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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.

Video games, even though they are one of the present's quintessential media and cultural forms, also have a surprising and many-sided relation with the past. From seminal series like Sid Meier's Civilization or Assassin's Creed to innovative indies like Never Alone and Herald, games have integrated heritages and histories as key components of their design, narrative, and play. This has allowed hundreds of millions of people to experience humanity's diverse heritage through the thrill of interactive and playful discovery, exploration, and (re-)creation. Just as video games have embraced the past, games themselves are also emerging as an exciting new field of inquiry in disciplines that study the past. Games and other interactive media are not only becoming more and more important as tools for knowledge dissemination and heritage communication, but they also provide a creative space for theoretical and methodological innovations. The Interactive Past brings together a diverse group of thinkers -- including archaeologists, heritage scholars, game creators, conservators and more -- who explore the interface of video games and the past in a series of unique and engaging writings. They address such topics as how thinking about and creating games can inform on archaeological method and theory, how to leverage games for the communication of powerful and positive narratives, how games can be studied archaeologically and the challenges they present in terms of conservation, and why the deaths of virtual Romans and the treatment of video game chickens matters. The book also includes a crowd-sourced chapter in the form of a question-chain-game, written by the Kickstarter backers whose donations made this book possible. Together, these exciting and enlightening examples provide a convincing case for how interactive play can power the experience of the past and vice versa. Source: Publisher

This book focuses on the almost entirely neglected treatment of empire and colonialism in videogames. From its inception in the nineties, Game Studies has kept away from these issues despite the early popularity of videogame franchises such as Civilization and Age of Empire. This book examines the complex ways in which some videogames construct conceptions of spatiality, political systems, ethics and society that are often deeply imbued with colonialism. Moving beyond questions pertaining to European and American gaming cultures, this book addresses issues that relate to a global audience ? including, especially, the millions who play videogames in the formerly colonised countries, seeking to make a timely intervention by creating a larger awareness of global cultural issues in videogame research. Addressing a major gap in Game Studies research, this book will connect to discourses of post-colonial theory at large and thereby, provide another entry-point for this new medium of digital communication into larger Humanities discourses.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: As I sit writing in my kitchen while the forces of the U.S. military state are brought to bear on thousands of Standing Rock water stewards and land protectors and their allies in Cannonball, North Dakota, I consider how this sail special issue on digital Indigenous studies not only represents a collection of essays about the critical work Indigenous women are performing in their various digital projects but also illustrates that these online “Indigenous territories” (Hearne), crafted on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, save lives. Every single day since the protectors first gathered to oppose the proposed 1,170-mile Dakota Access pipeline (a project that would potentially contaminate the Missouri watershed and the Ogallala Aquifer and desecrate Dakota sacred sites), digital independent and social media have constantly covered the story. At least 1.3 million Facebook users checked in virtually at Oceti Sakowin and other Indigenous camps and communities to ensure that support presence is recognized, while the world monitors the presence of the military and police force gathering at the construction site to curb further violence. The Standing Rock gathering offers hope to networked Indigenous youth, a demographic between three and ten times as likely to commit suicide than the national average peer rate. The Nodapl action in the Indigenous imaginary is an invitation to stand at the front lines of a global movement to protect water and land resources for all living beings on this planet and to draw attention to and support those whose lives and ways of being are in peril through overt military action and consequential environmental destruction. It is also an occasion, in the words of Jolene Rickard, “to invest in the apparatus of the imagination” (Bernardin). One need only look at the online art, handwritten signs, and logos representing #nodapl, #standingrock, [End Page 172] #waterislife, and #rezpectourwater to see the ways in which Indigenous artists are creatively and powerfully envisioning this movement, most often immersed with work that features strong images of Native women and girls, the community backbone and life force. Or we need only view digital videos like computer animator and artist Joseph Erb’s black-and-red graphic history of Standing Rock, “Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXoy5lzpjiM), and first-person game platforms like Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strike, which extend the conversations at Standing Rock to the struggles over Enbridge’s Alberta tar sands pipeline and fracking practices as players work to undo and prevent further environmental degradation. Following Idle No More’s digital and geospatial (re)articulation of Indigenous territories, we are now living and loving and hoping in this historic moment as new ways of relating to one another and living in deep connection with the land and all its forms of life are being physiologically, intellectually, and spiritually forged at the geospatial confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers. They are being forged as well through the confluences of digital rivers on our electronic devices and in our online conversations about the beauty and devastation of the events that are unfolding in Standing Rock. Susan Bernardin’s essay in this issue on Heid E. Erdrich’s “Pre-Occupied” considers the meaning of rivers to Native peoples and contends that images of waterways, particularly the Mississippi, are mobilized “to make visible the continuing claims of this and other imperiled riverine systems.” In her introduction, Joanna Hearne asks us, “How might such an intersection of digital and Indigenous specificities take place in a way that is ‘native to the device’; that is, how might Indigenous specificity be embedded in shared platforms that are therefore central to all of our digital lives?” The essays in this special issue respond to this question by theorizing digital media in fresh and innovative ways. Many of us teach digital humanities courses or classes with strong digital media content, but we lack the language for critically engaging this new field on its own terms as it intersects, extends, and radically reconceptualizes more familiar research areas such as cinema studies, Indigenous / Native American studies, communication, literature, art, and history.

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

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.

Computational algorithmic thinking (CAT) is the ability to design, implement, and assess the implementation of algorithms to solve a range of problems. It involves identifying and understanding a problem, articulating an algorithm or set of algorithms in the form of a solution to the problem, implementing that solution in such a way that the solution solves the problem, and evaluating the solution based on some set of criteria. CAT is an important scaffolded on-ramp as students develop more advanced computational thinking capabilities and apply computational thinking to solve problems that are more constrained and require greater expertise. Supporting Computational Algorithmic Thinking (SCAT) is both a longitudinal between-subjects research project and a free enrichment program supporting and guiding African-American middle school girls over three years as they iteratively design a set of complex games for social change. This article explores Scholars' reflections about the difficulties they faced while using CAT capabilities as they engaged in collaborative game design for social change over those three years. We particularly focus on how these difficulties changed over the course of three years as well as new difficulties that emerged from year to year as Scholars become more expert game designers and computational algorithmic thinkers.

What are the implications of freedom and agency when a player exercises agency to prevent another player or a non-player character fromacting freely? Such a scenario, taken to an extreme, would be that of slavery and in turn, would raise questions about the nature of freedom itself. Video games have recently begun to address questions of slavery in earnest although academic discussions on games have not yet caught up: the presence of slavers in Fallout 3, the portrayal of racism in Bioshock Infinite (Irrational Games 2014) and the direct depiction of the Caribbean slave trade in Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry (Ubisoft 2013) are extremely appropriate cases in point. This article compares the representation of slavery in video games to that of slave narratives in earlier media in order to examine how effectively digital games are able to convey the horrors of slavery as a human condition and what they can teach about the notion of human freedom and agency per se.

In the twenty-first century, American popular culture increasingly makes visible the performance of African spirituality by black women. Disney’s Princess and the Frog and Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are two notable examples. The reliance on the black priestess of African-derived religion as an archetype, however, has a much longer history steeped in the colonial othering of Haitian Vodou and American imperialist fantasies about so-called ‘black magic’. Within this cinematic study, Martin unravels how religious autonomy impacts the identity, function, and perception of Africana women in the American popular imagination. Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. She develops the framework of Voodoo aesthetics, or the inscription of African cosmologies on the black female body, as the theoretical lens through which to scrutinize black female religious performance in film. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Positioning the black priestess as another iteration of Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of controlling images, Martin theorizes whether film functions as a safe space for a racial and gendered embodiment in the performance of African diasporic religion. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Conceptually, Martin recalibrates the scholarship on black women and representation by distinctly centering black women as ritual specialists and Black Atlantic spirituality on the silver screen.

“Internet addiction” in China and elsewhere is considered a serious social problem. In China, some psychiatrists have claimed 10% of all Internet users—60 million—are potentially “addicted” to the Internet. Following on the heels of the publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), this qualitative-based research article critically investigates the new concept Internet gaming disorder, a category recently included in the DSM-5 as a condition “warranting more clinical research and experience before it might be considered for inclusion in the main book as a formal disorder.” This article takes up this challenge and responds in the following way: When we investigate the social existence of online gamers labeled Internet addicts in China, and then subject their social existence to the DSM’s own definition of a mental disorder, we discover not a clearly understood mental disorder called Internet gaming disorder but more so an issue of social deviance.

This study critically assesses the Chinese online games industry through problematizing the creativity of Chinese games. I find that between 1995 and 2001, Chinese online games were mostly developed by amateurs, noncommercial, and considerably creative. Between 2002 and 2005, industrial growth allowed some room for local creativity despite commercialization and dominance of imported games. Current scholarly, business, and media discourses unfairly ignore creativity in these first two periods and yet praise the Chinese game industry’s commercial success since the late 2000s. I challenge these discourses by illustrating that between 2006 and early 2009, a new, ethically dubious, and uniquely Chinese business model emerged, became domestically dominant, and quietly and profoundly impacted on global online game design. From mid-2009 to 2015, there is ongoing corporatization based on the dubious Chinese business model on the one hand, and a reemphasis on creativity motivated by browser and mobile game formats on the other.

Transformation and the decolonization of the curriculum, modes of teaching, and classroomare key concerns in South African Higher Education. In game design education this need is exacerbatedby the slow pace of diversification in both academia and the industry.This paper presents a close analysis of interventions undertaken into an introductory game design course to address the difficultiesof diversification across racial, genderand economic divides. The results of the interventions are assessed, and recommendations for future adjustments to the course in aid curricular decolonization is are made.

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.

Beyond Hate offers a critical ethnography of the virtual communities established and discursive networks activated through the online engagements of white separatists, white nationalists, and white supremacists with various popular cultural texts, including movies, music, television, sport, video games, and kitsch. Outlining the ways in which advocates of white power interpret popular cultural forms, and probing the emergent spaces of white power popular culture, it examines the paradoxical relationship that advocates of white supremacy have with popular culture, as they finding it to be an irresistible and repugnant reflection of social decay rooted in multiculturalism. Drawing on a range of new media sources, including websites, chat rooms, blogs and forums, this book explores the concerns expressed by advocates of white power, with regard to racial hierarchy and social order, the crisis of traditional American values, the perpetuation of liberal, feminist, elitist ideas, the degradation of the family and the fetishization of black men. What emerges is an understanding of the instruments of power in white supremacist discourses, in which a series of connections are drawn between popular culture, multiculturalism, sexual politics and state functions, all of which are seen to be working against white men. A richly illustrated study of the intersections of white power and popular culture in the contemporary U.S., and the use of use cyberspace by white supremacists as an imagined site of resistance, Beyond Hate will appeal to scholars of sociology and cultural studies with interests in race and ethnicity, popular culture and the discourses of the extreme right.

This article attempts to explore the popularization of Japanese console games in China in the past two decades, which reveals the tripartite relationship of the nation-state, transnational cultural power, and local agents.1 This study focuses on the formation and development of the console game industry in a non-Western context, where the society has undergone dramatic transformations and has been largely influenced by the globalization process. Encountering social anti-gaming discourse and cultural protectionism, the importation and distribution of Japanese console games did not get support from the state. However, it found its way to the audience and gained popularity through piracy, the black market, and the local agents’ appropriation, becoming an integrated part of many Chinese early gamers’ lives. This article draws upon the intersection of cultural globalization with game studies, calling for an investigation into the complexity of the game industry through its sociohistorical, political, and cultural environment.

Informed by a mix of theoretical sources and interviews with middle-class Chinese amateur gold farmers, this article argues that within China, the figure of the Chinese gold farmer might function as focus for reflection on Chineseness and China’s role in an increasingly interconnected world, rather than as a carrier of third-world stereotype as it tends to do in the West. The concept of shanzhai—often associated with sometimes comical, sometimes innovative Chinese copying of foreign consumer goods—is employed as a key analytical tool and helps highlight the themes of “Chinese ingenuity,” independence (from game operators and to some extent also parents), and critique (of games).

How culture uses games and how games use culture: an examination of Latin America's gaming practices and the representation of the region's cultures in games. Video games are becoming an ever more ubiquitous element of daily life, played by millions on devices that range from smart phones to desktop computers. An examination of this phenomenon reveals that video games are increasingly being converted into cultural currency. For video game designers, culture is a resource that can be incorporated into games; for players, local gaming practices and specific social contexts can affect their playing experiences. In Cultural Code, Phillip Penix-Tadsen shows how culture uses games and how games use culture, looking at examples related to Latin America. Both static code and subjective play have been shown to contribute to the meaning of games; Penix-Tadsen introduces culture as a third level of creating meaning. Penix-Tadsen focuses first on how culture uses games, looking at the diverse practices of play in Latin America, the ideological and intellectual uses of games, and the creative and economic possibilities opened up by video games in Latin America—the evolution of regional game design and development. Examining how games use culture, Penix-Tadsen discusses in-game cultural representations of Latin America in a range of popular titles (pointing out, for example, appearances of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer statue in games from Call of Duty to the tourism-promoting Brasil Quest). He analyzes this through semiotics, the signifying systems of video games and the specific signifiers of Latin American culture; space, how culture is incorporated into different types of game environments; and simulation, the ways that cultural meaning is conveyed procedurally and algorithmically through gameplay mechanics. Source: Publisher

Interview with the Indian Game Designer Shailesh Prabhu about his game Sky Sutra.