Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent

Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations explores the gaming culture of one of the most culturally diverse and populous regions of the world-the Indian subcontinent. Building on the author's earlier work on videogame culture in India, this book addresses issues of how discussions of equality and diversity sit within videogame studies, particularly in connection with the subcontinent, thereby presenting pioneering research on the videogame cultures of the region.
Drawing on a series of player and developer interviews and surveys conducted over the last five years, including some recent ones, this book provides a sense of how games have become a part of the culture of the region despite its huge diversity and plurality and opens up avenues for further study through vignettes and snapshots of the diverse gaming culture. It addresses the rapid rise of videogames as an entertainment medium in South Asia and, as such, also tries to better understand the recent controversies connected to gaming in the region In the process, it aims to make a larger connection between the development of videogames and player culture, in the subcontinent and globally, thus opening up channels for collaboration between the industry and academic research, local and global.

Auteur

Souvik's research looks at the narrative and the literary through the emerging discourse of videogames as storytelling media and at how these games inform and challenge our conceptions of narratives, identity and culture. Related interests and expertise include a broad spectrum of topics in Game Studies ranging from identity and temporality in videogames to the videogame industry in South-East Asia. Currently, he is researching how videogames relate to Postcolonial Studies and separately, also how certain ancient Indian board-games contribute to the understanding of gameplay. Souvik is the author of two monographs, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) and Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (Springer UK 2017), as well as many articles and book chapters in national and international publications.
His other interests are (the) Digital Humanities, Poststructuralist theory, Posthumanism and Early Modern Literature. His databases on the Dutch Cemetery at Chinsurah, the Scottish Cemetery in Kolkata and the nineteenth-century Bengali industrialist, Mutty Lall Seal are all available open-access. He has also been an advisor on an archive on the 'Plaques of Presidency' project. He has been a board-member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and a founder-member of DHARTI, the Digital Humanities group in India. Souvik has been named a 'DiGRA Distinguished Scholar' in 2019. He is also an affiliated senior research fellow at the Centre of Excellence, Game Studies at the University of Tampere. Apart from his research at CSSSC, Souvik is interested in supervising students with similar areas of interest. He had been recently nominated a HEVGA (Higher Education Video Game Alliance) fellow.