The Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent: The Exotic and the Colonized
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Published:April 2024
Souvik Mukherjee, 2024. "The Video Game Version of the Indian Subcontinent: The Exotic and the Colonized", Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us, Christopher B. Patterson, Tara Fickle
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The Indian subcontinent has long been a zone of exploration and exoticism for the European and North American countries, and arguably it continues to remain so even in very new media such as video games. Strangely, although it is one of the most populous and diverse parts of Asia, it is generally not counted in Euro-American descriptions of “Asianness.” When it comes to representing the region, the portrayals border on extreme exoticization or sweeping generalizations. Chapter 8 analyzes the construction of South Asia and the Indian subcontinent within video games. In doing so, it invokes comparisons with the portrayals of the region in earlier narrative media, perspectives from postcolonial theory, postcolonial digital humanities, and game studies in the larger context of the Global South and, particularly, Asian identities.