Futures of Learning

Although India’s gaming market and associated activities have grown dramatically over the last few years, the research literature on the topic is still sparse. According to Nasscom, the Indian IT industry’s main association, the country’s gaming segment — comprising mobile, computer and console games and development — was estimated to grow from Rs 192 crore (US $3.8 million) in 2006 to Rs 1,700 crore (US $ 34 million) by 2010, equaling an annual growth rate of 72 percent. In spite of this increase, which is sustained by young men gaming in internet cafes and increasingly on mobile phones, the industry has yet to make significant in-roads into the everyday practices of Indians. There is therefore noticeably little in the public discourse about gaming addiction, violence and other concerns, which are so pervasive in other countries.

According to market research companies, the gaming expansion in India is pushed by increasing broadband use, growth of Internet cafes, an increasingly - and increasingly affluent - middle-class, the emerging youth market and inexpensive mobile prepaid game cards http://www.ibef.org/artdisplay.aspx?cat_id=60&art_id=17259&refer=n47. The Indian gaming expansion can also be ascertained from the fact that important gaming events and competitions are starting to be organized from this country. On February 12, 2009, the first-ever ‘World Gaming Day,’ which was marketed as “the largest-ever youth connect initiative to celebrate gaming” by its organizers Sony Ericsson, Zapak.com and Microsoft XBOX 36, was celebrated in Mumbai http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Infotech/Software/Sony_XBOX_announce_World_Gaming_Day_on_Feb_12/articleshow/4090144.cms. The World Gaming Day culminated four weeks of intense activities, with an estimated 19 million games played predominantly in India, US, UK, Australia, Singapore, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia. Later this year, the FIFA Interactive World Cup 2009, sponsored by Electronic Arts and Sony Ericsson and played entirely on Playstation 3 consoles, will take place in India. The flipside to this growth is the gaming industry’s concern about the increasing pirating practices.

Another element in the growth of Indian gaming is its connection to the world of Bollywood, materializing in mobile phone games based on popular Bollywood films. For example, at the World Gaming Day mentioned above, two Bollywood actors were at hand to congratulate the winners and to extoll the fun of playing games. Earlier this month, the Bollywood classic “Devdas” gave rise to “Dev D,” a new mobile phone game that enables gamers to take on the persona of the main protagonist of the film. The hope is that the mass appeal of such classics will translate into mass markets for the games (http://in.news.yahoo.com/137/20090203/740/tnl-second-bollywood-hero-goes-virtual-i.html). Similarly, the country’s first 3D video game is inspired by the Bollywood hit thriller “Ghajini.”

Most games are played in internet cafes, mainly by boys and young men. While networked gaming is one of the most popular activities in urban internet cafes (Rangaswamy 2007a), in rural internet kiosks boys have also been observed to play video games
(Kentaro et al 2007). Most specifically, zapak.com, a leading game provider that is part of the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group, is building ‘gameplexes,’ which are dedicated cyber cafes that promote online gaming. Zapak is also aiming to expand gaming beyond young males, with a service called zapakgirls.com, branded as “the world’s largest/India’s first ever/ gaming destination for women” that makes available strategy, puzzle and arcade games. The site also has forums with titles such as ‘Career’, ‘Health & Fitness’, ‘Love’, ‘Fashion’, ‘Family’ and ‘Let Loose,’ where the women can exchange their views on these topics (http://girls.zapak.com ). Similarly, Zapak Tiny provides games for 4 to 7 year olds, in order to grow the next generation of gamers (http://www.tiny.zapak.com ).

Educational Games

One important area arising from the development focus of ICTs in India is the development of games for use in mobile phones that help children, and adults, to learn outside the formal educational setting. The Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE) project at UC Berkeley uses such games to teach rural Indian children English; the project is supported by the MacArthur Foundation (http://hub.dmlcompetition.net/profiles/blog/show?id=2044804%3ABlogPost%3A3511).
The same team has also developed and field-tested various other games to help children who may not be able to go to school (Kam et al 2007). Another example is the work of Netika Raval around mobile phone games for water use, developed in part to connect children’s learning to real life experience (http://rdvp.org/fellows/2006-2007/netika-raval/). In virtually all of these design studies and their applications, at least one of the team members is of Indian descent and thus can act as a cultural broker for the design team, as it develops and tests its prototypes. Aside from examining the rural and urban of schools and communities, there is little attention paid to contextualizing these interactions in participants’ everyday experiences. In the formal educational setting, two young Indian bankers from Chennai, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, developed the HeyMath game, which provides mathematics textbooks, teaching and assessment tools as well as lesson plans over the internet, with the use of animation tools.

Gaming Discourses

In contrast to countries like Korea, discourses of game addiction do not (yet) seem to have emerged; I could only find one article on general internet addiction (Kanwal and Anand 2003). It might be however that as gaming is taken up by the Indian population in a more substantial way, new dimensions of the moral panic discourse (Ravindran 2007) come to focus on issues of addiction and illness.

In addition, in January 2008, a measure was introduced in the Indian parliament to ban violent video games. Rather than garnering large-scale support, the bill has been controversial because it was introduced by a Bollywood star whose son purchased the game for his son, who wanted a popular game that his friends in the UK were playing. The reaction has been one of outrage against attempts of censorship at the state level, rather than in the video game industry. As one of the contributors to the debate noted, on the blog desicritics.org:

“As with Internet usage, parents need to make their own informed decisions as to which games their kids get to play. In fact, video games can be great bonding activities between parents and their children and I have frequently seen fathers come with their kids to the local pirates and buy games for their children after much entertaining discussions. The Big Brother approach rarely works with Indian citizens, yet people revel in the same nevertheless. When children find creative ways of breaking family rules, how does the state with lax legal institutions and enforcement agencies curb adults from indulging in activities they don’t consider to be illegal in the first place? Does censorship really work in India or is it just a paper tiger? Since when have we let these Bollywood actors and socialites dictate what the citizens of India can or cannot do? Maybe it’s time Mrs Tagore sorted out her own house, paid more attention to the kind of games her grandkids played especially when the games have big letters saying MA printed on them instead of urging the government to babysit the nation’s children at the expense of the tax payers hard earned money. Why should others pay for her blatant ignorance and negligence?” http://desicritics.org/2008/01/09/071938.php

I am quoting this post at length because it provides a good summary of my examination of gaming in India, as it touches upon its connection to Bollywood, the perceived entertainment value of gaming, as well as pirating activities. Most importantly, the post also speaks to a number of larger issues around the use of gaming, and new media technologies in general, and how Indian society is negotiating the issues that arise with their use. Just as for Indians themselves, much remains to be learned for academics wanting to study everyday gaming practices in India.

References Cited:

Friedman, T. (2005). Still Eating Our Lunch. New York Times, September 16, 2005.

Kam, M. et al. (2007). Mobile Gaming with Children in Rural India: Contextual Factors in the Use of Game Design Patterns. Paper presented at Digital Games Research Association Conference (DiGRA), Tokyo September 2007.

Kanwal, N. and A. Anand. (2003). Internet Addiction in Students: A Cause of Concern . CyberPsychology & Behavior, 6(6), 653-656.

Kentaro, T. et al. (2007). Rural kiosks in India. Unpublished paper from Microsoft Research India.

Rangaswamy, Nimmi (2007a) ICT for Development and Commerce: A Case Study of Internet Cafes in India. Paper presented at the 9th international conference on social implications of computers in developing countries. Sao Paolo, Brazil, May 2007.

Ravindran. G. (2007). Moral Panics and Mobile Phones: The Cultural Politics of New Media Modernity in India,’ Paper presented at the Living the Information Society Conference, Makati City, Manila, April 2007.