Games in Media
Gaming the Indian Digiverse
What sets Indian videogames apart? Dive into this overview on digital games in India to find out how independent games are transforming this landscape.
By Souvik Mukherjee
Walking through the deserts of India, amid the ornate Rajasthani architecture and Javanese art, one follows Raji on her mission to rescue her brother Golu from his demon captors and in the process encounters the tholu bommalata shadow puppetry, kollam puzzles that reveal the back story and power-ups from gods such as Durga and Vishnu. The huge leap that Indian game development has made since its early days just over two decades ago is impressive. In the wake of License Raj with its bureaucratic hurdles to international collaboration, along with the common mindset, videogame development made a rather late start in India when commercial giants such as Nintendo had already made an early exit.
Two games, both first-person shooters, Yoddha and Bhagat Singh, were pioneering efforts that set off the conversation on videogames made in India with Indian themes. For example, Bhagat Singh (2002) was based on the heroic exploits of the eponymous Indian freedom fighter.
Despite their relevance and their novelty in Indian cultural milieux, these games did not match up to games released globally around the time such Microsoft and Ensemble Studio’s Age of Empires (1997) or Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto (1997). Nevertheless, the floodgates of game development had opened up and India soon had its own developer conference (then the NASSCOM Game Developer Conference) and game jams.
How do you say ‘gamer’?
Rajesh Rao, another pioneering figure of Indian game development, was Ted Friedman’s favourite case study in his The World is Flat (2005) where Rao’s global expertise and involvement was summed up in his brave and confident comment, ‘India is going to be a superpower and we are going to rule’.
International game design figures such as Ernest Adams would also echo the sentiment in times to come. Adams went on to call India the sleeping giant of the videogame industry. While on the one hand the diversity of Indian culture is difficult to represent in videogames, on the other, when Adrienne Shaw asks the question, ‘How do you say “Gamer'' in Hindi?’, there is no specific word to be found in Indian languages, highlighting the westernness of gaming culture uniformly across India.
A new world of gaming
All things considered, there has been a surge of game development with diverse Indian content especially with the rise of the indie games, or independent games created by small development teams. Indian game developers have been showcasing a rich variety of very creative ideas for over a decade now. Shailesh Prabhu’s Yellow Monkey Studios has come up with games such as Huebrix! (2012) and It’s Just a Thought (2011), the first an artsy puzzle game that was described as ‘a soothing rainy Sunday afternoon to Super Hexagon's hedonistic Saturday night’ by Edge Magazine; the latter a game where the player navigates a thought through different emotional states. As unique as these concepts sound, Prabhu’s creativity has had many parallels in the work of contemporary developers such as Satyajit Chakraborty, Yadu Rajiv, Dhruv Jani, Poornima Seetharaman, Arvind Raja Yadav and Zainuddin Fahad to name a few.
The range of topics that these games cover is impressive. For example in the fictional ancient Indian city in Unrest (2014), the player is in the position of the socially disadvantaged and is faced with numerous ethical decisions. Instead of the ‘hero’s journey’ narrative pattern preferred by most western videogames, here the story is told from the perspective of those referred to as ‘subaltern’ in Postcolonial theory.
Dhruv Jani, of Studio Oleomingus, directly addresses the lives of those who are rendered voiceless and ‘minor’ in society, whether by colonialism or by other socio political scenarios. In his Somewhere series, Jani creates the fictitious land of Kayamgadh where the people are afraid to speak for fear that their words would be lost and other people’s fictions can infect one’s own sense of self. Jani is one of the most creative developers on the Indian game design scene and combines the magic realism of authors such as Italo Calvino with postcolonial theory and references to Indian culture, both contemporary and historical.
The story of the underdog and the exploited continues in Missing: A Game for a Cause (2016), designed by Leena Kejriwal and Satyajit Chakraborty, which quite uniquely focuses on the plight of the thousands of girls who are trafficked in various regions of South Asia. Set in Sonagachi, Kolkata’s largest red-light area, Missing is based on real life research conducted by the game developers.
Playing on memory
A rather new addition and one coming from India’s diaspora, is Venba (2023), a cooking game that is also about remembering and forgetting, immigration and loss, all of which play out as the player tries to restore a partially destroyed recipe-book. Or what if, as in Forgotten Fields (2021), the protagonist is a writer with a writer’s block revisiting childhood locations to remember what it used to be like when he was a child in coastal Goa?
The theme of memory continues in Afrah Shafiq’s recent game Nobody Knows for Certain (2022), which is about the Indian experience of reading Soviet books - a very specific but important phenomenon that shaped the childhood of many in the eighties and the nineties. While playing through the fairytale literary worlds, what Shafiq actually presents is a research project on archives, wherein one can digitally flip through the book.
Shafiq is among the many women game developers and writers who are changing the face of the industry in India. Poornima Seetharaman, the only Asian to be in the Women in Games Hall of Fame is planning her game Madhuram, based on Indian musical traditions and Meghna Jayanth is now an international name with her games such as 80 Days and Sunless Seas. Jayanth’s vocal critique of ‘white protagonism’ and the imperialist logic of videogames was an impactful message for the industry.
The future of Indian gaming
India’s game industry may be young and the jury may be out for whether it is a sleeping giant but it presents a diverse, inclusive and wide ranging vista of the ‘Digiverse’. There is a high degree of uniqueness, innovation and promise in the air. Contrary to popular perceptions (particularly in the media and public discourse) of videogames being a violent addiction, Indian videogames challenge set perceptions at many levels, and are simultaneously entertainment media and pedagogical tools. They present an alternative to hero-based plotlines by speaking for the marginalised, and represent the rich cultural diversity of India with its neverending stories and its pervasive lucidity.