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- [00:02]
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- [00:58]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
good, so good, so good.
- [01:00]
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- [01:25]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:29]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Hi everyone. Welcome to the New Books Network podcast. My name is Kadija and I'm your host. Today I'm here to interview Dr. Aditya Deshpandu, a lecturer in communications, digital media and sociology at University of Exeter. We are here to discuss his latest book, the 21st Century in Hundred Games, a fantastic read written for both academic and general audience audiences. Thank you Aditya for joining the New Books Network podcast and many congratulations on the release of the monograph. How would you like to introduce it to our listeners?
- [02:04]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Thank you. Khadija, thank you very much for taking the time and speaking about my book today. I'm really, really happy, really really excited. So to talk about the book a little bit, right? So multiple ways where different people think of what the book can be. My publisher especially wants to call it an interactive history of the 21st century. And different people who have read it have told me that it's a product of love. It comes across as, you know, the journey of a global south researcher navigating video games, which is largely a Western kind of dominated industry. Some people have called it a journey of understanding immersive media and interactivity. Some have found it to be a little too disparate, a little too spread out, trying to do too much. But for me, I think I would say for me it's something that comes out of me reconciling three parts of my life, and I talk about this in the book a little bit. On an everyday, active basis, I do three things. I play games because I'm a massive fan of the medium. I love video games for what they can be, as artifacts, as sites, play, all of that. So I play games regularly, almost on a daily basis. I review games for about nine years now, I mean, I'm in my ninth year now, where I write a weekly column for Telangana Today, which is a newspaper based out of Hydsburg, on the games industry and video games. So heavily looking at how the industry is kind of shaping how things are moving and stuff like that. And the third thing, which is my bread and butter kind of thing, I study video games as media, as artifacts, as interfaces, also as sites of being and possibility and so on there. So reconciling all these three things, right? The player, the reviewer slash, industry expert, and the researcher, and bringing it together to kind of offer that combined sense of what I think the book does. It tells us how the industry works differently, works on its own logic. It tells us how players and gaming communities expect interactions and engagements from the medium, and in many ways also then tells us how to study these things as researchers. So what is it that the researchers would like to know, what is it that the industry would like to do and what is it that the players would like to want? And I think somewhere in the balance of all three things is where the industry can find a sweet spot to keep doing the great things it always does. So the book kind of maps that as what I feel.
- [04:56]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. And as you mentioned, the book is described as an interactive public history of the contemporary world. You also sort of argue that there is no clean or distinct history of video games outside their cultural or social context. Why is it important to move away from a single grand narrative of gaming and more towards its multiple histories as such?
- [05:22]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. I think in the first part of the book, right, Especially the first chapter, I try my very hard to explain that how you cannot have teleological, linear, grand narratives of history or, you know, think of video games in a particular technological fashion, or, you know, infrastructural fashion for that matter. So I strongly believe with all things digital, there is the element of what we call the multitude. So there is what designers of the technology or the interface or the application or the service would like to do with what they are designing, and then there is what people end up doing. So this is very well Documented. When Nick Coldrey talks about media as practice, he talks about how you don't ask what media does to people, but you ask what people do to media. And I think that is where the heart lies, especially for mapping anything that is digital or interactive or. The word I would like to use is postmodern, but it's lost all that sheen now. Correct. So the question is, what are the many things that video games as artifacts or as media mean to the people who play with them or engage with them or find meaning with them? And that is something, I think, a grand history or a grand narrative cannot really map. So there is all that goes into the building of a game and what its possibilities can be. But then there is also the many ways in which people find interesting ways to repurpose games, remap games, you know, mod, expand, find interesting ways to do things that games are probably not designed for. Correct. And I think mapping those things are more important because, you know, any history for video games has to come from the users as well, so at least the players as to what exactly do games mean to them. So again, keeping in mind that video games are not globally available even today, as I speak this, a leading developer like Nintendo, for example, is not available in a large global gaming market like India. So how people find ways to access, how people find ways to enable player unlock play is a big part that needs to be documented within the district. So which means that we then move away from what we would call grand narratives of histories to what we would call collages of micro histories, personal histories and narratives, trying to piece together things where context and realities matter more than, you know, trying to find causality or trying to find linkages. So something interesting. Also, I'm going to speak a little bit about something I wrote recently where I was trying to figure out a nostalgia for 90s Internet. And in order to kind of trace that, I kind of came across the Internet archive and, you know, for that matter, the larger project that goes with it. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized how centralized and how, I would say, singularly focused all of these archive projects, archival projects, are when it comes to all things digital. And I began to realize that in many ways, if a grand history were to emerge, it would automatically pick a version of the history that it would then champion as right, thereby marginalizing all other lived memories and events, whereas also kind of, you know, erasing things that people probably experienced found great value. So with video games, I'm hoping that we can kind of counter that because Games by themselves are so fluid, so openly interactive. As long as we document what is not intended to, I think we open up avenues for new histories.
- [09:25]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yeah, thank you so much for that introduction, especially on games as media artifacts as such. And now maybe let us understand more about the methodological nuances that are being introduced by the book, such as the auto ethnographic ludonarratology interpretive framework, which you describe as a double mirror for thinking in both the first and third person at the same time. So how does combining autoethnography with formal ludological analysis help in capturing acts of play as such?
- [10:02]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Correct. No, thank you for that. So, yes, that is quite a mouthful, right? The ALNI or the Olney framework, as I call it. Yeah, sorry about that. Correct. So one of the things I've been dabbling with ever since I started my journey with examining games, just, I think around the time when I started my PhD back in Hyderabad and, you know, Professor Usha Raman was my supervisor, actually kind of realized that I had a problem. So I was a massive, massive gamer. I used to play games. I mean, let's just say I play games seven days a week, even today. And pre PhD it was a lot less regulated, so it was at a much higher frequency. And she realized that it was important for me to reflect on my own gaming experiences critically, because otherwise the joy of playing games and the joy of, you know, the interactivity that games can kind of do. So if you look at games, you also encounter the work of 6 cent me o, especially the idea of flow and how flow kind of is experienced by players. And for researchers, especially who play games, we got to be very, very aware of flow because it kind of colors and tints our own experiences with games. So she felt that autoethnography could be a way that I could critically examine my own gaming journeys and think about what I do more critically. And that's where I think it kind of started. So auto ethnography has always been part of what I do. It was just not part of my doctoral project or any of the other research papers I wrote after that or the other post PhD projects I was part of. So the thing is, the auto ethnography bit remained, though it remained in my review side of things. So when I would review games, when I would talk about the industry, when I would situate my own position when talking about recent developments, the auto ethnography would constantly surface. The more I looked at it, the more I realized that, you know, especially with video games, auto ethnography is very Important, right? And this was around the time when I was also winding down my journey in India as an academic. I was leaving my position at IIM Indore, I was looking abroad, and I was in touch and in collaboration with Rob Kozanet, said usc, which is the University of Southern California. And we were talking about ethnography and how ethnography could kind of be applied to game studies and so on. And the more we spoke, the more I kept talking to him about autoethnography. And he told me that, you know, Aditya, with anything that is digital focused, especially when you work with digital research, all experiences are or have to be auto ethnographic. And that kind of reinforced my belief that autoethnography needs to come back into game study. So before I write the book, I write this one small article on the need for autoethnography in game studies. And I argue for how autoethnography helps us to capture things more holistically, forces us to kind of question what kind of researchers we are, what kind of biases we might have if we are taking the easier path, and especially how useful it is to understand giving practices developments within the industry and also how exactly the culture kind of matures in Global south context. So for outsiders who are not from the Global south, autoethnography probably gets them to think about what exactly is different and to critically examine the difference. And for insiders, it forces us to question what we take for granted and our own biases and think about that. So I wrote that paper, and as I was writing that paper, it's a short piece that came in Journal of Autobiography, I think in 2023. 20, yeah, 2020, maybe 23, yeah, from what I recall. And as I was writing that, I kept thinking that, you know, it needs to go back within the book. It has to go back within the framework. And I started developing Olney at the time and I kept thinking about how within game studies, for the longest time, there has been a traditional debate between understanding games as sites of play and games as storytelling platforms. What we call the ludology narratology debate. And I was questioning, why should we be bothered about that debate? Why should we even think about what games can be? Shouldn't we be asking what players want to do with games? Autoethnography then becomes very important to look at that. So how omni kind of functions is it takes the autoethnographic framework, it connects it to the ludonaritological. So I take specific tools that are already established for ludology and narratology. So for narratology, for example, I look at close reading that Jonathan Gray kind of talks about. I look at formal game analysis that Bjork and Lenkowski kind of speak about. I look at stimulated recall that Bjarkkinen kind of talks about. So I look at all of those and I try and synthesize, but I also synthesize in within that the realities of the player playing the game and how they are constructing these things and how they're recalling. So only comes out of the framework because of the central question of the project. So the question of the project is not what is the history of the 21st century and how are games part of it? Because that's a simple question. The more important question I wanted to ask is is it possible to write a history of the 21st century from the games we played as a community? Can the games that we play and the realities in which the games were kind of designed and built and acquired and engaged with become foundations to understand 21st century? So to answer that question, I realized the auto ethnography becomes so much more important because it forces us to think of games as socio cultural products, as things made not in vacuum, not in isolation. Correct. Some would argue that this is not very different from what Rob Merton and all of them have done in science and technology studies, especially with sociology of scientific knowledge. But I think considering how games are what I call them as metamedia, I think there is a significant difference to kind of consider. So I hope that makes sense this
- [16:24]
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- [17:23]
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- [17:54]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yes, of course. And I'm a bit curious to know. So if given a choice to be a reviewer or to be a researcher of games, what will you choose?
- [18:04]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
That was a very. No, that's a very, very tough question, David, because it's almost like choosing between my left hand and my right because they're both now deeply entwined in what I do. So the way it kind of works for me right now is I constantly review games and through the reviews I sharpen the critical gaze sort of. Right. And within the reviews I find new ideas for research to kind of carry forward. It has also worked in interesting ways. My association with the reviews I do has allowed me to establish connections within the industry to speak to game developers, to speak to people who manage gaming communities for companies, and so on and so forth. Interestingly, now I have former students of mine who are within that industry and space. So the reviewer angle kind of gives me both the credibility and the entry point into further conducting more critical academic research. So in my head, I don't view the two of them differently. Of course, when I do write, I write in completely different writing styles for both of them. Though with this book I've tried blending the two. But in many ways I would say the reviewer comes first and it enables the researcher to then do the more meaningful work. The researcher then gives the space for me to kind of be a better reviewer. It's almost like an unending cycle of sorts.
- [19:32]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for that fantastic answer. I really enjoyed. Yeah, so now maybe let's go into more chapters. Questions as such. Yeah. So in chapter one, there is this amazing example of a participant who remembered playing Super Mario on a Sega 64. I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, a console that does not exist, but was a part of a lived experience with knockoff hardware in India, when personal memory kind of conflicts with official records. Why should historians take those lived experiences seriously?
- [20:13]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Okay, this is a brilliant question. Right. So I had a lot of trouble actually when I was documenting that. So the participant in question, I call her Radhika. In that particular line of research that I Carry Out. And one of my first academic publications, it's called Player Perspectives, what It Means to be a Gamer, comes out in 2016 with a journal called Press Start in Glasgow. I document her journey as part of that particular paper and also my doctoral project, which goes on to become the book, right? So in that first book, while writing that down and while writing that particular paper, she kept telling me, aditya, this was a Sega 64, this was a Sega 64. And it made no sense to me, right? Because there is a Nintendo 64, which Nintendo kind of has historically manufactured, and Sega is a rival gaming company based out of Japan that makes its own hardware. The thing was, she kept calling it the Sega 64 and she kept, you know, talking about playing Super Mario and Mario Kart and all of those on the Sega 64. And it made it very, very difficult for me. But I wrote it down, you know, because you value what research, what the participants kind of say, right? And end of the day, all researchers are storytellers. We are carrying the meaningful narratives that our participants construct and situating them in broader theory and philosophy. So I reported it as such. And as with that paper, because it was being published in Glasgow and my reviewers were European, they found it very, very difficult to digest. They're like, what on earth does the Sega 64 mean? Did you mean this? What does this mean? And of course, they began to worry if my data was even authentic, right? But see, again, you have to trace a history for this. The history to trace is Nintendo has officially never sold any hardware in India since 1985. They don't consider India to be a valuable enough market. They don't see enough opportunity there for them to maximize profit. But that hasn't meant that players have not enjoyed Mario, Donkey Kong, Pokemon or any of those games. They found interesting ways. So the Sega 64, the more I kind of searched, I found out, was a knockoff console that was manufactured in India which could kind of emulate any of the games that were made for the Sega console or the Nintendo consoles, right? Now, what makes it interesting is for a lot of people, that becomes their origin of gaming journeys. Consoles like that, where they were playing on consoles that were not authentic, but the games that they were playing were very, very similar to what everybody else around the world is playing, correct? Even the hardware, while it was not authentic, was mimicking to some extent a similar range of functionality and features that the authentic ones were meant to offer, correct? Now the question is, do we consider these experiences, right, the played experiences of play or what I call lived realities of play. Do we consider them authentic or inauthentic? I try and use Dipesh Chakraborty and his argument of the public life of history to kind of ask about this. Also there's the whole history from the bottom up kind of movement that we are talking about now. So those become interesting kind of elements to grapple with. Right now my question is, let's say 20 years from now, if we find out the number of people in India who played, you know, Super Mario or Pokemon on a console like this, you know, which is, you know, one designed to enable access for games that are not intended to through emulation or whatever, and that number exceeds the Western number of players, let's say it happens, how do we then consider authenticity or, you know, or even for that matter, verifiability or. Yeah, the solidity of the historical origin in that if all of them are playing the same game, if they're playing the same experience, should the hardware even matter? Should the ideal conditions even matter? And these are important questions, right? Because whenever we talk about a history of video games, we always talk about manufacturers, we talk about technology, we talk about platforms. But you know, what we encounter with Radhika breaks bad open. It talks about experiences and asks if experiences are the things we need to question. Right. So these are things I think we should kind of question and move away from the hardware, kind of.
- [25:01]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yeah. It's also like us being from the global south kind of normalizes using knockoff or pirated versions, be it like games or films, as part of our everyday life as such. Yeah, I really liked how you are approaching that. And now going forward in chapter two, there is this case for video game reviews as a form of public memory. How can a review written at launch act as a special and temporal snapshot of the game's release context? As such?
- [25:33]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Okay, no, this is a very interesting question, Khadija. I would answer this in two ways. Firstly, of course, in the context of the book and secondly, in line with some of the newer work I'm kind of doing. So let me answer with the first bit. Right. So increasingly what has happened is there is a service turn in video games. And most people who play games and who study games will tell you that video games are no longer products, but they are services and they are kind of like live service games. So they're constantly being reconfigured, changed, updated, patched and expanded through the circle or through the life of the game itself. Right. So for example, if you look at a game like Pubg Mobile today, or Fortnite for that matter. If you were to play them today and if you were to compare them with what they were when they were first launched, you will realize that there is no connection whatsoever. The game you're playing today is a completely different game from what it was when it launched. Neither the functions, nor the menus, nor the interface, nor even the aesthetic kind of remains what it was meant to be. So reviews then kind of become both like what I call time capsules. So they become points of origin. Right? So when you look at a review, you'll think back to, hey, this is how this game kind of started. Because none of the games are ending, they're running perpetually. And these are not games that you can finish. Right. Because people are supposed to log in, play day after day, are supposed to compete, and then, you know, get rewards, then a season ends and a new season starts, and then they do it all over again. Correct. So in many ways, then the review kind of becomes the first point of origin to kind of always go back to and see, oh, this is what the game was. Oh, this is what its functionalities were. This is what they wanted to do. This was the hardware that kind of ran on. Oh, this was what, you know, players were required to do to win and so on. Correct. Oh, and this is where the game has kind of gone today. Correct. So I find reviews having what I would say in many ways, archival powers and properties in this regard. Right? Because considering how ephemeral online games and digital games are, especially when they become live service games, and how they're constantly being reconfigured, sometimes every couple of weeks, sometimes every few days, and you want to preserve different parts of the various game states of what the game kind of was. So reviews then become kind of like buttons. Then you can kind of go back to them, look at the visuals, look at the images, look at, read what text it was. Also depends on what kind of review it is, right? Is it a written review, is it a video documented review? Is it something else in a different kind of format? And suddenly you find new avenues to kind of explore these things, to look at how the game kind of transitioned, to look at how the philosophy of the game itself changed or how even the playing community changed. So within the game, if you were to place a history or the nature of interactions itself, the review kind of becomes the first point to kind of unlock those things. Also, it's interesting and towards the second half of the book, I asked this question, right? How. What do you say? Sacrosanct do we consider the review because the review is static, whereas the game is dynamic and ephemeral and constantly being reconfigured. For a game that has multiple transformations, do we review at every transformation? Or do we have one review as a point of origin? And we do a current review at the time of examination. And these are questions I don't really have complete answers to yet, but I'm hoping over the next few years I kind of figure this out. But I'll leave this kind of question with an interesting example for you to think about. So a few years ago, there was this amazing game that came out called Life is Strange. And there have been quite a few Life is strangers after that. And Life is Strange is one of those narrative heavy games that became the first one to kind of launch in what we call is an episodic format. Correct. And when it came to me for review, I was thinking, you know, I was grappling with the idea, how do we kind of review Life is Strange? Because they would drop an episode every three weeks, every four weeks. So do I review every episode and then do a collective review at the end for the whole game? Or do I play through everything and then do a collective review? Or do I review each episode individually and look at them, what they are, as individual playable sequences? And those are questions that we want to ask. Right. So I think that's where the academic kind of steps in, because the reviewer never has either the space or the bandwidth to review six different pieces on the single game. So I think it's in those contradictions that somewhere the reality kind of lies. Right. The more and more I am engaging with live service games, and the more and more I'm looking at the platform turn in games, I'm beginning to realize that the review is probably extremely important. And if this is a review that the researcher has done themselves, then with the added auto ethnography, it becomes like, you know, not just your point of entry, but also your participation within the culture itself to kind of, you know, examine things more holistically, more critically.
- [31:09]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yeah, I really like that example. It's also connecting back to our initial stance of this conversation of ephemerality of gaming as such. Yeah. Also in chapter three, you discuss how the industry's focus on photorealism shapes the technological capital that players need today. In what ways does this affect access and play?
- [31:32]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Right. Oh, this is a brilliant question. Right. So in 2024, when I was writing this, Nvidia had not become what Nvidia is today. Right. And in many ways I knew something on the sort was in the works, right? With photoreality, photo fit at high photo fidelity, visual fidelity becoming the foundations for what we are beginning to see today, which is GPU or graphical processor unit centered computing and so on. Right. So yeah, I think there is a massive problem there, right. So historically we have, at least for researchers in the Global south, we consider gaming to be a site of privilege. And a very close friend of mine, Dibiduthirai, asked me this in 2019 and I think ever since that I've always asked this question that Aditya, for you to study games, coming from India, coming from a public university like Hyderabad, it's very important for you to interrogate the privilege that you kind of come in yourself, right? Because if you think about it, right, in a country where even today average monthly incomes would not exceed 30,000 rupees, you know, I'm talking about at a country level, right? And you would say even at 30,000 rupees a month, I'm probably overestimating the number. Right. For context, 30,000 rupees is about, yeah, about $310 a month, right? US dollars. But to think of buying something like the PS4 or the PS5, which cost more than the average monthly salary, and then to find the latest games to play and partake in that culture is an extremely, extremely expensive hobby. And these are important things for us to kind of question, right? So when I kind of look at India's history with video games and you look at that one particular game, I look at Crisis and I look at it in more detail and how it takes the GPU mainstream. And in many ways, I would say the launch of Crisis unlocks what we are seeing with Nvidia today. You know, the 5 trillion, 6 trillion dollar behemoth it is, right? So in many ways it is a culture becoming inaccessible. It is a culture that is setting boundaries, that is telling people that not everyone is welcome. And only if you can afford the hardware and they know the technological, know how of how to use that hardware, can you enter those kind of spaces. Right? So gaming as a privileged site of space in the Global south, absolutely. But also then gaming as an exclusionary site and that becomes very, very, very, very important because, you know, increasingly what we are seeing is gaming as a hobby around the world now, not only in the Global south, is becoming a lot more unaffordable in the current reality of things, computing equipment is so much more expensive than it was meant to be. I mean, if you look at the prices of Ran chips, you look at the prices of memory, you look at the prices of hardware or graphic chips, you realize it's very hard to build a gaming computer today. And most gamers will tell you that the right of passages to build your own gaming computer, right? So the more you look at it, the more you realize that, you know, that photo that what do you say? That photorealistic kind of obsession that the industry has with game building is more focused towards making video games more exclusionary as sites of practice. And that's a problem because it's possible to still have fun with games that don't look as though they are blockbuster films. I'm not saying that really good looking games aren't fun, of course they are. But not everybody needs to, what do you say, find fun in that particular way. Game makers need to look at affordable computing, need to look at affordable gaming practices because that is where the sustainability will kind of happen, at least over the next couple of decades. I see computing, what do you say, requirements and hardware requirements will continue to spiral increasingly more expensively and you know, energy consumption is something we'll have to be even more careful about considering, you know, questions of sustainability and so on. Right. And I think it's important for us as an industry, as a community to step away from trying to have the best looking games because I mean, if you ask any of us, right, they would be hard pressed to tell you what's the difference between 1080p and 4k, right. And if it even makes a difference on an everyday basis. So these are things that we are going to have to keep questioning because the industry will continue doing what it wants to. It'll want maybe five years from now to push 8K gaming or 16K gaming or whatever, because it can, right? But the question is, do we as players, do we as the community even want something like that? So yeah, I think that chapter kind of forces us to ask that question.
- [36:46]
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- [37:16]
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- [38:06]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yeah, thank you so much for that critical discussion that we had. Now it also kind of relates with the digital divide discussions that you're mentioning. Yeah, that's true. Also in chapter four, you look at broken games such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Anthem. So when games launch unfinished and are later fixed through patches, does this shift part of the development work onto players as such?
- [38:37]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
No. Absolutely right. This is the whole. This is the culmination of what, you know, people would call labor and, you know, gamified labor. You know, how players are today, essentially. I mean, in the community, people will tell you our players are today essentially beta testers of unfinished projects and so on and so forth. So what I found really interesting, especially with Anthem and even with Cyberpunk to some extent, there was so much hype and there was so much expectation from within the industry for the games to kind of come out that at many points I feel user experience, player experience, foundations of what makes a game fun, work overlooked. Right? So now the miracle of at least what we call live service kind of games or when games go, service based, is you believe that with software updates and patches, you can fix everything. And we have seen this to some extent, Right. So within that chapter, I document how a game like no Man's sky comes as a horrible, horrible experience to play in 2016. And by 2020, 2021 becomes a lovely game for people to kind of engage with. And to some extent, Cyberpunk 2077 has done that. Now, originally launched in 2020, right. At the end of 2020 December, but so much more finished and polished as a game experience by 23:24. But the question is, that is the time it took for these games from 2016 to 2019, 2020 for no Man's sky and 2020 to 2024 Cyberpunk. So what was the need for the games to even launch that? And those are the bigger questions to ask. Of course, the industry wants to realize revenue for the investment it has made yes, absolutely. But it is setting a very dangerous precedent by trying to tell people that they can fix everything through software updates later in the day. So in many ways it changes what production work means for the industry. It changes what players expect from games. With large games now, most players that I speak to as part of my research and also as part of reviews tell me that they don't even try the game at least 90 days after launch because they believe it'll be playable and will be good only three months or four months in. Now, isn't that last revenue correct? Right. It kills the whole matter of the hype, the launch cycle, all key parts of the industry. Now the second part of it also, and I think this is the more interesting part for us to focus. The industry has, and not just the industry, even the community has the singular focus on how big a game can be. So when they look at a game and look at the cost of the game, they ask how much time can I spend in that game? Right. So I don't know if number of hours and quantity of game time or the length of game time is equitable to quality of experience. And this is something I think we need to navigate a little more with a little more nuance. Right. So we have had games where people have tried everything they can to fix things after, you know, a disastrous launch. They have not been fixed and they've been left. So Anthem is a great example for that. Battlefield 2042 was a great example of that. Games that have just not clicked and people have had to stuck away. So my point here is, I think in many ways I think we could kind of scale back on what we think our games can do. Find more manageable, more achievable projects. I'm not saying don't be ambitious, but to have projects that have, you know, fix deliverables and, you know, well defined boundaries and so on, but also to know that, you know, just because you can push updates and patches and fixes, it's not a miracle, it cannot really solve everything. So, yeah, so these are big things I have to think about. And it's essential for us, you know, to research, to examine broken games because just as we examine the successful things, we also need to examine failures because it is within the failures that we kind of understand, you know, what not to do or what can be done better and so on and so forth.
- [42:52]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yeah, thank you so much for that fantastic response. Also in chapter five, you discuss Diablo Immortal and its monetization model alongside its free 20 to 30 hour campaign. I believe this question is kind of picking on where we left previously. So for players in the Global south, can freemium models genuinely improve access to major game franchises as such?
- [43:21]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Yeah, this is a very interesting question, right? I would say double edged sword, Khadija. So, yes, it allows them to access things, franchises and worlds that they've never been part of. So Diablo Immortal does that, you know, especially in India where the gaming community and you know, the gaming culture scene was not as big as what it is. I mean, so for example, if you think about Diablo, right? So when Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Diablo 3 kind of come out, the Indian gaming scene is very, very, very nascent. It's, I mean, there are very few people who are part of the gaming culture. So for a lot of people who had, you know, who pick up gaming, you know, post smartphones that post really, really affordable Internet, jio Airtel, all of that, that I kind of talk about in the book, right? Diablo Immortal becomes the first entry point into the Diablo franchise. And there's a reason, right? And I talk about it in the book as to why Diablo Immortal comes. When it does, it becomes an Advertisement For Diablo 4, which is the big flagship game that comes later. And for lots of people who have never been part of Diablo Immortal becomes the first point of entry. So in the Global south, it makes a lot of sense. It's a free to play game. You have 20 to 30 hours of amazing, a really well designed world with amazing fun things to do. So why would you not like that? It makes a lot of sense. But that is also where the second edge of that sword comes. So for most game developers who are designing games for freemium markets, they know that Indian players and players from Global south countries or digital majority countries are unlikely to spend a lot of money. It's going to be very, very rare for people to spend money. And even with a game as popular as Call of Duty Mobile, it's only during the pandemic that I start seeing Indian players are willing to spend up to 100 rupees a month for season pass and so on. So players don't like to spend money. So what they kind of do is this is especially how online games kind of function, right? So I call them economies of engagement. What they do is they need to project themselves as vibrant places for other players to come and play, correct? And the only way to portray themselves as vibrant sites is to give players increasingly difficult. So for people who are not putting any money to unlock rewards, to unlock, you know, better items, or to level up or to Progress in the story, they need to put inside twice as much more time and effort, twice as much more or maybe thrice as much more. You know, a commitment in terms of regular play and so on. Correct. Because a multiplayer game needs to show how many people are playing it at any given time. And through the freemium model, you can show players from the Global south who are always going to be in huge numbers because of the population. In countries like India, China, Indonesia, all for that matter, increasingly countries within the African continent, you can show those numbers to say that we are extremely popular, which means that other players will join and those players will join and probably spend. Correct. So in many ways, players on the Global south become ambassadors for the game, become advertisers for the game, and their labor and effort is kind of extracted so that the game is constantly made to look visible. Right. And I found that increasingly this has become a lot more exploitative than anything before. Grinding mechanisms have become harder because game makers and game developers are constantly looking at what's the how to get people to spend money. Right. And for people who don't spend money, they become increasingly more extractive in terms of requirements. Right. So the grind becomes too much. So with modern games, you look at this, this becomes a lot clearer. So for a game like esports, FIFA or fc, a free to play player probably has to put in eight to nine hours a day on the game. Right. That's almost like working a full time job. Right. So then the question is, are these even games? Is this even fun or is it work? And you know, a huge level of questions there. A lot of my newer researchers beginning to ask these questions.
- [47:48]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
So yeah, yeah, it's a very layered answer, I would say. It's not just about accessibility. Right, yeah. Now going to chapter six that explores characters like Peter Parker and Miles Morales listening to in game broadcast media while playing. So what does this blend of hero narratives and media commentary say about how reality is represented in games today?
- [48:16]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Yeah, this is an amazing question. Thank you for that. Right, so yeah, that's the chapter on Transmedia. And I'm looking at how increasingly game based properties and IPs and game worlds are becoming, you know, interesting sites or audio, visual content and so on and so forth. Right. So of course the Last of Us becomes a very popular TV series. You see it with Outlast, you see it with Fallout, you're now increasingly seeing it with, I mean, Sony says that they have 12 different kinds of films and TV series and so on in the works for its first party properties. And so on, of course. So I was looking at that intersection, right? So when you look at Spider man itself, right? So be it Peter Parker, be it Miles Morales, be it, of course, the fact that, you know, there is that whole reality blending animated movie franchise which is into the spider verse and across the spider verse, right? And Miles Morales technically comes from there, goes into the game, comes back and the question is, how does the magic kind of translate across all of those media? And those are interesting questions to ask, but within the hero bit I think, right? There is a lot, I think within the larger video game industry where video games are viewed as extensions of comic book, cinematic, television based content and superheroes especially, and video games, because of their ability to offer experiential journeys, to offer to some extent embodied, limited lived experiences, allow for a deeper connection to kind of form, right? So for when you play as Spider man, be it Peter Parker, Miles Morales, video games kind of break that boundary, you begin to think of yourself as Peter Parker, you begin to think of yourself as Miles Morales. Of course you are still navigating a very real kind of reconstruction of Brooklyn or New York in these games. So for example, as Peter Parker, you want to see what Central park in New York is like or you want to climb the Empire State Building. Correct. So video games become in many ways like these stitched, imaginative, fictive realities of sorts, where it is possible for you to also find where the Avengers Tower is, but also go and look at the Met in New York and so on. Right? So through the eyes of the heroes, believing that you're heroes, you can kind of question what everyday landmarks, cities quotients are like because of games recreate urban logic. It's a little complex, I know, with where I'm going. But again, you would not, for example, find any opportunity to engage with jazz music history the way Spider Man 2 kind of does it at that point. When you're going through that museum where you're looking at the various instruments and the bits of information on various musicians, it doesn't matter if you're Spider man or anybody else, right? Because it's a game to learn and something similar that you see with Assassin's Creed, right? So when you climb the Great Pyramid in Giza, it doesn't matter if you're an assassin or you're playing an imaginary world. What you're looking at is how the pyramids are for what they are, you know, truly magnificent spaces and so on. Yeah.
- [52:00]
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Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
an Oscar winning director.
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Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
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Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
I'll never work again. If anyone found out, my lips are sealed.
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- [52:29]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
So I hope that makes sense. I know I went a little bit more crazy than this answer, but.
- [52:34]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Oh no, it was really fantastic. Thank you so much for that response. Going to the last chapter, which looks at the pandemic through games such as Wordle and Among Us. How did daily puzzles and online hobbies functions as a kind of social presence or reassurance during that difficult time we all had to go through?
- [52:57]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Yeah, no. So I would say if you look at the entire book, right. So each of the chapters provides a different way of looking at a history of what games would say about the 21st century. But I think with the one on the Pandemic, it does a much closer connection because it's also the uniqueness of the time. Right. So the temporal reality is so different. I mean, if you think about it at a time when it was impossible to go out, at a time when it was impossible to be part of your favorite leisure time activities, to socialize, to even explore, you know, things or even go grab coffee for that matter, or talk to people at those times when we were struggling globally as a community to do interesting activities, that a big part of what it means to be human people turn to video games and I call that whole thing ludic socializing. Right. So you see it first with games like Pictionary on something like Scribble IO or Ludoking, which become extremely popular pandemic games. And then it picks up a little further down in the pandemic or to a much higher degree with something like Among Us. And I use this question in class every time I talk about it. Right. So I ask people, how many of you remember playing among us at the pandemic? And almost everybody's played among us, and a lot of them are probably not even gamers to begin with. Right. And it's the same thing with a game like Suspects or with any of the games that can be it, Animal Crossing, you know, which became extremely popular. Right. So what happens is when people don't have spaces to go back to, video games become spaces that they can repurpose to find some of that magic. If you cannot go to a coffee shop to get to know new people, can you do that in a video game? Like among us. If you cannot have your graduation at the university because of the Pandemic, can you recreate it in Minecraft? If your favorite band is launching an album and you cannot attend the launch concert, can you attend it in Roblox or Fortnite? Correct. So these become really, really interesting questions to ask because at a time when the world was not open to us, we used video games to recreate and repurpose parts of the world. Of course, this gave brilliant people amazing ideas. With Mark Zuckerberg, for example, going all down on the metaverse and all of that. Of course, six years later, nobody wants the metaverse because the world is awkward. But at a time when we needed spaces to be human again, video games stepped up for us in ways. Right? We turn to video games for those things. And I think that documents to us in many ways how we survived the pandemic, how we found sanity. And through the chapter, I document different stages of the pandemic and how we ourselves find things so much more difficult as the pandemic progresses, how the anxiety is kind of deepened, how our challenges with staying alive kind of manifest. And you move from stage one to two and three. And wordle comes right at the end, right? If you remember, it comes at the time when the third wave is kind of picking up and it becomes a thing. And I look at something like Wordle and I ask, yes, we all play the game. Yes, it's immensely social. You can share it and you can talk about it. But I think there's a reason it becomes as popular as it does during the third wave. And it's at a time when, you know, when we are all tired of asking other people how we are and how are we doing or telling other people that, yes, we are alive. One more day. One more day. So the everyday Wordle post becomes a proof of life. So every day you play the wordle, you put it on social media, you're telling other people out there that, hey, one more day and I'm alive. And that kind of a bond, I think, does not manifest with any other game. So I think that history is also important for us because deep, personal, intimate histories is what I think video game histories should be.
- [57:05]
Khadija (Podcast Host)
Yes, absolutely. And thank you so much once again, Aditya, for joining us here and having this wonderful conversation, talking about games and everything that you're passionate about. And finally, if I may ask, what are your future projects?
- [57:22]
Dr. Aditya Deshpandu (Guest, Author and Researcher)
Yeah, thank you for that, Khadija. So, as some of you might know, and as I've told you earlier, Khadija I'm on research sleeve, so at the moment I'm trying to write as many things as I can and put together. There are a couple of things I'm really, really proud about. There's a chapter, I think, that comes out slightly later in the year in a volume on digital exhaustion that my friend Alex Taylor has kind of put together, where I talk about burning out in games and how you burn out year after year when you play games. You know, a live service game that just does not end. So we are looking. It's a collaborative auto ethnography with two very close friends of mine from a time when we were on the competitive FIFA circuit and what it meant to be as part of that circuit and how we stepped away. Correct. Then there's a chapter that's coming out on 90s Internet nostalgia and where I look at how game preservation techniques, right, emulation, ROMs and so on could probably be the way to preserve, you know, digital experiences from the. From 90s Internet, from a time when Internet was still amazing, you know, and the end shitification had not happened. That's a chapter coming out in a volume on 90 called Coming Back Stronger. 90s Internet, sorry, 90s nostalgia, that my friends Neil Ewan and Hannah Hamad and Shelley have kind of put together. Apart from that, I have a couple more chapters coming in, one talking about the picture of the Indian game industry and how currently the kind of jobs in India are still more to do with the outsourcing of quality testing roles and so on in the to India and how this is counterproductive to the Indian game industry that I've kind of written. There's another one coming out on in the Routledge volume on history and video games that looks at how Indian video games set in India dab it more in mythology than actually Indian historical events. So these are the four ones that are immediately coming out. A couple more that I've been writing, I've been exploring the intersections between necropolitics and violent games. Akilah Mbembe's work, of course. Then I'm also kind of examining the entire New York Times games umbrella. And I'm looking at that from lenses of engagement, economy and so on. So there are a bunch of interesting projects. I don't know how and when those will get done. I'm working away through bits of them as and when I get the time. But I would say there's enough for the next couple of years that, yeah, it is going to keep me occupied and it's going to be fun, though.
- [60:20]
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- [61:02]
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