ways in which we read them.

The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-a-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.

Today over half of all American households own a dedicated game console and gaming industry profits trump those of the film industry worldwide. In this book, Soraya Murray moves past the technical discussions of games and offers a fresh and incisive look at their cultural dimensions. She critically explores blockbusters likeThe Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid, Spec Ops: The Line, Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed to show how they are deeply entangled with American ideological positions and contemporary political, cultural and economic conflicts.As quintessential forms of visual material in the twenty-first century, mainstream games both mirror and spur larger societal fears, hopes and dreams, and even address complex struggles for recognition. This book examines both their elaborately constructed characters and densely layered worlds, whose social and environmental landscapes reflect ideas about gender, race, globalisation and urban life. In this emerging field of study, Murray provides novel theoretical approaches to discussing games and playable media as culture. Demonstrating that games are at the frontline of power relations, she reimagines how we see them - and more importantly how we understand them.

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.

People of color comprise a large proportion of the US player base, yet are systematically and grossly underrepresented in digital games. We constructed a survey to assess if players perceive this underrepresentation, how they experience these representations, and sample their beliefs about diversity and gaming. Mixed-methods analyses show significant differences between players of color and White players on perception of racial norms in gaming, effects on behavior, emotions, player satisfaction, engagement, and beliefs stemming from a lack of diversity. Players from all races-ethnicities overwhelmingly expressed a desire for greater diversity. We discuss reasons why our methodology shows higher dissatisfaction than previous research and discuss our findings in the context of industry's challenge to meet audience demands for greater racial diversity in games.

Interview With Ben Joseph P. Banta, Founder Of Ranida Games

Interview with With Kurt Prieto, Games Designer Of Boo! Dead Ka! Game

Interview with Ryan Sumo, Lead Artist/Business Developer at Squeaky Wheel Studio

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: introduction While digital games hold promise for learning and socialization, emerging research and popular debates have critiqued inclusive access to these practices and literacies. This essay examines digital games for their potential to integrate diverse individuals and communities for learning and socialization, especially in online play and broadcasting of gameplay. For example, a level of cultural competency can be attained in well-developed games to overcome essentialist notions and assumptions about women and people of color. Using Black Cyberfeminism as a theoretical lens to make sense of players’ experiences, and Racialized Pedagogical Zones (RPZs) as an analytical frame to situate digital games’ entrenched ideologies of race and racism, we contend that games offer highly unproblematized depictions but have extreme potential for cultural competency. We further utilize Communities of Practice (CoP) as a frame for understanding and interrogating equitable access to community-supported collaborative learning and mastery within game culture, more broadly, and interest-driven guilds, clans, and affinity spaces, more specifically. In our extension of CoP, we integrate inclusive to highlight the resistive and resilient strategies employed by supportive communities for diverse women in addressing the systematic nature of oppression and power relations that undergird communities of practice, particularly in marked gendered spaces such as gaming. Marginalizing practices in game culture have become more widely publicized and understood in recent years, most notably because of high profile incidents of harassment. However, representations of women and racial or ethnic minorities by the gaming industry have also been problematic historically. For instance, since the 1980s video games have been critiqued for the hypersexualization of women and women are often the victims of misogynistic [End Page 112] vitriol, as the incidents around Gamergate have exposed. People of color are featured in largely stereotypical ways and are all but absent from the gaming industry. Queer gamers and gamers with dis/abilities are almost entirely absent and, when present, are not depicted fairly. This differential treatment appears to have a symbiotic relationship with the exclusion of marginalized players. As researchers have noted, Internet technologies and virtual communities operate in a manner that benefits privileged identities. These unequal power relations are accepted as legitimate and are embedded in the cultural practices of digital technology. Nevertheless, many gamers—most notably women—have resisted this perpetual state of inequity and the dominant narrative of power, control, and exclusion. Although some in gaming contend that these are not overt practices of exclusion, many players and scholars acknowledge the existence of symbolic exclusion, where those who are valued have the privilege to define legitimate practice and participation within gaming culture. The unequal power relations operating within the gaming community influence not only what gamers consume but also what they learn about themselves and others. Further, the racialized and gendered consumptive practices through gaming are often taken for granted. Commercial gaming culture is, with few exceptions, complicit in these exclusionary practices by continuing to design at a deficit, despite these increasingly apparent realities. But many gamers have begun to resist and challenge not only the imagery but also the practices that sustain white, masculine privilege within gaming and technology in general. While these practices have yet to reach a critical mass to disrupt the power structure operating within game culture as a whole, they exist counter to the mainstream and empower the marginalized operating within them. While the literature will provide an overview of these practices, our purpose is to privilege the resistance and resilience strategies of the marginalized to disrupt the traditional narrative while they empower themselves. We utilize Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality to reflect on identity, recognizing that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.” We also want to caution that while we focus on players who have historically been the marginalized in gaming culture and game research, we recognize that men...

How have video games evolved to now create meaningful stories about race and sports? This essay examines how Spike Lee's film-within-a-game, Livin' Da Dream (2015), reproduces some existing procedural and racial logics that reflect the desire to constantly manage and contain the centrality of black athletic greatness in mainstream sports and video game culture. While Lee's long-form cinematic model for turning sports video games into narrative games has been emulated across the medium as a whole, fans and gamers continually discuss the film as an evidently "broken" part of the popular NBA 2K video game series. As I argue here, however, the film-within-a-game productively insists on a default blackness when it functions as what I call "procedural cinema" (a rules and process based narrative). Ultimately, in functioning procedurally, Lee's otherwise conservative melodramatic story serves as a particularly instructive example of how computational blackness may, in systematically subverting the rules of the game, signify disruptively both within and against the machine.

"Although the fields of media studies and digital humanities are both well established, their overlaps have not been examined in depth. This comprehensive collection fills that gap, giving students, scholars, and media studies practitioners a cutting-edge guide to understanding the array of methodologies and projects operating at the intersection of digital humanities, computing, and culture. Topics covered include: networks; interfaces; media and culture at scale; procedures, programming, code; memory, digitization, and new media; and hacking, queering, and bending."--Provided by publisher