Abstract
Foregrounding gamers’ experiences in a mobile-first environment: A review of Gaming Culture(s) in India by Aditya Deshbandhu
The pandemic restrictions on in-person interactions have made our lives “digital by default” (Livingstone, 2020) and brought virtually everything to our screens. In the Global South, Internet-enabled smartphones are increasingly becoming the one-stop shop for online classes/work, video/voice calling, and leisure activities like watching movies, listening to music, or playing games (Bahia & Delaporte, 2020; UNICEF Innocenti, 2020) even as there are issues of access, privacy, and digital divide (Chen, 2021). Mobile gaming in India is arguably not a feature of the pandemic—although it might have led to a spurt in growth—for India is not just one of the fastest growing mobile gaming markets in the world, but also a mobile-first environment (Pandya, 2019; HT Studio, 2020). For example, Xiaomi has partnered with Call of Duty to launch a “gaming phone” optimized for mobile audiences in India (Kulesh, 2021), furthering the importance of the mobile in the life of a gamer.
This is why Deshbandhu’s Gaming Culture(s) in India: Digital Play in Everyday Life is a timely and significant contribution to existing literature at the intersections of gaming, communication, and media studies. His work foregrounds gamers, their everyday routines, and ludic practices. In doing so, Deshbandhu makes a conscious effort to go beyond the binaries of professional versus amateur players, and serious versus casual gaming debate, thereby analyzing Indian gamers’ interconnected practices and contexts from a cultural perspective. Through an intensive ethnographic approach including observations, in-depth interviews, and co-playing sessions, Deshbandhu situates his participant gamers in their socioeconomic and cultural contexts and fellow-gamer communities for a highly nuanced take on this topic.
The book has six chapters, along with the introduction and conclusion chapters. In the first half of the book, the author takes us through theories of gaming, tools to map ludic practices of the everyday, and players’ perspectives. In the second half, he delves into issues of access in the Indian gamescape, unpacks sites of contestations, and demonstrates how gaming is social. Deshbandhu’s work draws on existing scholarship of Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, and Couldry, to situate the practice of playing video games in the everyday, and of Aarseth, Boellstorff, Taylor, Juul, and others to foreground gamers’ ludic experiences in juggling different stories and skills and games’ interactive narratives within gaming cultures.
This has helped him fashion his own ludo-narratological framework that takes into account these experiences and how they interact with the game’s design and storytelling instead of just the technology or the industry, even as they have important roles to play in this mix. Not only is this significant as a heuristic device to understand gamers and gaming cultures from the Global South, where this industry is growing spectacularly, it is also a means to decolonize literature on this topic that is dominated by Anglo-Eurocentric scholarship. As India and China among other Global South countries become larger markets for mobile gaming (Navani, 2021; Singh, 2021), studies like these show us the way to “unlock the next level” of mobile media and gaming cultures in these regions.
Gaming cultures in the Global South deserve attention as mobile gaming becomes an accessible, digital, and social activity for a large and varied user base that finds playing games on their mobiles a liberating, open, innovative, and competitive arena even as they grapple with issues of accessibility and affordability. This book complicates the monolithic depiction of the hardcore gamer of the Global North as it highlights ludic experiences of myriad players across a variety of games on a multitude of platforms. This book is a step in filling an important gap in the literature by framing these inquiries from a culture-centered perspective. It also acknowledges theoretical/conceptual traditions of gaming studies and technology and industry interactions of shifts from consoles to mobiles as gaming sees a freemium revolution. I would have liked to see how the author could have addressed the ways in which technology and industry in India react to these interactions, which could be an important site of future research.