IIM Indore seeks to be a contextually-relevant business school with world-class academic standards that develops socially-conscious managers, leaders and entrepreneurs. IIM Indore is committed to: Excellence in management education, research, and training, Use of contemporary participant-centric pedagogies and teaching methods, A presence in emerging segments of management education.

IIM Indore

This article examines representative games from Zapak.com: India’s most-popular gaming website (highest number of daily visitors) to conceptualize the relationship between masculinity and colonialism within digital geographies, in postcolonial spaces. Three of the four games chosen here, Sleeping at the Meeting, Zombie Pirate and Yoga Teacher, are representative of games categorized as ‘Girl’s Games’ on Zapak.com: where the ludic engagement is limited to dressing and undressing of white women in a variety of professional or social contexts. The fourth game Bipasha’s Beach Blaze is a continuation of such reductive stereotyping, albeit in the different but culturally significant site of Bollywood. The four games were selected using a case-study methodology and represent discrete but related artifacts. Following a survey of key literature, the authors address the limitations of traditional game studies approaches and propose a replicable methodology located at the intersection of two epistemic frames: one of critical masculinity studies and the other of ludology. Through analyzing the strategic ideologies behind the production, circulation and the game-play of these digital artifacts we argue that Zapak.com not only enables online sexism but also becomes a representative digital space where anxious performances of postcolonial masculinity – that has its historical basis in India’s colonial legacy – can be materialized. Further in highlighting the status of these ‘Girl’s Games’ as artifacts that do not allow for any substantial ludic or narrative involvement – we emphasize the need to constantly interrogate digital spaces as sites where hegemonic ideologies about race, gender and colonialism are reproduced and reified.

Communication

Gender, Place & Culture

Anxious postcolonial masculinity in online video games: race, gender and colonialism in Indian digital spaces

Simulating the world’s most popular sport is big business and the most popular titles in the industry are Electronic Arts’ FIFA (2015-2019) franchise and Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer (PES) (2015-2019). A rivalry that begun in 1995, the last 24 years have seen the games modify, adapt and transform the way sports simulators are made. In the pursuit of digitally recreating the magic from the football pitch, the two titles have garnered extremely loyal fanbases that include some fans whose gaming practices are limited to playing just one of these games. This article aims to analyze the success of FIFA and the decline of PES in the last decade when reviewers of games and industry observers have repeatedly found PES to be the better game. It begins by comparing review scores of the last eleven iterations of the two franchises and then uses a multi-pronged approach to identify the various dimensions that allow FIFA to thrive as a game despite offering a comparatively poor gameplay experience to its players. This paper uses a multipronged approach to identify and analyze the various dimensions that has enabled FIFA as a franchise to create a near monopoly in the simulated football/soccer genre. By close reading streams of players of the game, formally analyzing the last five iterations of the FIFA franchise and then juxtaposing the two frames to examine FIFA as a hybrid cross-media product/service, this paper looks at the various non-play related elements that make it successful. The paper identifies and analyses the various dimensions that make FIFA a service that has allowed the franchise to create a near monopoly in the simulated football/soccer genre

Gamevionments

Towards a Monopoly: Examining FIFA’s Dominance in Simulated Football

Gaming Culture (s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life

Gaming Cultures

Charting the Indian gamescape

Building tools to map the ludic everyday

Gaming Culture (s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life

One of my earliest memories of playing a video game comes from a scorching, twenty-four-hour train ride from Delhi to Hyderabad in June 1997. Despite the railway’s stuttering air-conditioning system, the atmosphere in the compartment was hot and sticky. With no company of my own age, I was left with my Brick Games handheld device, and I spent hours playing the variety of games bundled on it. There was Tetris, Brick Breaker, a variant of a racing game where one needed to avoid collisions, an early version of Nokia’s popular Space Impact and a number of other games I cannot recall. Armed with a strip of AA cells and powered by a vivid imagination, the hours went by in a blur. Fast-forward two decades later, and I observe that mobile phones have made it possible for a large number of people to fill their travel time in buses, trains, subways and at airport terminals playing games. After that train ride, my passion for video games continued unabated as I spent hours crouched before the family personal computer playing a wide variety of games and gaining experience in the various video game genres and approaches to gameplay. Soon, I was spending a critical number of hours playing video games, causing my parents to grow worried about addiction and prompting them to send me to a boarding school (a primitive digital detox of sorts!). At the boarding school, I soon forayed into reading fiction and fantasy as I dove into JK Rowling and JRR Tolkien with gusto and discovered Christopher Paolini and Tamora Pierce along the way. To this day, I reminisce of my vacations from school as short bursts of sunshine on a dull gray day as I would try to&nbsp;…

Gaming Culture (s) in India

Fantasy sport has risen in popularity in the last decade with the advent of web 2.0. As people from around the world watch sporting events today, the internet has become an ideal site to instantly disseminate results and achievements for avid fans and followers. This paper is an attempt to position fantasy sports in the realm of game studies, drawing from the specific case of fantasy football (soccer in North America). Borrowing from and building on Roger Caillois classical game typology, this paper seeks to arrive at a nuanced understanding of both fantasy sport as a game and the experience it offers to participants. By using an ethnographic approach, based on in-depth interviews and co-playing sessions, this study closely observes participants in-game performances in the Fantasy Premier League. By stitching together information from the interviews with observation of participants approaches and preferences along with the performance of their teams, this paper identifies the key decisions and processes that a player of fantasy sport is part of. By situating fantasy sport in the ludic debate of preparation versus luck, this paper offers unique insights into the various ways that players exert effort to succeed at the game. The use of an approach that examines what players do to their fantasy teams enables this paper to examine players psyches and the interrelated elements of fandom, favoritism and loyalty. Analysis of the data offers insights in to the various practices and approaches of players as well as lays the foundation of new concepts

gamevironments

Decoding Fantasy Football: A Ludic Perspective

The last five years have been increasingly transformative in the realms of broadcast and electronic media; following an inevitable convergence with internet-centric technologies. The emergence of new platforms has enabled the untethering of audiovisual content from specific temporal and spatial bounds as consumption of AV programming has embraced the facets of mobility. This paper critically examines content streaming applications like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and Voot in conjunction with similar platforms of streaming content for media forms like podcasts. By analyzing the content on offer, the various modus-operandi for content creation and dissemination and the way consumers engage/consume content on these platforms; this paper hopes to arrive at a nuanced understanding of binging both as an activity and as a new way of engaging with broadcast content. In terms of market value, the Indian online streaming market is estimated to be over 100 million regular subscribers and is valued at USD 280 Million. By using specific cases and situating the analysis in the context of an increasingly connected world; this paper will extend the academic understanding of binging by building on the foundations of a remediated understanding (McLuhan) and giving it a social dimension.

International Journal of Media Studies

Unpacking Binging: New Ways of Production &amp; Consumption

World University root node

“How video games changed my life”: Life-Changing Testimonies and The Last of Us

The term gamer has been applied in various, often simplistic ways to anyone who plays video games as a preferred leisure activity. Being heavily value-laden both socially and culturally, the term has spawned fiery debates on a variety of issues ranging from perpetuation of stereotypes to gender inequality. This paper seeks to understand the gamer tag by charting and critically analysing the gaming journeys of three video game players in an everyday context.The paper uses an ethnographic approach, based on in-depth interviews with and observation of the gaming activity of three individuals over a year. Drawing from Nick Couldry’s Media as Practice approach the gaming practices of the players were examined in relation to how they themselves reflect upon their experience and its various components, and the ways in which they construct and express their gamer/gaming identity. The emergent themes from the analysis have been used to build a tentative framework that could enable a more holistic understanding of the gamer within the gaming world and more generally in popular culture.