ABSTRACT

This volume critically analyzes the multiple lives of the "gamer" in India. It explores the "everyday" of the gaming life from the player’s perspective, not just to understand how the games are consumed but also to analyze how the gamer influences the products’ many (virtual) lives.

Using an intensive ethnographic approach and in-depth interviews, this volume

  • situates the practice of gaming under a broader umbrella of digital leisure activities and foregrounds the proliferation of gaming as a new media form and cultural artifact;
  • critically questions the term gamer and the many debates surrounding the gamer tag to expand on how the gaming identity is constructed and expressed;
  • details participants’ gaming habits, practices and contexts from a cultural perspective and analyzes the participants’ responses to emerging industry trends, reflections on playing practices and their relationships to friends, communities and networks in gaming spaces; and
  • examines the offline and online spaces of gaming as sites of contestation between developers of games and the players.

A holistic study covering one of the largest video game bases in the world, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, media and communication studies and science and technology studies, as well as be of great appeal to the general reader.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

Ludic beginnings: gaming journeys and experiences

chapter 1|22 pages

Fun, magic and play

Theories of gaming

chapter 2|22 pages

Building tools to map the ludic everyday

chapter 3|33 pages

Player perspectives

Gamers and gamerworthiness 1

chapter 4|26 pages

Charting the Indian gamescape

Redrawing lines of access

chapter 5|31 pages

Gaming as a site of contestation

chapter 6|28 pages

Friends, communities and networks

Gaming is social

chapter |9 pages

Conclusion