Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games 9789048543946

Citation preview

Transnational Play

Transnational Play Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Don Gravity (2011) by Nightspade Studio, Bandung, Indonesia; Game Screenshot. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 890 4 e-isbn 978 90 4854 394 6 doi 10.5117/9789463728904 nur 670 © A.-M. Schleiner / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2020 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.



Table of Contents

Introduction: Transnational Play

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Section One  Reorienting Player Geographies 1. Tilting the Axis of Global Play: From East/West to South/North

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2. Venues for Ludoliteracy: Arcades, Game Cafés, and Street Pirates

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3. The Free-to-play Time of Women in Brazil: Localized Mobile and Casual Games

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Section Two Ludic Perspectives from South of the Border 4. Ludic Recycling in Latin American Art: From Remixing the City to Sampling Nature

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5. The Geopolitics of Pokémon Go: Navigating Bordering Cities with a Mobile Augmented Reality Game Map

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Section Three  From Global to Local Game Development 6. The Absence of the Oppressor: Games for Change and Californian Happiness Engineers

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7. Game Studios in Southeast Asia: From Outsourced to Culturally Customized Games

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Conclusion: Play Privilege

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Bibliography

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About the Author

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Index

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Introduction: Transnational Play Abstract Transnational Play makes a case for approaching gameplay as a global industry and set of practices that also includes diverse participation from players and developers located within the global South, in nations outside of the First World. Such participation includes gameplay in cafés, games for regional and global causes like environmentalism, piracy and cheats, localization, urban playful art in Latin America, and the development of culturally unique mobile games. This book offers a reorientation of perspective on global play, while still acknowledging geographically distributed socioeconomic, racial, gender, and other inequities. Over the course of the inquiry, which includes a chapter dedicated to the cartography of the mobile augmented reality game Pokémon Go, I develop a theoretical line of argument critically informed by gender studies and intersectionality, post-colonialism, geopolitics, and game studies. This book looks at who develops, localizes, and consumes games, problematizing play as a diverse and contested transnational domain. Keywords: globalized games, participatory gaming, post-colonialism, mobile games, global South, urban studies

Digital games are attracting new players. Yves Guillemot, French CEO of game publisher Ubisoft, told GamesBeat in an interview: ‘It’s a very interesting time for the industry, because the mobile is bringing in more and more casual people; Facebook brought new people too by using a new system to monetize’ (Takahashi). Danish game researcher Jasper Juul, somewhat dramatically, dubbed this shift in player demographic: ‘the casual revolution’ (1). No longer the exclusive realm of a Personal Computer hardcore demographic of teenage boys versed in militant teamwork and digital combat, grandmothers, younger women, users of mobile phones and Facebook of any gender, are playing these shorter, more interruptible, and cartoonish games. Players navigate the uncertain outdoor terrain of augmented reality games

Schleiner, A.-M., Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728904_intro

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with their smartphones, collecting cartoon pocket monsters in parks and public plazas and deploying their creatures in digital turf wars. Although seldom included in North American, European, or Japanese studies, these trainers of Pokémon, overseers of digital farms on Facebook, virtual city builders, and argonauts of addictive puzzle challenges, are also located in the ‘global South’, in Latin America, in Africa, and in Southeast Asia.1 We are only recently beginning to account for games and gameplay as global industries and practices in recent digital game scholarship. For instance, the anthology Video Games Around the World consists of brief yet informative historical contributions on game development from authors originating from thirty-nine distinct nations. The editor of the anthology, Canadian game researcher Mark J.P. Wolf writes, ‘Small video game companies are appearing all around the world, each hoping for a hit that will bring it international attention and fame, both of which can grow faster due to the Internet’ (1). And in Cultural Code: Videogames and Latin America, North American scholar of Latin American gaming, Philip Penix-Tadsen writes ‘Videogames are being converted into cultural currency for an ever-increasing array of purposes throughout Latin America and the globe’ (26). To a certain extent, a transnational account had already been formulated in the 1980s of the forces that helped establish a global game industry headquartered primarily in the United States and Japan, developments usually framed as a series of both tensions and collaboration along a geopolitical axis of East vs. West, as I will discuss in ‘Chapter One: Tilting the Axis of Global Play from East/West to South/North’. Otherwise in most analysis of games, researchers tend to assume a North American and occasionally European or Japanese public, a ‘Northern’ audience of industry specialists, academics, and players. Especially players outside the First World, in both so-called emerging economies, and in poorer nations from the global South, have remained largely invisible to digital game studies. One reason for the absence of diverse global players from otherwise thorough accounts such as Steven Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, and Aphra Kerr’s The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework and Gameplay, seems to be that only recently 1 I refer to the global South, despite important differences between regions and nations, as a unity which has in common such factors as a post-colonial legacy of global economic disadvantage, undeveloped infrastructures including limited access to the Internet, and a large portion of the population struggling with poverty and precarious living conditions.

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have players or game ‘users’ come to carry comparable weight with the industry in reckonings of digital gaming. Even game scholarship written from a more critical, post-Marxist perspective on the business of ‘global capitalism and video games’, such as Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s Games of Empire, has been largely dismissive of games as a global medium. The authors write: ‘Most of the sales of this supposedly global media are in North America, Europe, and Japan, with the United States still the largest single market. Game culture is thus heavily concentrated in the developed, rich zones of advanced capitalism’(xvii). In their analysis, only players who live in the global North and legitimately purchase games count as participants of ‘game culture’.2 Such a perspective presumes that due to widespread global poverty across the digital divide, the existence of Second and Third World developers and players is purely wishful thinking. For instance, while criticizing the application of Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village to gaming, the authors of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing write, ‘It [the global village] skips over the divisions in wealth that separate young North American owners of PlayStation 2s and Xboxes, commanding what were once military levels of computing power from their homes, from the majority of the world’s children who can never afford such gadgets’ (Kline, Witheford, de Peuter 36). This well-intentioned critique of the hyperbole of the global village casts the entirety of the global South’s children outside of North America in a sadly passive, gadget-less light. The authors are probably unaware that in many parts of Latin America and Southeast Asia, and increasingly in Africa, game consoles which do not necessarily require Internet access, are a relatively accessible form of digital gameplay. Even if unable to afford their own console, players can go to a neighborhood game and Internet café to play what are often pirated console and computer games. Addressing this blind spot regarding gaming in the global South, Penix-Tadsen criticizes the lack of scholarship across a too rigidly defined ‘digital divide’: ‘Too frequently, we simply accept outdated characterizations of the global south as a massive technological backwater, strictly on the downside of the “digital divide” between hi-tech haves and have-nots, when the reality of technological acquisition and usage in Latin America tells a more nuanced tale’ (44). Looking more carefully at the practices of the world’s less privileged players is key for accounting for 2 Dyer-Witheford and de Peuters premise in this book is that games are a ‘paradigmatic media of Empire’ composed of ‘two pillars’ of the ‘military and market’ evident in once popular American and European mainstream games like America’s Army and Second Life.

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1. Game café, Mumbai, India, by Cory Doctorow, ShareAlike 2, Creative Commons, 2008; Digital Photograph.

gaming culture’s general, transnational tendencies, and well as cultivating awareness of unique, local practices. In addition to renting play time at public game cafés, players overcome the infrastructural challenges of the global South with the more recently, accessible mobile phone platform. Even when lacking basic services like water and electricity in the home, both older and younger gamers are spending more hours playing casual games on their phones. North American game researcher Adrienne Shaw’s fieldwork on gaming in India indicated that the increased accessibility of mobile phones led most of the industry representatives she interviewed ‘to focus on developing mobile and social networking games accessible on phones’ (188).3 The first step toward ending an unwitting blindness toward the gameplay of the global South is a matter of knowing where to look, such as in small video game arcades and in Internet cafés, on consoles like Wii, Xbox, and PlayStation, for which pirated game copies can be purchased from mobile street vendors, and more recently on mobile phones, both older and newer ones. These localities and platforms for gameplay contrast with the home computers with high-speed Internet, or the latest smart phones and tablets, that are a staple of gameplay in more affluent nations. 3 The technical industry is also starting to take note of up and coming mobile users in the global South. For instance, Melinda Klayman, a User Experience designer based in Google’s London offices, is conducting research on Indian women’s usage of mobile phones, a population she refers to as India’s ‘Next Billion Users’.

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Meanwhile, starting a few decades earlier, a neighboring field of media studies had taken note of game players in the global South. Information Communication Technology (I.C.T.) studies concerned with regional development and modernization have been some of the first research to observe digital gaming practices outside the First World. For instance, in the article ‘Computer Games in the Developing World: The Value of Non-Instrumental Engagement with ICTs, or Taking Play Seriously,’ Beth E. Kolko and Cynthia Putnam write of Central Asia: ‘When schools are not wired and home access rates are low, game cafés are likely places for people’s “first touch” with computers’ (5). One shortcoming of such media literacy studies from a game researcher’s perspective, is that they seldom directly analyze gaming culture, assuming that games merely serve as an entertaining entry point towards overall media literacy. What can we learn from player practices in the global South? Must we assume that there is little to learn, that digital game developments flow only from one source outwards, exported from ‘First World’ industries situated in the technologically upscale North to the rest of the globe? Is gameplay in the global South therefore always a few steps behind digital game trends already surpassed in Internet wired, soon to be even faster 5G Northern nations like the United States and Canada, where for instance games are no longer played in venues like arcades and Internet cafés? On the contrary, I will make the case in this book that global game researchers would do well to query modernist assumptions about the First World, or what I refer to as the global North, inevitably steering progress and innovation in technical and digital fields such as gaming. In addition to following alternative paths to ‘modernization’, for instance bypassing home computers and adopting wide-spread mobile phone usage, the global South is taking the lead in other areas of game industry and ludic cultural development. For example, for a game to be deserving of attention, it need not take the form of a three-dimensional photo-realistic world crafted through Triple A streamlined production processes that requires extensive, Hollywood-scale game production, including teams of modelers, animators, level designers, and artificial intelligence programmers. Elegant design and innovative playability can also be observed in the games of smaller, emerging developers in the global South who are especially active makers of short, casual mobile games with relatively simple, 2-Dimensional cartoon graphics. While independent developers in the North gather and demo their games at industry conventions like the annual Game Developer Conventions in California and Europe, and at the Indiecade Awards in Los Angeles and Boston, some international developers, like Vietnamese Dong Nguyen, the

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2. Unblock Me (2009) by Kira Games; Game Screenshot.

designer of Flappy Birds, distribute their games through mobile phone online marketplaces like Apple’s ‘App Store’ and Android’s ‘Play Store’. Developers like Kira-games in Northern Thailand incorporate local cultural influences into their mobile game design, such as the traditional wooden puzzles that are converted into digital puzzles in the globally popular Unblock Me. Osja Studio paint Kmeer heritage temples and mythology across the mobile levels of Asva the Monkey, combining Cambodian cultural inspirations with puzzle game conventions. Indonesian developers like Elven Games populate their games with characters and settings drawn from both mythological and contemporary Indonesian sources. A broadened cultural palette for game design inspiration, more immediate online distribution channels, the accessible mobile platform, and also the smaller-scaled development cycles for these independent games, are some of the conditions favorable to game development outside the global North. While casual games are becoming more international, in terms of their development and especially in their consumption, larger Triple A game studios are still headquartered well within the global North, in California and Texas, in Canada, the U.K, Europe, and in Asia in South Korea and Japan. Yet even Triple A games, although costly and perhaps only made in English, Korean, or Japanese, are also played in the global South. Cottage industries of unsanctioned localizers and pirates do the translation and localization work that Northern publishers leave undone for many international players. And in some nations like Vietnam and Thailand, above-the-board localization outfits legally translate and customize games from the United States, Japan, South Korea, and increasingly from China. A transnational

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approach to game analysis accounts for such international, cross-border movements of game culture, what I have elsewhere referred to as ‘play material’ (Schleiner, Player’s Power to Change the Game 51). If not only the industry but also players matter, as potential consumers with buying power, as untapped markets, or as co-producers, as localizers, and even as illegal pirate participants of gaming, digital game scholarship would benefit from acknowledging players from the greater population of the globe, not only those located in the world’s most affluent nations. Innovative, environmentally and socially conscious, playful work in the global South has also been imagined and prototyped outside of the game industry, for instance by artists active in the field of Latin American public art. My Fourth Chapter, ‘Ludic Recycling in Latin American Art’ is based on interviews with Latin American artists who have been exemplary in their ludic practice over the last few decades. Crafted with reused material and old electronics, their artworks include Cambalache Collective’s toy-like, mobile hand carts pushed through marginal neighborhoods of Bogota, Arcangel Constantini’s interactive artworks repurposed from hacked game consoles in Mexico City, and Rene C. Hayashi’s playgrounds constructed of recycled material for children living in peripheral shanty towns in Buenos Aires. These are deliberately low-technology, but innovatively conceptualized, often urban, metropolitan approaches to playful art. Such socially and environmentally engaged work from Latin America offers an instructive counter-example to the wasteful, rapid cycles of obsolesce within the mainstream digital game industry, which relies on consumers frequently updating and discarding their digital hardware of computers, and also now phones. And as income disparity and job precarity rise even within the global North, there are lessons to be learned from the socially engaged ludic practice of artists who have been working creatively, ecologically, and playfully with less privileged publics from within their own cities and regions. Recognizing multiple approaches to modernization, and accounting for innovation that emerges from the global South, including social and environmental innovation, that is either applicable elsewhere in the global South, or also is instructive for the global North, are arguments for discarding the implicit ranked elitism of the First, Second, and Third World tiers for differentiating global economic zones and conditions, while still acknowledging differing, inequitable conditions and challenges. Rather than strict adherence to the geographic boundaries of the Northern and Southern hemispheres, the opposition South vs. North is shaped by a view of economic world history that recognizes a global power imbalance since colonial powers laid claim to territories most of which have since become

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3. Paisajes Errantes or Itinerant Landscapes in Managua, Nicaragua (2013), by Rene C. Hayashi in collaboration with Moisés Mora and Claudia Morales; Photograph.

‘Second and Third World’ nations. How game scholars and media researchers frame developments in a rapidly changing global industry influences where they see development. Geographic ‘de-centering’ work, undoing the cultural imperialism wrought by past and present ‘empires’ of the global North, from former European colonial powers, to later military and economic heavy-weights like the United States, is an ongoing process (Liboriussen and Martin). Post-colonial scholars and transnational feminists have critiqued the lack of agency ascribed to inhabitants of the Third World by First World scholars and researchers, for example, a tendency among ‘white feminists’ to portray Third World women as powerless ‘socio-economic victims’ who lack the ability to make choices in their lives (Mohanty 23). As the humanities scholar Gayateri Spivak famously posed the question from a philosophical angle, in response to the work initiated by the historians of the Indian Subaltern Group, can the ‘subaltern’ speak for themselves (83)? Or should the more privileged attempt to speak for those they deem voiceless and lacking in agency, which could in this book be construed as a Northern academic writing of the concerns of game players outside the global North? I will grapple with these speaking agency issues in relation to other Northern ‘speakers’ over the course of this book, when I discuss Northern industry analysts who patronizingly counsel Southern nations to do more to combat game piracy, in the interest of protecting their own Northern Intellectual

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Property, or when Northern Games for Change designers whom I discuss in Chapter Six, either characterize the inhabitants of the global South as powerless victims, or alternately invest them with superpowers. I will pause for a self-reflexive moment to locate myself within the global South vs. North framework animating this analysis. I am a white, Northern (United States and European) educated media artist, game scholar, and designer. My early life experiences in California and ethnic privilege have shaped my views. But I also conducted much of this research later as an adult when I was living abroad in Latin America and Southeast Asia for over a decade. The experience of having inhabited both international academic game studies and public activist art circles, in diverse national and linguistic regions, is useful for bridge building across disciplines and regions. For instance, while exhibiting as an artist and teaching game design in Mexico, I learned of ludic art that is inspirational and lauded within a vibrant, urban public art scene in Latin America and internationally, but also could contribute more to fields such as game studies, urban geography, and environmental studies. And later while living in Southeast Asia, I encountered culturally inspired approaches to independent game development that could in turn serve as models for game making elsewhere in the global South. In addition to being informed from my own experiences within the global South, my research method attempts to mitigate my Northern bias when I build my arguments based on listening to and citing what Southern players, developers, and artists have said in live conversations, digital forums, interviews. Although my analysis is in this sense empirically influenced, also including ethnographic fieldwork and a play tour at the border of the United States and Mexico, as a writer I am not without my own agenda. My argumentation and theoretical optics in this book are drawn from postcolonialism, critiques of First World hegemony captured in the opposition of global South vs. North, post-Marxist critiques of neoliberal globalization, game scholarship and ludology, feminism, and gender studies. My past exploration of activist, artist, and augmented reality games in my first book, The Player’s Power to Change the Game, although differing in approach and informed primarily by political philosophy and media art activism, can be read as a prequel to this newer book. For instance in Chapters Three and Five of Transnational Play, I continue to explore questions of player power in Augmented Reality Games and Games for Change. In this book, I am more interested in the transnational implications of these rapidly evolving play genres (Schleiner 61). Like casual games intended for ‘casual’ entertainment, more serious Games for Change and educational games also lend themselves to production

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4. Cucarachilandia or Cockroachville (2011), a party-organizing math game by Caldera Estudio; Game Screenshot.

in smaller-scaled, independent studios, a relatively accessible means of game production for global designers located outside the global North. For example, Mexican game designers Yvonne Davalos Dunnig and Elisa Navarro Chinchilla’s math learning game, Cucarachilandia, is based on the premise of the cockroaches trying to organize a party. Cucarachilandia has won national prizes and is played by schoolchildren in Mexico, but is relatively unknown outside Mexico. Their Mexico City based studio has produced and designed a number of such educational games and more recently produces ‘rallies’, referring to gamified learning competitions that incorporate mobile, augmented reality features. And a small Indonesian studio, Nightspade, raises awareness about the threatened status of local Indonesian lizards in their game for children, Komodo Island: Newborn Wonders. An increasing number of serious games are made for such educational and awareness raising, environmental and social causes around the globe, applying play to challenges and concerns beyond pure entertainment. Despite such altruistic intentions, in the process of appealing for aid from affluent Northern players, some serious games designed in the North, especially those aiming to garner donations for non-governmental organizations and non-profits, disseminate patronizing and prejudicial ‘white savior’ perspectives on the sufferers of crisis’. As Dutch game researcher Joost Raessens and co-authors write critically of Food Force, a charity game on Facebook where the player is deployed as a United Nations unit, ‘Such games are built on the metaphor of the West as the helping parent, on the premise that emergencies, conflicts, or local wars, all originate from within

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while the conflict can only be defined or solved by external forces’ (‘Homo Ludens 2.0’ 10). A game that relies on heroic foreigners to resolve what are characterized as local problems, reinforce stereotypes of incompetency and a lack of agency among the inhabitants of the global South. On the other hand, the design of such Games for Change can also be overbalanced towards the locals’ side in the attribution of agency. In Chapter Six, ‘The Absence of the Oppressor’ I discuss Evoke, a game designed to spur entrepreneurial solutions to problems in Africa like ‘water scarcity’ and ‘food insecurity’. Similar in orientation to self-help problem-solving literature and workshops, the game attempts to motivate and empower local players to resolve ‘their’ problems on their own. The prolific Californian game designer of Evoke, Jane McGonigal, once ambitiously proposed that gamers could ‘solve world hunger’ in an online Ted video lecture. McGonigal’s occasional Californian collaborator Ken Eklund, with similar aspirations for the transformative, altruistic potential of gaming, predicted that ‘it’s entirely possible that a serious alternate reality game is going to be one of those revolutionary moments’ (Cook)..Gamifying the world’s crises as problems for players to ‘solve’ is in line with a turn toward social engineering and life improvement gaming, from alternative reality games about energy usage, to citizen-science hack-a-thons that explore data sets on air pollution, discussed in such venues as the Playful Citizen symposium at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2012. These matches between behavioral modification, technical design, and worthy global causes are both inspirational and at times well-implemented and effective. For instance, in 2007, several years before governments and scientists openly started attempting to address carbon emissions and global climate change in agreements such as the 2016 Paris accord, Eklund, together with McGonigal, designed the forward-thinking World Without Oil, a crowdsourced game which invited players around the globe to speculate on ways to improve on their energy consumption habits. The international players of World Without Oil noted direct improvements of their everyday energy consumption habits after participating in the game. Positive change in such a game occurs through modification of the player’s own behavior. But such gamification must also be thought through, especially when games are problematized in the global South or target Southern player-publics, the populations who are most predicted to be most severely affected by climate change, militant conflicts, and continuing economic disparities between North and South (Fourth National Climate Assessment). How should designers attribute the root causes of problems when they gamify—as primarily local or global? Who acts with agency and who is cast as the victim of a crisis?

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A decade before the emergence of motivational, life betterment, and wellness gamification, a more ‘negative’, oppositional Games for Change approach was theorized by a designer from the global South. In Chapter Six, I review Uruguayan game researcher and designer Gonzalo Frasca’s proposal for ‘the Videogames of the Oppressed’, for resistant games that simulate and practice resistance, including against oppression at a smaller, family unit scale, such as a gay child coming out against homophobic parents. As I discuss further in that chapter, Frasca’s model of Games for Change is directly indebted to other Latin American, resistant and counter-hegemonic, Marxist cultural and pedagogic work. These more oppositional, political approaches may again be a promising angle to explore for some applications of Games for Change, at times a better choice than motivational self-transformation, among other tactical approaches. Singaporean game designer Shao Han Tan adopts a similar critical approach to problem-solving via games, as I will discuss further in Chapter Seven’s tour of gaming in Southeast Asia, in game mastered, table-top scenarios, such as a game where players rehearse standing up to an exploitive boss. As Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe proposes, ‘it is only when division and antagonism are recognized as being ineradicable that it is possible to think in a properly political way’ (15). 4 One possible avenue for playful change is through critical opposition. At times this book is about outright tensions between South and North. Players in the global South are implementing creative tactics for overcoming economic and infrastructural obstacles to game literacy that are not always Northern sanctioned. For example, Vietnamese players of Pokémon Go intentionally falsely tagged densely urban neighborhoods of Ho Chi Min City on Google Maps as recreational park zones so that the game would generate more game characters in a Southeast Asian city with relatively few parks (‘Vietnam’s Pokémon Go Players Get Yellow Card’). And refusing to wait for the official release of the game in their nation, Malaysian Pokémon Go players figured out how to play an unofficial version of the game with localized characters with names like NasiLemakBungus and Maggi Goreng, influenced by regionally popular rice and noodle dishes (Lim). Player-driven game labor, including cheats, piracy, game translations, customizations, and external-to-the game maps, turn the tables on who has a hand at shaping and experiencing digital game culture worldwide. Rather than dismissing such actions as merely the work of thieving pirates 4 In her later work, Chantal Mouffe distinguishes between agonistics and antagonism, arguing that when tension is openly acknowledged and addressed (agonistics) this can mitigate the eruption of agonistics into antagonism, or violent conflict.

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and uninvited cheaters, in ‘Chapter Two: Game Cafés and Piracy as Platforms for Ludoliteracy’, I will argue that such activities can also be understood as beneficial innovations in ludoliteracy or ‘gaming competence’ (Raessens et al. 15). Global players devise such participatory tactics for keeping apace with digital gaming idioms and also for crafting new, culturally meaningful gaming experiences, such as the social bond that forms between a local game pirate who responds to special requests from customers in the Philippines. Although piracy has been a conduit to experiencing digital gaming in the global South for over a few decades, more recently accessible platforms like the mobile phone are more openly and legally exposing diverse populations to casual games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush. How empowering is this alleged casual game ‘revolution’ of diverse, transnational player publics? Freemium, or Free-to-play, is a monetization model for initially free games especially popular across Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the broader, global South. Free-to-play games are initially cost-less, and therefore much more accessible for mobile phone owners. But a few days into a game, Free-to-play players often find themselves tempted to purchase add-ons for advancement. And when the publishers of these addictive games are located in the global North, profits flow upwards in a Northern direction, comparable to the gains from other globalized, Northern owned ‘addictive’ industries, such as the sugared soda and tobacco brands marketed extensively in the global South. Despite such inequitable vectors of globalization in the game industry, is it fair to portray players as exploited game addicts, only once more gender diverse and culturally diverse global publics are gaming? Meanwhile the Northern ‘boy’ players of prior, more hardcore game genres were afforded their fun and leisure time pursuits, practices that could also be characterized as addictive vices. This again is a question of agency, of how to frame the choices diverse players around the world make. As I will explore further in Chapter Three, past feminist media studies have already debated similar empowerment issues in relation to ‘women’s’ television viewing genres like the global soap opera industry. Such gender attentive television analysis and research has also focused on girls and women’s time management and practices of ‘dailiness’. For example, in Television No Time for Mother, Elizabeth Nathanson emphasizes female viewership’s priority of time management: ‘The process of negotiating daily rhythms, patterns and schedules in the postfeminist context requires understanding, coming to terms with and learning to cope with how one spends one’s time’ (4). Casual games, easy to play in short intervals, hone players’ time management skills with ludic multitasking challenges. Gendered entertainment consumption research

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of older global media becomes newly relevant when accounting for the rise of transnational, gender-diverse casual game players. Not only Northern game developers market casual and mobile games for consumption outside of their own nations. Even in nations with their own relatively recent local game development scenes like Indonesia, developers also deliberate which stance to adopt in their games vis-a-vis their own countrypersons and towards the rest of the world. For instance, Indonesian developers like Garuda Games balance making culturally specific game titles primarily targeted at their own populations, while also releasing more generic so-called bread and butter ‘international style’ games like the mobile game Hot Dog Frenzy aimed at a global market. Developers in Thailand and in Vietnam question whether it is appropriate to continue to import and translate American and Japanese, South Korean, and Chinese role-playing games, or whether to make more original games drawn from the cultural fabric and values of their own national players. In Chapter Seven, I conduct a tour of the Southeast Asian region’s mobile, tablet, and role-playing game studios, contrasting differing market orientations and development paths among neighboring nations. When casual mobile games incorporate local settings and geographic data into game mechanics, cultural and socioeconomic context directly shape the experience of play. Since the initial flash popularity of Pokémon Go in 2016, the free-to-play mobile game has attracted a steady stream of international players to this North American mobile, augmented iteration of a popular, Japanese game franchise. Transnational players of Pokémon Go have developed various tactics for coping with the game’s environmental challenges. Dutch media researcher Sybille Lammes likens the players of such ‘location-based games’ to ‘navigators at sea’, ‘always aware of the perilous and shifting connections between map and territory’ (‘The Map as Playground’ 7). Whose bodies move through these augmented play terrains? Are augmented reality games played in public spaces safe for girls and women, for LGBQT players, for players of diverse ethnicities? How do players in poorer nations afford high wireless charges? Will small business owners rent Pokestops from the United States developer, Niantic, to attract more customers, or will only the big Northern franchises like McDonalds Japan and the United States coffee shop chain Starbucks, who have already benefited from formal alliances with Pokémon Go’s United States developer Niantic, be able to afford to optimize this ludic real estate? Augmented reality games elicit such geopolitical questions, even if they were initially only intended for fun and games. During the initial release of Pokémon Go, state officials in Vietnam allege that the game is a foreign

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societal malady, as well as a traffic hazard for motorbike riders (‘Vietnam’s Pokémon Go Players Get Yellow Card’). And in Russia, legislators speculated that Pokémon Go was an American scheme for world domination undertaken by communication giant Google, and later counter the game’s foreign influence by releasing GettoKnowMoscow, a nationalist, augmented reality game application containing Russian historical characters (Raspopina). The experience of playing such location-based map games shifts when crossing the border of one nation into another, especially when crossing a line from North to South at a border city. In Chapter Five, I discuss fieldwork I conducted when I followed a trail of Pokestops across the U.S./Mexican border and then met up with a Mexican member of ‘Pokémon Go Tijuana’s Facebook’ group. This knowledgeable level 34 player led me on an insightful Pokémon Go tour of her tough and beautiful city and its augmented reality playscapes, from the downtown area to the beach. I preface my discussion of this Pokémon Go play tour with a historical, geopolitical inquiry into cartography, empire building, and game mapping, informed by Sybille Lammes’ careful mediatic analysis of mapping games, Souvik Mukherjee’s post-colonial critique of game territory, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s transnational feminist borderland metaphors for ‘mestiza consciousness’ (Anzaldúa 78). How does a cartographer of game maps, a developer like Niantic, draw up territory in foreign lands? And how are play maps navigated at border cities between nations of unequal means, across borders that anxious, racist Northerners wish to turn into ‘walls’? Such questions about digital gaming surface at the tensions between local cultures and foreign entertainment, between regional, national economies, and the far-reaching forces of globalization. It is therefore insufficient to only speak of global gaming in terms of cultural difference and national diversity, as if the world were a level playing field with equal opportunity in each individual nation. This in my view, is one of the shortcomings of the approach adopted in some recent literature on global gaming to date, such as the anthology Video Games Around the World. Although such work importantly foregrounds a multiplicity of diverse national perspectives and local histories, it lacks theorization of global play practices that are shared across national borders, including identification of transnational tactics for resisting and overcoming systemic power imbalance. At issue here, as articulated from a political theory perspective, is that: ‘the pluralism of the advocates of new cosmopolitanism is also a case of ‘pluralism without antagonism’ (Mouffe, Agonistics 22). Global discussions of national or cultural plurality that are unaccompanied by critiques of power, in other words analyses that do not

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recognize cultural hegemony in cultural sectors such as games, obscure inequity. On the other hand, some scholars working in international game studies, while eschewing a framework of ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ game analysis as operating at a too general and large a scale, rather than focusing on individual nation states, have promoted a regional approach that captures broad, cross-national tendencies of shared cultural and economic zones. For instance, Bjarke Liboriussen and Paul Marten, two European game scholars conducting collaborative research in Asia, write: ‘With ‘regional’ we want to direct attention to local places but also to how places connect with each other and with such higher-order structures’[…] These higher-order structures include the state as well as supra- and trans-national entities such as global markets, trade blocs, ethnolinguistic groups, academic networks and intergovernmental organizations’. These scholars argue that in comparison to post-colonial analysis which assumes ‘fixed centers’ like Europe, a regional scale better accommodates global shifts in ‘power geometry’ such as the rising influence of China (Liboriussen and Martin). Many of my chapters are grounded in more regional focuses within Latin America and Southeast Asia, and I agree that situated game scholarship, whether at a regional scale, or even more narrowly focusing on local game developers, ludic artists, and player’s individual perspectives, expressed in interviews and forums, is important ground work. Details and cultural context matter, and when possible I also play the games I analyze, conducting what could be described as ‘close playing’.5 But in this book my selection of the broad scale of the South vs. North opposition is tactical, and intentionally global in scale, with the aim of communicating and deliberating cross-border tactics and strategies for how to actively participate in and contribute to the shape of transnational game culture—across nations, South to South regions, and even continents.6 In my view, such a transnational stance is not unnecessarily polemical. Whether acknowledged or not, scholarship and research always occupy a position within power. 5 I was trained to cultivate this intimate familiarity with ‘my object’, whether a film, novel or in my case games, during my doctoral research at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. 6 Tactically, my selection of the term transnational is also inspired in orientation by transnational feminism and this international movement’s ‘diversity in alliance’ approach to diverse struggles in women’s daily and public life around the world. Rather than subsuming such divergent struggles under one allegedly proper (and often Northern) style of feminist resistance against a universal ‘Patriarchy’, transnational feminists look at diverse tactics of resistance against varied patriarchies, or the ways that men gain the upper hand through means that are both deliberate and/or systemic in multiple cultures and nations (Mohanty 44).

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Rather than advocating one ‘proper’ path to gameplay and development, I look at a variety of tactical approaches that player and developers have worked out for overcoming obstacles to gaming in the global South. Third World players, as one contributor to a game piracy forum cited in Chapter Two sums it up, sit on less comfortable chairs. Although often facing a number of pressing health and basic economic security issues that more privileged players of the North are less prone to suffer, players in the global South, younger and older, of diverse gender and class, have just as much a right to experience the evolving pleasures and idioms of play, what I in the conclusion refer to as play privilege, as their Northern counterparts—and have already been doing so already whether game scholars and researchers acknowledge them or not. The risk of sweeping optics like South vs. North at a global or transnational scale is overgeneralization. The standpoint of the researcher in relation to their foreign persons can be inflated by generalities, by essentializing and stereotyping ‘the other’. A Southern pirate gamer’s illegal, pirated gaming contrasts to the Northern scholar’s ‘proper’ purchasing habits, supporting how a Northern scholar might wish to be perceived, perhaps quite falsely, as belonging to a nation of a law-abiding citizens. For instance, in his ground-breaking post-colonial work, Orientalism, Palestinian Edward Said argues that when the Western scholar of Orientalism constructed an essentialized mysterious ‘other’ through generalities, he ended up confirming an imperial, self-congratulatory view of self as rational and superior—as fit to rule, writing: ‘Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand’ (7). Said argues that Oriental scholarship is infused with this imperial power dynamic because Westerners were writing of the East from a historical moment and position of ‘ascendancy’: ‘And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part’ (7). Similarly, after a few decades of ignoring the other side of a firmly imagined ‘digital divide’, a portion of the recent spike in Northern academic and industry interest in the global South, rather than ensuing from generous hopes for greater diversity, must assuredly be attributed to the newer ‘imperial’ and Capital impulses of neoliberal globalization, to a mercurial interest in emerging markets, including those located in the global South.

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The epi-centers and corporate headquarters of rapidly globalizing industries, including the game industry, are on an ‘ascending’ arc in the global North. Said’s two fears of ‘distortion and inaccuracy’ that he formulated in critique of Westerners writing of the East, can also be directed at the South/North axis of analysis (8). What after all do South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia have in common, other than the potential of untapped markets? Vast geographic, linguistic, and cultural distances yawn between such nations, and ethnic, linguistic, and regional differences are rife even within many nation-states. But diverse alliances can be advantageous. The growing acknowledgment of such a broad and culturally diverse territory as the global South identifies common economic challenges based on similar histories of colonialism and economic exploitation of labor and resources. Resistant tactics and divergent modernization agendas can be strategically shared between distant nations against Northern dominated globalization, building on preexisting resistance movements such as the global liberation movements against colonialism. This oppositional, counter-hegemonic formulation of the global South vs. North, while sometimes surfacing in more regional study of post-colonial nations such as Latin American studies, can also be traced to ongoing international struggles against the lasting effects of colonialism. As Turkish American historian Arif Dirlik writes in Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism: ‘The global South has its roots in earlier third world visions of liberation, and those visions still have an important role to play in restoring human ends to development’ (150). Economic development itself is therefore openly promoted in such global South discourse, even if approached with an awareness of global inequity, and with increasing attention to environmentalism and sustainability. Some of the ‘de-colonialists’ who share this more development-friendly stance, maintain that post-colonial scholarship, often focused on cultural spheres, and critical of Capitalism, leaves the unfinished work of de-colonization and nation or region building undone, meaning unf inished economic development (Kumar 1). Meanwhile post-colonial scholars who hail from the Humanities, and who often eschew allegiance with any form of Capitalist development (at least in their scholarship), have been instrumental in formulating a critique of agency that could be applied more often to developmental economic discourse. Additionally, intersectional gender analysis that applies a kaleidoscopic rubric of gender, class, ethnicity, ableism, and race to cultural analysis, looking at oppression from a variety of overlapping perspectives, is also of relevance for my analysis of the game industry, for instance when portraying how primarily white, male, heterosexual developers from the global North

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localize casual games in the global South. As Afro-Surinamese Dutch cultural scholar Gloria Wekker writes of intersectionality, ‘Existent categories for identity are strikingly not dealt with in separate or mutually exclusive terms, but are always referred to in relation to one another’ (63). A developer or player belongs not to just one category of identity, but can be characterized as a dynamic combo of gender, race, class, and other demarcations. Such an intersectional approach has been applied sophisticatedly to North American games, with attention to the intersectional identity of characters who perform within a game’s narrative, rules and play mechanics (Murray, Soraya). But what happens when culture is understood to extend beyond such literary scenarios, beyond the fictional sphere of the game, to the transnational players, developers, and publishers of games? My method in this book not only engages in interpretive analysis of internal game scenarios, but also directs attention outwards to geographies of gender, race, economics, nation, culture, and hemisphere. To sum up the general layout of the book, the first few chapters belong to a section titled ‘Reorienting Player Geographies’. The first chapter launches with a historical review of East vs. West tensions between the United States and Japan, as dramatized in past game studies literature on the evolution of the international game industry. I then reframe these game innovations within a North to South framework. In the second chapter, I review popular platforms and venues for gameplay in the global South like game cafés and mobile phones. I also conduct a digital ethnography of gaming forum posts, looking into how Southern players and game pirates defend their ethics. In the third chapter, I turn my attention to the popularity of casual mobile games in the global South in nations like Brazil, bringing feminist and intersectional critique to bear on an analysis of addictive, initially costless, ‘free-to-play’ games. In the second section of the book titled ‘Perspectives From South of the Border’, when critiquing public ludic art in the fourth chapter, I foreground an ecological, ludic approach to crafting public ludic artworks, an ‘aesthetics of ludic recycling’ that repeatedly surfaces in interviews with prominent Latin American artists who design playful experiences. In the fifth chapter, after conducting an ethnographic cross-border play tour in the border city of Tijuana at the United States and Mexican border, I analyze the ludic cartography of the globally popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, developing a theoretical line of argument critically informed by postcolonialism, geopolitics, and game studies. In the last section of the book, ‘From Global to Local Game Development’, I investigate how Northern game designers imagine transformational life

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improvement occurring through ‘Games for Change’ in continents far from their own such as Africa. Also in this last section, I contrast differing approaches to how developers both localize and globalize the cultural and market orientation of their games, conducting a regional tour of Southeast Asian game studios. This tour is primarily intended to serve as a potential source for South to South, as well as South to North, vectors of game innovation. Players in the global South are active participants of a rapidly evolving cultural arena. In this book I will attempt to look around and behind games into the power of who makes, localizes, plays and consumes these cultural objects, in so doing problematizing play as a culturally rich, innovative, and contested field of transnational practices.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Dirilik, Arif. Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism. First published 2007, Routledge, 2016. Dizik, Alina. ‘Entrepreneurs Learn the Rules of the Game.’ Financial Times. http://w w w.ft.com/cms/s/2/7436860a-51a0-11e0-888e-00144feab49a. html#ixzz2xcTkJQYV (accessed October 21, 2013). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Guillemot, Yves. Profile in ‘EuropeanCEO’. http://www.europeanceo.com/profiles/2012/10/yves-guillemot/ (accessed November 7, 2013). Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. M.I.T., 2010. Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games: from Pong to Pokémon and Beyond; The Story behind the Craze that Touched our Lives and Changed the World. Prima, 2002. Kerr, Aphra. The Business and Culture of Digital Games Gamework/Gameplay. SAGE, 2006. Kline, Stephen, Nick Witheford, and Greig Peuter. ‘Media Analysis in the HighIntensity Marketplace: The Three Circuits of Interactivity.’ In Digital Play: the Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Kolko, Beth E., and Cynthia Putnam. ‘Computer Games in the Developing World: The Value of Non-Instrumental Engagement with ICTs, or Taking Play Seriously.’ In

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Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 46-55. Kumar, Satish. ‘From Decolonial to the Postcolonial: Trauma of an Unfinished Agenda.’ The Calcutta Journal of Political Studies, Special Issue on ‘Powerscapes in Postcolonial Contexts’ 2017, pp. 75-79. https://pure.qub.ac.uk/portal/ files/134028943/From_Decolonial_to_Postcolonial_Trauma_of_Unfinished_Business.pdf (accessed January 8, 2020). Lammes, Sybille, ‘The Map as Playground: Location-based Games as Cartographical Practices.’ Proceedings of D.I.G.R.A Think Design Play, Volume 6, January 2011. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/the-map-as-playgroundlocationbased-games-as-cartographical-practices/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Liboriussen, Bjarke and Martin, Paul. ‘Regional Game Studies.’ Game Studies, volume 16, issue 1, October 2016. http://gamestudies.org/1601/articles/liboriussen (accessed January 8, 2020). Lim, John. ‘These Malaysian Inspired Names for Pokémon Go Characters are Just Too Accurate!’ Says, July 13, 2016 https://says.com/my/fun/Pokémon-puns (accessed January 8, 2020). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press, 2003. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso. 2013. Mukherjee, Souvik. Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Murray, Soraya. On Video Games. I.B.Tauris, 2017. Nathanson, Elizabeth. Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother. Routledge, 2013. Penix-Tadsen, Phillip. Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America. M.I.T., 2016. Raessens, Joost, de Lange, Michel, Lammes, Sybille, and Frissens, Valerie. ‘Homo Ludens 2.0: the Ludic Turn in Media Theory.’ Universiteit Utrecht, Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen, 2012. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978. Schleiner, Anne-Marie. The Player’s Power to Change the Game. Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Shaw, Adrienne. ‘How Do You Say Gaming in Hindi? Exploratory Research on the Indian Digital Game Industry and Culture.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. By Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press, 2010. Takahashi, Dean. ‘Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot Embraces Disruption, New Business Models and New Platforms (interview).’ VentureBeat. http://venturebeat. com/2012/06/04/ubisoft-ceo-yves-guillemot-interview/ (accessed October 3, 2013).

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Wekker, Gloria. ‘The Arena of Borders: Gloria Anzaldua, Intersectionality, and Interdisciplinarity.’ In Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture: A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies. Ed. by Rosemarie Buikema, Liedeke Plate, Kathrin Thiele. Routledge, 2009. Wolf, Mark J.P. ‘Introduction.’ In Video Games Around the World. Ed. by Mark J.P. Wolf, M.I.T., 2015.

Section One Reorienting Player Geographies

1.

Tilting the Axis of Global Play: From East/West to South/North Abstract ‘Tilting the Axis of Global Play’ presents an historical review of East vs. West tensions between the United States and Japan, drawing past game studies literature. I posit that an East/West framework, although rightly recognizing national and regional cultural differences in the emergence of the game industry, has limits that a South/North perspective better addresses transnationally. Like other industries, the game industry leverages globalization to exploit Southern labor in the fabrication of game consoles and other game hardware. And predominant Northern cultural paradigms are disseminated globally in the fictional scenarios of highly produced Triple A games. Despite this disequilibrium, I make the case that in the global South, players and other gaming culture participants contribute meaningfully to transnational gaming culture. Keywords: globalization, global South, Japanese and North American game industries, localization, piracy

Although the global South is only recently being considered more often in studies and analyses of digital games, a number of historical accounts of digital games have recognized at least two primary Northern nations’ roles in shaping a cosmopolitan game industry, namely, the United States and Japan. Before I continue to argue the utility of a global South/North framework, I will revisit the East/West axis which we are more accustomed to applying to our understanding of international gaming. I will then argue that such an East/West framework, although rightly recognizing national and regional differences and the existence of a transnational dialogue and cultural exchange on game innovation, has limits that a South/North perspective better addresses transnationally.

Schleiner, A.-M., Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728904_ch01

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Most of the earliest digital games were programmed in United States. For instance, in 1962, Steve ‘Slug’ Russell, an undergraduate student and member of an informal hacker club of computing aficionados at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a science fiction-inspired game, titled Spacewar!. Russell designed the spaceship battle game to show off the new keyboard control features of a PDP1 computer that MIT had recently acquired (Levy 47). Copies of Spacewar!, along with other student-written programs like a ‘expensive typewriter’ word processing program, soon spread to other university computing labs across the United States (Levy 35). In 1969, entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, who had played Spacewar! at a university computing lab, made a difficult-to-play variation as an arcade game, which he named Computer Space (Kline et al 94). Bushnell, together with his associate Ted Dabney, later founded the Atari corporation, meaning ‘to hit a lucky target’ in Japanese. With help from an engineer at Atari, Bushnell combined aspects of the earlier Computer Space game with the idea of a digital abstraction of table tennis, inspired by a game briefly on display in 1958 at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, called Tennis for Two. In 1972, Pong was installed at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, and the first popular arcade game came to be. Initially, expensive mainframe computers like the PDP1 at MIT (which was used to develop Spacewar!) and those at Brookhaven National Laboratory (Tennis for Two) were reserved for governmental calculations and Cold War military affairs and research. But the playful, hacker approach of students at North American nascent centers of computing technology yielded unexpected, more ‘frivolous’ applications, including the popular Spacewar! game. And although profit was far from the thoughts of techenthused researchers and students when they first wrote game programs, who were after all making these games for themselves and other players, entrepreneurs like Bushnell later popularized and commercialized digital games. After the success of Pong, arcade games like Space Invaders and Centipede collected coins from children and young adults outside supermarkets, in bars, bowling alleys, and in dedicated video game arcades. Atari also brought computer games like Space Invaders into American living rooms as stand-alone game consoles that hooked up to the customer’s television. Although the fledgling industry seemed to be on an upward swing, in 1982, Atari’s stock plummeted when consumers failed to buy unoriginal sequels to Space Invaders, Asteroids and Pac-Man. Kline et al. write: ‘An image that was to haunt the interactive game business for decades was that of millions of unsold and unwanted game cartridges being bulldozed into New Mexico landfill sites’ (106).

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At this stage, Japan’s Nintendo corporation enters our tale. From this point forward, the early history of console gaming is often told as a series of competitive innovations between the East and the West. Nintendo alternately looms as an intrusive marketing giant in relation to North American consumers, or is seen to have played a crucial role in rejuvenating the entire game industry in the wake of Atari’s crash. Nintendo, which means ‘leave luck to heaven’, is a Japanese toy company founded in 1889, which early on ‘displayed a peculiarly globalized hybridization of Western and Eastern influences’, selling card games in Japan of Disney characters (Kline et al. 110). After first distributing the Magnavox Odyssey game console invented by German-American engineer Ralph Baer, Nintendo went on to develop its own console machine. Nintendo’s aggressive marketing and branding campaign for its consoles in North America was a first in the game industry that had heretofore relied on word-of-mouth among players and sporadic advertising to promote its products (Kline et al. 126). At times, Nintendo’s rigid copyright stance did verge on a monopoly over game developers of console games, who suffered from the business phenomenon of ‘the razor and the blade’—the company controlling the razor (the console) controlled who made the blades (the games). Nintendo’s defense to such criticism was their intention to maintain tighter quality control over their brand image, stemming from fear of a crash similar to Atari’s when their badly received games glutted the market. In North America, Nintendo’s controlled approach to intellectual property and their brand, combined with carefully orchestrated marketing strategies targeting American youth, triggered fears of a Japanese corporate invasion, evident in fear-mongering book titles such as David Sheff’s Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children. Other competitive Japanese electronic products on the North American market, such as cars and television sets, contributed to this xenophobia toward the Techno-Orient, fueled by pre-existing anti-Asian and anti-Japanese racist sentiments. But to a certain extent this fear of Nintendo, ironically since many American corporations have since done the same, is an understandable reaction to the corporate branding of 1980s American youth as the Nintendo generation. As Naomi Klein sums up the impact of such global corporate campaigns, ‘brand identity is waging a war on public and individual space’ (5). Although many game industry analysts focus on Nintendo’s marketing and branding innovations at the more impersonal scale of Nintendo as a faceless, Japanese corporation, individual credit has also been awarded to Nintendo’s prolific game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto came up

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with cute, family-friendly characters like Jumpman, who hops to the top of the screen and rescues Princess Peach in the arcade game Donkey Kong. After input from the Nintendo America offices in Redmond, Washington, Jumpman was transformed into the peculiar cultural hybrid of Mario, an Italian-American plumber. Miyamoto’s Mario Bros. console game was an early implementer of the navigational style of side-scrolling, wherein the player controls a character jumping from left to right over a sequence of scrolling obstacles. According to Sheff, ‘When a game was nearly completed, he [Miyamoto] spread out its blueprints across a room full of tables that had been pushed together. The blueprint was a map of the game’s pathways, corridors, rooms, secret worlds, trapdoors and myriad surprises. Miyamoto lived with it for days, travelling through the game in his mind’ (55). The unique horizontal layout of Miyamoto’s Mario landscapes, the pipes transporting the player to secret areas off the screen, and their other level design features, continues decades later to influence the format of 2-Dimensional games, especially in the Independent and casual game genres. Nintendo, while continuing to develop innovative game consoles such as the gesture responsive Wii and Wii U, has at times been surpassed in popularity by other Japanese competitors like Sega Genesis and Sony PlayStation, as well as by American competitors like Microsoft’s Xbox and Kinect. In hindsight, Nintendo did not suppress the game industry in the United States. East/West console development was primarily co-evolutionary, whereby an innovation in game design, such as Miyamoto’s addictive side-scrolling levels and catchy characters, or Nintendo’s engineers’ technical efficacy in improving on the American Magnavox Odyssey console, spurred a further innovation by another company—either in Japan or across the Pacific. This East/West exchange and competition contributed to the establishment of a popular, global entertainment industry, with development centers located primarily in the United States and Japan, and player-customers spanning the globe. The development of consoles is only one thread of the story of the game industry with its early beginnings in the military-industrial computing infrastructure of the West and a fiscally ambitious and innovative toy industry of the East. Meanwhile, a number of game genres, and attendant companies and publishers, emerged primarily for play on home computers located in Japan, Europe, and the US. And in the 21st century, games are developed for tablets, mobile phones and augmented reality gear, and online platforms such as Facebook. In such histories, we should remember to take the players, not only the game developers into account. For instance, United States gaming researcher Mia Consalvo has investigated how dedicated

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North American fans, rather than official game developers, went so far as to conduct ROM (Read Only Memory) hacks of Japanese game Compact Discs and translations of Japanese games like Square’s Final Fantasy, making such games available to English speaking players. According to Consalvo, ‘Such groups arguably had a task more difficult than the official translators at Square. They had to reverse engineer the game code and work without documentation or support from the developer’ (124). Determined to play what their counterparts in Japan were already enjoying, these console players in the United States decoded foreign cultural products. International game development is no longer limited to such ‘East-West’ movements and interactions between Japan and the United States—and as I will argue further on, players were always more internationally located than just these two nations. More recently some publishers and developers are adopting a deliberately transnational outlook towards players, production cycles, and markets. Although corporate headquarters are limited to one nation, game production operations globalize as publishers subcontract entire games or portions of games to international studios. For instance, Ubisoft, established in 1986, is an extensive global game title publisher. Although Ubisoft’s main headquarters are located in Montreuil, France, the publisher has thirteen centers worldwide, including Shanghai, Casablanca, Abu Dhabi, Montréal, and Singapore. The name ‘Ubisoft’ was intended to sound like ‘ubiquity’ and thus convey the five Guillemot brothers’ ambition for their game company to have ‘a presence everywhere in the world’ (‘EuropeanCEO’). With similar globally scaled ambitions, Niantic, the United States developer of Pokémon Go, set the stage for their internationally popular release of Pokémon Go by testing out augmented reality gameplay in numerous cities with their first, lesser known augmented reality game, Ingress. As I will discuss further in Chapter Five’s analysis of the geopolitics of augmented reality play, Niantic skillfully incorporates geographic data tags and user data from digital maps to automatically generate recreational and urban game maps. Although Niantic’s main offices are in San Francisco, their first augmented reality game was launched under the umbrella of Google, who operate offices worldwide. South Korean NCsoft, makers of the Lineage series of games, has also adopted the outward facing yet targeted localization strategy inspired by the business motto of Viacom and Disney ‘think globally, act locally’, but within a more regional, Asian scope of operations. They have established branches and joint ventures with local developers in several countries including Taiwan, China, and Thailand. Dal Yong Jin writes that ‘Unlike other Korean and foreign game developers and publishers who sell

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the rights of games to foreign companies, NCsoft’s strategies are conceived and marketed through actual local needs and expectations’ (133). But are all companies as willing as Ubisoft and NCsoft to operate game development studios outside their own nations, including in Africa, India and Southeast Asia? A chapter of Kerr’s The Business and Culture of Digital Games is dedicated to ‘how publishing companies in LA, London, and Tokyo interact,’ international cities located within the relatively affluent zone of the global North, returning to our North/South axis of comparison (75-101). According to Kerr, the game industry follows neoliberal globalization trends whereby skilled game labor—the developers, designers, artists, programmers, and publishers—are hired within the global North, while ‘non-skilled, non-core labor moves South’ (78). For instance, after the deregulation created by NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994, Microsoft moved its Xbox fabrication to Guadalajara, Mexico under the subcontractor Flextronics. A business write-up on Flextronics states: ‘Flextronics is everywhere: in your smartphone, your video game console, your washing machine, your car’ (‘Flextronics: A Part of Everyday Life’). With thirty fabrication centers worldwide, Flextronics hires workers in Mexico and China to piece together Xbox consoles and other electronics at a low wage—and although the CEO of Flextronics, Joe McKenzie, is Californian, the company is headquartered in corporate tax haven Singapore. In his article ‘Who Plays, Who Pays?’ Randy Nicholas writes ‘This outsourcing represents the real “twenty-first-century Zeitgeist” Microsoft and other console makers were after outsourced manufacture in the cheapest markets of goods designed to be sold to the most affluent’ (Gaming Globally 28). Similarly, Nintendo, the Eastern actor in our East-West digital game innovation history, subcontracts the manufacture of its consoles in Brazil (Kerr 77-78). The unskilled workers in such factories, such as the maquiladoras laboring in North Mexican factories like Xbox manufacturers Flextronics near the United States border, are often indigenous young women who have migrated from poorer Southern regions of Mexico like Chiapas and Oaxaca.1 Although Kerr does not profile Flextronics’s workers, we can infer from her description that these so-called ‘non-core’, easily replaced laborers do not make their own games, or have time to play on the Xbox consoles that they spend hours piecing together. As we rotate our global axis from East/ West to South/North, the differences between East and West diminish. 1 Although Guadalajara is not as close to the United States border as another Flextronics operation in Juarez, Mexico, it is still within a corporate tax-free ‘Free Trade Zone’ designated by N.A.F.T.A. (North American Free Trade Agreement).

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Whereas before, Western game analysts were tempted to be mystified by the efficiency of the Techno-Orient, in awe of Japanese corporate culture and streamlined production, from a North/South perspective we start to see operational similarities between East and West in both Microsoft and Nintendo’s production supply chains. Kerr’s across-the-border view of non-skilled electronics manufacturing labor exposes how the game industry, like many other industries, is profiting from low-taxed, free-trade zones employing low-wage workers in the global South. Similarly, Nicholas underscores a pattern of globalization that exploits low-wage female labor in hardware production, writing ‘Video games, as with most high tech industries, rely on female workers for much of their labor force, and the numbers rise as jobs move overseas’ (29). According to Nicholas, hardware assembly is contracted to emerging nations including China, India and Taiwan, while mineral resources come from ‘struggling nations’ like the Republic of Congo. Factory workers, whose gender typically is the exact inverse of the male dominated game software industry in the global North, are female ‘migrants, hoping to send funds back to their families in rural China by taking advantage of job opportunities not otherwise available at home’ (31). But if we conclude our analysis of global digital game culture with these important observations about electronic game hardware production chains and the neoliberal exploitation of global labor, we have not learned enough about players and game developers situated outside the global North. Here it is useful to bring up the critique of a lack of agency and voice being attributed to the inhabitants of the global South that has been articulated among scholars of post-colonialism. While expressing sympathy for the plight of exploited populations in the global South, Northern academic experts have a tendency to diminish the agency of ‘the subaltern’, rending marginalized segments of a population voiceless (Spivak 66). The case study of unskilled Mexican labor at Flextronics in Guadalajara, if it stops there in looking at play across the border, excludes Mexicans as active participants in digital game culture. As Indian-American health communication scholar Mohan Dutta writes: ‘the voices of marginalized communities have historically been stripped of agency in modernization discourse and constructed as recipients of messages of development targeted by experts located in the global North’ (‘A Culture Centered Approach’ Blog). By underscoring agency, I do not mean to belittle the powerful forces of globalization, including highly exploitative and hazardous labor practices, polluting subcontracted factories that pay negligible if any taxes to host nations, as well as the infrastructural and economic disadvantages, often a

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legacy of colonialism and continued exploitation, in evidence in the global South (Liang et al. 1499-1533). These forces of globalization produce a set of conditions common across a large swathe of the earth, even as more of the global population is crossing ‘the digital divide’ and participating in digital game culture.

Customization and Localization of Northern Games Global game industry analysts have also criticized the small number of game publishers and hardware providers like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, who monopolize the game industry domestically and globally, as evident in Microsoft’s absorption of game developers and game console production into their corporate body. This troubling state of affairs is reflective of what Nina Huntemann in her article ‘Women in Video Games’ calls the ‘political economy view that a handful of media companies in a highly consolidated environment are a threat to democratic participation in culture’ (Gaming Globally 42). Huntemann is sympathetic to this framing and is therefore skeptical about hopes for the ‘liberating possibilities of new media’, which she casts as the false hope of participatory media to empower player-makers to ‘create, consume, modify, remix and share the fruits of their imaginations’ (42). Although celebratory enthusiasm for participatory media like games should be balanced with a critical look at exploitative, neoliberal labor conditions and corporate monopolies, this should not erase the active ways that Southerners are participating in digital gaming, including player-devised creative solutions, work arounds, pirated cracks, translations, localizations, and external to the game applications. These practices are at times shared with others facing similar obstacles to digital gaming in other geographic regions of the global South. For the remainder of this chapter, now that we have transitioned from an East/West axis to a South/North axis, I will turn from analyzing how a primarily Northern headquartered industry is globalizing both production and consumption, often quite exploitatively abroad, while disseminating Northern cultural moirés in their games, to starting to look at culturally resistant and emergent player practices across the global South. The transnational practices I will focus on primarily are cross-border game piracy, as well as more legal approaches to cultural customization and localization of foreign games. Game industry analysts often lament the loss of revenue due to game piracy in foreign nations. For instance, Kline et al. write, ‘Piracy drains profits on a global basis’ (56). But this alleged loss is somewhat imaginary

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because most players in the global South earn far below the income necessary to afford the price of Triple A (large studio) games produced in the North, which cost around $60 per game. Seen from the perspective of a Southern player, who may pay about $5 to a mobile street vender for a pirated game, who has in turn paid a lower amount to a data pirate for the copy, purchasing pirated games is a practical way to keep informed and up to date with the larger-scale game productions of the North, while also spawning a small cottage industry of game pirates. Game crackers often earn very little from their labor, motivated by a desire to share a passionate hobby at affordable prices with a regional public. For instance, the owners of a small game shop in Beijing confess that they barely cover costs making firmware hacks of Xbox 360s so that their customers can play pirated games (Jou).2 Although game piracy does not earn developers in the North direct profits, piracy can inadvertently serve as nationalist, Northern propaganda abroad. Early 20th-century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci famously designated culture as a site, outside of traditional expressions of politics, where ‘common sense’ views of who holds power (hegemony) are normalized and disseminated (Mouffe XVII). Perhaps more compellingly to global youth than the Voice of America radio broadcast, Northern and Western values are conveyed to the global South via game character types (the American good guy being a familiar one) and conflict scenarios. More than thirty years after the establishment of the digital game industry, an entertainment sector which now rivals Hollywood, the characters and play styles of entertaining Northern games are still seldom drawn from the cultural fabric of Southern nations, except for artificially intelligent non-player characters (N.P.C. automatons) who are cast in the roles of enemies, criminals, and Muslim terrorists. This Northern cultural bias in game entertainment is especially evident in hardcore combat games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and Splinter Cell, and is reflective of the concentration of the majority of the larger game studios in the global North and in the non-Islamic world. According to British game industry analysts Julie Prescott and Jan Boggs, ‘In relation to culture, the Middle East is perhaps arguably the most stereotyped in the gaming world. In particular the Middle East is a favorite virtual battleground and in the current climate holds links with terrorism and Islamist extremism’ (4). 2 Global pirate rings of game, software, and film data run by the Russian mafia and other larger circuits may be less altruistically motivated. On the plus side, these larger operations are better at ensuring the quality of their pirate ‘brand,’ imprinting recognizable logos on black market digital data that might otherwise turn out to be empty data discs or faulty copies.

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Even in game scenarios set far from the Middle East, and imagined as taking place well within the global North’s own borders, racism is deployed, for example in a popular, post-apocalyptic game scenario premise North American cultural critic Soraya Murray refers to as ‘Whiteness in Crisis’, for depictions of a ‘crumbling phallocentric order that is embodied in the ruins within which the primary player characters move’ (113). In her intersectional analysis of both race and gender in the cultural terrain of Triple A titles like Naughty Dog’s Sony PlayStation 3 game The Last of Us, she argues that last stand scenarios of North American white, male characters who are protective of white, female characters prey on 21st-century fears of racial and gender diversity (109). Even when devoid of such expressions of cultural hegemony, including negative stereotyping of non-whites and Middle-Eastern foreigners, (and/or zombies), Northern-produced games often present situations and characters far from the life experience and culture of the inhabitants of the global South, a cross-cultural miscommunication problem that United States globalization critic Naomi Klein characterizes in advertising as ‘the Marlboro Man bringing US cattle country to African villagers’ (116). Players who play pirated Northern games in unaltered form, sometimes years after the game’s release on older generation computers and platforms, navigate a foreign, often imperialist, Northern worldview in game scenarios that is possibly even hostile to their own religious or ethnic identity. In order to mitigate the Northern cultural hegemony evident in many games, some enterprising game crackers in the global South have altered game content to better accommodate the cultural tastes and values of Southern players. Self-taught localizers creatively customize and translate games, effectively doing the work that the original Northern game publisher leaves undone in reaching out to radically different cultural and linguistic markets. For instance, in a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, pirated copies of PlayStation 2-era computer games are available for purchase. Joe Keiser, a visitor to Nairobi who reviewed these games for the Gameological Society, describes the hazardous, unfinished state of the mall where these games are sold: ‘It is a beautiful, terrible place, perhaps my favorite in the city. And they sell games here, the sort of games you would expect in a place where only some of the rooms have a floor’ (‘The Pirate Hacks of Africa’). On the packaging and inside the games, the original characters from the UK-developed Grand Theft Auto series have been collaged and redone (skinned) into rainbow-ensconced, masked figures designed to appeal to local customers. Another pirated version of Grand Theft Auto available in this same store is GTA: Dubai City, where the road signs in San Andreas, California now feature Arabic writing and a promotional tourist video of Dubai has replaced the game’s introductory scene.

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Interestingly, this Kenyan store also sells modified games from nations even farther away like Indonesia and Brazil. For instance, a pirated version of the Californian-developed and published Guitar Hero game is available for sale, and contains popular tunes sung in Bahasa, a regional language in Indonesia and Malaysia that would likely have even fewer speakers in Swahili and English-speaking Kenya than Arabic ’ (‘The Pirate Hacks of Africa’). The appearance of Southeast Asian cracked and translated games in a pirate vender stall in East Africa is evidence of far-reaching South-toSouth transnational sharing of pirated games between continents, and of far-reaching transnational movement of game culture. Legal proponents of decriminalizing such unsanctioned game hacks and localizations have argued that the digital remixes of the Information Age, rather than being condemned as piracy, should instead be welcomed as a healthy benefit to the industries from which they borrow their material. For instance, Lawrence Lessig proposes that digital remixes are useful hybrids of commercial and gift economies, writing: ‘The hybrid is either a commercial entity that aims to leverage value from a sharing economy, or it is a sharing entity that builds a commercial entity to better support its sharing aims (177). Others, like Huntemann cited earlier in this chapter, question a pervasive, techno-utopian rhetoric of false empowerment embedded in the enthusiasm for participatory digital media like gaming. For instance, the voluntary, mostly unpaid efforts of digital laborers like game modders, are in Italian Tiziana Terranova’s analysis, naïve ‘free labor’ for Information Age capitalism to exploit (78). Yet what has seldom been factored into either of these opposing narratives is a transnational perspective that recognizes the socially beneficial role of game pirates who earn a small income localizing and translating digital game products for their local player-publics. Instead of being conducted in the shadows by entrepreneurial game crackers who share pirated games on digital underworld forums and venues, such professional translation and cultural recoding work also transpires openly and legally. Localization, glocalization, and also tropicalization, are marketing terms referring to the tailoring of products for sale to local customers, often in reference to Northern transnational corporations aiming to attract more customers for their products in the global South. Inspired by popular local demand, professional localization is also at times initiated by stake holders situated within rapidly emerging nations of the global South, who negotiate above-the-board licensing agreements with a game’s original publishers. For example, in his 2018 doctoral dissertation, ‘Online Gaming: The Transnationalization Nexus Seen in the Case of Vietnam’, Vietnamese game industry analyst Phan Quang Anh interviews professional localizers

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in Vietnam of locally popular ‘Wuxia’, a role-playing genre of online Chinese martial arts themed games that are originally developed in China (198). He writes, ‘localized games also provide a benefit to the local laborers who operate the translation business or even participate in phase of developing the games, which can later spur the growth of local game industry development’ (Phan 33). Interestingly, Phan notes that although most of such localization and translation of Chinese games in Vietnam is cultural and linguistic, occasionally state regulators of this rapidly developing, communist nation pressure private localization outfits to make more geopolitical changes to their big neighbor’s game content, such as altering the in-game maps displaying disputed island territories between China and Vietnam (204). The anthology Gaming Globally includes brief ‘snapshots’ of game development in Brazil, Argentina and India which also address this emerging professional field of transnational game localization. In an essay in the same volume, ‘How Do You Say Gamer in Hindi?’ Shaw discusses some of the varying approaches facing new Indian developers, from importing game mechanics from abroad and making relatively small changes in content, to what she views as a greater challenge of developing a more specifically ‘Indian’ cultural language for gaming, much like Bollywood did for Indian film and television (192). Unlike the ‘nationalist project’ of Indian television which resulted in Bollywood, Shaw’s study seems to suggest that the relatively small number of video games presently developed in India is due partially to video games being viewed as alien, imported Western hybrids, ‘media products that transcend nationalist borders’ (191). What would an Indian digital gaming development scene equivalent to Bollywood be like and how would it happen? Which development trajectories should game industries at a national scale follow? Should an emerging national game industry aim to imitate the global North, such as Silicon Valley in California, or follow other models like the Southeast Asian ‘Tiger’ economic emphasis on technical education combined with export dependent economies? Such questions when posed to nations of the global South have not one, but a variety of answers dependent on national, cultural, and economic factors which I address further in the regional context of Southeast Asia in Chapter Seven.

A Rotated Global Axis In this chapter, I recounted the beginnings of a global game industry often portrayed in digital game literature as a series of competitive tensions and ultimately growth inspiring interactions between East and West. I reviewed

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20th-century computer games programmed in Northern military-industrial computing centers in the United States, as well as early innovations that arose in the Japanese toy industry. During this early phase, commodification of player-made, non-commercial games and later console industry development in both Japan and the United States combined to establish an international entertainment sector. Often in such initial game historical accounts in Western literature, the differences between Eastern and Western corporate cultures were underscored and Orientalized, at the expense of the recognition of the more individual, innovative contributions of designers, especially those of designers from the East. I then shifted my frame of analysis towards an even more global North vs. South framework that discovered more common ground than differences between East and West. Northern game industry giants in the United States and Japan are shifting towards globalization first of production, and secondly of consumption, beginning with the globalization of electronic hardware supply chains. As the supply chain of electronic hardware necessary for playing games is globalized, this primarily Northern headquartered game industry exploits untaxed, inexpensive female labor forces situated mostly in factories in the global South in across the border free trade zones, such as those established under the North American Free Trade Agreement. And after a few decades of a more limited focus on making games primarily for players located within the world’s most affluent large nations, Northern publishers with global ambitions are adopting a more outward facing stance poised towards multiple game markets beyond that of the United States and Japan, globalizing not just game production, but also consumption. But this retelling of the history of transnational gaming, now tilted from an East/West analytical framework to a South/North dialectic, if limited to a Marxist critique of the neoliberal, industrial impacts of globalization, although an important part of the story, does not do justice to the agency and practices of transnational players and developers inhabiting many regions of the global South. For the remainder of this chapter, I presented examples of counter-hegemonic tactics like cross-border piracy that gamers in the global South implement for accessing what would otherwise be unaffordable Northern entertainment products. Even before Northern developers and publishers started to dedicate more attention to optimizing global markets, players in the global South developed and shared tactics for accessing games, at times even sharing cracked games transnationally across great distances and continents, for instance when cracked games translated in Indonesia, later surface in Kenya. I will continue to discuss more locally situated instances of game piracy in the global South in the following chapter.

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Increasingly, such cross-border movement of games, and linguistic and cultural customization of game material, is conducted legally in the light of day by professional translators and localizers. While larger publishers like Ubisoft undertake their own localization and translation work for distant player publics, in their numerous worldwide offices, some professional translators and game localizers initiate their own agreements with foreign game publishers, setting up shop in emerging nations like Vietnam in response to local player demand for foreign games. Both unsanctioned game customization, and also professional localization contravene the Northern cultural bias coded into digital games, including those that may be directly hostile to a local ethnic or religious identity, such as tendency in Northern games to depict racist stereotypes of Middle-Easterners and Muslims as the enemy. When looking at these more recent transnational movements of games across cultures and economic zones, a rotated axis of comparison better captures the economic and infrastructural interactions, disparities and points of tension between South and North.

Works Cited Consalvo, Mia. ‘Unintended Travel: ROM Hackers and Fan Translations of Japanese Video Games.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. By Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Dutta, Mohan, ‘A Culture Centered Approach Blog.’ http://mohandutta.culturecenteredapproach.com/ (accessed September 2, 2013). Guillemot, Yves. Profile in ‘EuropeanCEO’. http://www.europeanceo.com/profiles/2012/10/yves-guillemot/ (accessed November 7, 2013). Huntemann, Nina B. ‘Women in Games.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Jou, Eric. ‘Bootleggers Explain Why There Is So Much Piracy in China.’ Kotaku, March 5, 2013. https://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/03/bootleggers-explain-whytheres-so-much-video-game-piracy-in-china/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Keiser, Joe. ‘The Pirate Hacks of Africa | Featured Article | The Gameological Society.’ The Gameological Society. http://gameological.com/2013/02/the-pirate-hacksof-africa/ (accessed December 17, 2013). Kent, Steven L. The Ultimate History of Video Games: from Pong to Pokémon and Beyond; The Story behind the Craze that Touched our Lives and Changed the World. Prima, 2002. Kerr, Aphra. The Business and Culture of Digital Games Gamework/Gameplay. SAGE, 2006.

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Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Picador, 2000. Kerr, Aphra. The Business and Culture of Digital Games Gamework/Gameplay. SAGE, 2006. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Picador, 2000. Kline, Stephen, Nick Witheford, and Greig Peuter. ‘Media Analysis in the HighIntensity Marketplace: The Three Circuits of Interactivity.’ In Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin, 2008. Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. Liang, Tao, Kexin Li, and Lingqing Wang. ‘State of Rare Earth Elements in Different Environmental Components in Mining Areas of China.’ Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 186, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1499-1513. Murray, Soraya. On Video Games. I.B.Tauris, 2017. Nicholas, Randy. ‘Who Pays, Who Plays?’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. By Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Phan, Quang Anh, ‘Online Gaming: The Transnationalization Nexus Seen in the Case of Vietnam.’ Doctoral dissertation, Communication and New Media. National University of Singapore, 2017. Prescott, Julie and Boggs, Jan. Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry. IGI Gobal, 2014. Purves, Ted. What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art. State University of New York Press, 2005. Shaw, Adrienne. ‘How Do You Say Gaming in Hindi? Exploratory Research on the Indian Digital Game Industry and Culture.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. By Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Sheff, David. Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children. Random House, 1993. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press, 2010. Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Pluto, 2004.

2.

Venues for Ludoliteracy: Arcades, Game Cafés, and Street Pirates Abstract This chapter presents a review of popular platforms and spaces for gameplay in the global South. My research method in this chapter is closest to digital ethnography, informed by site visits and other online visual and textual documentation. I also discuss experimental gaming venues in India, Senegal, and Kenya that attempt to overcome obstacles to accessibility. I reflect on a lack of gender diversity observable in many global public play spaces. The mobile platform is approached as one of the more recently viable and gender diverse platforms for gaming in the global South. The chapter closes with a presentation of Southern players’ and game pirates’ defense of their ethics on online gaming forums. Keywords: ludoliteracy, arcades, game cafés, game piracy, ethics

‘It’s so simple actually. If you have enough money to buy a game and you pirate it that is awkward. But if you simply don’t have enough money to buy all these games you want (Currency people!!! $50 is a fortune to pay in some countries.) Then what should you do? Sit there wishing you had that game? Hell no, screw companies and do what you want because a pirate is free. And please stop talking from your comfy chair.’ ‒ Gamer, October 16, 2012 at 12:57 pm

As ‘Gamer’ points out above, in response to an anti-piracy post on a blog, digital game players in the global South are seated in less comfortable chairs—both literally and metaphorically—than are Northern players.1 1 These comments are responses to an anti-piracy blog post at: Comments section. ‘Is Piracy Killing the PC Gaming Industry?’ Blog Oh Blog. http://www.blogohblog.com/is-piracy-killingthe-pc-gaming-industry/ (accessed October 10, 2013).

Schleiner, A.-M., Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728904_ch02

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They suffer from frequent power outages, unreliable Internet service, and high local taxes on digital imports. Furthermore, these inhabitants of relatively impoverished nations often lack home computers, accessible retail distribution channels for games, and disposable leisure income. Yet despite such obstacles, digital games have been played both legally and illegally for a couple of decades across the global South. Apart from anti-piracy campaigns initiated by Northern intellectual property stakeholders, these players have remained largely invisible to game studies. In this chapter, I aim to shed light on global play practices in nations like Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Malaysia, and Vietnam. I will present older venues for digital gaming in the global South, such as sidewalk vendors of pirated Personal Computer and console games, arcades, game cafés, cyber cafés, and board game cafés. I will reflect on who these players are and how gender and age are distributed in the majority of examples. I will also discuss a South Korean MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) developer’s innovative entry into the Indian game market and present some novel solutions for overcoming infrastructural obstacles to digital gameplay being experimented with in Africa. My intention is not to provide one blueprint for how a ‘proper’ game industry ought to be consumed across the globe—as evident in much of the anti-piracy literature and campaigns written by Northerners targeted at Southerners. Instead, in an attempt to learn from the South, I will present a multi-faceted panorama of both humble and innovative play spaces and practices already in existence. These everyday gameplay spaces such as game cafés share qualities in common across vast distances, while also being distinguished by unique local factors. My attention to play spaces in this chapter is influenced by the spatial turn, a shift from the cultural analysis of words to places articulated in the humanities by French thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault (35).2 Such attention to social space is not entirely new to game studies though, evident for instance in the analysis of ‘gendered’ game spaces conducted by UK based researchers Jo Bryce and Jason Rice who write, ‘While lab-based and textual research has assumed an individual asocial space for gaming, it is impossible to neglect the fact that much gaming is social and played with friends in the playground and arcades, or with family in front of the TV (249).’ 2 For instance, Lefebvre writes, ‘Social space thus remains the space of society, of social life. Man does not live by words alone; all ‘subjects’ are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose themselves, a space which they may both enjoy and modify.’

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Although some of my observations are derived from first-hand experience of spatial venues in Latin America and Southeast Asia, my research method also takes cues from urban and digital ethnography. According to User Experience designer Mike Kuniavsky, ‘Unsolicited digital ethnography is the analysis of how people describe themselves digitally without being part of a research project. This can include analyzing blogs, videos, photos, and forums to extract an understanding of people’s behavior based on how they have documented it’ (208). So in addition to site visits to game cafés, and my own interviews, I will observe publicly available digital documentation, including photographs on Flickr, blog entries and images, websites listing game café properties for sale, advertisements aimed toward potential game café customers, and game forum discussions between Northern and Southern players. In this chapter I am interested in how, in spite of formidable obstacles, players and gameplay vendors in the global South have implemented effective tactics for acquiring, adapting, and keeping apace with gaming culture, including familiarity with game genres and the development of playful skill sets. Dutch media scholar Joost Raessens has theorized the growth of such ‘ludoliteracy’, or gameplay competence, knowledge that is then also useful in other contexts: ‘Game competence relates in particular to playing computer games and involves skills and knowledge related to using games, to critically interpret them and produce them. Ludoliteracy, however, is applicable across the full spectrum of media’ (‘Homo Ludens 2.0’ 22). From gamified films to Games for Change, Raessens and co-authors depict a ‘ludification of culture’, a turn towards play forms and cultural currency that goes beyond typical commercial games, including ‘the development of all kinds of new practices and objects, which in turn stimulates the ludification of our worldview’ (Playful Identities 21). Underscoring the transnational scope of such playful idioms, Raessens and co-authors write: ‘in the 21st century we can even speak of the global ludification of culture. Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind in this context is the immense popularity of computer games, which, as far as global sales are concerned, have already outstripped Hollywood movies’ (Playful Identities 9). To be fully media literate in the late 20th and early 21st century has entailed and continues to require a degree of familiarity with ludic forms and interactions. Transnationally, players have managed to acquire and maintain such literacy through disparate channels that are not always openly acknowledged or sanctioned.

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Arcades on Both Sides of the Border I will begin my panoramic walk-through of global play spaces with one of the oldest venues for digital play, the arcade. In the United States, digital game arcades were a hallmark of the 1980s, and arcade gaming salons opened in most cities and towns. Arcades games were coin-operated stand-alone boxes displaying cheerily beeping, brightly colored, 8-bit graphics games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, and Centipede. Arcade games were mostly designed and fabricated in the United States and Japan, as discussed in the previous chapter. Atari founder and Californian entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell later launched the Chuck E. Cheese’s franchise, hybrid pizza parlor/ game arcades in suburban North American malls that became a popular location for children’s birthday parties. Over the course of the 1980s in the United States, arcade games also appeared at entrances to grocery stores, shopping malls, and bars. Similarly, game arcades were also opened in larger cities and towns in the global South during the 1980s by businesses who could afford to purchase the machines, sometimes effected through leasing arrangements with distributers. For instance, according to a former inhabitant of Mexico City, dedicated game arcades sprang up in middle-class neighborhoods. Eventually, arcade machines also spread to other locales across the city, appearing at the entrances of poorer neighborhood’s local pharmacies and in tienditas, small ‘mom and pop’ grocery stores.3 In their chapter on the history of videogames in Mexico, Humberto Cervera and Jacinto Quesnel write: ‘Parallel to this arcade of the arcade parlors, once could find arcade machines at the entrance of corner shops and drugstores. Of course, most of these cabinets were illegal and unlike those in the real industry, there was never a trade association regulating the arcade business’ (Video Games Around the World 347). Subsequently, throughout the 1990s in North America, arcades closed up shop as gameplay of newer 3-D console and Personal Computer games moved to the more private space of the suburban home. But in some parts of Asia, Europe, and in much of Latin America, arcades have had longer staying power. In more affluent Asian nations like Japan and South Korea, arcade owners acquired more graphically sophisticated, 3-Dimensional arcade machines for their players. In spatially limited and densely populated Asia, public game arcades continue to offer a social outlet for youths who live with their families on throughout their higher education studies and often until they are married. Similarly, in Latin America, players are more 3

Conversation with Luis Hernandez, who grew up in Mexico City.

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likely to live with their parents as young adults. Whether on their own or living with their parents, players in the global South are also less likely to be able to afford their own personal computers or consoles—rural areas are sometimes without electricity in the home, possibly lacking even a television to display a game console. Artist and game art curator Rene C. Hayashi relates that arcades in Mexican towns and cities are referred to in Mexican colloquial slang as ‘chispas’ and that they remained popular throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Even as of this writing in 2014, new arcade boxes and games, some of them manufactured inside Mexico and other parts of Latin America, can be purchased by searching for chispas on the Latin America-wide ‘Mercado Libre’ website. For instance, in a tourist’s blog photo from 2010, two young indigenous women play on a weathered arcade machine located on an outdoor storefront porch in the remote mountain town of Creel in Chihuahua (Teal). Their arcade machine is identical in form and color to some of the arcade boxes manufactured in Mexico and still available for sale on the ‘Mercado Libre’ website. These arcade game containers, selling for around $800 (US) new in 2013, are indicative of a continued Latin American market for arcade games.

Game Cafés, Cyber Cafés, and Experimental Game Spaces Arcade game machines persisted longer in Latin America and Asia, but around the turn of the 21st century, Internet and game cafés became more common spaces for gameplay across the global South. As covered in the introduction to this book, the first to take note of this shift have been focused on regional development in the field of Information Communication Technology, observing that game cafés are often an entry point to overall digital literacy (Kolko and Putnam). Some game cafés, which may or may not actually offer coffee or other ‘café’ drinks and snacks, are comfortably furnished with padded office chairs, and offer the latest game consoles. They may even have networked personal computers running legal recent and subscription-based games, such as a well-equipped multi-player game café in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Other game cafés make do with humble plastic or custom-made wooden chairs and shelving, older computers, and older non-networked games, such as game cafés that offer console sports games in poorer and middle-class neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia.4 4 Real estate websites like OLX in Colombia provide a rich source of photographs and information on neighborhood game cafés up for sale (salas de videojuegos), and their mostly young male

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Consoles were sometimes imported to the global South on an individual basis during more affluent travelers’ trips to North, but were otherwise difficult to purchase new in the global South. According to Phillip PenixTadsen, console hacks in Latin America arose to fulfill a local demand for the consoles that were not locally distributed. He writes, ‘It wasn’t long before local modifications and unique consoles began to pop to fill this void, such as Telejogo, a 1977 modif ication of the home PONG console marketed in Brazil by US radio and television giant Philco (then Ford Philco) or the Argentine Telematch’, which was a clone of Magnavox Odessey’ (46). Although some could afford to play such consoles at home, others, perhaps without electricity at home, or unable to afford their own console, played console games in public game cafés. Due to a lack of reliable electricity and more impoverished conditions even than other parts of the global South, game cafés are less prevalent in Africa in comparison to Latin America and Southeast Asia. Yet these very obstacles have in exceptional cases also led to some interesting creative solutions. For instance, Google funded an experimental tablet café in Dakar, Senegal that uses a mobile data connection to access the Internet and is less reliant on unstable, local power sources. Tafline Laylin of the Green Prophet, a Middle Eastern online sustainable technology journal, reports that the owner of the Google tablet café, Médoune Seck, ‘had been running a cybercafé in the country’s capital for several years, and struggled with power cuts and high electricity bills and was ready to try anything new to make his business more successful. So Google gave him fifteen new tablets and he kept five of his PCs to populate the newly dubbed Tablette Café’ (‘World’s First Tablet Café’). The Tablette Café demonstrates a sensitivity to regional infrastructural obstacles—as well as opportunistic recognition of an opportunity for Google branding in Africa. StashBelt, an African fabricator of traveler belts, with more local, limited resources than those available from global megacorporation Google, initiated a small game café in a Kenyan shanty town. The founders of the café write: ‘The StashBelt Foundation (SBF) aims to address issues of poverty and development in Kenya through the lens of trade not aid, pride not pity. With our first loan, SBF has helped launch the Kibera Gamers Café, a video game hangout for kids in the largest slum in East Africa’ (StashBelt Website). Although the kids in this game café are seated on rows of benches, awaiting clientele. See: http://bucaramanga.olx.com.co/vendo-sala-de-videojuegos-en-centro-comercialacropolis-real-de-minas-bucaramanga-iid-572909544 (Accessed June 30, 2013)

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5. Kibera Game Café, Kenya, photographed by Jeff Davis, Canadian freelance journalist, 2012; Photograph.

their turn to play on just a few consoles, they appear to be enjoying the gaming space. Experimental game cafés have also been tested in India. In 2006 the South Korean MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) game developer, Sifi, initiated a unique mobile game café venture that bypassed the infrastructural obstacles to rapid high-data flow Internet gaming in India which are a requisite of an online genre like multiplayer role-playing games. The Korean game enterprise furbished high-speed Wi-Fi on game café vans, installing copies of their localized role-playing game, A3 India, on fast, high-end graphics PCs. Their vans circled the outskirts of prominent Indian universities, attracting young adult player-customers. Reviewers from the Indian gaming website GameGuru.in visited one of the mobile game cafés and reported on the game, commenting on the localized cultural changes that had been made to the originally Korean game for Indian players: ‘We were told that in the Korean version, known as A3, there was much more nudity. However, to suit the Indian culture, the content in A3 India has been mellowed down. The characters’ attire has been designed to match the parameters of the Indian mindset. Basically, there are four main characters—The Holy Knight, the Warrior, the Mage, and the Archer. Each of these characters has their own cyber pet, or “Shue”’ (Panday). These are some of the solutions for bringing ludoliteracy to populations in the global South via ‘café’-type spaces that have already been established and are also being experimented with in innovative ways, despite infrastructural obstacles and widespread impoverishment. But what is also evident from these global digital snapshots of game cafés from Africa, to Latin America, to Southeast Asia is that, similar to many digital gaming communities in the

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global North, players are overwhelmingly boys and young men.5 Especially because my focus in this chapter is on platforms and spaces for transnational ludoliteracy, on how games are made accessible to populations that would otherwise be unfairly excluded from ludic knowledge and pleasures, taking note of this apparent gender inequity within the global platform of game cafés is relevant. North American media scholar Henri Jenkins’ early article on male gendered play spaces, ‘Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces’ offers one explanation for the ‘boy’s culture’ of many game spaces. In one of the first anthologies to address gender and videogames, From Barbie to Mortal Combat. Jenkins makes a historical analogy between predigital boys play settings in the outdoors—backyards, parks and woods, to more recent boys’ ‘digital playgrounds’ in the home. According to Jenkins, in 19th-century boy’s play, ‘youngsters gained recognition from their peers for their daring, often proven through stunts, (such as swinging on vines, climbing trees, or leaping from rocks as they crossed streams)’ (‘Complete Freedom of Movement’ 271). He writes that in digital boys’ games the ‘central virtues’ are similarly ‘mastery (over the technical skills required by the games) and self-control (manual dexterity)’ (‘Complete Freedom of Movement’ 271). These can be understood as skills of ludoliteracy that boys acquire from play, and skills that girls who do not play, forgo. Citing E. Anthony Rotundo’s study of gendered suburban play patterns following the industrial revolution, Jenkins references a historical point when boys attempted to escape their mother’s supervision in the home by developing a ‘boys culture’. He posits that this ‘escape’ from mothers recently has shifted to the digital play spaces of videogames, writing ‘one of the many tragedies of our gendered division of labor may be the ways that it links misogyny—an aggressive fighting back against the mother—with the process of developing self-reliance’ (‘Complete Freedom of Movement’ 270). Whether or not we agree with Jenkins’ attribution of boy’s play to an escape from domesticating mothers, we also see here that he is writing from a North American perspective about more outdoor, rural forms of childhood play transitioning into more suburban lifestyles. How such play settings around the world have become male gendered globally can be historicized in other ways in accordance with divergent cultural and socioeconomic settings. For instance, children in poorer, either urban or rural circumstances, might 5 This male gender bias is strongly evident across approximately thirty websites and photos of game cafés I collected from around the world, more than those I have elected to show in this chapter.

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be expected to avoid leisure activities like gameplay (or even school) from an early age because they are already of necessity asked to work and to contribute to family income, and to do more chores at home. But despite such obstacles, boys worldwide even of lower incomes, are often playing in game cafés. Underscoring the gendered inequality of such play spaces, Bryce and Sutter write: ‘We would argue that in many public gaming spaces it is the environments that are male-dominated and this gender asymmetry works towards excluding female gamers at a stage prior to the gendering of gaming texts’ (249). In these U.K. based authors view, the gendering of space prefigures the gendering of game content or ‘texts’. They go on to associate ‘the gendering of public leisure spaces’ with masculinity: ‘in which women are granted limited access and assume particular roles. Public gaming spaces such as gaming competitions or LAN parties follow similar patterns and can therefore easily be considered to be masculine – i.e. male dominated – spaces’ (249). How do these gendered play roles map out across private and public space in a study in an emergent Asian nation? Taiwanese media researcher Holin Lin underscores that girls, even more so than boys, are under strict parental supervision at home. Even if they have access to digital game platforms at home—and Taiwan is a relatively affluent nation where computers and Internet in the home are common—girls are more likely to be asked to help out with domestic chores or reminded to do their homework: ‘Playing on a home computer also entails interruptions to meet the demands of daily family routines. This is especially true for young female players who live with their parents. They are frequently sent to run errands, ordered to help with household chores, or simply nagged about the “uselessness” of playing online games’ (72). She also notes that brothers may be afforded greater access to game play equipment that is shared among siblings: ‘The control of gaming time and access is further complicated by negotiations with other family members over computer ownership and use’ (72). Similarly Bryce and Rutter refer to U.K. based studies which indicate that male gendered siblings and relatives in the home are afforded roles as experts in relation to any gaming equipment in the home: ‘Access to the technology and the gaming is controlled by the male player who assumes the role of expert by interpolating the female gamer into a subordinate role. The technology and its use create an environment in which girl gamers are reproduced as not being skilled or technological competent enough to compete with the boys’ (252). Despite these challenges to gameplay within the private domestic space for Taiwanese girls, Lin still reflects that a girl’s likelihood of playing games in the domestic setting is higher than that of playing in Taiwanese public

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game cafés, which are ‘stigmatized’ as sites of teenage social disruption, as ‘dangerous places where girls and young women are a particular risk’ (69). But she notes that some girls in her study do enter public game cafés, despite a perception of risk ‘deeply rooted in their bodies’, which leads them to avoid ‘dangerous places to manage the fear of male violence’ (67). And when playing mobile games, Lin observes that Taiwanese girls often use pseudonyms to minimize the perceived or actual risk of linking their gaming identities back to their physical bodies. Curiously, while conducting my digital ethnography of game cafés, when I broadened my search criteria to include ‘cyber cafés’ and ‘net cafés,’ seemingly incidental photos of young women and girls appeared with game software open on their screens. Although this was not a conclusive finding, why would girls and young women appear to play games in cyber cafés, but seem generally absent from more explicitly game-dedicated cafés across the globe? Explaining the absence of these hidden ‘invisible’’ players from game café’s is tricky. Bryce and Rutter warn ‘to extrapolate from the invisibility of females at public gaming events to making assumptions about female domestic participation in computer gaming is problematic’ (250). But let’s nevertheless attempt to capture gendered contrasts between game cafés and other play spaces. As suggested by Lin’s study of gendered play spaces in Taiwan, perhaps girls feel uncomfortable in the boys’ club atmosphere of sports and fighting games in game cafés. And maybe they cannot afford to appear to have the luxury of engaging in such leisure activities. Conversely in Internet cafés, in between fulfilling obligations like homework and chores, girls and young women in the global South find moments to play. What is key here is how play time, in addition to play space, is gendered. In a groundbreaking article on the rise of casual gaming among girls and women, North American researchers Jillian Winn and Carrie Heeter cite a number of studies concluding that women and girls have less time than boys for leisure activities: ‘Studies in developing countries found girls had less time than boys for leisure activities and carried a larger workload at school and home’ (‘Gaming, Gender, and Time’). Similar to Lin’s findings regarding girlhood domestic responsibilities in Taiwan, in their article, Winn and Heeter underscore that ‘the availability of “disposable or leisure time” is inversely related to other obligations in life’ (‘Gaming, Gender, and Time’). Girls and young women learn to develop time management skills, to carve out smaller moments for breaks from responsibilities—assuming they don’t just surreptitiously play the whole time they are in a cybercafé. If this is true in many places, such multi-tasked gameplay of girls, like

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6. Meeples Game Café photographed by Meeples Team, Johur Bahru, Malaysia; Photograph.

Jenkin’s ‘boy’s’ mastery of technical skills and manual dexterity, can also be interpreted as a learned, gendered skill of ludoliteracy, as preparation for the expectation for women in adulthood to time manage or ‘multitask’ responsibilities and fun. A more-balanced gender diversity among young players is visible in the board game cafés popular across Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, a social type of game café prevalent in Southeast Asia. With no need for technical maintenance of computers and Internet connections, board game cafés bridge traditional and more recent play genres, offering players new card games that are often evolutions of Magic-style strategic resource games, ‘German-style’ board games like the medieval-themed, strategic territorial game of Carcassonne, as well as more traditional Asian board games like Chinese Animal Chess. Although a situated cultural study of such board game cafés is beyond this chapter, it is interesting to consider whether such public play spaces are rooted historically in public tea houses and other venues where traditional Asian board games were once played. Board game café owners often purchased and mail-order ‘German style’ board games from Europe or from the US from online distributers, or in some cases, they purchase board games designed by local designers. These cafés typically sell tea, coffee, and snacks, and are a popular place for

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teenagers and young adults to socialize away from parental supervision. The mid-sized city of Johur Bahru, Malaysia for instance, across the Strait from Singapore contained no less than seven distinct board game cafés in operation in 2014.

The Public Service of Piracy In addition to arcades, game cafés, cybercafés and board game cafés, game piracy contributes to broader ludoliteracy in the global South. In densely populated urban centers, like the megacities of Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Jakarta, illegal game copy vending is often facilitated through the informal economy of the street. Sidewalk stalls are set up in the afternoon and disappear late at night, and change location on different days between popular thoroughfares and subway stops. Depending on the level of local law enforcement in regards to piracy, vendors of pirated games, movies, and software may bribe local officials to look the other way, as was once the case on the sidewalks surrounding Mexico City’s downtown Plaza de la Tecnología, before the P.A.N. party initiated an anti-piracy crackdown. In his discussion of game piracy in Latin America, including in Lima, Peru Penix-Tadsen writes ‘the local and global circumstances that drive prices beyond the reach of the average consumer have sparked a range of black market sellers across the region, from street vendors with blankets covered in Xbox games, to small town game stores featuring some major game series and used titles, to shopping center -style clearing houses of pirated wares in urban centers’ (51).The lower and middle-class customers of these piracy stalls play games on their home computers and consoles, which can be hardware-hacked by professional bootleggers to accept pirated console games. And even game cafés and cyber cafés often use pirated games, which may be the only games locally available that run on such a venue’s older computers and consoles. As noted by Karaganis and collaborators’ global study of digital piracy conducted from a social sciences perspective, most research into digital piracy has been funded by industry stakeholders from the global North: ‘What we know about media piracy usually begins, and often ends, with industry-sponsored research. There is good reason for this. US software, film, and music industry associations have funded extensive research efforts on global piracy over the past two decades and, for the most part, have had the topic to themselves’ (1). These same authors cite an interesting venture in Bolivia to promote a more locally informed perspective on digital piracy

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and intellectual property that takes into account global inequities between North and South: ‘Even on a broader scale in Latin America, the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean, known as ALBA, shows an understanding of piracy in the context of poverty. ALBA is signed by eight countries including Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and recognizes that intellectual property rights have historically been used by countries further North to benefit their own media industry at the expense of poorer Latin American countries’ (‘Copyright and Media Piracy in Bolivia’). Such initiatives point to the emergence of a more public, legislative, and state supported discourse on software piracy in Latin America that recognizes global inequities of wealth between the North and South. Online game forums and blog comments offer a variety of motives for game piracy voiced by self-labeled ‘Third World’ players themselves. For instance, anonimite writes on a game forum: ‘What I think is piracy is hope for people and countries like mine, it is what’s keeping gaming alive even when it never was supposed to exist.’ In 2013, Rodion says: ‘I live in a Third World country and all PC games here are pirated. I’ve only seen physical discs here once and that was years ago in a mall hours away from my house. There is no shipping or online retail so ordering isn’t an option.’ Such explanations in the words of the transnational players who buy and play pirated games, usually posted anonymously, using pseudonyms, have begun to appear more frequently on game forums. These inhabitants of the global South respond to the moral condemnation in Northern players’ anti-piracy comments, offering locally informed motives for pirating games. Rodion further notes that platform compatibility is a major obstacle to purchasing new games that will not run on the older computers still in use in the global South: ‘Old PCs can’t run new games. And old games aren’t sold anywhere (in America or here). I don’t think steam has added that many older titles either. I have friends here who still play Age of Empires II. GTA 1 is still alive and well.’ In the global North, by contrast, retro-gaming consists of small player subcultures of aficionados who collect and appreciate older games by choice. As Ben Aslinger notes, ‘players in primary markets who choose either not to upgrade or love obsolete machines continue to enjoy playing on these systems’ (Gaming Globally 62). Such retro-gamers might make the case that since novels are still appreciated from a few hundred years ago, and classic f ilms from over f ifty years ago, games can also certainly be enjoyed that were published only a few decades ago. But this election to enjoy playing older games on older consoles like PlayStation 2 becomes a necessity in what Aslinger refers to as ‘emerging markets’: ‘The PS2’s popularity has to do with its lifespan, the fact that it is the most

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affordable in emerging markets, and that the prevalence of used games, pirated games, a hefty back catalog, and a rich network of modders and file sharers all conspire to make it still the world’s most popular platform’ (Gaming Globally 63). Playing older games on older computers is not a choice but the only available game literacy option for many situated in the global South. Although digital gaming in the global South on older platforms may appear behind the North, there are also forward thinking, environmental benefits to slowing down the development and consumption of games. In the North, player expectations about digital gaming are shaped by a broader digital electronics industry that thrives on the rapid obsolescence of both software and hardware. Updates and innovations proceed at a lightening pace, even for the Northern game makers who labor long overtime hours at development studios to reach game release deadlines, often burning out of the game industry at a young age (Parkin). As discussed in Chapter One, gaming hardware, consoles, computers, and mobile phones, are also pieced together in even more exploitative working conditions in factories in the global South, and raw minerals and materials for electronic hardware are mined under even more laborious conditions. After a brief lifespan, game platforms at best are recycled, and often become electronic waste, exported to inexpensive dumpsites in the global South. This wasteful cycle of environmentally damaging, exploitative transnational labor practices, and rapid obsolesce, warrants reevaluation even in allegedly advanced Northern nations. Occasionally, game piracy also affords surplus benefits and conveniences to gamers beyond those enjoyed by legal customers. On a website about game piracy in the Philippines with a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ section, a player reflects on the supportive relationship that may emerge between a vendor and a loyal customer of a pirated games: ‘Interestingly enough, you can finish an entire RPG game using one bootleg CD. If ever it breaks, you can just return it to the shop and they will give you a brand-new fake CD as a replacement. It helps to befriend the vendor by purchasing from them again and again. Then they will call you their ‘suki’ or loyal customer’ (‘Video Game Software Piracy in the Philippines’). Although such game bootleggers steal the game’s intellectual property without permission, they also invest time and labor into cracking the game, compiling different game versions onto one disc, and ensuring that the game runs on local customers’ computers. This software piracy labor requires expertise, and also social skills when providing local customers with customized services. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter One, pirate vendors perform a useful translation and

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localization service for their local customers by modifying game consoles like Xbox so that they can play pirated copies of games—games that, due to import barriers or lack of distribution, platform incompatibility or cost, would otherwise not be available. But assuming that it would be preferable for a variety of legitimate local game industries to develop and sell games that are affordable, games that are either localized legally or are original titles made by local developers— should players start purchasing legal game copies and stop supporting game piracy? A comment from another Asian player of pirated games, Montanel12, sums up some of the ethical contradictions that players of pirated games have accepted for the moment: ‘In my opinion, pirated games are wrong, but at least it is giving a chance to people who don’t have any retailer or not enough money to play it. Especially in Asia, where you rarely find GameStop and retailers selling it. Conclusion, piracy is wrong but fair.’ In other words, game piracy contributes to the spread of ludoliteracy among populations who would otherwise be unfairly excluded from acquiring knowledge of the gaming medium. As this review of gaming spaces from across the global South over the last couple of decades indicates, transnational ludoliteracy has both been present longer than might be supposed and is also evolving, moving from arcade games to game cafés, to pirated games, and more recently to mobile and social software casual game platforms. Such spaces are often gendered, and especially public game cafés seem more frequented by boys and young men, but other genders may acquire ludoliteracy through more surreptitious, interrupted play time in Internet cafés and other venues. Significantly, both play time and play space is gendered. Some entrepreneurs take the infrastructural barriers to digital gaming in the global South, especially in Africa and India, as inspiration for creative solutions to enable game access, like tablet cafés and mobile cafés. Regional associations like the Central American ALBA. have formed alliances to justify the media literacy practices and to legally defend the ethics of software piracy under certain conditions. Players in the global South, who have been playing bootlegged games for years, have begun to publicly articulate their own complex ethical motives and justifications for acquiring game literacy based on local limitations and global inequities. Digital game knowledge continues to circulate transnationally, enabled by a variety of solutions engineered by local ludoliteracy advocates, the bootleggers, game title crackers, console modifiers, and street vendors, whose skilled labor brings the ludic riches of the North within reach of player publics in the global South.

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Works Cited Aslinger, Ben. ‘Redefining the Console.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Bryce, Jo and Rutter, Jason. ‘Killing like a Girl: Gendered Gaming and Girl Gamers’ Visibility.’ Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference. Ed. Frans Mäyrä. Tampere University Press, 2002. Cervera, Humberto and Quesnel, Jacinto. In Video Games Around the World. Ed. by Mark J.P. Wolf. M.I.T., 2015. ‘Copyright and media piracy in Bolivia: US aim to reshape cultural notions of intellectual property.’ WikiLeaks Press. http://wikileaks-press.org/intellectualproperty-and-media-piracy-in-bolivia/ (accessed September 3, 2013). ‘Is Piracy Killing the PC Gaming Industry?’ Blog Oh Blog. http://www.blogohblog. com/is-piracy-killing-the-pc-gaming-industry/ (accessed October 10, 2013). Jenkins, Henry and Squire, Kurt. ‘The Art of Contested Spaces.’ Ludologica Weblog on Ludology and Game Research, October 7, 2002. http://konzack.blogspot. com/2002/10/henry-jenkins-kurt-squire-art-of.html (accessed January 10, 2020). Jenkins, Henry. ‘“Complete Freedom of Movement”: Video Games as Gendered Play Space.’ In From Barbie to Mortal Combat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. M.I.T., 1998. Karaganis, Joe and collaborators. Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. US Social Science Research Council, 2011. Kolko, Beth E., and Cynthia Putnam. ‘Computer Games in the Developing World: The Value of Non-Instrumental Engagement with ICTs, or Taking Play Seriously.’ In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 46-55. Kuniafsky, Mike. Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design. Elsevier, Inc., 2010. Laylin, Tafline, ‘World’s First “Tablet Café” Circumvents Chronic Power Cuts.’ Green Prophet. http://www.greenprophet.com/2013/06/worlds-first-tablet-cafecircumvents-chronic-power-cuts/ (accessed December 3, 2013). Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991. Lin, Holin. ‘Body, Space, and Gendered Gaming Experiences: A Cultural Geography of Homes, Cybercafes, and Dormitories.’ In Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat ed. by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, M.I.T., 2008. ‘Maquinitas De Juegos Para Chispa.’ MercadoLibre Website. http://listado.mercadolibre.com.mx/maquinitas-de-juegos-para-chispa (accessed November 21, 2013). Pandey, Rohan. ‘A3 India by Sify: The Beginning of an MMORPG Scene?’ Game Guru. http://www.gameguru.in/action/2006/26/a3-india-by-sify-the-beginningof-the-indian-mmorpg-scene/ (accessed November 1, 2013).

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Penix-Tadsen, Phillip. Cultural Code: Video Games and Latin America. M.I.T., 2016. Raessens, Joost and co-authors, Introduction to Playful Identities. Ed. by Joost Raessens, Michel de Lange, Sybille Lammes, Valierie Frissens, and Jos de Mul, Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Raessens, Joost, de Lange, Michel, Lammes, Sybille, and Frissens, Valerie. ‘Homo Ludens 2.0: the Ludic Turn in Media Theory.’ Universiteit Utrecht, Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen, 2012. ‘StashBelt: Stash Cash – Store Files – Stay Safe.’ Indiegogo. https://www.indiegogo. com/projects/stashbelt-stash-cash-store-files-stay-safe (accessed December 30, 2013). Teale, Adam. ‘Photo: “Arcade Girls” – Creel, Chihuahua, Mexico.’ Adam Teale. http:// adamteale.com/1553/ (accessed November 24, 2013). Verne, A. ‘Video Game Software Piracy in the Philippines.’ HubPages. http://vernea. hubpages.com/hub/Video-Game-Software-Piracy-In-The-Philippines (accessed September 3, 2013). Win, Jilliann and Heeter, Carrie. ‘Gaming, Gender and Time: Who Makes Time for Play?’ Springer Science and Business Media Online. Volume 61, Issue 1-2, July 2009, pp. 1-13. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-009-9595-7 (accessed January 10, 2020).

3.

The Free-to-play Time of Women in Brazil: Localized Mobile and Casual Games Abstract This chapter looks at the rising popularity of casual mobile games in the global South with a spotlight on Brazil. Initially costless, ‘free-to-play’ games are appealing to increasingly gender-diverse players. Structurally, the addictive features of design are looked at carefully, especially in relation to temporality and pacing, drawing from past feminist studies of how women incorporate entertainment media like television into their daily routines. I question whether players are empowered, or whether they are exploited by such sticky casual game mechanics. The intersectional analysis in this chapter takes both gender, and the geographic location of developers and players into account. This chapter also discusses localization strategies that Northern developers are implementing for marketing casual mobile games in the global South. Keywords: Feminist media analysis, intersectionality, mobile games, casual games, game addiction, localization

In the previous chapter I presented examples of digital play in the face of formidable infrastructural and economic obstacles. I also observed a tendency for play spaces in the global South like game cafés to become marked as predominantly boy’s leisure time territory. One hopeful consequence of easy-to-pick-up and shorter to complete, non-violent ‘casual’ games seems to be the large scale assimilation of women and girls, as well as other once uncommon digital gamer profiles such as elderly and LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) players into the ranks of global game players. In this chapter I question whether this expanding, apparently more egalitarian, shift in game consumption is really such a positive, empowering

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improvement of players’ lives. Players in the global South, especially those located in so-called ‘BRICI’ nations with large, strong emerging economies like Brazil and India, are finally appearing on the radar of global game marketers. Do initially free-to-play Facebook and MMORPG games like Farmville and CityVille exploit game addiction among those in relatively poorer nations who can ill-afford to pay later for power-ups, inventory items, and other game add-ons once they are addicted to a game? Who benefits from the global upsurge in mobile and social network gaming among casual players? Are glocalized games like the quiz-game SongPop with nineteen musical Brazilian music genres tailored to the knowledge of Brazilians, helping to spur local Brazilian game industries? Or are these new, more diverse, casual game players, including older women and men, housewives, grandmothers and working mothers, young girls, (and older men), just lining the pockets of a relatively new set of young male game entrepreneurs hailing from the global North?

The Rise of Global Casual Ludoliteracy Julie Prescott and Jan Bogg’s’s succinct definition of a casual game holds in most cases for ‘games that are easy to learn, utilize simple controls and aspire to forgiving game play’ (80). Casual games, although not tied to a specific digital game platform, are often made for popular social software and mobile phone platforms which also contributes to the newfound accessibility of these games. Mobile phone games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga, and Facebook games like Farmville, CityVille, and SongPop are increasingly played across the global South, with predictions of further growth as smart mobile phones penetrate more rural areas. A study by the Boston Consulting Group notes that mobile devices will continue to be more prevalent than computers in rural India, for example, where in contrast to computers, ‘mobile phones are cheaper and more convenient tools for both communicating and seeking out entertainment’ (Roy). And not only girls are playing more but also women and men of multiple generations, sometimes together within families. Larissa Hjorth and Michael Arnold’s study of Chinese players of casual social games discusses examples of such intergenerational play, for instance a young woman and her mother located in another city who play Happy Farm together on their phones (Gaming Globally 110). US Media Consulting, an advertiser on mobile and Facebook games, listed large numbers of mobile and Facebook users across Latin America, especially in Brazil, writing: ‘By 2015, SuperData projects that there will be 58.7 million

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Brazilian social gamers and that revenues from social gaming in Brazil will reach $257 million—basically half the total social gaming revenue produced by Latin America’ (Koike). The authors of a short ‘snapshot’ of the game industry in Brazil, titled ‘Tomorrow’s Market’ write: ‘Its going to be a wild few years but now is the time to be betting on Brazil. A little publishing money spent there could ensure that major Western publishers are the publishing entities for all of Latin America for the foreseeable future. This market is simply too big and too rapidly developing to dismiss’ (Portnow et al. 77). Casual games have even been dubbed the ‘casual revolution’, indicative of the mass appeal of the genre (Juul). Meanwhile, hardcore gamers lament the ruination of more challenging gameplay and a lack of lengthy campaigns. No longer the exclusive terrain of boys and young men at their home computers—or in game or LAN (local area network) cafés, the medium of digital gaming is being democratized. The everyday simulated activities of casual games: farm management, restauranteering, city building, and pop music quizzes, or, more abstractly, matching gems or candies, appeal to those who are not drawn to fighting themed games like First-Person Shooters, sports simulators, and real-time strategy games like Warcraft and Defense of the Ancients. Digital games are going mainstream, garnering appeal beyond the narrower heterosexist, masculine culture of teenage boys and young men. As I discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the gendering of game cafés and cyber-cafés, studies of time management among girl and women players indicate that casual games also appeal because they demand less uninterrupted playtime than so-called hard-core digital games. In the Gender Divide and the Game Industry, Prescott and Boggs cite time management statistics on female players in the United Kingdom: ‘In particular gender differences have been found to exist in the amount of time available to play games. Difference is found in the amount of leisure time the two genders have; according to the National Statistics (2004) in the UK men have an hour and half more free time per day then women with similar gendered differences found across Europe and USA with men gaining between 30 minutes and up to 2 hours more free time then women (Eurostat, 2005)’ (77). Outside the United Kingdom and around the globe, the shorter, fragmented game levels in casual games also appeal to busy mothers, housewives, and gender-diverse adult wage workers. Casual players can allow themselves the luxury of playing a one-minute Facebook game on a lunch break, during a break from household chores, or on a mobile phone while commuting to school or work.1 1 Although in some parts of the global South mobile phones used in public are vulnerable to robbery and are therefore only safe to use extensively inside the home or at work.

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Women Managers of Everyday Game Routines The simulated activities in casual games, like the content of much of daytime television, is often drawn from the so-called feminine realm of everyday daily life. Television cooking shows, relationship dramas in soap operas, and sitcoms take place in the home, in restaurants, or in other work-a-day life settings. Similarly, the thematic story worlds of early 1990s casual games like Diner Dash, Sim City, and the Sims, which in many ways prefigure later casual games, make use of domestic and work life settings. These everyday scenarios contrast to the futuristic, science fictional themes of contemporous hardcore games like Bioshock and Halo. The insights and findings of television researchers are also in some ways relevant to casual games. In the Introduction to Feminist Television Criticism, the authors retrace the steps of second wave feminist media scholars in the 1970s who made visible the undervalued focus on the private home sphere in daytime television programming (Brundson and Spigel 7). Some of these media scholars conducted textual analysis of how the content of such programming fictionalized domestic life. Others, like Dorothy Hobson, studied how actual mothers incorporated daytime drama (soap opera) viewing pleasure into their childcare routines. In the 1980s daytime drama began to reflect the tension of balancing home life and work life. Later soap operas like Desperate Housewives returned more exclusively, perhaps nostalgically, to the domestic sphere as a setting for life’s dramas. If casual games are replacing television to certain extent as a popular women’s leisure time activity, we have more to learn from when and how these games are integrated into women’s daily rhythms and the ways that they reflect ‘women’s’ and other household runner’s concerns in everyday and home life. In daily practical life, despite shifts in gender roles and greater equity in a number of transnational contexts, time management and multitasking are skills often aspired to and expected of women. In Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother, Elizabeth Nathanson emphasizes female viewership’s focus on time management, writing about North American middle class women’s ‘postfeminist’ juggling of leisure, work, and domestic activities: ‘The process of negotiating daily rhythms, patterns and schedules in the postfeminist context requires understanding, coming to terms with and learning to cope with how one spends one’s time’ (4). Inside the fictional toy worlds of casual games, players also juggle similar activities within time constraints. Games like Farmville, even more so than daytime television because of a game’s ability to simulate accelerated cycles with divergent outcomes and consequences, offer the player compelling simulations of

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everyday operations like food production, processes that must be managed in a timely manner over multiple stages. The core play mechanic (the primary action that propels the game forward) of casual games is often a simulation of conducting these everyday tasks. The experienced player of a casual game develops a sense of mastery over the time management of practical spheres of operations. In this sense casual games may offer a similar satisfaction to the experience of watching a television show or a YouTube video explaining how to cook an affordable, healthy family meal in under five minutes. And playing casual games may actually enhance multitasking skills. Let’s recall in more detail what playing a typical casual game is like. In Zynga’s Farmville, the player adopts a ‘god game’ or ‘goddess view’ over a miniature toy game world. She or he (or they), becomes an overseer of very practical sorts of operations that show as Ian Bogost words it in his analysis of the persuasive power of procedural play, ‘how things work’ (125). When played skillfully, as digital crops grow and are harvested, they yield a variety of increasingly rare foods that the player can sell for in-game currency, which can then be used to purchase seeds for new crops. Farm animals like cows produce milk and sheep provide wool for clothing. Given enough invested playtime and with viral help from their social network, players may even acquire rare animals for their farm like Farmville’s fabled ‘orange unicorns’. Players must also manage their farm’s finances and, although Farmville, like most freemium games, is initially free, if they spend actual money, (via PayPal and credit card) players can purchase powerful items like scarecrows and vehicles. Casual players who are already quite busy managing similar practical procedures in their actual everyday lives, like getting food on the table for the family, caring for children, and managing household finances, now have the satisfaction of dominating additional, useful-seeming tasks as virtual overseers of digital toy worlds.

Free-to-play Casual Games Casual games are usually more affordable and accessible than hardcore genres of computer games. Mobile phone games that are for sale via Google Android’s app store or the Apple store are priced within a range comparable to the low cost of pirated game copies. Free ‘adver-games’ on mobile phones typically display small banner style advertisements that appear near the edge of the phone screen, or in between levels. Although these ads are seldom as intrusive as television advertisements, they can be distracting especially when flashing animations. Often so-called updates of free mobile games

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are really only downloads of refreshed local advertising, and do not add more levels or install fixes on the original game. In addition to monetizing via advertising, so-called ‘free-to-play’ or ‘freemium’ Facebook games and browser-based role-playing games that are initially costless, generate revenue through selling in-game items and powerups, sometimes to locally targeted markets. For instance, Mini-Fazenda, a farming game similar to Farmville that is popular in Brazil, is initially free but charges for optional powerful items. Although the interface, and also the gameplay, are very similar to Farmville, Mini-Fazenda incorporates Brazilian touches such as Amazonian fruits and ‘players can build a carnival float with friends’ (Wingfield). The game menus of seeds, animals, and decorative items like temples, are all in Portuguese. Vostu, the developers of MiniFazenda, remark that ‘Brazilians have shown a big appetite to pay real money for virtual goods, like agricultural equipment and seeds, to customize their virtual farms. According to Vostu, Brazil has an Internet market comparable to the size of India’s, ‘but it has all the credit cards that India doesn’t have’ (Wingfield). With just a button press on the mobile phone that charges a card, Brazilian players can accessorize their toy farms. The authors of Brazil: Tomorrow’s Market’ write, ‘the free-to-play model is well received in Brazil, as indicated by the strong presence of localization companies that bring Korean MMOs to the country. The viability of non-traditional business models is further illustrated by the growing population of social, mobile and MMO gamers within the country’ (Portnow et al). In countries like Brazil with emerging economies, free-to-play games seem to be having a positive, equalizing effect on regional, gender, and age divides. In contrast to pirated games, the free-to-play model is a legal and affordable way of making games accessible to even broader publics, including relatively less affluent players located in the global South. But are casual games, although peaceful and light-hearted, inexpensive and accessible, really so benign? Although the levels are often of short duration and can be paused and interrupted, casual games can be exceedingly addictive. An article on ‘the science’ behind Candy Crush Saga addiction starts off: ‘If you haven’t heard of Candy Crush, it’s the mobile game that’s so addictive, players say they have left their children stranded at school, abandoned housework, and even injured themselves as they try to reach new levels of the game’ (Docktermann). Initially, such casual games do not seem to demand the extensive time investment as more hardcore ‘boys’ games. Yet due to their addictive pull, players often also ultimately end up investing substantial amounts of time and money playing casual games, even insomniacly borrowing hours from the night after a fully-packed daytime

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7. Mini Fazenda (2007) by Vostu. Game Screenshot.

schedule. The editors of Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat write: ‘It may be that this form of game appeals to women because it is possible to play in short chunks of time. However, a majority of players end up playing for longer periods’ (Kafie et al. xx). South Korea is a leader in transnational gaming, including casual games. For instance, South Korean game developer Nexon early on in 2003 penetrated female and all ages demographics across Asia with free-to-play games like MapleStory, a simplified (made casual) anime-style, cartoony 2-D platformer MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). But inside South Korea, gameplay in the South Korean media and in academia is commonly approached as a societal malaise and pathology, similar to drugs or alcohol abuse. Children under the age of eighteen are legally prohibited from playing games after midnight and addiction to games and the Internet has spawned a medical industry of recovery programs and retreats for the whole family, such as the brain clinic at Gongju National Hospital opened by neurologist Doctor Lee Jae-won. According to Dr. Lee, ‘Some people question why we need to use medical treatment for a habitual disorder. But if the condition has got so bad that the brain is not functioning as it should be, medical treatment is very effective’ (Williamson). Designers of addictive games carefully ramp up a game’s difficulty with successive levels

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(incremental difficulty scaling) that keep players in the much-lauded addictively pleasurable state of ‘flow’ between accomplishment and challenge (Csikszentmihalyi 74). Players are also hooked with the promise of incentives such as additional items or levels to unlock. Stamina systems, which I discuss in more detail in the Chapter Seven, entice players of Freemium games to pay for quick and easy lives and health unit regeneration. Bogost’s 2010 satire game Cow Clicker, encapsulated most of these addictive casual game mechanisms in one game, including viral social media marketing. Although the game was intended as a parody it became popular in its own right among players unaware of the North American game researcher’s critical message, probably due to its line-up of tried and tested casual game mechanics. Facebook games like Farmville and CityVille reward players who recruit other players from their social network with more tools and items. Such games leverage a viral, ‘sticky’ means of attracting new customers from among the networks of friends and family listed within social software. As Hjorth and Arnold observe, online gaming, once the prerogative of niche ‘hard-core’ players, has now become the preoccupation of casual and mainstream audiences as games expand their ability to be social’ (Gaming Globally 104). Casual games are producing novel viral, and often quite devious marketing strategies to attract customers from existing popular social media platforms. With tricky incentives for monetization embedded in free and accessible casual games, viral means of marketing, and game design that encourages repetitive, addictive play behavior, casual games are not as harmless as they might seem. But is it fair to pathologize such games only now that women and girls transnationally have become players, whereas once such entertainment was the exclusive domain and prerogative of boys? Similar to daytime television dramas, casual games may be affording the world’s women and girls a relaxing release of tension and escape from life’s toils. Who should be afforded both the pleasure and the pain of such addictive vices?

Developer-Entrepreneurs Let’s now consider the rise of transnational casual gaming through yet another optic, shifting our attention from the player-consumer side to the makers of such casual games. Who are the developers of these games that are spreading like wildfire among the globe’s diverse populations, including in emerging economies where mobile and social software platforms are increasingly prevalent? A common gripe in the more established game industry is

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that the more recent crop of casual game developers are outsiders with little knowledge of or passion for games—usually business graduates who boast entrepreneurial training rather than computer skills. Investigation into the developers behind popular casual games reveals that there is something to this claim, at least in regards to education. For instance, Mark Pincus, San Francisco-based entrepreneur and former CEO of Zynga, maker of globally popular Farmville, holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Who are the developers of popular casual games in a country like Brazil, one of the so-called emerging economies of the world that has made extensive inroads across the digital divide with increased mobile and Internet usage among its population? In addition to globally popular games like Farmville and Candy Crush Saga, in Brazil casual games for mobile and social software are played that are more reflective of Brazilian culture. Popular casual games with Brazilian cultural appeal include Café Mania (a Facebook game similar to Diner Dash), and Paciencia, an Android version of the traditional card game Patience. One might expect that a game like Mini-Fazenda—made exclusively for Brazilians, in Portuguese, by Vostu, with offices in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires—would be headed by Brazilian or Argentinian developers. But on further investigation, it turned out that the founders of Vostu are three young North American entrepreneurs who met at Harvard Business School. The Vostu founders relate that during their studies, they found that ‘cases on Brazil were an inspiration’ (Dizik). Twenty-eight- year old Kafie puts it bluntly when speaking of Vostu’s choice to target Brazilian players, ‘If you focus on a big market, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing because you’re going to find something that works because the market is big’ (Dizik). Vostu’s developers hail from the same university as Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, another North American young man whose digital media business is leaving a global footprint. What is noteworthy is not only a geographic divide between developers located in the United States and consumers situated in emerging economies like Brazil, but also a gender divide between male game developers and female consumers. As Prescott and Bolton remark, ‘It would appear that girls and women are increasingly engaging with technology from a consumer base, but less so from a productive base’ (9), Although casual games appeal to more diverse genders, to women, girls and LGBTQ players, we have yet to see substantial evidence of what the female game developer collective Ludica refer to as ‘the virtuous cycle’ where girl players, with ‘positive early experiences of play with family, friends and peers’ transition into adult women developers (Fullerton et al. 165).

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Here it is again telling to invoke a parallel to daytime television and its predominantly female viewership. The daytime drama industry is locally represented in many nations of the global South, employing local actresses, female producers, and female writers. Unlike the global television industry, we do not see such diverse involvement in terms of gender and nationality among the makers of casual gamers. Is it just too soon? Perhaps today’s young girls and LGBTQ children in Brazil and other locations in the global South who are now playing casual games will grow up to make their own games (even of some unknown future genre) when they reach adulthood.

Localizing Casual Games for Global Markets Northern developers are trying out a variety of approaches to localizing casual games for player markets in the global South. FreshPlanet’s music quiz game SongPop, another phone game with four million players in Brazil in 2012, offers Brazilian players playlists of nineteen popular Brazilian musical genres, including Brazilian reggae and rock, Pagode and Samba, Sertanejo, and Tropicalia.2 Despite the game’s tailored appeal for Brazilian players, SongPop, like Mini-Fazenda, is also made by North American developers from New York. In Subway Surfers, another popular mobile game in Brazil, players navigate a young graffiti artist character who must escape from the police on a skateboard. Subway Surfers is made by a Danish company Kiloo. Subway Surfers attraction in Brazil and other international locations outside Europe is enhanced by the timed release of new levels set in megacities around the globe, with each release offering local appeal for players in the corresponding city. The game description on the mobile app store states: ‘Since January 2013, updates have been based on a ‘World Tour’ theme that places game action in a new city each month.’ Cities featured in the game include: New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Rome, Tokyo, Miami, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, New Orleans, London, and Mumbai. These casual games are attracting newcomers to digital gaming through more targeted localized attention to diverse global settings and cultures. Quiz games like Song Pop add genres reflective of local music culture. Subway Surfers periodically adds new levels inspired by global cities, and Mini-Fazenda repackages preexisting popular English games in Portuguese with local nuances. Compared to the effort required to localize Northern Triple A 3-Dimensional games, which require teams of makers to construct 2

SongPop is reportedly one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg favorite games.

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and animate new models, adding localized content to 2-Dimensional casual games is relatively easy to execute. Since photorealism is no longer the targeted aesthetic of what are often cartoonish casual games, one hundred person plus Hollywood style production units of 3-Dimensional modelers, animators, and Artificial Intelligence programmers are not required for their development. And adding new quiz game genres, songs, and changing languages is even faster from a localization standpoint than inserting new localized graphics, only necessitating new audio recordings, translations, and alterations of text for each new cultural setting. While the more established hardcore game industry resents the appearance of these newer entrepreneurs with allegedly more business sense than passion for game development, Northern casual game companies like Vostu, with ambitious global game market visions akin to Ubisoft’s discussed in the first chapter, are opening offices in strategic global locations. Unlike the older industry of console and Personal Computer games who brushed off large segments of the global population as unviable markets, and who focused more narrowly on teenage boy consumers, a new set of financially savvy, young, male, Northern developers is at last paying closer attention to gender diverse players in the global South, especially those located in the BRICI economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Indonesia. Northern male publishers and developers with elite educational pedigrees, in concert with legions of transnational players, are changing the global face of entertainment. For the most part, the profits that these freemium and low-cost casual games generate, at least in Brazil and Latin America, flow from South to North, a financial pattern that echoes the direction that other makers of non-digital Northern products, from Coca Cola to automobile manufacturers, when they sell their products in the global South. Historically such vectors of South to North globalization are rooted in prior relations of colonial exploitation between the industrialized global North and the more recourse laden South. The advent of casual gaming has brought more gender and age diverse players into the digital gaming fold, both in the North and South. But when we take the makers who profit from such games into consideration, this popular genre of games is not necessarily an empowering ‘revolution’.3 Furthermore, its questionable whether the addiction players suffer while repeating tasks ad infinitum in mobile casual games—matching jewel 3 This vector of financial gain contrasts to television programming. Globally, television drama viewing is a popular women’s media pleasure that penetrates rural impoverished areas. These shows are one of the few forms of media that is produced nationally even in the global South rather than imported from the North.

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types, piecing together farms and cities via their online social network, and clicking cows—is a truly pleasurable form of entertainment, or is this activity akin to repeatedly throwing coins in a slot machine? Are mobile and Facebook games just another evolution of the global inequity between North and South experienced since colonialism, in this case, another commercial scenario that profits a new Northern suave younger male financial and telecommunications elite through the sale of smart mobile phones and game apps to populations in the global South? In sum, are we witness to exploitation in a newer form, or are these gender-diverse players taking a well-deserved break from their daily routine, and perhaps even among those who in the future will transform their pleasurable vices into local game development?

Works Cited Bogost, Ian. ‘The Rhetoric of Videogames.’ In Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. M.I.T., 2008. Brundson, Charlotte and Spigal, Lynn. Introduction to A Feminist Television Reader. Ed. By Charlotte Brundson and Lynn Spigel. Open University Press, 1997, 2nd Edition 2008. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row, 1990. Dizik, Alina. ‘Entrepreneurs Learn the Rules of the Game.’ Financial Times. http://w w w.ft.com/cms/s/2/7436860a-51a0-11e0-888e-00144feab49a. html#ixzz2xcTkJQYV (accessed October 21, 2013). Dockterman, Eliana. ‘The Science Behind the Candy Crush Addiction.’ Time Business. http://business.time.com/2013/11/15/candy-crush-saga-the-sciencebehind-our-addiction (accessed February 3, 2014). Fullerton, Tracy, Fron, Janine, Pearce, Celia and Morie, Jackie. ‘Getting Girls into the Game: Toward a Virtuous Cycle.’ In From Barbie to Mortal Combat: Gender and Computer Games. Ed. by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins. M.I.T., 1998. Hjorth, Larissa and Arnold, Michael. ‘Playing at Being Social.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Hobson, Dorothy. A Feminist Television Reader. Ed. By Charlotte Brundson and Lynn Spigel, Open University Press, 1997, 2nd Edition 2008. Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. M.I.T., 2010.

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Kafai, Yasmin B. et al., Introduction to Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat. Ed. by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, M.I.T, 2008. Koike, Tatiana. ‘Social Gaming Takes Off in Latam.’ Latin Link. http://latinlink. usmediaconsulting.com/2012/09/social-gaming-takes-off-in-latam/ (accessed November 2, 2013). Nathanson, Elizabeth. Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother. Routledge, 2013. Portnow, James, Protasio, Arthur, and Donaldson, Kate. ‘Brazil Tomorrow’s Market.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. by Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Prescott, Julie and Boggs, Jan. The Gender Divide and the Computer Game Industry. IGI Gobal, 2014. Roy, Sumit. ‘237 Million Indian Internet Users by 2015.’ Online Marketing Trends. http://www.onlinemarketing-trends.com/2011/03/237-million-indian-internetusers-by.html (accessed September 12, 2013). Williamson, Lucy. ‘South Korean Clinic Treats Web Addicts.’ BBC News. http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14361420 (accessed December 25, 2013). Wingfield, Nick. ‘Vostu Translates Social Games for Brazil.’ Technews and Digits form the WSJ, Sept 7, 2010. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/09/07/vostu-translatessocial-games-for-brazil/ (accessed January 17, 2015).

Section Two Ludic Perspectives from South of the Border

4. Ludic Recycling in Latin American Art: From Remixing the City to Sampling Nature Abstract In this chapter I foreground an ecologically aware, ludic approach to crafting public art experiences, drawing primarily from interviews with four prominent Latin American artists. Conditions observable in the global South that influence these artworks include urban sprawl and shanty towns, electronics waste sites accumulating from the rapid production cycles of electronic hardware, and the environmental damage of natural habitats. My intent in this chapter is to offer a view into a field of public art production in Latin America where artists and critics have over the past few decades developed a sophisticated, yet inclusive visual, interactive, and playful dialogue with the public. Keywords: Ludic Art, Public Art, Recycled Aesthetic, Environment, Latin American Studies, Urban Geography

From the derives of the Parisian Situationists in the 1950s, to the mixed reality games that London-based group Blast Theory played with mobile devices in the early 2000s, to more recent commercially produced augmented reality games like Niantic’s Ingress and Pokémon Go, artists, architects, and designers have been experimenting with playing games in urban spaces (Schleiner ‘Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play’ 85). Meanwhile, artists and designers in Latin America, somewhat unrecognized by their gamic and media peers in the North, have also been developing ludic remixes of urban space, inspired by conditions and urban survival tactics in their own cities. As urban poverty, disparity in wealth, and precarity increase even within more wealthy nations, from homeless encampments in Los Angeles and San Francisco, to refugee camps in Europe, the work of Southern ludic recyclers

Schleiner, A.-M., Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728904_ch04

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also acquires Northern currency. Internationally exhibited artworks such as Mexican Rene C. Hayashi’s playgrounds built from found materials in the shanty towns of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Jakarta, Indonesia, or Carolina Caycedo’s CD of Shanty Sounds, a digital mix of ambient life and rap in Bogotá, Colombia, exhibited in the 2003 Venice Biennale, articulate a sophisticated aesthetics of ludic urban recycling and remixing that invites society’s most marginalized to play. More recently, as I will discuss at the end of this chapter, some of these same artists are turning their attention from urban settings to samplings of nature that also address environmental concerns within the global South. I will start this chapter by introducing what I mean by an aesthetics of ludic recycling. In the Western aesthetic tradition, a distinction between aesthetics and utility is still wide-spread, observable in a distinction 19th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant drew in his foundational aesthetic treatise, the Critique of Judgement, between ‘disinterested’ appreciation of universal beauty vs. an everyday utilitarian world driven by more material concerns and needs (Daniels 198-199). By contrast, a Latin American ludic aesthetics of recycling, observable in many of the artworks I will critique in this chapter, finds beauty and draws inspiration from humble survival strategies and recycled goods, from found or thrown away materials such as obsolete electronics and game consoles originating in the global North that are taken apart, sold in pieces, and repurposed. Not only a Western distinction between beauty and utility is transgressed with such a recycling aesthetic, but also the divide between play and poverty. An aesthetics of ludic recycling is creatively inspired by the tactics of mobile vendors who live precariously off of Latin American city’s discarded goods and sell their wares from unlicensed push carts, for instance the so-called ‘Tlacuaches’ (marsupial Latin American racoons) who sell recycled goods in Mexico City for a few pesos. In this chapter, I will present material collected in my own and in others’ interviews with four visionary and still-active media and public artists ranging from across Latin America. In their diverse public works, ludic sites of creativity and play are crafted in the midst of megacities of unplanned urban sprawl, haphazard infrastructure, and high-population density. The first artist whose visionary urban mobile media work I will discuss is Brazilian Giselle Beiguelman. A media artist, writer, curator, and professor of architecture and urbanism, Beiguelman was born in and resides in São Paulo. As one of the world’s emerging economies along with China and India that I have discussed in the previous chapter in relation to mobile and casual games, Brazil has also long been home to visible, decidedly more

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high-tech than low-tech innovations in urban media art. For instance, since 2000, São Paulo has hosted the annual international media festival FILE (Electronic Language International Festival). As early as 2002, foreseeing the coming popularity of mobile devices and querying their viability as an art platform, Beiguelman said: ‘I think PDAs and mobile phones are the icons of our time. They made us proto-cyborgs, supporting our nomadic way of life. We need those devices because we are always on the move, but to create art for those interfaces is a challenge’ (D’Ignacio). Beiguelman has served as a jury member of the Austrian media competition Ars Electronica, has exhibited her work in international venues like ZKM museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, and published books and many articles. Yet she attributes her initial exposure to media art to more local influences, through working with an active scene of Brazilian urbanists, philosophers, artists, and architects in São Paulo: ‘Actually my first contact with new media was related to public art, working with a nonprofit organization Arte/ Cidade (www.artecidade.org.br) devoted to arts and urbanism responsible for amazing urban interventions in downtown São Paulo, curated and coordinated by the Brazilian philosopher Nelson Brissac. In 1994 they were preparing a CD-ROM with artists and architects involved in their The City and Its Fluxes project. It changed my mind and my life’ (D’Ignacio ). Beiguelman also cites Brazilian concrete and visual poets as early influences.1 Her early works, such as the Book After the Book, are experiments with phonetic digital poetry and take the form of websites. In 2003, with the project Poetrica, she decided to mix digital text compositions into more physical, urban settings via electronic city advertising billboards, or what she called ‘teleinterventions’ (D’Ignacio). The Poetrica project began with a collection of poems that Beiguelman composed herself, as well as three thousand ‘poetic experiences, love messages, and urban messages’ submitted by the public: ‘All the broadcasted images were produced anywhere and submitted by SMS, the web and by wap. They appeared in three large electronic billboards located in downtown São Paulo, around Galeria Vermelho, between Paulista, Consolação and Rebouças avenues’ (D’Ignacio ). A year later, Poetrica also was exhibited on electronic billboards in Berlin. Although Beiguelman addresses her urban works like Poetrica to a global urban viewer who could allegedly be in any city, saying ‘Poetrica seeks that 1 Beiguelman stated in an interview with Catherine D’Ignazio aka Kanarinka: ‘I grew up in São Paulo, an important center of visual and concrete poetry, where Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari worked (and still work, although Pignatari is now living elsewhere). They were very important for my generation.’

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8. Poetrica (2003-2004) by Giselle Beiguelman; Photograph.

reader: the inhabitant of the global city,’ she also emphasizes local context, such as the changeable and dynamic textual characteristics of graffiti in ‘a city like São Paulo,’ saying: ‘It is one of the rules of the game… The metropolitan landscape today is a kind of Photoshop image. Everything can be pasted to everything. The modernist dream is over and there is no logic neither formal logic. The landscape is so polluted by ads, signs, outdoors, banners and in cities like São Paulo, all covered by different graffiti—a kind of visual guerrilla—that you should be reading all the time’ (D’Ignacio). The Poetrica project adds another layer of ludic digital communication to both advertising messages and the graffiti that marks the surfaces of buildings and sidewalks of São Paulo. While running this project on then-innovative Palm Pilot mobile devices, Beiguelman predicted that this mixture of offline urban space, mobile, and large-scale digital textual space would in the future become everyday, saying ‘Poetrica deals with cybridism, it means its default situation is a cross platform of numerous on and off line network (traffic, electricity, billboards, mobile phones, handhelds)’ (D’Ignacio ). Although we may still have yet to see more direct—as well as more ludic or poetic—links between graffiti, large-scale advertising billboards, and mobile texting on a daily basis, Beiguelman’s forecast of more ubiquitous mobile texting has indeed been borne out, as mobile devices

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9. Ludoteca (2007) by Rene C. Hayashi, Outskirts Rosario, Argentina; Photograph.

and apps penetrate not only global cities, but also rural areas in the global South where the Internet is still a luxury. In contrast to Beiguelman’s technically self-aware, future-casting experiments with urban ‘cybridism’ and mobile devices, internationally exhibiting Mexican artist Rene C. Hayashi’s work may not be immediately recognizable as tech-savvy media art. Similar to the rough materials used by the 1960s Italian Arte Povera movement, the recycled aesthetics of Hayashi’s ramshackle urban playgrounds and other precarious-looking sculptural structures deliberately eschew the slick, next-gen look of Northern tech industry products and prototypes. His interactive shanty town playgrounds are composed of inexpensive and recycled materials such as plywood, metallic roof ing, tarps, PVC pipes, and bamboo stalks. Such materials don’t seem out of place in the sprawling unplanned outskirts of Rosario, Argentina, and Jakarta, Indonesia—the two sites where he was commissioned to build similar public play sculptures. The recycled aesthetic of these works is inspired by the do-it-yourself, haphazard, and novel solutions that shanty town dwellers piece together themselves on a daily basis in the poorest neighborhoods of Southern cities. In comparison to these dwellings, Hayashi’s playgrounds serve a more ludic purpose than shelter, forging temporary communal spaces for neighborhood children to gather and play.

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In collaboration with other artists like Mexico City-born Eder Castillo, Hayashi has also designed public sculptures intended as floating Internet cafés for migrants. The first such structure, Guatemex (2007) was a covered raft containing computers made for illegal immigrants who cross the river from Guatemala to Mexico to use. Another temporary migrant Internet café structure, Biosfera (2010), in appearance somewhat like an asymmetrical Buckminster Fuller dome, was installed in a canal near the United States border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2013, Hayashi was commissioned to design a floating Internet café as a public art sculpture on a park lake in the city of Managua, Nicaragua. The floating structure is a variable composite of triangular, polygon-like boats. Like a life-size version of a Lego-like open world game, these floating polygonal shapes are continuously reconfigured into new formations by the public. Born in northern Mexico in Chihuahua, and later educated in Guadalajara, Hayashi initially studied filmmaking and has since developed an interest in the intersection of art and play. Early in his artistic practice in 2002, he built a low-tech, portable game headgear device with repurposed toy electronics, displaying a game he modded himself which he played and wore around Mexico City.2 In retrospect, this off-kilter mobile game viewing device could be seen as an early prototype of devices like the Oculus Rift game Virtual Reality headgear developed a decade later in California. In addition to his own art practice, he has curated exhibits of other artists’ works thematicizing play in Mexico, such as a 2007 exhibit at Sector Reforma gallery in Guadalajara called Chispitas, borrowing its title from the Mexican slang for video game arcades. He also curated a game-themed video art exhibit, inviting artists to create videos and machinimas—video animations made using existing commercial game engines. These videos were projected onto the interior screen cockpit window of a children’s space rocket ride in a working-class neighborhood amusement park in Mexico City. Visitors were invited to enter the vehicle and take a seat. Although the rocket’s paint was peeling and the machine had overall seen better days, the rocket-ride’s kinesthetic movements of tilts and vibrations were still functional and were synced to the videos and games exhibited on the screen, immersing visitors in a multi-sensory ludic art experience. Hayashi’s ludic artworks are influenced by tendencies in global design and architecture, such as the modular, flexible construction of his public sculptures. Projects like the portable headgear game apparatus and the rocket-ride experiment with game visuals and kinesthetics share similar 2

Hayashi showed me this device in Mexico City in 2003.

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media design and innovation concerns to Northern game developers and new media artists. But the bricolage construction of Hayashi’s play sculptures and their resultant recycled aesthetic also speaks to the context of the global South, from Latin America to South Asia. Additionally, his choice of accessible public venues like neighborhood amusement park rides, urban slums, and city parks makes the work accessible not only to art aficionados but also to less-privileged participants like the young urban poor. Even when grappling with weighty social themes like migration and urban poverty, and while using modest and recycled materials, such innovation creates a space for children to experience playtime and a temporary escape from more difficult circumstances. Similar to Hayashi’s ludic playground sculptures, Colombian Carolina Caycedo’s seminal work, Shanty Sounds (2003), draws inspiration from and actively engages marginal inhabitants of a Latin American city. When she was invited at the age of twenty-four to represent Colombia in the international art festival in Italy, the Venice Biennale, Caycedo conducted interviews with Colombian street rappers in a ghetto of Bogotá, in the process befriending them and their families. While often surviving off of criminal activities like narcotrafficking and petty theft, the rappers of Bogotá borrow from the musical conventions of North American African-American gangster and street rap, composing rhymes in Colombian slang that address their lives’ challenges. Caycedo recorded and released a two-C.D. (compact disc) compilation set of spoken word, singing, and found urban sounds with funds from a grant for the Biennale. Caycedo’s compilation includes snippets of conversations and environmental samples that are mixed between songs.3 Across the global South, from Senegal to Bogotá, the urban poor have repurposed their own local versions of hip hop music and poetry into their own languages and dialects, yet these oral street poets are often unable to afford access to electronic recording and remixing equipment. Caycedo’s grant enabled her to offer some local musicians in Bogota an opportunity to access professional studio equipment for mixing musical beats to accompany their rhymes, resulting in catchy but also haunting, and at times raw and angry recordings. The environmental samples on Shanty Sounds also reflect the ambient acoustic environment of everyday life in a shanty town in Bogotá, registering activities like cooking, dogs barking, and children crying in close, urban living quarters. 3 This format follows in the tradition of many African-American Hip Hop recordings that splice skits and sometimes live conversational samples between songs.

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Before orchestrating Shanty Sounds, Caycedo was a member of an artists’ collective formed in Bogotá, which included Colombian-born Adriana Garcia and Spanish-born artists Federico Guzmán and Alonso Gil. In an interview with critic Carlos Basualdo about the setting and inspiration for their projects, the Cambalache Collective describe the Bogotán Cartucho neighborhood and its population of homeless recyclers who subsist day to day from society’s cast-off objects: It is a very rundown sector, the product of the inequality, unemployment, and poverty afflicting Colombian society since who knows when. All kinds of people live and sleep here. If you walk down 9th Street you will see hawkers, recyclers, beggars, and drug sellers making their income from all kinds of legal and illegal activities, this is the ‘rebusque’ or ‘search’ for everyday subsistence. […] Among those making their living from the street, recyclers form an extensive collective (Basualdo).

Cambalache Collective began the first installation of their project Museo de la Calle (Museum of the Street), on the streets of Bogotá with ‘a street cart, modeled on the types of carts used by street recyclers or peddlers, which functioned as an open space for bartering’ (Purves 143). From 1998-2002 they bartered objects on their cart with passersby, chatting and exchanging stories in the process. Cambalache Collective write of their Bogotán inspiration of street peddling: ‘The recyclers use the street as a space of interchange, transforming its secondary material into prime material. Garbage and useful objects are rendered once again merchandise that describes human and social relations.’4 This Latin American-based collective, like Rene C. Hayashi, learn and draw inspiration from the creative survival mechanisms of Latin America’s urban poor. As Colombian-born art critic Catalina Lozano Moreno writes in her analysis of the Cambalache Collective’s artistic appropriation of recycling in her article ‘Recycling Bogotá’: ‘These processes of transformation are always a resonance of the tactics of survival, creative and precarious, ephemeral and visible’ (‘Recycling Bogota’). Since participating in Cambalache Collective and producing Shanty Sounds, Caycedo has had a prolific and nomadic career as an artist, living in London, Bogotá, Puerto Rico, New York, Berlin, and she currently resides 4 My translation from the Cambalache Collective website: http://museodelacalle.tripod. com/ (accessed March 1, 2014): ‘Los recicladores utilizan la calle como espacio de intercambio, transforman el material secundario en su materia prima. La basura y los objetos inútiles se vuelven otra vez mercancías que redescriben las relaciones humanas y sociales.’

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10. Museo de la Calle or Street Museum. Courtesy of Cambalache Collective, Barrio Venecia Biennial. Bogota, 1999; Photograph.

in Los Angeles. Her public, performative works have been exhibited and sold in numerous art biennials, galleries, and international art fairs. Her practice does not conform to a specific medium such as sound, digital media, or sculpture, and her works exhibit varied degrees of play and humor, including mounting a breakdancing competition of doggie-style Perreo in Puerto Rico. But conceptually and tactically, Caycedo’s edgy public artworks and performances consistently work toward healing social bonds via playful interactions and exchanges between societies’ marginalized and invisible, from shanty-town dwellers to illegal immigrants from the global South. More recently, she has shifted her interest from urban spaces and those who make the street their own via recycling and other activities, to the public use of rural and natural spaces in Colombia, such as, ‘the gesture of a fisherman that throws his net into the river, that is the kind of material I am interested in right now’ (Schleiner, Interview with Caycedo). In 2014 she responded in an interview I conducted with her: ‘I am thinking about the forests, the mountains, the rivers as a public space, that by constitution belong to all the Colombianas and Colombianos. How can we understand public space in the rurality? I find this pertinent, as resources that are ‘public’ are being privatized and corporatized by transnationals under extractivism policies. In this sense the materials for this exploration are the very connections that conform an ecosystem’ (Schleiner, Interview with Caycedo).

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11. Atari-Noise (1999) by Arcangel Constantini; Photograph.

Similar to Caycedo’s shift in interest from the Latin American city to Latin American nature, Mexico City-based media artist Arcangel Constantini in his early work was inspired by a Latin American urban context, in his case cast-off electronics found in Mexico City, while in later work he proceeded to recycle more ecological and natural materials. In his biography, he describes himself as an artist who ‘develops pieces of ludic and experimental character linked to technology, highly influenced by the spontaneous and chaotic processes of the city’ (Villagomez). Constantini was born on the outskirts of the Mexico City metropolitan region in Cuautitlán. Typical of many Latin American artists, as well as of artists from other regions of the global South where art programs are less common, he came to his art practice via a circuitous path with education in a more ‘practical’ field, in his case, graphic design. He exhibits his media artworks internationally in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and currently splits his time between his art practice and curation. Since 2001, he has been involved with curating the innovative Cyberlounge media art exhibition program at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Constantini’s seminal media artwork, Atari Noise (1999) hacks a 1980s Atari game console into an audio-visual experience. The abstract fields of color and sound would seem to classify the work as digital ‘Noise Art’ or, in Constantini’s own terms, ‘error’ or ‘glitch’ art. Digital audio and abstract visual Noise, Net Art, Software, Game Mod art, and Hacker art began to be exhibited online via the web in the late 1990s, as well as performed live through VJing (video jockeying) in music and dance clubs, and in smaller and more esoteric, mostly European workshops and festivals.5 Constantini’s 5 Atari Noise’s reduction of the game to abstraction is somewhat similar to European duo Jodi’s series of art-game mods that reduced the Quake shooter game to flashing black and white moire patterns. But Atari Noise is a deeper hardware hack of a game console than the Jodi’s software

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work has often been critiqued and exhibited internationally with other media artists working in such venues. But a closer look at Atari Noise in relation to Constantini’s other works— such as Anima, a series of animations inspired by a vast junkyard of discarded electronics located on the outskirts of Mexico City—points toward a set of inspiring conditions and a local urban context removed from European avant-garde Noise Artists and their audio-visual remixes composed on costly new Apple laptops. Speaking of Atari Noise in an interview Constantini says: ‘The context of the project emerges out of my Latin American reality. Atari 2600s pivotal role in the digital revolution in the home can also be considered in a global context. During the eighties, in Mexico, electronic products were hermetic; most electronic goods were acquired illegally’ (Luining). As professor Cynthia Villagómez Oviedo at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico writes in her comprehensive review of his practice, ‘although Constantini is a technology lover, his work can’t escape environmental concerns, as well as those of excessive consumerism embodied in mountains of trash in the ‘tianguis’ of second-hand stuff, evident in his work through the artist’s obsession for reusing, for classifying, for not resigning to the obsolesce of objects but instead trying to breathe life into them once again’ (‘Arcangel Constantini, artist in continuous loop’). Constantini recycled practice is inspired by a creative urge to find new uses for the electronic junk that finds its way to his Latin American metropolis. Constantini’s source material for Atari Noise was an outdated game console and its cartridges. As Constantini mentions, when these consoles were new in the 1980s, they were difficult to obtain in nations of the global South like Mexico. But later, when he made the piece, Atari’s were one of many obsolete game electronics and other consumer products discarded by Mexico’s Northern neighbor of the United States. The global South has frequently been a dumping ground for the disposal of non-biodegradable toxic plastics and electronics generated by Northern electronics consumption (‘Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground’). Viewed through the optic of these South/North relations, Atari Noise breaks down a product of the North’s slick digital entertainment consumer industries by transforming electronic junk into an interactive ludic art experience. Rather than mere apolitical, audio-visual abstraction and noise, the work is an example of a reversal of the wasteful, planned obsolescence of Northern electronics industries. hacks. Although more of an engineering challenge than a software hack, Constantini’s piece responds to a Southern gameplay conditions where game consoles at home and in game cafés are more common than are home computer games.

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Although Atari Noise can def initely be appreciated for its audio-visual qualities and abstract, colorful ‘glitch aesthetics,’ the game hardware hack can also be understood as an artistic affirmation of Southern ingenuity at recycling, repurposing, and bricolage. In 2010, Constantini completed Nanodrizas, a transformational ecological project that samples and processes water. He was inspired to make this project about a fundamental natural resource while participating in an exhibit in a former textile factory in the Mexican industrial city of Puebla that had previously contaminated the local water supply. Nanodrizas is a collection of small robots that contain sensors for taking readings of water and then transmit this environmental data in real-time. The Nanodrizas bots also disperse a biological culture into lakes and ponds to repair and improve water quality. Art critic Victoria Messi explains, ‘Among the social and economic implications of industrialization, we also experience grave environmental consequences. La Constancia (the textile factory) depended on water to move the turbines that ran its machines, but as a result of this mechanism the river is completely contaminated. Arcangel’s idea was to create a series of robots that would directly act upon the water and reverse this process.’6 Nanodrizas is not only an interesting example of art that samples, transforms, heals, and ‘recycles’ nature, but also an impressive technical and scientific accomplishment that brings to mind larger ‘citizen science’ endeavors than those usually conducted by a solo media artist like Constantini.7 Although modernization is not new to many parts of Mexico, as more nations in the global South are intensely industrialized following the model set by the global North, and also through the transfer of factories across borders via globalization, environmental consequences are taking a toll on the global South’s natural resources. Iconic examples include the rapidly disappearing rainforests and corresponding wildlife, flora and fauna in Brazil and Malaysia, and China’s heavily industrialized, contaminated 6 My translation from: http://www.elpezelectrico.com/2010/11/arcangel-constantini-ysus-nanodrizas/ (accessed March 1, 2014). ‘Entre las implicancias sociales y económicas de la industrialización encontramos graves consecuencias medioambientales. La Constancia dependía del agua para mover las turbinas que ponían en funcionamiento sus máquinas, pero como consecuencia de este mecanismo el río está completamente contaminado.La idea de Arcángel era crear una serie de robots que pudiera actuar directamente sobre el agua revirtiendo los efectos de la contaminación.’ 7 Citizen-science refers to unpaid efforts of citizens in collecting data on environmental damage, as well as at times do-it-yourself scientific projects to actively alleviate contamination and for other purposes. Citizen-science efforts often attempt to bring media and government attention to industrial misconduct.

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waterways. Nanodrizas shows a transformational creative way forward to mitigate the effects of such damaging processes both on nature and in urban contexts. By underscoring the link between local contexts and such art practices, from Beiguelman’s urban interventions within São Paulo’s advertising and graffiti-scape, to Hayashi and Caycedo’s ludic remixes of shanty towns, and Constantini’s transformational repurposings of electronics and nature, I do not mean to celebrate or romanticize the conditions of poverty and social injustice that engender such tactics and strategies. These are lessons that emerge from difficult circumstances. Nevertheless, even those in the global North can learn from how artists are adopting the survival strategies of the global South’s most marginalized, demonstrating how we can breathe life into our cities by remixing the most challenged urban habitats and healing the globe’s natural resources. Ludic recycling is an aesthetic that, at least temporarily, transforms chaotic, dense urban settings and contaminated natural environments into innovative and playful experiences of joy and beauty.

Works Cited Basualdo, Carlos. ‘Little Seeds of Colombian Cartucho.’ Interview with Cambalache Collective, aMaze cultural Lab. http://www.amaze.it/AMAZE/it/node/282 (accessed October 4, 2013). ‘Copyright and media piracy in Bolivia: US aim to reshape cultural notions of intellectual property.’ WikiLeaks Press. http://wikileaks-press.org/intellectualproperty-and-media-piracy-in-bolivia/ (accessed September 3, 2013). Daniels, Paul. ‘Kant on the Beautiful: The Interest in Disinterestedness.’ Colloquy Text Theory Critique at Monash University, 2008. D’Ignacio, Catherine a.k.a. Kanarinka. ‘Interview with Giselle Bieguelman.’ Nettime mailing list archive. 2002. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettimel-0312/msg00020.html (accessed October 1, 2012). ‘Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground.’ PBS. http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ ghana804/video/video_index.html (accessed July 11, 2013). Lozano, Catalina. ‘Recycling Bogota.’ Drainmag. http://drainmag.com/contentNOVEMBER/RELATED_ESSAYS/Recycling_Bogota.htm (accessed October 10, 2013). Luining, Peter. ‘Peter Luining Interviews Arcangel Constantini.’ navasse.net. http:// navasse.net/p2pF/constantini.html (accessed November 4, 2013). ‘Maquinitas De Juegos Para Chispa.’ MercadoLibre Website. http://listado.mercadolibre.com.mx/maquinitas-de-juegos-para-chispa (accessed November 21, 2013).

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Schleiner, Anne-Marie. ‘Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming.’ In From diversion to subversion: games, play, and twentieth-century art. Ed. by David Getsy, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. Villagomez, Cynthia. ‘Arcangel Constantini, Artist in a Continuous Loop.’ Interior Grafico. http://www.interiorgrafico.com/edicion/decima-segunda-edicionseptiembre-2012/arcangel-constantini-artist-continuous-loop (accessed June 6, 2014).

5.

The Geopolitics of Pokémon Go: Navigating Bordering Cities with a Mobile Augmented Reality Game Map Abstract In this chapter I recount an ethnographic play tour I undertook of the augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go in the cities of Tijuana and San Diego at the United States and Mexican border, with help from skilled local players. I also conduct a theoretical inquiry into the cartography of augmented reality mobile games informed by post-colonialism and geography. Although technically advanced, I posit that such games implement older, geopolitical approaches to mapmaking when streets on the game map are converted into corridors of play stations. The chapter closes with a discussion of novel and feminist cartographic strategies and cheats I encountered among Mexican players for mitigating the risks and obstacles to playing such mobile games in urban public space. Keywords: Post-colonialism, geopolitics, urban cartography, augmented reality, mobile games, feminist and intersectional cheats

In the summer of 2016, an augmented reality game inspired crowds of players to emerge from the subway and walk the gridded streets of New York, to venture into the tropical heat of the Botanic Gardens of Singapore, to circulate through tourist landmarks in Warsaw, and to stop their motorbikes alongside parks in Ho Chi Min. Within a period of two weeks, one highly motived player traveled across the entire United States to collect all North American available species of artificial Pokémon life. Ironically, at a time when seventy-five percent of biological animal species on earth are facing extinction, and even as the initial popularity of the game has subsided, Pokémon Go players continue to comb the outdoors, amassing menageries of common pigeon-like Pidgeys and Rattatas, and more rarely capturing

Schleiner, A.-M., Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728904_ch05

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highly sought after Dragonairs or holiday-themed Pikachus. Maps created by players show a diverse variety of Pokeman nests distributed around the globe in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe. North American developer Niantic’s in-game mapping implementation is key to experiencing the game. A former Google Maps researcher, John Hancke, now CEO of Niantic, initially developed the augmented reality infrastructure of Pokémon Go, displayed on the player’s mobile phone. The game map also shows the location of power-up Pokestops, combat ‘Gym’ towers, and Pokémon, the cute ‘pocket monsters’ from the Japanese Nintendo franchise, originally inspired by a hobby of Nintendo designer Satochi Tajiri, ‘who as a child had a fondness for catching insects and tadpoles near his home in suburban Tokyo’ (‘History of Pokémon’). When collecting a Pokémon (or pocket monster), players can switch from map view to an augmented reality view that merges virtual Pokémon over a live camera view of the player’s surroundings. Most of the time, players leave the game in the more efficient map view. Again leveraging digital mapping, Niantic used Google Maps’ identification tags of natural features to populate wetlands with bird and fishlike artificial creatures, parks and green areas with ‘grass animals’, and drylands and urban zones with more ‘fiery, electric and rocky’ mammal-like and reptilian Pokémon’ (‘Pokémon Go Spawn Locations’). A few years later in December of 2017, in an apparent gesture of independence from their former umbrella corporation of Google, Niantic substituted Google Maps usage in the game with OpenStreetMap (O.S.M.), a global, crowd-sourced digital map initiated in the United Kingdom. After the switch to OpenStreetMap, the basic experience of how the game is navigated and experienced remained the same for most players.1 As Dutch media scholar Sybille Lammes writes of a slightly earlier generation of mobile, augmented reality games a few years prior to the 2016 release of Pokémon Go, ‘players use maps on their mobile phones as their chief “play equipment”’ (‘The Map as Playground’ 2). Lammes distinguishes such ‘location based’ games from board games with maps because, in comparison to a non-digital board game, the player of an augmented reality game’s movement through physical space influences the game: ‘mobile map-based games blur the distinction between the physical world and game-world through an ongoing integration of real-world aspects into the game-world. The map 1 Although some players experienced erasures on the map in their neighborhoods, others found their regions represented with more fidelity in regions where OpenStreetMap’s crowd generated cartography data was more rich.

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becomes a portable game-board that constantly incorporates the physical and spatial activities of players on the move’ (‘The Map as Playground’ 2). A location-based map in Pokémon Go is then at the same time a navigational interface for the game, includes fantasy game components, and references mapped digital data that is dynamically updated when the player moves. Who exercises the cartographic power to draw the contours of the maps in this recently augmented, digital, and physical reality game space? Not only the developer, and their chosen official digital map provider, but also global players and Third Party developers participate in map building, through a variety of digital mapping activities, some developer sanctioned, and others banned as cheats. As elsewhere in this book, I am especially interested in this chapter in the experiences and activities of players in the global South. Before Niantic banned most Third Party trackers, players in nations where universal mobile data coverage costs were unaffordable, located Pokémon faster with mapping apps like Pokevision, which showed more precise locations and species of Pokelife (Tassi). Another novel mapping play cheat occurred during the first generation of Pokémon Go in Ho Chi Min City, when Vietnamese players falsely changed Google Maps annotations to rezone residential areas of the city into parks in order to spawn more creatures within their own neighborhoods, in so doing balancing a game system that advantages urban topography in affluent Northern nations with more parks and recreational areas (‘Vietnam’s Pokémon Go Players Get Yellow Card’). A Pokémon Go player in 2018 shares a video of himself alone at night at a Pokémon gym stop in an empty parking lot in the city of Tijuana, Mexico, asking wryly, ‘where are the bodies of the other players on this raid with me?’ (Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group). These disembodied players, known as ‘ghosters’, ‘voladores’ (flyers), or ‘location spoofers’, fly around the map with third party fake G.P.S. (Global Positioning System) apps from the safety of their own home or free Wifi (wireless) spot, avoiding the cost of mobile data charges. They also side-step public dangers like robbery, rape, or physical assault, even jumping virtually over national borders that might be more difficult to cross in person due to visa or citizenship barriers (‘How to Fake your GPS Location’). But spoofing is not without potential consequences. If Niantic catches a spoofer three times, they are permanently banned from the game, including the erasure of their primary Trainer character and the loss of their Pokémon collection—the labor of months, if not years spent collecting, battling, and leveling up (‘Niantic explains how and why it bans players’). While some players who play by the rules are limited, at least in physical form, to collecting Pokémon on one side of a national border, others

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make a cross-border journey daily for school or work, capturing Pokémon and engaging in combat in virtual gyms across two nations. For example, Javier, a Mexican student, documents his Pokémon adventures on his own YouTube Channel, ‘Pokebros’, crossing the border on a daily basis to attend a college in San Diego (‘Pokebros Youtube Channel’). My initial intention in this chapter was to make a similar journey across adjacent bordering cities, a play tour where differences between the navigation of game map and territory in the global South and the North could be experienced and contrasted in a relatively short time. Initially I had selected my second home city of Singapore and neighboring Johur Bahru, the city across the strait in Malaysia, to be the site of this tour, but later, after moving back to the United States, I decided to conduct my fieldwork in San Diego and Tijuana, at the site of the United States/Mexico border. After reading and interacting with the social and knowledge sharing player forums of Reddit, Facebook, and YouTube prior to my trip, and after viewing the locations of PokeStops and gyms on the Third Party Pokémon Go map app ‘Go Map’, I charted an itinerary that began in Balboa Park in San Diego, continued through downtown San Diego, followed by a ferry ride to Coronado Island. The next day I followed a trail of PokeStops leading across the border into downtown Tijuana, ending at the beach neighborhood of Playas in Mexico.

Self-Reflexive Research Ethics For the Tijuana leg of my journey, before engaging in my physical play tour, I introduced the topic of this chapter on the Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook group. I interviewed players of this group online, and also met with and played the game with a local Mexican player, who hospitably volunteered to play with me after other players from the group warned me about safety concerns for solitary players in present day Tijuana. Ethnographic fieldwork in this chapter consisted of an embodied ludic mapped play tour of the border cities, as well as digital and face-to-face interviews with ‘informants’, players with special insight into the local, border-city player community. By preparing for and conducting this embodied play tour, my own life story, and my gender identity, race, class, way of speaking, and nationality more visibly became a part of this chapter’s ludic research. I will preface this chapter with a short, self-reflexive discussion of methodology. The self-reflexive turn in more contemporary anthropology was a recognition of the field researcher’s subjectivity, power position, and cultural lense when studying a cultural ‘other’ (Said xvii). In traditional anthropology,

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the cultural other, the object of an ethnography, was usually an indigenous culture and people often directly imperiled by the economic and colonial incursions of the West, whereas the cultural filter of the anthropologist, who often hailed from a Western Eurocentric nation or background, was not acknowledged. But more recent contemporary anthropologists concede that ‘anthropology no longer speaks with automatic authority for others defined as unable to speak for themselves’ (Clifford 10). Although anthropology has become more self-reflexive, in other fields including sociology, communication research, market research, user experience design, and Human Computer Interaction, where ethnographic methods have increasingly come into vogue, the researcher’s ‘situatedness and partiality of all claims to knowledge’ is still at times obscured as disembodied, objective observation (Clifford 198). So who am I? As a woman, I am more vulnerable to physical danger when playing an augmented reality game in public. I am a lower middle-class educator and self-funded the research trip with a credit card. And I am a white ‘gringa’ (Mexican slang for white person from the United States) with the privilege of a passport that allows me to move back and forth across the border. I speak fluent (if imperfect) Spanish after having spent much of my adulthood married to a Mexican citizen, and we have a child who is bilingual—yet I am not a Mexican. My personal identity as a white, Californian writer of a book with a plan to enter a border region elicit questions of privilege that should be posed. The border, or as they say in Tijuana, the ‘linea’ or line, is between nations of unequal economic means, the site of tourism, trade, and other cross-border interactions including both legal and illegal immigration. I conducted this border city trip when racist, anti-Latin American immigrant hostility in my own nation was at a fever pitch, immigrant children were being separated from their families and detained, and the President of my nation of citizenship was making good on his campaign promise to turn the entire U.S./Mexico border into a militarized wall. Even when overt racism is not being politized by white Northerners in the direction of the Southern border, could a playful research tour into Tijuana, a border city infamous, as the song about the city by French pop singer Manu Chao goes, for ‘sex, drugs, and marijuana’, be construed as a morally questionable tour of ‘poverty porn’, of participating in the voyeuristic exposure of game players’ poverty-stricken circumstances? The term of poverty porn has been applied to guided tours of Brazilian favelas and Indian slums for wealthy, white foreigners, and also to exploitative artworks and films, for essentially whenever Southern poverty is on exhibit for Northern

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titillation and entertainment.2 Although my fieldwork map did approximate a tourist itinerary, an entertaining path through historic city neighborhoods, landmarks, parks, and waterfronts in both bordering cities, as will become apparent later in the chapter when I walk through my tour in more detail, poverty was not solely visible on the side of the border where it might be expected. In a similar vein, could this trip be characterized as a misguided, postcolonial ‘white savior’ mission? Transnational feminists have critiqued, at least in the context of feminism, when white Northern feminists impose a helpless victimhood status on Southern women and girls who exercise more agency in their life choices than Northern feminists imagine. For instance, Chandra Talpady Mohanty argues that Western feminist discourse participates in ‘the construction of “Third World women” as a homogeneous “powerless” group often located as implicit victims of particular socioeconomic systems’ (23). For some Western feminists, women in the ‘Third World countries’ they write about ‘have “needs” and problems, but few if any choices or the freedom to act’ (Mohanty 30).3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her seminal essay in response to the post-colonial historical research project of the Indian Subaltern Group, poses a similar critical question in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, of whether educated writers and researchers, whether trained as European Marxists, continental philosophers, or even when belonging to an intellectual class within colonized nations, enact ‘epistemic violence’ when they attempt to speak for less privileged and marginalized ‘subaltern’ groups, like Hindu peasants or widows (35). Spivak, in this essay, in contrast to Mohanty’s more hopeful stance, dismisses the promise of transnational feminism as an illusion for only those feminists belonging to global upper ‘comprador’ classes. Spivak contends pessimistically but also provocatively, ‘If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern peasant has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’ (83). 2 According to the authors of ‘The Ethics of Poverty Tourism’: ‘Poverty tours—actual visits as well as literary and cinematic versions—are characterized as morally controversial trips and condemned in the press as voyeuristic endeavors’ (Selinger and Outterson). 3 In the place of such patronizing and stereotyped attitudes towards the Third World, she advocates alliances that do not erase difference, prefiguring her and other feminist scholars later use of the term ‘transnational feminism’ for ‘powerful histories of resistance and revolution in daily life and as organized liberation movements’ (44). This transnational feminist orientation, of being an ally to diverse women’s and LGBTQ global struggles and resistance, is one I attempt to borrow in this chapter and elsewhere in this book for a transnational orientation towards multi-gendered players’ diverse play activities across the global South.

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Was I, by an extension of such post-colonial critiques, attempting to write about, and speak for a ‘brown subaltern’ of cross-border game players who might better be left to represent themselves, and furthermore, if I were truly an ally, would it be better to leave their unsanctioned cheats and questionably legal, game add-ons in the shadows? To a certain extent I cannot deny that my views are shaped by a background of relative privilege. But as elsewhere in this book, in this chapter I will offset my own hypothesizes with the words and actions of players on digital forums and in interviews. While I quote from these players’ freely, if their words are not shared on a public forum, I do not disclose their identities. And although I use these citations to consolidate positions, I also hope to open questions of interest to other game analysts, developers, and players stemming from both the global South and North. My embodied experience of playing the game across both border cities, both confirmed and defied a number of my own expectations about the geopolitics of cross-border, augmented reality game cartography. My disclosure of my privilege, race, class, and gender, and my questioning of my own relation as an unwitting oppressor, as a co-citizen, or as an ally to other players and inhabitants of my selected border cities, becomes part of this chapter’s inquiry. These positional questions of power arising from post-colonialism are relevant not only self-reflexively for myself, the game analyst and play tourist, but also inform this chapter’s historical and theoretical investigation into the contested cartography and territory of augmented reality games at the border. In this chapter, I will make the case that the practices of transnational mapmaking and game navigation, even when just intended for entertainment, implement geopolitical strategies of empire and territory building. Post-colonial criticism, including post-colonial theorization of imperialism and games, as well as Third Space ‘mestiza’ borderlands visions and theory, will inform this chapter’s analysis. Initially, I will take a look more generally at location-based mapping games through broad cultural, historical, and theoretical lenses. When reviewing older cartographic approaches that seem newly relevant, I will contrast historical approaches to empire and territory building, from the naval charts and colonial maps of imperial voyagers, to United States 19th-century geopolitical theory. I will also critically revisit Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri post-Marxist formulation of globalized, networked Empire, arguing that such de-territorialized, abstract, theorizations of Information Capital inadequately account for more grounded, digitally augmented reality. After this historical passage into cartography, post-colonialism, and geopolitics, and a more theoretical discussion of empire building, games,

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and maps, I will return to ground-level, walking through my cross-border fieldwork play tour at the US Mexican border. Finally, I will reflect on the embodied pleasures of the game, as well as the gendered risks that these games pose especially for solitary girls and women navigating the game from the Southern side of the border, closing with a discussion of how players use cheats and other tactical solutions to address such challenges.

The Japanese and American History of Pokémon Go’s Game Maps The sudden popularity of Pokémon Go upon its release in 2016 is often attributed to the flexibility of the Nintendo Pokémon game franchise, a ‘transmedia’ title which has moved across media from portable Gameboy devices, to hand held cards, to children’s television cartoons, and now to augmented mobile phones for all ages (‘Transmedia Storytelling’ Jenkins). In addition to familiar, compelling characters like yellow, friendly ‘Pikachus’ and charming ‘Charmander’ lizards, it is also the skillful implementation of augmented reality mobile mapping in Pokémon Go that distinguishes the game from other Pokémon incarnations. Pokémon Go is the offspring of both a Japanese franchise, and a United States augmented reality game developer whose CEO John Hanke once worked on mapping for the U.S. global communication giant, Google. So rather than a competition between East and West as discussed in the first chapter’s discussion of the early global game industry, Northern Japanese and American game and technology industry developers joined forces from the outset with Pokémon Go, turning outwards to conquer more global play terrain and global markets with this augmented reality mapping game. Niantic is overcoming formidable infrastructural obstacles worldwide in order to wrap diverse culturally and economically divergent regions within Pokémon Go’s augmented play terrain. Pokémon Go is a Freemium or Free-to-play game that was released around the world in nations of differing economic conditions, leveraging the recent f indings of other global Freemium developers discussed earlier whose games are initially free of cost but monetize from global players via advertising, add-ons like the purchase of extra Pokeballs, and the leasing of extra storage space for collected Pokémon. Upon release in 2016, Niantic’s CEO stated in an interview that the company was working to bring the game to as many countries as possible, with a goal of launching Pokémon Go in roughly 200 countries and regions (‘Pokémon Go Rollout Continues’). And since the game’s initial release, Niantic refreshes and regenerates interest in the

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game with frequent updates, the release of new generations of Pokémon, and the addition of other new features. Pokémon Go is a ‘persistent’ game with ongoing developer support and evolution. During the development of their preceding, lesser known Augmented Reality Game, Ingress, Niantic was still under the tutelage and umbrella of Google. Ingress players uploaded the location of public landmarks and tourist sites like statues, plazas, parks, businesses and other buildings to a database of geographically situated play locations in cities and towns across the globe. In Ingress, these so-called ‘Portals’ were the site of territorial battles between two futuristic factions of players who played the game on their smartphones. In Pokémon Go, Niantic converted these same portals from Ingress into Pokestops where players pick up spheres for catching pocket monsters. Players take on the role of ‘trainers’ who set their captured creatures on a path towards evolution. Trainers compete in virtual cockfighting towers known as ‘Gyms’ and the outcome of these battles not only effects individual players’ ranking but, similar to a game of capture the flag, determines whether augmented physical territory belongs to a red, blue, or yellow player faction. Henry Jenkins and Kurt Squire have recounted a brief history of the spatial history of games, recalling a pre-digital era when children played in ‘the backyard, fields and woodlands where previous generations played capture the flag’ (‘Art of Contested Spaces’).4 Such territorial spatial contests are now not only waged in computer games but also in augmented reality on mobile phones. Comparing the movement of players in mobile mapping games like Paranormal Activity Sanctuary and Own this World to the movement of pieces in older game genres like board games, Lammes writes ‘Players become pawns inscribed on the map and the game-board becomes a transformative hybrid of the map being used and the environment through which players move’ (‘The Map as Playground’ 3). Familiar then to a certain degree, location-based mapping games reference older spatial contests in both physical environments and game boards, in addition to being novel ‘augmented reality’ experiences shaped by digital dynamic mapping and mobile live photography. Written just a few years prior to the release of Pokémon Go, Lammes’ essay ‘The Map as Playground: Location based Games as Cartographical Practices’ provides a number of other helpful pointers for how to think about and define such games. We could follow her lead by summing up the features of a game like Pokémon Go as a Latourean ‘mobile 4 Game studies is a field that more often tends towards discussions of rules and mechanics rather than spatial analysis.

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mutable’, a map that can be carried around by the player on the mobile phone, but whose ‘mutable’ appearance is also always changing in response to fresh location data (‘The Map as Playground’ 5). She argues that such game maps are not merely mimetic, a one-for-one digital reflection of geographic and human territory. Location based mobile games are closer in her view to ‘navigational interfaces’, mediators to a dynamic, malleable game-space. Lammes’ designations of ‘navigational interface’ and ‘mobile mutable’, accurately foreground the player’s individual, embodied experience of navigation and mobility, or what French cultural critic Michel de Certeau describes as ‘touring’. Citing de Certeau, Lammes writes of the tension between touring and map reading as ‘the frictional relationship we encounter in daily life between going places as a subjective experience and simultaneously having to deal with abstract and depersonalized renderings of our environments such as maps’ (‘The Map as Playground’ 3). According to Lammes, location-based games ‘hybridize’ this friction between what were previously more distinct categories of touring, and collective map building. The results of these hybridized activities are also directly visible on the game map. The populace’s touring decisions and behaviors influence the visible shape of the urban topographies of ‘place’ represented on the map such as tourist landmarks, neighborhoods, and streets (Tuan 4). So in a minor addendum to Lammes’ definition of ‘location-based games’ that still remains true to her emphasis on maps, in this chapter I will refer these games as ‘location-based map games’.

Ludic Cartography the Size of an Empire ‘We have traversed more than 100,000 li of immense water spaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising in the sky, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly] as a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare’ -Chinese Admiral Zheng He, Ming Dynasty

Although there is much that is new about coded, automated, data-driven mobile location based games, older cartographic practices are also at work in a game like Pokémon Go, practices such as touring, navigation, territory marking, and empire-building. The aim of this section is to start to address the question, answered in a somewhat preliminary fashion in Lammes’ analysis with ‘mutable’ game maps that dynamically visualize player

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movement, of who exercises the power of cartography, of mapmaking, in these ludic play territories. In this section, I will make the case that a 21st-century augmented reality ‘soft’ empire is being built, not a military empire, but a networked digital empire linking together nodes on the map. Instead of European conquistadors, naval explorers, and colonialists, the conquering mapmakers are now Northern global communications corporations like Google, entrepreneur friendly Open Source Data Companies like OpenStreetMap, and augmented reality game developers like Niantic. Although this empire is digital, data-driven, and crosses national borders, it is also grounded wherever the map is populated, an empire of human-constructed places. Geographer Yi Ti Tuan usefully makes the distinction between mathematically describable space vs. human influenced place, writing ‘”Place” is on the contrary more than just a location and can be described as a location created by human experiences’ (Tuan 4). In this section I will entertain the admittedly large question of how map-building, or cartography, constructs place and ‘colonizes’ territory, beginning with a popular, playful fiction. In his one paragraph-long short story, Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges foregrounds cartography’s utility for empire building: ‘In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province’ (‘On Exactitude in Science’). The largeness of the empire’s map invades the human territory it represents, so much so that the entire population inhabiting the map becomes part of the map: ‘In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it’ (Borges). Similarly, digital maps like Google Maps and OpenStreetMaps have grown so ‘large’ that they are ever present and detectable when the user turns on a mapping application on a mobile phone. Digital maps project ubiquitous data on the earth ‘point for point’, leveraging an infrastructure of communications companies, satellites in space, cell phone towers, wireless data transmitters, and servers that store the generated data of global users and players. Although the map on the phone displays at a small screen-size, the phone becomes a map-reading interface to an embodied, human-scaled environment overlaid with mapping data. For example, when the phone buzzes each time a Pokémon lurks nearby, the phone acts as an auditory sensor to a spatial, digital dimension otherwise hidden from the naked eye. In the process of being drawn, outside of fiction, maps have reshaped territories and contributed to the making of empires over the course of

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history. Such histories also depend on who is doing the map surveying and the telling. Cartographers in the service of colonial powers like the British, the Spanish, the French, the Portuguese, and the Dutch East and West India Companies, once drew lines, shaped borders, renamed ports, and imposed European urban plans as they aggressively transformed foreign lands and cities into territories and colonies.5 By contrast, the naval charts drawn up during the naval voyages of Chinese Admiral Zheng Ho, conducted from 1405 to 1433 during the Ming dynasty, inscribe a less intrusive, but nevertheless also imperial, tributary relationship instituted between China and distant port cities throughout Southeast Asia and reaching as far as Africa,. Long scrolling charts, effectively horizontal narrative maps, depict a horizontal coastal view of trade routes sketched from the perspective of the sea and waterways.6 5 European colonial maps register a penetrating and imperial spatial relation to colonized territories, especially when a European urban plan was imprinted onto distant global port towns and cities. For example, in a collection of maps of the Dutch East India Company I viewed in 2012 in a book in the Special Collections map archive of the University of Amsterdam Library, the company’s maps illustrate how the Netherland’s canalled cities were imposed onto a variety of company-controlled colonial ports along far distant trade routes to Africa and Asia. (The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (1602-1795)) In 1619, the Dutch East India Company, often viewed as an early ‘innovator’ of later transnational corporations, razed the preexisting tropical Javanese city of Jayakarta and built canals that were soon infested with malaria inducing tropical mosquitos: ‘Founded by the VOC over the ruins of Jayakarta, Batavia was built as a Dutch colonial city, and remained under Dutch control for over three centuries. The ownership of the city was apparent in part because of Batavia’s important role in the VOC network, and additionally because aspects of the built environment consciously evoked the cities of the Dutch Republic. This occurred both through the diffusion of building forms and materials and through the imposition of Dutch city planning principles on the Southeast Asian landscape’ (Kehoe). 6 This fascinating example of ‘hidden cartography’ is on display at the Cheng Ho Cultural Museum in the port city of Melaka in Malaysia, located at a warehouse where the admiral once stored his treasures. During a visit to Malaysia in 2010, I encountered an example of hidden cartography that as a Westerner was previously unknown to me. In the ‘Cheng Ho Cultural Museum the long scrolling maps of the Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho are on display: ‘Opened in 2006, it is believed that the museum sits on the site of Guan Chang, a warehouse built by Cheng Ho’ about 600 years ago to temporarily store goods he acquired during his travels.’ Zheng He(or sometimes spelled Cheng Ho in English) was a captured Muslim eunich from Mongolia who became China’s most legendary naval mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral. His fleets of over two-hundred ships included boats of treasure, equine, supply, warships, patrol ships and water tankers, including treasure ships approximately twelve times larger than the three ships that, almost a century later, the European explorer Christopher Columbus’ travelled on to the Americas. Drawn during over the course of Zheng Ho’s seven trade expeditions from China to Southeast Asia and Africa, these Ming dynasty naval charts were documents that functioned as both explorational travelogues to bring back home to the emperor, and also as

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The maps of nations with imperial tendencies inscribe relations to outlying, distant territories, often drawn up during naval exploration, trade, and conquest over preexisting civilizations. Even as arguably, violent imperial and intrusive colonialism belong to a bygone era of competitive European world dominion of the spice market, slave labor, and diverse peoples, natural resources, and lands, the harmful legacy of colonialism is far from over. Racial, environmental, cultural, economic implications and inequalities persist. Post-colonialism remains an unfinished project, some of whose critics lament a post-modern ‘amnesia’ even among post-colonial theorists ‘about the incompleteness of the project of decolonization in the erstwhile colonial world’ (Kumar). Colonial spatial logic, the imperial, overarching relation of conqueror to territory, has persisted in many computer game genres. Jenkins and Squire write: ‘Strategy games, such as Civilization or Age of Empires, transform the entire globe into their game board, casting players as the rulers of expanding nation-states, locked in a struggle for global domination’ (‘Art of Contested Spaces’). Indian game scholar Souvik Mukherjee argues persuasively that computer games like Minecraft, Warcraft, and D.O.T.A. (Defense of the Ancients) perpetuate an imperial logic of expansionist territorialism. He writes, ‘The basic aim of the game is to see what is hidden in the dark areas. Send a spy or diplomat (or a priest as the case may be) into uncharted territory or better, send ships and armies to take possession, often after giving battle. Once a region is occupied, the map is redrawn and carries your nation’s color’ (Mukherjee 34). Similarly, in Pokémon Go, and in Niantic’s prior game Ingress, players claim territory for color-marked teams. Mukherjee contends that colonizing territory on the game map may even further disseminate colonialist thinking, writing, ‘It is eminently possible to play on the maps that perpetuate the logic of colonialism, rather than challenging it’ (34). In addition to being a game of mock territorial battles for color coded teams, a game like Pokémon Go maps key geopolitical nodes in the emergent augmented reality terrain that can be leveraged for future control. Mukherjee’s observations on the geopolitical aspirations of surveying shed light on how earlier, more intrusive colonial mapping apparatuses once claimed colonial territory. He writes: ‘The imperialist machinery of expansionist geopolitics functions through cartography and surveying. navigational devices. The maps do inscribe a particular power relation of the naval explorer to foreign peoples and places, identifying key sea ports and villages for exacting tribute, trade, and supplies, with star patterns for navigation. But in these travel charts, the shape of interior land remains undefined, uncolonized and unmapped beyond the horizon.

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Sir George Everest, as the surveyor general of India and the head of the great Trigonometrical Survey of 1931, was instrumental in computing the height of Mount Everest to which he lent his name. Not surprisingly, the name of the Indian mathematician, Radhanath Sikdar, who, as part of the survey, made the actual calculation, is virtually unknown to the world’ (Mukherjee 33). Despite the essential contributions of an Indian mathematician, it is the British general who in an imperial gesture, appends a British name to the world’s highest mountain. A similar appropriative, geopolitical logic, although with less violent implications than British colonialism, can be observed operating within the game of Pokémon Go. Despite the contributions of global players to filling in and tagging areas of digital maps like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, it is the game developer Niantic who claims ownership of the ludic stations of the map, including the prerogative to repurpose them for newer games, like when Niantic converted portals from their previous game, Ingress, into new Pokestops and gyms in Pokémon Go.7 Geopolitical theory also explains how macro control of a larger geographic territory, can be expanded from the control of smaller key points. Here it is illuminating to return to the birth of the discipline of geopolitics. In the 19th century, United States naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan established the principles of geopolitics, identifying strategic control nodes for sea power like chokepoints, ports, canals, and coal stations. For instance, in a book section developed from his lectures at the West Point Naval Academy in the United States, titled ‘Links in the chain of Sea Power: production, shipping, colonies’, he writes of the key import of ports for maintaining sea power: ‘As a nation, with its unarmed and armed shipping, launches forth from its own shores, the need is soon felt of points upon which the ships can rely for peaceful trading, for refuge and supplies’ (Mahan 28). If we look for such geopolitical points within Pokémon Go, ports are analogous to Gyms and Pokestops, often located at popular spots on the map like real life rest and sustenance areas, parks, and other recreation areas, café’s, and businesses. And trails of Pokestops are analogous to coal stations where players load up on Pokeballs, while walking through city streets and parks. The purpose of a geopolitical control point like a seaport is variable, in Mahan’s analysis potentially fluxuating from an offensive or defensive military function for colonizers, to a trade purpose. In the case of Pokémon Go, control points alternate between being useful within the 7 Although OpenStreetMap is open source and allegedly anyone can make use of its data freely.

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game’s own telic system of goals and play experiences, and also being of import for other functions and experiences at that particular location on the map, like a park or café. These points, or ‘stations’ when chained together add up to a larger system of control. Mahan writes, ‘In the most active days of colonizing [..] arose the demand for stations along the road, like the Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena, and Mauritius, not primarily for trade, but for defense and war; the demand for the possession of posts like Gibraltar, Malta, Louisburg, at the entrance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,—posts whose value was chiefly strategic, though not necessarily wholly so’ (28). According to Mahan, more ‘exceptional’ ports like New York served key roles during both wartime and during times of more peaceful trade: ‘Colonies and colonial posts were sometimes commercial, sometimes military in their character; and it was exceptional that the same position was equally important in both points of view, as New York was’ (28). Likewise, converted from a tourist spot, to an Ingress portal, to a Pokestop, to a stopover of a yet to be designed game, virtual game stations are strategic points of a new augmented reality territory whose functions are evolving. The militarily strategic field that Mahan founded has since evolved from the strategic analysis of links between geography and naval power, to the geopolitical analysis of oil power, to ‘metageopolitical’ analysis’s of ‘soft power’, namely territorial dominion via commerce and trade (Nye). In Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, Harvard-based global affairs analyst Joseph Nye explains geopolitical soft power as ‘when one country gets other countries to want what it wants-what might be called co-optive or soft power in contrast with the hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants’ (31). When U.S. corporations like the Seattle-based café franchise Starbucks teamed up with Niantic to post Gyms and Pokestops in cafés across the United States, or when MacDonald’s Japan shared the cost of implementing new Pokestops and gyms in all their storefronts upon Pokémon Go’s initial release, play stations are further capitalized even outside of the game’s interior Free-to-play monetization system. Ludic stations on the map leverage the existent infrastructure of corporate globalization. Through such business franchise and playful marketing alliances, Northern corporations are strategically leveraging their presence in augmented reality. So far this territory’s relatively ‘soft’ peacetime purpose is Free-to-play gaming entertainment and/or to sell coffee and hamburgers. Is the Pokestop then comparable to a port along a more Ming Dynasty style imperial chain of tributary trade routes, or could it be leveraged for more intrusive European style ‘colonial’ control? We cannot precisely predict the purpose of strategic

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points on the digital play map, but they are potentially valuable stations of newly augmented, ludic territory. Geopolitical cartography in the service of playful globalization borrows from older colonial strategies, such as the imperial control of seaports and other strategic geopolitical points on the map, what are effectively territorial approaches. Although digital, automated, and networked, the grounded territoriality of location-based map games contrasts to the abstraction of Hardt and Negri’s influential, ‘de-territorialized’ theorization of ‘Empire’, of an amorphous Capitalist ‘machine’ without a locatable head (33). In their ambitious account of corporate globalization written at the onset of the Information Age, these post-Marxist scholars theorized a ‘passage’ from the sovereignty of individual nation-states to a de-centered rise of networked capital and international corporations, writing; ‘In contrast to imperialism, empire establishes no central territorial boundaries and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and de-territorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open expanding frontiers’ (Hardt and Negri xii). In making the case that a post-modern Empire was a novel deterritorialized evolution of Capital distinct from older world orders, Hardt and Negri were critical of what they viewed as the outdated post-colonialist perspective of Edward Said and other post-colonial scholars, writing ‘Empire is not a weak echo of modern imperialism but a fundamentally new form of rule’ (146). They write that in the old imperial order, ‘nearly all the world’s territories could be parceled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colors: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so forth’ (xii). In their view, newer corporate and technological imperialism contrast to such allegedly outdated, territorial approaches: ‘the legitimation of the imperial machine is born in part of the communication industries, that is of the transformation of the new mode of production into a machine’ (33). Others have similarly associated globalization with the growth of the Internet, and have likewise postulated that the Information Age deemphasizes place and territory. For example in 2001, Spanish communications researcher Manuel Castells writes: ‘the space of flows […] links up distant locales around shared functions and meanings on the basis of electronic circuits and fast transportation corridors, while isolating and subduing the logic of experience embodied in the space of places’ (171). But as the Information Age shifts into more a more grounded, mobile phase, augmented reality and digital mapping again foreground the experience of place and location, even if for players the experience of place becomes an instrumental, telic movement through ludic stations of supply, territorial combat, and Pokémon collection.

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As Google Maps, and later OpenStreetMaps, fuses with Augmented Reality entertainment, digital cartography relinks the abstract realm of networked data to landed geography, eliciting questions of territorial dominance for the ‘colonizers’ of the resulting mixed or augmented reality. French military and technology theorist Paul Virilio wrote presciently in 1997 that today’s infosphere is ‘gearing up to rule tomorrow’s biosphere’ (84). As I have explored elsewhere in a chapter dedicated to analyzing augmented reality games, ‘Toys of Biopolis’, such games institute a control relation and generate data that could be exploited by ‘biocontrollers’ originating from both the public and private sector, by both government entities and corporations (Player’s Power to Change the Game 114). Who ultimately profits from the player’s position showing on the map? Digital maps, like many other data driven applications and software, feed off of the valuable data that users generate, what Tim Cook, North American Apple CEO, in a speech to a European regulatory body, referred to as the ‘data industrial complex’ when ‘companies know you better than you may know yourself’ (Wolf). Similarly, French theorist Gilles Deleuze postulates that citizens of the ‘control society’ are controlled by their data: ‘Individuals have become dividuals, and masses, samples data market or banks (‘Postscript for the Society of Control’ 5). Skilled augmented reality cartographers are wrapping the globe in a map that geopolitically converts populated regions into profitable and playable experiences, a soft empire reliant on digital, data-driven technologies.8

Resistant and Post-Colonial Play Even if we limit the scope of inquiry to the game industry and to game players, how absolute is Niantic’s and Northern based digital mapping companies’ rule over these augmented play territories? Although players and users shape cartography, at times, like surveyors of mountains, what they mark and discover is owned and exploited by greater hegemonic forces. To return to geopolitical metaphors, fishing villages that are strategically located are transformed into key port cities of colonial powers. Preexisting global landmarks, tourist sites, and cafés become Pokestops. 8 This is why I find Lammes’ empowering view of the player as cartographer or mapmaker overstated when she suggests that just the act of playing a location-based map game amounts to cartography, when ‘the actual physical positioning of the player becomes an intrinsic part of the game-board’ (‘The Map as Playground’ 3).

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On other occasions, player-made maps disrupt the game developer and map company’s hold over the game map. For instance, after OpenStreetMap (O.S.M.) replaced Google Maps in 2017, OpenStreetMaps cartographers, like the previously mentioned Vietnamese Pokémon Go players at the game’s initiation, falsely tagged the map in order to generate more Pokémon nests. An announcement on OpenStreetMap’s blog states: During the last year the OpenStreetMap community has seen an influx of mappers coming from Pokémon Go, as the hugely popular mobile game was found to be using OSM data to influence ‘spawn points’ within the game. New mappers were welcomed and we shared some tips with them. We got a few people addicted to mapping, new places were mapped and help received a lot of questions. The flurry of new map editing activity also had some unfortunate side-effects, as a few new mappers tried to game the system by adding things that did not exist or by assigning the wrong tags (‘Open Street Map Blog’).

The post writer then goes on to threaten fake player-cartographers with punitive actions to be orchestrated through a closer alliance between Niantic and OpenStreetMaps writing; ‘Niantic is in the process of adjusting their algorithms so that areas with good map edits get more spawn points, while areas where players try to game the system get penalized’ (‘Open Street Map Blog’). Ultimately though, this announcement turns out to be a farcical ‘April Fool’s Day’ scare tactics. For the moment such actions, either rewarding or punitive, are beyond the scope of Niantic and OpenStreetMap’s enforcement. I am especially interested in tension or ‘pain points’ between Northern developers, mapmakers, and Southern players.9 Players outside the global North are playing games in ways that address their needs, and these sometimes unsanctioned, resistant tactics push back at Northern developers’ hold over their ludic experiences. Resistance is at times too strong a word. Players do not always make a distinct, binary choice between either resistance or compliance when navigating the ‘hegemonic’ territory of a game.10 For instance, in ‘Hybridity, Reflexivity and Mapping’, Sybille Lammes and 9 A pain point is a user experience design term for user frustration. 10 I use hegemony here to refer in the more cultural Gramscian sense to the game’s fantasy universe and play mechanics that is instituted through play, for cultural constructions that contribute to general notions of ‘common sense’, as well as for the explicit hold of the game’s monetization system. In the case of location based map games, I refer to territorial hegemony as well.

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Stephanie de Smale reflect on their ambivalent experience of playing a game of colonial conquest, Civilization, in a their own allegedly post-colonial fashion, arguing that ‘Civilization as a postcolonial game in which the player occupies a ‘third space’ in which ambivalent meanings are created (Bhabha, 1995)’ (‘Hybridity, Reflexivity and Mapping’). In Lammes and de Smale ‘collective ethnography’ which appears to be primarily about their own experience of the game, they posit that in Civilization, ‘Play is in essence an activity of hybridisation’ thereby defeating strict demarcations between hegemonies and counter-hegemonies’ (‘Hybridity, Reflexivity and Mapping’). Their ambivalent approach to the game’s hegemony, or ideological hold over players, borrows from Indian born, post-colonial scholar Hohmi Bhabha’s concept of a hybridized, ‘third space’. Bhabha’s theorized a third space approach to post-colonial subjectivity across a number of temporal, linguistic, and literary examples ranging from Mexican-American Chicano poets, to post-colonial theorists and writers located in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. For instance, when discussing the experience of a ‘coloured South African’ character in a Nadine Gordimer short story who was born of both white and black parents during the racial segregation of apartheid, Bhabha writes of ‘a hybridity, a difference “within” of a subject who inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality’ (19). In the context of a game session of Pokémon Go, rather than outright cheating or false tagging of the game map, a ‘third space’, post-colonial experience of the game might be the navigation of both the hegemonic overview map controlled by the North American game developer and the Japanese Intellectual Property owner, combined or ‘hybridized’ with a local player’s embodied experience of touring city streets in her postcolonial nation. Chicana American poet Gloria Anzaldúa borderlands, ‘mestiza’ approach to feminism offers further inspiration for developing a post-colonial perspective on playing location-based map games in border cities. Mestiza, and Mestizo or Mestizx, refers to the descendants of both Spanish conquistadors, colonialists, and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Influenced by her childhood growing up at the border between Mexico and Texas, Anzaldúa further complicated the mixed post-colonial Spanish and Indigenous heritage of mestizos with her borderlands, feminist concept of ‘mestiza consciousness’, of the ‘borderland’ oppositional relation between Mexico vs. the United States: ‘we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between two mortal combatants somewhat healed so that we are on both shores at once, and at once see through the serpent and the eagle’s eyes’ (78-80). Rather than dissolving into hybridity and ambivalence,

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her metaphors, drawn from the animal life of a desert landscape, retain a predator-prey power relationship between the eagle who swoops down and grabs the serpent, as well as the borderland relation between bordering powerful and weaker neighboring nations, relations that are internalized in mestiza, post-colonial ‘consciousness’. From a feminist perspective within the field of scientific epistimology, Donna Haraway similarly makes an argument for ‘situated knowledge’, for partial perspectives viewed from bodies located on the ground, writing: ‘Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object’ (583). Although wary of ‘the serious danger of romanticizing or appropriating the vision of the less powerful’, according to Haraway, it is especially the oppressed, or ‘subjugated’ who ‘have a decent chance to be on to the god trick and all its dazzling—and therefore blinding illuminations’ (584). She associates the vision of this ‘god trick’ with satellites and other omnificent overviewing ‘capitalist’ and ‘colonialist’ technologies, an association we might also extend to the overarching game map. In this regard Haraway’s split in vision is similar to Anzaldua’s, also in its recognition of a power differential implicit in differing, but interconnected ways of seeing. But Anzaldua’s metaphor of an eagle flying above earthbound prey is a more explicit in its portrayal of a predatory power relation between modes of sight that are not easily divided between conquerors and conquered. A mestiza subject alternates between the split perspectives of both. Anzaldúa ’s metaphors also more explicitly articulate these power positions from disparate spatial viewpoints from the ground and above that are useful for conceiving the different modes of touring and map reading enacted within location-based map games. Players view the game through the eyes of the overarching eagle, from the overview perspective of the map, a map primarily drawn by Northerners who may descend at any time and ban cheaters and external map application users. And the game is at the same time navigated from the ground, by embodied, touring players who must navigate challenges like data loss, traffic, mobile phone robbery, and physical threats that adversely impact women, LGBQT and other marginalized players even more than men. And within the game’s virtual, ‘third space’ combat Gyms, Pokémon players shift through several serpentine and animal shapes, learning the special moves of each animal. They celebrate those rare occasions, when a relatively weaker animal’s moves, are the correct foil against a more powerful opponent with a higher C.P. (combat point) score. Snakes also bite.

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– A List of Serpentine Pokémon: 1. Dunsparce (Land Snake Pokémon), 2. Ekans (Snake Pokémon) 3. Onix (Rock Snake Pokémon) 4. a Steelix (Iron Snake Pokémon) 5. Servine/Snivy (Grass Snake Pokémon) 6. Seviper (Fang Snake Pokémon)

A Game Mapping Tour of Bordering Cities After a more abstract discussion of the power of cartography, the geopolitics of augmented reality games, and imagining serpentine, mestiza play, I will now narrate a more direct experience of playing territories, moving from a more theoretical eagle’s eye of the map, to the snake’s perspective from the ground. I began writing this chapter while living in Singapore as a foreign game design university instructor for almost a decade, with the intention of conducting a virtual tour of Singapore, and its neighboring border city across the Strait of Johor, Johur Bahru in Malaysia. The initial focus of this journey was to document the experience of navigating the augmented features of these two cities play terrains. My initial interest was in how cartographical experiences of the same game differ when crossing the border from North to South, across the border from a wealthy city to one in a relatively less affluent, less safe, and less privileged nation. My methodological approach to this tour drew from digital ethnography and game ethnography, research approaches that rely, in addition to observation and analysis, on interactive participation and interviews with ‘insider’ game player informants who have dedicated what often amount to months and even years to a game. My privileged identity as a Northerner, as an outsider, a tourist, a university researcher, a white expatriate in British post-colonial territory in Southeast Asia, and, then as a white middle-class American, a ‘gringa’ in a Spanish speaking Mexican city, also should be acknowledged. Intersectionally, my gender, my age, in addition to my race and my nationality, and even my personal history and connection to border, become part of retelling the navigation of border cities via an augmented reality game. The two bordering cities I initially selected in Southeast Asia share both cultural similarities and are distinguished by economic and cultural differences. Malaysia obtained independence from the United Kingdom in 1952 and only fairly recently in 1965 did Singapore split off from Malaysia, declaring independence as a nation state. Each city also has its own is

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unique geographic characteristics and religious makeup—Malaysia is primarily Muslim, and secondly Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu among other denominations. Singapore is primarily ethically Chinese and increasingly Christian, but also substantially Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and non-denominational. In a relatively short time, Singapore has achieved remarkable economic success as an independent island city state, while neighboring larger Malaysia, although also modernized, struggles with more poverty, crime, slums, and unemployment. The bordering cities of Singapore and Johur Bahru share many common cultural components like Malay language and cuisine, but they also exhibit some of the glaring contrasts of global North and South. For instance, stories of the robbery of mobile phones in Johur Bahru are often spoken of among Singaporeans, whose experience of theft in their own nation is so minimal that students save their seat at university cafeterias with their laptops. Before actually implementing a proper version of my Southeast Asian border city play tour, I moved back across the globe back to California in the United States. I then decided to conduct my augmented reality game tour at a quite different border, one familiar to me from having grown up in California and having spent a few months living in Tijuana, Mexico over a decade earlier when I was newly married to a Mexican citizen and working on a different game project. In preparation for my ethnographic tour, I read San Diego player forums on the knowledge sharing platform Reddit, watched player uploaded videos in San Diego and Tijuana on YouTube, and joined the Facebook Pokémon Go Tijuana player group. I introduced my border city book chapter project to this Spanish-speaking group, and asked about players’ experiences of playing the game in Tijuana. I also asked for advice on where players would recommend I play, and if they experienced obstacles to playing the game in their city. My role and identity in this fieldwork as a white, female Northern researcher –with nevertheless a certain degree of cultural familiarity with Tijuana and San Diego—was from the outset disclosed. A number of players on the Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group responded to my questions, including offering conflicting advice about whether it was even safe for women and girls to play in present day Tijuana. Like much of Mexico, since the nation’s openly acknowledged, failed militant ‘war against drugs’ initiated by the right-wing P.A.N. party in 2006, narcotic gang violence and other criminal activity have increased in the city (Miroff). The border city’s once prevalent tourism is lately more limited to ‘medical tourists’, United States citizens seeking inexpensive healthcare and pharmaceuticals. While one local father shared in response to my questions that he often plays in downtown Tijuana and at the beach with his six-year old

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son, another male player warned: ‘In the center (downtown area of Tijuana) it is dangerous to play and also in the suburbs. On top of being distracted, there are too many assaults these days—for women it is very dangerous. Its advisable to play in a group during the day and it’s a shame that one needs to walk in fear in one’s own city’ (Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group). A woman player then qualified this advice to a certain degree writing ‘I always go around by myself downtown but only during the day and just for while’ (Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group). Other players recommended coming out on ‘Community Day’, Niantic’s once a month event instituted since 2017 when extra bonuses, like ‘shiny’ Pokémon and holiday themes appear, but a Community Day did not coincide with the date of my visit. According to a player whom I later interviewed in person, on Community Day in Tijuana, Mexican families emerge onto Revolution Street in the center, at Morelos park, and the beach neighborhood to play, including mothers and daughters, and its ‘very beautiful’ (Interview with M.). The caution conveyed in these players’ warnings about playing in the city alone, especially for female players, echoed what I had observed on YouTube videos posted by players of mostly groups of young men standing together playing in public. The only video I had found made by a woman was taken from the back of a taxi while she played the game around the city.11 Fortunately, a player from the forum volunteered to meet me and walk around the city and play the game with me. She also invited several of her other female player friends that she tagged in the thread, so my safety concerns for that portion of my solitary fieldwork trip were allayed. Based on this and other preparatory research I conducted prior to my trip, including consulting the San Diego Pokémon Go Reddit group, and Poke Go Map, a Third Party map showing Pokestops and nests in the region, I worked out a loose itinerary of trails of Pokestops to follow through San Diego and across the border into Tijuana over the course of two days. Stages of planning for this trip were similar to the practical and pleasurable considerations of preparing a tourist adventure. I needed to take into account factors such as safe and affordable transportation, reserving a hotel, whether I would have phone data, places to recharge my phone and to rest and eat, arranging to meet my Mexican Pokémon Go ‘guide’ and play companion, and bringing the necessary documents for crossing into a foreign nation. I also was looking forward to the potential capture of rare Pokémon 11 Players still sometimes play and drive anyway on both sides of the border, as evident from advice on the San Diego Reddit forum about a good road to drive through and stock up on Pokeballs in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

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12. PokeStops(cubes) and Gyms (pyramids) at the United States/Mexican Border, 2018; Application Screenshot.

after taking a ferry from downtown San Diego’s to Coronado Island where I had never been, and returning, after many years, to Tijuana’s historic center, to a border region that had been a previous site of inspiration for an earlier independent computer game project. On a Thursday in October of 2018 I flew early in the morning into San Diego, took the airport bus into downtown San Diego and located, after some difficulty crossing over freeways, my chosen starting point of my tour, a Pokestop at an aging Chess Club building at the southwest corner of Balboa Park. San Diego’s largest central park includes a number of museums and a world-famous zoo. And according to a Pokémon Go thread on Reddit, Balboa park was a good place to load up on PokeBalls. I captured a Pinsir, a fiercely toothed bug creature, and then left it behind to help defend a gym for my team (blue), while being overtaken by middle aged white women joggers in brand name exercise gear and headphones jogging in from a nearby upscale neighborhood of high-rise apartments. But as I passed fenced off, abandoned looking pony ride near a homeless encampment, and walked by a parking lot full of more well off white homeless people bringing back paper cups of morning coffee to their parked vans, I realized that confirming a blatant economic contrast between global North and South at the border would be difficult to maintain, especially in light of the homelessness crisis in California. I left the park and continued walking along 6th avenue into the increasingly dense and lively streets of downtown San Diego. As I continued to collect Pokeballs, Pokémon, and fought in one gym, I did not knowingly happen on other players, (and those paused on the street with their phones whom

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I asked denied they were playing). Also, at some points I was not sure how safe it was to stay and find out, like when I walked past a group of teenage boys with a loud boombox, who were wearing cut off jean shorts revealing intricate LatinX tattoos covering their legs. I stopped in a coffee house across the street from a hotel service workers’ strike to charge my phone and took the opportunity to send Pokémon gifts that I had just picked up in San Diego to my in-game ‘friends’ from the Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group. These gifts, a feature only added in 2017, share the landmarks of the location of where each gift was captured to the recipient, allowing players to interact with each other in a limited way via the game across national boundaries and large distances. After side-stepping tourists who were zipping along the sidewalk on rental scooters, I walked to the waterfront and took a ferry to Coronado island, the site of a San Diego military base, beachfront parks, and an upscale residential neighborhood. I captured some rare grass Pokémon on Coronado Island that were new to my collection, and I recharged my phone battery in Tartine, a French dessert café. The customers at the other tables were upper-class Spanish-speaking women whose accents reminded me of the wealthy students whom I had once taught for a semester at a private university in Mexico City over a decade ago. I spent the night in a hotel on the U.S. side near the border in San Ysidro, after arranging to meet a player the next morning who I was assuming from her Facebook photo, a family photo of a young woman with two parents, was a young adult woman. I was able to pick up a few Pokeballs at the stop near a McDonald’s just before walking across the border or ‘linea’ but then I lost data connectivity. I continued on foot into the Tijuana side of the border station and waited for the player, whom I shall call M., who I had prearranged to meet. After a few missed calls in both directions, we agreed to meet at ‘el Arco’, the iconic Arch sculpture at the beginning of Revolution Ave, the main promenade in downtown Tijuana. I walked downtown the way I remembered walking many times over a decade ago, on a bridge over the highway crossing, through a pedestrian mall of touristy souvenir shops, and on a pedestrian bridge over the river. This was an uncanny experience because the sunny streets, crowded during my previous stay in the city with ‘Gringo’ families, retirees, and soldiers in search of diversion, were now empty.12 When I arrived at the meeting point, my data came back on. According to the Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group, spotty data connectivity is 12 Another border crossing station has been added even closer to the center of the city which also contributed to the decrease in foot traffic.

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problem for many players on the Mexican side the border, especially those with United States based phone plans like mine. With data, I realized that a yellow gym was located at the Revolution Avenue arch guarded by a large and powerful MewTwo, a fearsome cat-like creature. Now there were more people, mostly locals. M. arrived and she was not the young woman as I was expecting, and was much closer to my age. Given my own interest in games I probably should have been less surprised—I realized she must have been the mother from her Facebook profile photo of a family. We walked together down the historic Revolution Ave, an avenue of bars, clubs and shops, and passed the Caesar Hotel once frequented by U.S. movie stars during the 1929’s prohibition area, the historic location of the invention of the Caesar Salad. This downtown avenue was now also dotted with Pokestops, which I was able to see over M.’s shoulder on her phone because I had lost data again. We stopped in a café, and while drinking ‘café’s de olla’, coffee boiled with cinnamon, our conversation that began as a loosely structured interview about playing Pokémon Go in Tijuana and then diverged into other topics like family, work, and the expense of chocolate for baking. M. is a mother of six, a grandmother, a mobile street vendor of jewelry and keychains, a baker of intricate colorful desserts for parties, as shown on her phone photographs, and a Level 34 Pokémon Go player. She played Pokémon Go together with her youngest daughter up until her daughter was twelve years old. She and her daughter would go together to the beach neighborhood at night to play, accompanying her husband on his way to work his night shift as a taxi driver. Otherwise she mostly plays alone and is more of a Pokémon collector and trainer than a fighter because she says she doesn’t get enough practice with combat by herself. She doesn’t like the shooting games like Fortnite that her daughter now plays together with her boyfriend due to the violence. M. had some additional spare time to dedicate to this conversation and play tour so we decided to continue with my planned itinerary and play at the popular Pokémon Go beach neighborhood of Playas, M.’s customary Pokemon playground, a beachfront neighborhood of seafood restaurants and expensive, beachfront apartments and houses. We took a collective taxi (combi) up through the hills along the border to the beach. The neighborhood had been renovated since my previous time living in Tijuana, with an oceanfront park with large flower sculptures, adjacent to the border fence with the United States, and was dotted with many Pokestops and Gyms. We stopped for lunch at a popular seafood restaurant and I captured what for me was a highly desirable Pikachu, who floated just above my fish ceviche tostada.

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At this point, looking through my phone over the ocean waves, I begin to feel like I am on vacation with a friend. We discussed some of the shared challenges of being mothers of sons. M. shared an inspirational story of how she removed her young adult son from a conflict by interjecting herself into his social life and creatively peacemaking. And here I imagined challenges I may face when my son grows into a teenager in my own nation, a nation of mass shootings where weapons are currently legal and easily accessible. M. fears that even the newly elected Mexican president, Lopez Obrador, cannot fix the rampant corruption and crime in Mexico. A year ago, M. was the victim of a violent robbery on a street near her home in an interior neighborhood of Tijuana. I level up to 20! We return to gamer talk, the sharing of what United States game researcher Mia Consalvo refers to as ‘game capital’, and M., who is a far ahead of me in the game, teaches me a new trick of capturing a Pokémon with circular, tapping gestures (Cheating 4). I mention some of the rare Pokémon I captured the day before in San Diego and M. says regretfully that she wished she could go there to catch them but she let her tourist visa expire and cannot at the moment afford the fees to get a new one. I ask if it is possible for us to trade Pokémon or whether she could go there via GPS location spoofing, the fake map traveling apps that Niantic attempts to ban from the game. She responds ‘yo no vuelo’, I don’t fly, but that other players in Tijuana do fly over the border to capture Pokémon in San Diego. I am not surprised, given the principles M. seems to display elsewhere in her life, that she does not fly. At the same time, I sense a lack of righteous condemnation on her part for those who break such rules, possibly the same matter of factness with which she pointed out, during our collective bus ride to the beach, to a spot where migrants still jump over the fence into the United States. We take the collective taxi back to the center, stopping at a mall with East Asian-Mexican vendors where she purchases jewelry and blue Pokémon keychains to resell later in the neighborhood near her house, and then she walks me to a collective taxi heading back to the border crossing station. Later, we stay in communication, and she generously sends me several photographs she took for me of an October 2018 community day event in Morelos Park in Tijuana.

Flying Over the Risks of Embodied Navigation From the perspective on the ground during the play tour, safety issues loomed large on both sides of the border. Unlike a computer game, playing

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a location-based map game is an embodied experience of navigating public space. As Lammes observes of other augmented reality games that use the phone-screen as a navigational interface to a dynamic digitally mapped territory, players are akin to ‘navigators at sea’, ‘always aware of the perilous and shifting connections between map and territory’ (‘The map as playground’ 7). Navigation via the game map follows trails of PokeStops and the Virtual Battle Arenas of Gyms through uncertain territory, where perils which could arise from both in-game elements like battling Pokemon, to more risky physical obstacles like car and foot traffic, assailants, thieves, and other unpredictable dangers. When the game detects that the mobile phone is moving as fast as a car, Niantic warns players not to play while driving, in an attempt to dissuade players from the danger of mobile phone use while driving. In Vietnam, state officials considered a total censure of the game after motor-bike accidents spiked during the initial the release of the game (‘Vietnam’s Pokémon Go Players Get Yellow Card’). As the more extreme weather conditions of climate change worsen, including the dangers of floods, hurricanes and drought-stricken forest fires, Pokémon Go at startup also checks local weather conditions and provides players with warnings about the risk of even stepping outdoors. Safety concerns also threaten some embodied players more than others, depending on whose ‘reality’ is being augmented. For example, the African American maker of the Facebook Page ‘Pokémon No’ argues that an African American male player seen aimlessly walking in circles in a predominantly white North American suburb could be viewed as a criminal threat by trigger-happy white neighbors and police. Are these new leisure time activities only for those who enjoy a certain racial, economic, or gender privilege? As my San Diego portion of my trip made evident, as I walked past isolated homeless encampments in the park and teenage groups of boys in downtown San Diego, playing within the global North as a white person is not an absolute guarantee of public security. A global South is also within the global North, evident in economic disparities of race and class. And playing the game in front of a hungry, homeless person who is probably neither able to afford the mobile data necessary to play nor is in a ludic frame of mind seems a cruel form of entertainment. Playing an augmented reality game can also pose a physical safety risk for women at night or even in the daytime, for children, or for any other player whose body becomes vulnerable while distractedly wandering with a smart phone in public. Although location-based map games encourage healthy physical exercise and movement compared to older, more static entertainment platforms, they also pose a variety of graver risks to players beyond

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combat with a Raticade or with a more fierce Pokemon. Both developers and players develop tactics to minimize such risks, but physical and even mortal danger increases in nations and neighborhoods where poverty and criminality are more prevalent and where even using a smartphone visibly could be seen as an invitation to theft. These new embodied perils arising with augmented reality games contrast to the relative safety of the home entertainment system or even in comparison to the public game café, which in Chapter Two, was referenced as a potential public risk for women in a study of Taiwanese game cafés. Some players bypass the risks of embodiment by never leaving their home and virtually touring the map with third party ‘ghosting’ or ‘flying’ apps. These players include women players like A. who elects for a less sanctioned, but physically safer way to navigate the map, and who proposes legitimizing and even monetizing the practice, speculating: ‘It would be interesting to study the cost of poke money and why many people opt for flying to see if Niantic would stop shadow banning us and so regular players would stop hating us’ (‘Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group’).13 She also defends the practice of flying by pointing out that in Tijuana embodied players often lose their data signal. Southern players face greater technical, economic, and infrastructural barriers to playing augmented reality games than do Northern players. A.’s post to the group on flying also openly acknowledges the ‘hate’ some more rule-abiding local players harbor against flyers. But interestingly, the Tijuana Pokémon Go player community seems to have overcome this sentiment to a certain degree, integrating flyers into their play practices along with embodied players. Player-drawn excursion maps include friendly advice directly addressed to flyers, such as the directions included in an invitation for a play tour beginning at the park ‘High Tides’: ‘The route we will follow is marked on the map- the idea is the same as last time, to move rapidly so as to take advantage of lucky eggs. For flyers, a list of the sequence of our route is below- the times cannot be exactly defined since it depends on when we get there’ (‘Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group’).14 13 My translation of: Sera interesante ver el costo de las poke monedas y el porque mucha gente opta por volar para ver si Niantic nos deja de dar shadow banned y los que se dicen legales nos dejan de odiar P.D. Tambien la internet de mierda que varia depende el lugar y en algunos lugares de plano se pierde la señal y pierdes tu pase para una incursión. Esto pasa mas en Tijuana (Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group). 14 My translation of: ‘Buenas tardes entrenadores, para estar preparados el sábado con Gengar, la cita es en el parque “Olas altas” a las 10:45 AM, la ruta que seguiremos está marcada en el mapa,

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Although this is a welcoming means to include those who cannot afford data connectivity, and to include gender-diverse players who don’t wish to risk physical danger or harassment on public excursions, what it also shows is a two-tiered set of players, a first class of those whose mostly male bodies are privileged with movement through public ludic space, and a second class of marginal ghosts who are constantly at risk of being banned and erased. On the other hand, limitations are also affordances, GPS flyers and spoofers are freer to roam all corners of the map on both sides of the border, capturing rare Pokémon. Serpents grows wings, evolving into dragons.

Mobile Map Play at the Border Groups of players amass suddenly at popular Pokémon nodes, especially on monthly Community Days, a temporary, playful transformation of the urban, social fabric of even tough border cities and towns. Although there is much that is new about such data-driven, augmented reality gaming in the game of Pokémon Go, older practices like navigation, touring, map-reading, cartography, and ludic contests over territory are practiced in these increasingly popular location-based map games. The evolving shape of the ludic map, although digital and data-driven, is grounded in places. As a global communications infrastructure of digital mapping converges with gaming, Northern mapping services and game developers are strategically poised to profit from these globally extent play territories. In this chapter I have made the case that geopolitical logic is key to the wrapping of this playful map around the globe. Colonizers once violently converted key urban nodes like sea ports into strategic stations of ‘sea power’. Through a much softer global reterritorialization, urban concentrations are converted into game stations, which may then be repurposed for future games, or for strategic, street level business alliances with other globalized ventures and restaurant chains, as Niantic has already forged between Pokémon Go and a few existing franchises. Downtown streets, tourist spots, and recreational zones are transformed into trails of power up stations. Towering virtual combat arenas emerge, where players cycle through frequently refreshed and evolving fantasy animal types in rapid succession, as if to fill the void from the actual biological species rapidly la idea es la misma de la vez pasada, movernos rápido para acabar y aprovechar los huevitos de la suerte. Para los voladores, la lista en orden de nuestra ruta está ahí abajo, los tiempos no se podrán definir ya que entraremos en cuanto lleguemos’ (Pokémon Go Tijuana Facebook Group).

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going extinct around the earth. Data connectivity permitting, this ludic architecture of towering Gyms and Pokestops alters the augmented skyline of global cities, a dimension of playful reality detectable on the ground visually, and audibly, with a well-supported, persistent Free-to-play application on the player’s mobile phone. I walked along a trail of Pokestops, following a road of play stations across the border from a city in the global North into a city in the global South, with the intent of contrasting differences on the ground from the perspective of a player and a mobile phone user. In Tijuana, when I met and toured the city together with a local player, I discovered both unexpected commonalities of experience of age and gender shared between two middle-aged mothergamers, and also reminders of ethnographic difference. We had both enjoyed the intergenerational experience of parents playing together with their children. Like my son and I, M. had learned how to play together with her daughter. Other players in Tijuana shared similar intergenerational gaming experiences in response to my questions on the Pokemon Go Facebook group, although some players felt that such family play was safer only on monthly Community Days, when entire families take to the streets and parks of Tijuana to play Pokémon Go. My embodied tour was not a clear confirmation of greater security and ease of play on the Northern side of the border in contrast to greater peril in the public play space of a Southern city. Precarity, increasing homelessness, and poverty are present within the global North, observable in the homeless encampments growing in Balboa Park, the main city park of San Diego, the recreational terrain that is allegedly ideal geographically for generating playful Pokestops. Meanwhile my play tour of Tijuana was attractive and enjoyable, following popular player routes through a historic, if rundown downtown neighborhood to a beautiful beach park. Still, as investigation of online player groups from both cities indicated even prior to my trip, Southern players, at least in the Mexican border city of Tijuana, grapple with more pressing public safety concerns, as well as infrastructural hurdles like data connectivity. These challenges are also affordances. In Tijuana, for greater safety, outside of Community Days, mostly young men play together in groups, and for them the game is a communal, social experience. Women, LGBQT, and poorer players in Tijuana have developed strategies to overcome the risks of embodied play in public, including traveling across the game map virtually. Although players’ participation in the game may leave only a temporary mark on the primary official game map, the developer is not the only one who exercise the power of cartography, of map building in and outside the

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game. Players build and use external Third Party mapping apps, and map spoofing apps. They also quickly and effectively draw their own maps, often by hand, when organizing group tours. To borrow from Anzaldúa ‘new mestiza’ borderlands viewpoints, players see from both the overview perspective of the eagle who views the map from above, and the serpent who navigates from the street below. For some players like M., mother of six and grandmother, the game became a habitual ‘third space’ getaway on a moonlit beach with her youngest daughter just before her husband’s night taxi shift starts. She also continues to play the game by herself in short runs while conducting work-related errands in downtown Tijuana. Others like A., grow ghostly wings, flying with banned 3rd party map spoofing apps in search of fierce and cute Japanese pocket monster characters on both sides of the border. In the process, players become skilled navigators and cartographers, and even float weightlessly over the North’s walls and fences.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Borges, Jorge. ‘On Exactitude in Science.’ In A Universal History of Infamy. Translated by Norman Thomas de Giovanni. Penguin Books, 1975. Castells, Manuel. ‘Informationalism and the Network Society’, Epilogue in The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen, Random House, 2001. Clifford, James. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press, 1986. Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games. M.I.T., 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control Gilles Deleuze.’ October, Vol. 59, Winter 1992, pp. 3-7. https://cidadeinseguranca.f iles.wordpress. com/2012/02/deleuze_control.pdf (accessed January 10, 2020). Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn 1988, pp. 575-599. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066 (accessed January 10, 2020). Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ‘History of Pokémon.’ In Bulbapedia, the Community-driven Pokémon Encyclopedia. https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/History_of_Pok%C3%A9mon (accessed December 28, 2018).

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‘How to Fake your GPS Location.’ https://mobile-ar.reality.news/how-to/fakeyour-gps-location-movement-cheat-pok%C3%A9mon-go-android-0172215/ (accessed November 2018). Jenkins, Henry and Squire, Kurt. ‘The Art of Contested Spaces.’ Ludologica Weblog on Ludology and Game Research, October 7, 2002. http://konzack.blogspot. com/2002/10/henry-jenkins-kurt-squire-art-of.html (accessed January 10, 2020). Jenkins, Henry. ‘Transmedia Storytelling.’ MIT Technology Review, January 15, 2003. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401760/transmedia-storytelling/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Jin, Dal Yong. Korea’s Online Gaming Empire. M.I.T., 2010. Kehoe, Marsely L., ‘Dutch Batavia: Exposing the Hierarchy of the Dutch Colonial City.’ Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, Vol. 7.1, Winter 2015. https://jhna. org/articles/dutch-batavia-exposing-hierarchy-dutch-colonial-city/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Lammes, Sybille and de Smale, Stephanie. ‘Hybridity, Reflexivity and Mapping: A Collaborative Ethnography of Post-Colonial Gameplay.’ Special Collections: PostColonial Perspectives in Game Studies, Open Library of the Humanties. https:// olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.290/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Lammes, Sybille, ‘The Map as Playground: Location-based Games as Cartographical Practices.’ Proceedings of D.I.G.R.A Think Design Play, Volume 6, January 2011. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/the-map-as-playgroundlocationbased-games-as-cartographical-practices/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783. Little Brown and Company, Twelfth Edition, originally published 1890. Mirroff, Nick and Booth, William. ‘Mexico’s Drug War is at a Stalemate as Calderon’s Presidency Ends.’ The Washington Post, November 26, 2011. https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/calderon-finishes-his-six-year-drugwar-at-stalemate/2012/11/26/82c90a94-31eb-11e2-92f0-496af208bf23_story.html (accessed January 10, 2020). Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press, 2003. Mukherjee, Souvik. Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ‘Niantic Explains Why and How it Bans Players.’ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/20/ niantic-explains-how-and-why-it-bans-players-in-Pokémon-go/. Nye, Joseph. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Basic Books, 1990. ‘Open Street Map Blog.’ https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2018/04/01/nianticopenstreetmap-collaboration/ (accessed January 10, 2020).

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‘PokeBros YouTube Channel.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBxIC_vfQb4 (accessed November 2018). ‘Pokémon Go Rollout Continues.’ https://9to5mac.com/2016/07/16/Pokémon-goeuropean-rollout-continues (accessed November 2014). ‘Pokemon Go Spawn Locations.’ https://rankedboost.com/pokemon-go/catchinglocations/ (accessed January 9, 2019). Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1978. Selinger, Evan and Outterson, Kevin. ‘The Ethics of Poverty Tourism.’ Boston University of Law Working Paper. June 2, 2009. http://www.bu.edu/law/workingpapersarchive/documents/selingereouttersonk06-02-09.pdf (accessed January 10, 2020). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. Columbia University Press, 2010. Tassi, Paul. ‘The Pokevision Team Now Has 12 Million Players Across Zombs.io And Spinz.io In A Month.’ Forbes, July 13, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ insertcoin/2017/07/13/the-pokevision-team-now-has-12-million-players-acrosszombs-io-and-spinz-io-in-a-month/#3f73e1971fd0 (accessed January 9, 2019). Tuan, Yi Ti,Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, 1977. ‘Vietnam’s Pokémon Go Players Get Yellow Card.’ http://asia.nikkei.com/Life-Arts/ Life/Vietnam-s-Pokémon-Go-players-get-yellow-card (accessed January 10, 2016). Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Translated by Julie Rose. Verso, 1997. Wolf, Bryan M. ‘Tim Cook Decries “Data Industrial Complex”, pushes for privacy legislation in the U.S.’ October 24, 2018. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/10/24/ tim-cook-decries-data-industrial-complex/ (accessed January 10, 2020).

Section Three From Global to Local Game Development

6. The Absence of the Oppressor: Games for Change and Californian Happiness Engineers Abstract Games for Change have been designed to support various causes and charities for global players and publics located far from a game designer’s country of origin. The intent of this chapter is to contrast Northern and Southern approaches to designing such transnational games for inspiring action, life improvement, and political change. In this chapter I discuss the Games for Change of primarily two designers, Jane McGonigal’s ambitious environmental and entrepreneurial games and gamification literature advocating self-motivational approaches for playful transformation. I also review a more oppositional model proposed a few decades ago by prolific Games for Change designer, Uruguayan, Gonzalo Frasca, situating his ‘Videogames of the Oppressed’ within a tradition of Latin American resistance movements. Keywords: Games for Change, Oppression, Wellness Games, motivational design, gamification

Games for Change is a 21st-century movement of activist and critical game making that has at times also been referred to as activist games, ecological games, charity games, and life improvement gamification. Although Games for Change centers have opened in France, South Korea, and Brazil, some of the movement’s most outspoken and renowned proponents and designers are located in the United States, in the Californian techno-futurist enclaves of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. For instance, San Jose-based game writer Ken Eklund is best known for his alternative reality game, World Without Oil, co-developed with San Franciscan game designer Jane McGonigal. Players from San Francisco to Singapore played World Without

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Oil for the span of a month, changing their energy consumption habits in their daily lives while immersed in a near-future scenario where the world’s oil resources have dried up. As lead designer, McGonigal has also designed an inspiring number of other alternative reality games for corporations and organizations ranging from Microsoft to the World Bank. In a well-circulated TED talk, she calls for the ambitious application of gaming to ‘solve problems such as world hunger’ (‘Gaming can make a better world’). One of her repeated aspirations is for a game designer to win the Nobel Peace prize. In her 2011 bestselling book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, McGonigal writes a well-structured and engaging analysis of game design principles and positive psychology motivational techniques for life improvement. Also in Reality is Broken, McGonigal cites the World Health Organization’s designation of depression as a global ‘pandemic’ as proof that depression is one of the most urgent global crises of our time. But one might posit that such an urgent call for ‘happiness engineering’, a term she herself coins in the book, applies a self-help styled inward focus exclusively applicable to inhabitants of more affluent regions of the world. The problems she discusses gamifying in her book are arguably luxurious First World ailments, such as flying phobia, accident recovery, fitness, and as mentioned, depression. Happiness engineering does not seem to address the concerns of those who are enmeshed in crises like famine or war—or who might stand to benefit from the efforts of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Yet interestingly, McGonigal also applies similar motivational gamif ication techniques toward alleviating Third World poverty and hardship in Evoke, a game she developed as lead designer.1 Evoke is targeted at South African players and consists of missions that address ‘food security, energy, water security, disaster relief, poverty pandemic, education, and human rights’ (‘How to Play’ Evoke). By contrast, how does a prolific game designer originating from the global South approach life-changing games, games that aim to do more than just entertain, to engender positive change? In 2001, a decade before the Games for Change movement took off, at a time when few activist or Games for Change (even his own), had been made yet, Uruguayan game designer Gonzalo Frasca drew up a proposal for the Videogames of the 1 I use the term gamification in a broader sense for adding game-like features to applications beyond entertainment, as opposed to gamification understood in a more narrow sense as reward point systems for tracking customer loyalty and similar marketing applications.

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Oppressed: Videogames as a Means for Critical Thinking and Debate, drawing on Brazilian Augusto Boal’s interactive theater techniques. Frasca’s treatise provides a useful theoretical framework written from a Latin American and Southern perspective, albeit while enrolled in a Masters study program in the United States at Georgia Tech University, against which to contrast more recent Northern designers’ approaches to Games for Change. While sketching the schematics of his hypothetical, transformational games, Frasca stresses a Third World perspective embedded in Boal’s participatory theatrical experiments in the Theatre of the Oppressed, influenced by Latin American Marxist populist pedagogy, evident in theatrical scenarios such as a factory worker stepping on the stage to role-play a confrontation with an exploitative boss. Boal later abandons this more oppositional or ‘agonistic’ political approach to theatre in his ‘Rainbow of Desire’ workshops that he later developed to deal with ‘First World psychological problems’ when Boal expatriated to Europe (Mouffe). Thus Frasca’s game design-oriented discussion of the individualistic, psychological focus of Boal’s Rainbow of Desire as a response to the primary concerns of the inhabitants of more affluent regions prefigures McGonigal’s application of ‘positive psychology’ self-empowerment theories to game design. With these North/South contrasts in mind, in this chapter I will turn a critical eye to how these game designers and thinkers address the following questions: What types of problems and issues should Games for Change address? Is the motivational engineering approach—where real life ‘problems’ are re-contextualized as game challenges to be surpassed with good game design, even a helpful or an appropriate angle? Alternately, as proposed by Frasca, rather than direct problem solving, should Games for Change’s primary aim be to foster open-ended critical play, dialogue, and awareness building? Furthermore, should Games for Change critique the ‘oppressors’ of groups and persons? Or is even representing oppression in such games a self-victimizing, disempowering, outdated approach to activism? Instead, should these games focus more ‘positively’ on actualizing players’ agency and potential for self-betterment? I will start off by reviewing a few of the key ideas presented in Frasca’s 2001 thesis. For the purpose of my discussion, I will source material from Chapter Six of his thesis where Frasca reviews Boal’s experimental participatory theater and its primary pedagogical influences, and Chapter Seven, where he redeploys Boal’s approach to drafting hypothetical examples of ‘the video games of the oppressed’ (55-75). According to Frasca, North American Seymour Papert’s constructivist pedagogical theory was one of Boal’s primary influences on the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ or ‘TO’

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developed in the 1950s. Constructivists like Papert argued that a student’s learning process is activated through the student’s mental model making and categorizations or ‘schemas’ (Ackermann). Constructivists promote this learner-empowering approach to education, over a more traditional understanding of the student as an empty vessel to be f illed with the instructor’s information. Frasca also emphasizes Boal’s reliance on a Latin American branch of constructivism led by Boal’s friend and Brazilian compatriot Paulo Freire. Friere’s Marxist-influenced constructivism invited broader changes in students’ living conditions beyond the classroom. Frasca writes, ‘It is not an accident that Freire worked in one of the poorest regions of the continent—the Brazilian nordeste—and Papert in Massachusetts. Freire’s pedagogy is better suited to deal with social and personal issues because the students that he dealt with had not reached the minimum acceptable conditions for a decent living’ (59). Frasca opines that Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and its ‘offspring’, Boal’s ‘Theater of the Oppressed’, offer him ‘a more robust set of tools for [his] video game design purposes’ than North American Papert’s constructivism, with its more limited scope of revising power relations between students and teachers within the classroom (60). Brazilian social movements and the social consciousness for empowering the poor and disadvantaged, the conscientizacao that was shared among Latin American educational and literacy constructivists like Freire, are therefore an important Southern regional influence on Frasca’s conceptualization of Games for Change, allowing him to conceive of games that impact life situations outside of academia. Frasca continues by outlining Boal’s most popular interactive theater formats in his constructivist-inspired ‘Theater of the Oppressed’. In the so-called Forum Theater, ‘a short play that represents an oppressive situation is enacted and then spect-actors take turns and replace the protagonist in order to show how they think that the oppression could be broken’ (62). Frasca conducts a detailed discussion of Boal’s theatrical techniques, but what is of import for our discussion is to understand how Frasca adapts Boal’s oppressive situations to his proposed Games for Change model. Frasca proposes simulating oppressive situations in games and providing players with tools that allow them to customize and change their roles within these simulations. For instance, he proposes hypothetical variations on the commercial game The Sims (Maxis), which he calls ‘The Sims of the Oppressed’ (84). Players would run Sims of the Oppressed scenarios such as the parents of a high school student refusing to accept that their son is gay, a husband who abuses his wife, and an alcoholic mother who mistreats her

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children (82).2 In addition to improvising and evolving different coping and exit strategies in response to these ‘oppressive’ family situations, players would be able to customize the characters of the oppressors to match their particular situations, for instance, adding a stressful job to the alcoholic mother’s life scenario. Thus, although these situations are abusive and disempowering, the player is invited to actively experiment with resisting virtual ‘oppressions’ that match their own life scenarios, much like spectactors were invited to step onto the stage in Boal’s interactive theater skits. Similar to Boal, Frasca proposes using such games as a platform for critical play and discussions that might later indirectly contribute to social or personal change, rather than applying gameplay as a direct problem solver intended to yield concrete solutions. Frasca repeatedly underscores his affinity to Boal’s critical stance at one remove away from reality, writing: ‘The ultimate objective of FT [Forum Theater] [..] is to foster critical discussions among the participants. […] It does not show ‘what happened’ but rather ‘what could happen’: it is a theater that stresses the possibility of change’ (65). Again emphasizing the critical and discursive function of his proposed games over direct reality engineering, Frasca writes: ‘The goal of op-games is not to be able to represent a concrete solution to the participant’s problem, but rather to simulate (usually metaphorically or metonymically) it and use it as an ‘object to think and discuss with’ (101). He writes, ‘the social problems that FT deals with have not, unlike video game puzzles, binary solutions. They are rather complex problems where many factors and agents interact. Still, sometimes it is possible that the participants may accept a proposed solution as appropriate’ (67). Frasca, although open to helpful solutions resulting from gameplay, is wary of reducing complex social situations and serious real-life conflicts to problems to be solved like game puzzles or engineering challenges. In this sense, Frasca’s critical and open-ended dialogic approach contrasts strongly with McGonigal’s telic, recipe-like solutions for ‘fixing reality’ via game design in her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. What are McGonigal’s proposed fixes? The first part of the book reads as a synthesis of what could comprise an expert course in game design for any genre and application, whether for an activist 2 Most of Frasca’s ‘oppressive’ examples are at the scale of family. Perhaps he believes these to be more universal ‘oppressions’ that would also speak to apolitical North Americans where he was conducting his master’s degree. Boal’s original oppressive theatrical situations were not limited to the family, and included scenarios such as workers resisting exploitative factory managers, although his Forum Theater typically also represented small scale scenarios with a limited set of roles.

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game, a self-betterment game, or a commercial game of entertainment. Drawing on foundational game definitions, McGonigal states that games have goals, rules, and feedback systems that keep players informed about their progress, and that games are voluntarily played (21). Games also make simple tasks more difficult by imposing unnecessary obstacles as challenges and this gamic feature of challenging obstacles becomes McGonigal’s first ‘reality fix,’ useful for inspiring intense engagement in gameful activities (23).3 Achieving the right balance between challenge and achievement immerses the player in psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s much-lauded state of ‘flow,’ inspiring an intense state of game-specific mental concentration (74). The avid gamer is motivated to continue playing, even when they initially fail at the game’s objective, eventually reaching a state of ‘fiero’ a feeling of great triumph over adversity when (or if) they achieve an ‘epic win’ (22). Recent behavioral studies in positive psychology provide McGonigal with her second reality fix of ‘emotional activation’ for generating optimism (31). Positive psychology, in contrast to the scope of psychiatry or psychoanalysis, aims at improving general happiness rather than correcting pathological mental illnesses. McGonigal writes that: ‘positive psychologists have been acquiring a formidable body of knowledge about how our brains and bodies work to help us achieve well-being and life satisfaction’ (37). She underscores a natural affinity between positive psychology and game design, ‘Game designers and developers are actively transforming what was once an intuitive art of optimizing human experience into an applied science’ (38). This allegedly fruitful relationship between game design and positive psychology inspires a number of McGonigal’s further reality fixes including an ‘epic scale’ of social engagement in grand collective struggles, ‘whole-hearted participation’ and ‘meaningful rewards when we need them most’ (148). These f ixes for ‘reality’ are largely applied to motivating the self, or multiple selves, to improve mental health, phobias, and fitness, at least in the initial stages of the book. Examples she discusses include Nike + gamified jogging shoes, A Day in the Cloud, a game to counteract flying phobia available on Virgin America flights, and SuperBetter, a health recovery game McGonigal developed herself to aid her recovery from a concussion (159; 153). In SuperBetter, the player crafts a custom superhero for him or herself, setting their own goals and missions to motivate themself to strive to overcome an injury or phobia, while also ‘crowd-sourcing’ to draw in other players to provide a supportive social network. 3 She further addresses workplace dissatisfaction with her Fix #3 of ‘satisfying work with clear missions.’

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McGonigal differentiates her approach from self-help manuals, arguing that games are more than books that are read but then not followed through into action. But despite the real-life behavioral modifications that can ensue via play of these life betterment games, their personal scale and wellness orientation brings to mind not only self-help literature but also interactive group therapy workshops and retreats especially common in California and other New Age enclaves. Her emphasis on interactive happiness engineering also recall Frasca’s references to Boal’s apolitical Rainbow of Desire workshops, developed during the 1960s for more affluent participants while Boal was living in Paris: ‘While TO [Theater of the Oppressed] dealt with social forms of oppression, when Boal was forced into his European exile, he discovered that his techniques were harder to adapt to the more bourgeois problems of people from rich countries. This led to the creation of the Rainbow of Desire, a set of techniques specifically designed to deal with more personal and psychological problems’ (62). And it is perhaps no accident that McGonigal’s preferred game genre for gamification, alternative reality games, is also closely allied with theater. In both alternative reality games and interactive group therapy skits, players and spect-actors cross the fourth wall between the game scenario and skit scenario, role-playing the outcomes of improvements to their personal lives. When Boal relocated from the global South to the global North, from Brazil to France, his interactive theater shifted its focus from economic oppression to personal transformation. So what happened when, conversely, Californian designer and gamification wellness guru McGonigal was signed on as lead designer of Evoke, an alternative reality game project primarily intended for players living in South Africa? Can happiness engineering be redeployed toward the crises that loom especially large on the horizon in the global South, such as scarcity of resources like water, poverty, and the aftereffects of violent conflict and war? Evoke: A Crash Course in Changing the World challenges players, referred to as ‘agents,’ to address urgent problems across ten missions including Water Scarcity, Food Security, the Power of Women, the Future of Money, Urban Resilience, and Crisis Networking. According to the World Bank’s website for the game, the aim is to encourage players to devise innovative entrepreneurial solutions for these problems: ‘EVOKE was created by The World Bank Institute as a direct response to African demands—namely, universities’ request to develop ideas to engage students in real-world problems and to develop capacities for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Developing nations face steep challenges, and resources in these areas can be limited. These challenges demand the most robust and innovative of solutions’ (‘The Lesson of Listening’).

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Did the game achieve its objective in spurring players to develop innovative, entrepreneurial solutions to Africa’s problems? In McGonigal’s post-mortem notes on the Evoke website, she reflects that the game could be improved by encouraging players to move beyond social networking (the game’s first mission) to instead focus more on individual business plans and entrepreneurship: ‘At the end of the day, we’re not trying to build a global communications network. We’re trying to create small hubs of innovation, individual enterprises that are strengthened by their global connectivity.’ McGonigal’s solution for better meeting this entrepreneurial objective is a game design fix of tracking and rewarding innovation: ‘Solution: I think this is a copy and design solution. We need to sharpen our copy and re-configure our metrics to focus more on tracking the progress toward social innovation and less on social networking’ (‘Evoke Blog’). Let’s more closely examine the game’s entrepreneurial objective for which McGonigal would like to design better motivation. This objective was originally set by the project’s sponsor, the World Bank, but McGonigal seems to endorse it without question. For Games for Change makers stemming from the tech-friendly, start-up atmosphere of Northern California, such an entrepreneurial approach might seem quite natural—but are local entrepreneurship hubs the best response or ‘solution’ to water, energy, and food crises in the global South? In a forceful critique of McGonigal and other gamification advocates, North American professor and serious games journalist Heather Chaplin writes: ‘Indeed, gamification is an allegedly populist idea that actually benefits corporate interests over those of ordinary people. It’s strange that its advocates don’t seem to understand there’s a difference’ (Chaplin). The World Bank’s approach to crises in Africa, in accordance with its alleged mission in the global South of fostering economic development, is via business solutions, and this neoliberal agenda aligns very well with the individual empowerment rhetoric implicit in McGonigal’s style of Games for Change. Such an approach seems to assume that if only the populations in these Southern countries could be motivated to take care of their own problems with smart entrepreneurial ideas, activated as what the game refers to as ‘agents,’ then these problems could be solved. Although recognizing and encouraging the inhabitants of the global South to come up with innovative solutions using their own agency in the face of hardship and crisis is laudable, the danger of framing such entrepreneurial social engineering as the prime and unquestioned remedy is that it erases other local and global actors from culpability who substantially contribute to the conditions that produce poverty, hunger, and environmental damage in the region. For instance, present day and near-future water scarcity (one

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of Evoke’s concerns) is influenced by French and other European water corporations like Veolia, who, with aid from pro-privatization schemes directly funded by the World Bank itself, are privately purchasing public water rights in a vast number of Latin American and African countries (Lake). As Veronica Lake writes, ‘The big water corporations—Suez, Vivendi (now Veolia), and RWE—have been able to use the World Bank and the IMF extensively to fund their operations in the global South. When Suez took over the water operation in Buenos Aires, all but $30 million of the $1 billion required for investment in new infrastructure was provided for by the World Bank’ (‘Privatizing Water, The New World War’). As has been recognized across much of the global South, as well as among globalization critics like Lake, despite the World Bank’s alleged mission to modernize and improve conditions in Third World nations, the bank’s loan schemes often work toward the financial advantage of corporations and nations situated in the global North. Similarly, we could point a finger at other Northern global actors whose dealings actively exploit and contribute to hardship in the global South, such as the monopolistic hold that the United States-based Monsanto corporation has on genetically modified seeds that are used for corn and other crops in Latin America, or the European and North American weapons dealers who benefit from violent ethnic conflict in the Sudan. In the wake of globalization, Northern neoliberal and post-colonial interests, including the World Bank, are influential in the global South, complicating and at times actively contributing to ‘local’ problems. The carbon pollution of the global North increasingly adversely impacts populations in the global South via climate change and the weather extremes of droughts and hurricanes. Although the rhetoric of socialism, of ‘consciousness-raising and oppression’ seems to belong to a bygone era of the 1960s, as Frasca himself apologizes for in his thesis on the Videogames of the Oppressed, there are still such entities and persons who ‘oppress’. To only direct Games for Change toward self-empowerment of the poor, while never speaking of oppressors, renders such oppression invisible, neither advancing understanding, nor producing viable solutions to these problematic situations. Frasca’s model for Games for Change is therefore more appropriate for addressing situations with complex global roots and actors than McGonigal’s gamification scenarios, which are entirely dependent on self-empowerment. Like McGonigal’s alternative reality play scenarios, his simulation games in the Videogames of the Oppressed promote agency through play, encouraging players to actively role-play possible solutions and outcomes. But Frasca’s Latin American-influenced counter-hegemonic model also

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promotes criticality and resistance, underscoring that there are actually persons and entities inhabiting the roles of oppressors, whether at the scale of the family unit or larger. For instance, his influential anti-war game, September 12, (designed in 2002), highlights the oppressive role of North American military drones and missile power over a small Middle Eastern village. Interestingly, in this game, unlike Frasca’s hypothetical Videogames of the Oppressed scenarios, the player is cast in the role of the oppressor, the missile or drone launcher, rather than the oppressed villager. The player is culpable in promoting further violence and terrorism when they try but fail to eliminate terrorists, and instead convert injured villagers into new terrorists, thereby simulating an escalation of violence triggered by North American-led military interventions in the Middle East. 4 I am convinced that motivational gamification and happiness engineering does have appropriate applications. Eklund and McGonigal’s World Without Oil is an inspirational example of a crowd-sourcing game that inspired life-changing modifications to players’ own energy consumption habits. Alternative reality scenarios combined with gamic motivations like feedback and rewards can be highly effective means of real-life behavior modification for improving wellness, health, and fitness, and have been well-utilized in a number of games, including British game designer Naomi Alderman’s mobile jogging game, Run Zombies, Run! and University of Utah’s PE Interactive, a computer game designed to help children diagnosed with cancer (Yusef). Yet the risk of generalizing a self-help gamification approach for most applications of Games for Change is not only that it patches a reductive, engineering-style mentality of problem-fixes onto complex societal and environmental issues and situations—when at times a more nuanced approach such as Frasca’s resistance testing, may be more appropriate. More deceptively, an exclusive focus on the positive motivation of players via game design erases the negative role that powerful oppressors play globally, from globalized corporations that profit from exploitation, to oppressors at a more local scale in the workplace or family. In the absence of criticality, gamification scenarios aimed toward resolving crises like food and water scarcity, promote a happy fiction similar to some philosophies of self-help, which assume that all problems stem exclusively from lazy individual passivity (or in Web 2 times a person’s social network’s inactivity), and therefore can be resolved through skillfully implemented, motivational 4 For further detailed analysis of this game see my discussion of activist game approaches in the third chapter of The Player’s Power to Change the Game.

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game design—in the case of Evoke, game design that triggers entrepreneurship. If motiving such activity was all it took to fix reality, talented game designers would truly be superheroes and heroines.

Works Cited Ackermann, Edith. ‘Piaget’s Constructivism, Papert’s Constructionism: What’s the Difference?’ Learning Media. M.I.T, 2002. http://learning.media.mit.edu/content/ publications/EA.Piaget%20_%20Papert.pdf (accessed September 20, 2013). Chaplin, Heather. ‘Gamif ication: Ditching Reality for a Game Isn’t as Fun as It Sounds.’ Slate Magazine, March 29, 2011. http://www.slate.com/articles/ technology/gaming/2011/03/i_dont_want_to_be_a_superhero.html (accessed September 4, 2013). Evoke Blog. http://evokenet.org (Last accessed December 2013). ‘Flextronics: A part of everyday life.’ PRO MEXICO. http://negocios.promexico.gob. mx/english/09-2011/art03.html (accessed December 2, 2013). Frasca, Gonzalo. ‘Videogames of the Oppressed – Thesis by Gonzalo Frasca.’ Georgia Tech University. Ludology. 2001. http://www.ludology.org/articles/thesis/ (accessed September 15, 2013). ‘How to Play.’ Urgent Evoke. http://www.urgentevoke.com/page/how-to-play (accessed December 4, 2013). Lake, Veronica. ‘Privatizing Water, The New World War.’ Solidarity, ATC 108, January-February 2004. http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/469 (accessed October 12, 2013). McGonigal, Jane. ‘Gaming Can Make a Better World.’ TED Talks, 2010. http://www. ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world (accessed October 30, 2013). McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Penguin, 2011. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso, 2013. Yusef, Omar. ‘PE Hopes to Strengthen the Resolve of Cancer Patients.’ Trendhunter Lifestyle. September 29, 2011. https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/ pe-interactive (accessed January 10, 2020). ‘The Lesson of Listening.’ Urgent Evoke. http://blog.urgentevoke.net/page/8/ (accessed December 4, 2013).

7.

Game Studios in Southeast Asia: From Outsourced to Culturally Customized Games Abstract In this chapter I conduct a regional tour of Southeast Asian game studios. Nations like Thailand have adopted primarily an outsourcing approach to game development, in the hopes of building up skillsets that could later be applied to locally developed games. Other developers located in Malaysia have focused on developing educational games, relying on a Tiger economic formula of cooperative state, industry, and educational alliances. Paradoxically, nations that are relatively more impoverished like Indonesia and Cambodia have developed original games drawn from their own local cultural fabric. Intended as a potential source of South to South game innovation. this chapter also investigates when developers opt to globalize for publics abroad, and when they design for more local players. Keywords: Southeast Asia, Game Industry, globalization, culture, casual and mobile game development

Unlike the mobile games played in Brazil discussed in Chapter Three, whose publishers and developers mostly hail from the global North, a growing number of nations in Southeast Asia are home to local game studios and independent developers. As Taiwanese, Hong Kong based media scholar Peichi Chung writes of such smaller game companies in her analysis of Singaporean and South Korean game industries, ‘In creative industries, government, small media firms and creative talent become emerging actors in the new media production system’ (60). To what degree do these developers incorporate their own cultures and values into their productions? Do they primarily make these games for their own countrypersons, or are they intended to be globalized products for global players? And how does the

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so-called ‘Asian Tiger’ style economics prevalent in much of Southeast Asia, with an emphasis on export industries and educational infrastructure, impact such game production? While embarking on a tour of Southeast Asian game studios, this chapter will shed light on contextual and regional differences between Southeast Asian nations in game development, from Thai studios that mostly do outsourcing and conversions for Northern game developers, to the surprising quantity of game studios located in Indonesia’s smaller cities, producing original, casual games in the nation’s official Bahasa language. I will begin in Thailand, one of the region’s more industrialized nations since the Asian Tiger and ‘Tiger-Cub’ years of rapid modernization in the 1980s and early 1990s. As has been recognized in retrospect, the formula for the Asian Tigers, occurring in nations like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore that were able to avoid excessive ‘extractive’, corrupt governance, is to have ‘maintained a strong macroeconomic strategy, implemented strong educational policy, lowered birth rates, and on average narrowed the income gap between rich and poor’ (Elbert). An allegedly defining feature of Asian tiger economics is a reliance on exports. As economist Noah Elbot writes, ‘Most importantly, all of these nations implemented adapted strategies that focused on creating comparative advantage in export industries, called export-oriented industrialization (EOI).’ An Asian game industry report from 2011 attributed 50 percent of game market share in Thailand to Thai companies located in the capital city of Bangkok, including Debuz, Digicrafts, Digitopolis Game Studio, and Sanuk Software (‘Thai Online Market to Reach US$132M by 2014’). Bangkok is a city that seems to loom off the pages of a science fiction comic book, sporting an elevated metro train system that snakes through the metropolis’s skyscrapers, some of which were abandoned midway through construction and left to decay when the Asian stock market crashed in 1997. Despite this snag in Thailand’s economic plans, and the 2014 military coup d’etat of the former democracy, development rolls on, including in digital and electronic industries like game development. What kind of games do these Bangkok based studios produce? Actually, most game studios in Bangkok do not make games. For instance, Digicrafts, one of the allegedly Thai companies mentioned in the game industry report, is in the business of localization, converting Japanese online role-playing games into the Thai language, while most other components remain the same as the original games produced in Japanese game studios (‘Digicrafts Game Portal’). In Thailand, Internet usage at home is rising and also in game cafés, and MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role

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Playing Games) imported from abroad are popular. Japanese and more recently South Korean game companies have developed expertise in porting their game products abroad, especially to other Asian countries. For instance, companies such as South Korean NCSoft, makers of the Lineage MMO have penetrated China and Taiwan. South Korean game researcher Dal Yong Jin points out that such localizations are easier to conduct in neighboring Asian countries with similar cultures, but pose a greater challenge further abroad, ‘not because of a technological gap but because of significant legal and cultural differences’ (134). Another primary occupation of Thai studios besides localizing foreign games, in keeping with Tiger economic principles, is providing cost-effective outsourcing services to developers located abroad. Piecemeal outsourced projects such as those made by Thai Sanuk Software are usually quite technical in nature, and are defined in detail in advance by a game developer in the United States, Europe, Japan, or Korea (‘We Mean Fun’). Such jobs afford little room for leaving a local Thai stamp in terms of gameplay, characters, artwork, or other aspects of the final game product. Outsourced game components cater primarily to foreign rather than local markets and tastes. Localized games such as Digicrafts Japanese MMORPG’s are also defined in terms of content and game design abroad. Are there Thai developers making games for the proclivities of Thai players from the outset? A few of the Thai studios that primarily do outsourcing have also developed their own games. In an article in Gamasutra about the nascent Southeast Asian game industry in 2005, Terence Tan recommended outsourcing as a stepping stone toward ramping up skills to increase local development of homegrown games in nations with emerging game industries: ‘A way out of this tricky dilemma, though, is for local studios to try to build these skills purely by doing outsourced development, while trying to partner with a more established foreign development company who may be able pass these skills to them. So long as the companies can break even financially, build a good reputation for quality products shipped on time, retain staff and work on game engines/prototypes on the side, then the company may be in position to work on AAA titles.’ Such a road to local game development, published on Gamasutra, a trusted game industry online publication based in the United States, assumes that emerging local game industries in Southeast Asia should initially follow in the footsteps of Northern developers to learn the trade from outsourcing, before developing their own titles. The Bangkok-based studio Debuz has followed Tan’s recommended development path, moving from foreign to local development. Debuz, which also continues to take on outsourced game development, claims to be one

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of the few Thai studios to have developed an original Thai game. While this claim is debatable, as we shall see in the later discussion of other, more casual, Thai games, Debuz is unique in its development of a Thai Triple A game for Thai players: ‘Founded in 1999 as a web-hosting developer and web-application developer, Debuz expanded the business into mobile game developing and won many prizes overseas. In recent years, Debuz has become an online game developer, developing Asura and has become the regular top ten ‘most popular online game’ in Thailand, the only Thai-developed game that is able to do so’ (Asura Online). Asura (not to be confused with the 2014 Chinese, full 3-Dimensional role-playing game of the same name) presents players with an isometric, quasi 3-Dimensional overview of cartoonish, anime-style characters moving through a fantasy landscape, including blue-roofed, rounded temples constructed in a traditional Thai architectural style. Like other MMORPGs, players of Asura choose classes for their characters with distinct powers and weakness, form alliances with other players in campaigns, go on quests, and wage battle in PVP (Player vs. Player) mode. Positive comments from Thai players collected on the Asura website via Facebook express gratitude for socialization and friendships made in the game. Uniquely Thai components of the game are not specifically highlighted in customer feedback, at least those which the company chose to publish (Asura Online). Digitopolis Game Studio, another Bangkok based developer of mostly outsourced mobile games, has also produced a few of their own titles, including Honey Farm, a casual and cute iOS (Apple) tablet and phone game that makes effective use of the touchscreen drawing interface to collect honey for the player’s bees. Other Thailand-produced casual mobile games popular both abroad and at home are in the puzzle genre, such as the 3-D cube world Cube Raider by Bangkok-based Gamesquare, and the 2-D puzzle game Unblock Me by Kiragames, a studio located in the Northern mountain city of Chiang Mai. Unblock Me is an immensely popular mobile game around the globe that offers the player short levels composed of wooden looking blocks to reassemble. Since the game is entirely abstract, without even any characters or settings, it translates easily to many languages and cultures, and most global players are probably unaware of its Northern Thai roots. In her discussion of possible approaches to development that the nascent Indian game industry could implement, Adrienne Shaw highlights the transnational portability of abstract game mechanics reflecting: ‘Games do not have to be culturally specific, of course. As Hrishi Oberoi of Indiagames described, a game that is primarily focused on specific game mechanic (e.g. Tetris), can come from anywhere in the world and be globally popular’ (192).

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Cambodian-based Osja Studio is a Southeast Asian mobile phone game studio that has developed a game with both global and local appeal, and with more self-conscious cultural nuances for local players than the aforementioned Thai games. Employing around twelve employees dependent upon project requirements, the studio was founded in 2011 by two young Cambodians in the capital city of Phnom Penh. A bootstrapping effort fueled by enthusiasm, neither of Osja’s two founders formally studied either digital art or software development. Osja Studio’s art director, Chivalry Yok, has a business management degree (‘Santa Game Developed for Apple’). And Osja’s producer, Ear Uy, learned about computers from a previous job repairing computers and through later work for other game developers. Cambodia, scarred by its history of civil war, and prior legacy of French colonialism, is one of Southeast Asia’s poorest nations, and Phnom Penh, although it has technical universities like the Institute of Technology Cambodia ‘which churns out hundreds of tech students every year,’ is quite far from the highly developed technical infrastructure of Bangkok (Do). Cambodians do, however, seem highly motivated to cross the digital divide, with Southeast Asia’s most active hacker conferences gathering annually in Phnom Penh and strong local and youth interest in new media and games. As an article in Tech in Asia admonishes their primarily Asian readership: ‘Don’t look down on Cambodia. Although the population is just fifteen million with only three million online, its capital’s latest Barcamp (a coding and hacking technology conference) is the envy of the region, clocking in over three thousand participants’ (Do). Asva The Monkey is the first game Osja Studio made that was targeted at local Cambodian players, following three Christmas-themed game apps designed for a primarily Western market. In an interview with the Cambodia Daily, Uy, producer of the game, relates that although the game was not made exclusively for locals, the integration of local culture draws in Cambodian players: ‘We’re not targeting this only for Cambodia. The graphics, sounds and gameplay are what make it popular. But in this country, it is popular because we introduced Cambodian culture to the game—and people support that’ (‘Locally Created Video Game Tops Apple’s Downloads in Cambodia’). Players of Asva The Monkey game must maneuver Asva so he executes the correct jumping pattern in order to unlock the next level. Each puzzlelevel is solvable within a few minutes, as with many casual mobile games, therefore allowing the player to easily stop and start playing in-between other activities. Although players must own a phone that can download and play mobile games in order to play, Asva the Monkey is relatively affordable for

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13. Asva the Monkey (2012) by Osja Studio; Game Screenshot.

Cambodians at a cost of $0.99 and is also free to play as a trial version. ‘Asva’ means monkey in Khmer, and anthropomorphic Asva sports Cambodian tattoos and wears a traditional wrap, around his legs and waist: ‘We decided on what looked the most Khmer. For example, Asva wears a kben’ (‘Locally Created Video Game Tops Apple’s Downloads in Cambodia’). The monkey lives in ‘a secret, uninhabited location within the forest near Siem Reap’s Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s famous Hindu and later Buddhist temple complex and UNESCO World Heritage site dating back to the 12th century of the Khmer Empire (‘Locally Created Video Game Tops Apple’s Downloads in Cambodia’). The compelling graphics and levels in the game are inspired by this rich, cultural and architectural heritage. Traveling south across the Gulf of Thailand from Cambodia brings us to the Muslim democracy of Malaysia, a former British colony of lush tropical rainforests, and once a loose association of Sultanates and pirate-ridden port cities. In addition to its capital city of Kuala Lumpur and its iconic Petronas Twin Towers, Malaysia has invested in modernizing the infrastructure of the wider metropolitan region of central and populous Selangor state, a Silicon Valley inspired region sometimes referred to as ‘CyberJava’, where ten cities and most of Malaysia’s universities, shopping malls, automotive and other factories are located.

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A few years ago, a slew of educational game startups were launched in Malaysia, mostly headquartered in Selangor state, taking the ‘Tiger’ emphasis on the link between education and economic growth a step further into the digital realm of entertainment. Yet few seem to have survived what appears to have been over-optimism in the market for math and other learning games. One studio still in operation is Hezmedia Interactive, founded in 2009 in Malaysia ‘with branch offices outside’ (‘Reliability and Affordability’). Targeting ‘a broad audience of consumers globally’, Hezmedia makes original ‘freemium educational games for smartphone and tablet devices,’ such as Math Quest, Urban Heroes, Abacus DJ, and Ah Long Attack (‘Reliability and Affordability’). Math Quest teaches decimals via role-play in a fantasy world. The player’s character, a rebellious schoolboy, is jettisoned from a mundane math class into the past when he touches a historical cutlass on display. Math Quest won a Gold Medal in the 27th Annual Invention & New Product Exposition (INPEX) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. According to an article published on the game by computer science faculty at Universiti Teknologi Petronas in Malaysia: ‘As students play, they can look at the nature of the action they are following and the results yielded by the actions. Hence, learning mathematics can be more enjoyable’ (Wan et al.). Math Quest implements a constructivist learning template of contextual learning by testing math results in a game world context. Edy Zahid, formerly one of the primary programmers and designers at Hezmedia, posted developmental milestones of Math Quest on his blog. He reveals that Hezmedia considered changing the name of their more recent game, Ah Long Attack, to ‘We Fight Loan Shark’ so as to make the game more accessible to global players (‘Ah Long Attack’). Loan sharks are often aggressive in Malaysia and neighboring Singapore, where gambling is a traditional cultural ‘vice’. Southeast Asian loan sharks, before resorting to more violent means of extortion, often use public shaming tactics like splattering paint across doorways to frighten debtors. In Ah Long Attack, which doesn’t appear to have a clear educational objective other than financial management, a village is attacked by unscrupulous loan sharks who charge exorbitantly high interest rates. The play mechanic (the way the game is played) of Ah Long Attack is similar to Seattle-based developer PopCap Games’ Plants vs. Zombies, a popular ‘tower defense’ style casual game in which the player protects his home from attacking zombies by planting vicious flowers and shrubs in his garden. As with Plants vs. Zombies, the player of Ah Long Attack positions coin throwers and other increasingly powerful weapons on the left side of

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the screen to protect a village from incoming hoards of zombie-like loan sharks. Also like in Plants vs. Zombies, an overall balance of debt (the score) and a weapons catalog are displayed at the top of the screen (‘Play We Fight Loan Shark’). These similarities in GUI (Graphical User Interface) and play style make Ah Long Attack seem like an overly recognizable derivative of Plants vs. Zombies (‘Home of the World’s Best Free Online Games’). Also, it is doubtful whether a name change to We Fight Loan Shark is sufficient to draw in players outside of Southeast Asia who are unfamiliar with mercurial, unscrupulous ‘Ah Longs,’ thus failing to fulfill Zahid’s stated aim of increasing the game’s global traction. Despite the game’s shortcomings, this Southeast Asian glocalization of a popular Northern game is well executed and strikes a humorous cultural chord with Southeast Asian players. Crossing the short bridge over the Johor Strait transports us from Malaysia to Singapore, a nation that split off from British Malaysia quite recently in 1965. Predominantly ethnically Chinese, and under the financially savvy and tightly controlled leadership of the Lee family and the P.A.P. party since attaining its independence, Singapore has been transformed from a British colonial outpost into one of Southeast Asia’s most wealthy nations. A small island city-state of towering skyscrapers under perpetual construction with imported labor from Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India, Singapore is also a global finance hub and shipping port into Asia. The high rent in Singapore rivals New York and Tokyo. In her comparative analysis of the impact of government policy on Singaporean and South Korean Game Industries, Chung characterizes both countries as ‘two leading Asian tigers that are basking in the success of digital development’ (59). In this Southeast Asian Tiger nation, whose rapid rise to wealth is incongruous to that of its neighbors, placing it largely outside the categorization as a member nation of the global South, surely we might expect to find a number of innovative, local game studios? Although Singapore does have an Independent Game Association that meets on a regular basis, game developers in Singapore hail mostly from abroad, lured by Singapore’s strategic location in Asia, its English-speaking population and its friendly tax haven approach to foreign companies. Chung notes that this is a conscious policy on the part of the Singaporean government intended to encourage economic growth: ‘The government concentrates on both the economy and technology with particular focus on attracting foreign talent and overseas capital to Singapore’ (63). For instance, Electronic Arts, with headquarters in the United States, has offices in the Biopolis media tech hub in Singapore and primarily focuses on translations and localizations for the Asian region. Also housed in the Biopolis skyscrapers is Ubisoft, the most active Triple A development studio in Singapore,

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an outpost of the French globally minded game developer discussed in the introduction. Unlike Electronic Arts, Ubisoft has developed games ‘in house’ like Assassins’ Creed with local Singaporean talent, although younger Singaporean game makers fresh out of university and poly-technical colleges are usually under the supervision of foreign game designers, programmers, and producers. Koei Games, a Japanese developer of Triple A console action titles like Dynasty Warriors 1-8 also maintains a presence in Singapore. At Koei, local Singaporean employees complain about a ‘glass ceiling’ that inhibits career progression, including a corporate culture where ‘employees are discouraged to communicate with Japanese bosses during their visits’ (‘Only good for short term experience and exposure for fresh grads’). What happens when young Singaporean developers want to make their own games? The story of Touch Dimensions studio, housed since 2012 in the Singapore government supported incubator, Games Solutions Center (GSC) at Block 71 is an instructive example.1 Autumn Dynasty, a mythic, ancient Chinese-themed real time strategy (RTS) game for phones and tablets, was initially made for an independent game festival from the family home basement of one of the two founding developers and ‘had never been meant to be the commercial success it is today’ (Lee). A description of the game on the app store reads: ‘The traditional Chinese painting becomes an epic battlefield in Autumn Dynasty—a multi-touch real time strategy game for Android devices. Direct your armies with brushstrokes in the spirit of classical maneuver warfare; employ terrain, positioning and cunning stratagems to defend your lands and conquer your foes!’ (Autumn Dynasty-RTS’). RTS, or Real Time Strategy genre games of strategic army management, are popular in Singapore, with the free Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) topping the list. But Touch Dimensions’ choice to release an RTS game, a genre normally played on personal computers, on a mobile platform is unusual, as is their fusion of traditional Chinese art with contemporary gaming. The developers of Autumn Dynasty creatively translated what are normally keyboard commands in PC RTS genre games to mobile touchscreen ‘brushstrokes,’ an interactive mode that matches the traditional Chinese painting style of the game’s visuals. Even with the Singaporean MDA (Media Development Authority) providing offices, technical support, counseling, and other services for local startups with incubator schemes like Block 71, Singaporean developers like Touch Dimensions may question their decision to develop games with 1 The Games Solution Center is an initiative of the MDA (Media Development Authority) of the Singapore government.

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long-term commitment. An interview conducted by Games in Asia with Jeffrey Jiang, one of the two Touch Dimensions cofounders, reveals that his business partner, Travis Ho, had planned to become a dentist upon completion of their game and its submission to an independent game competition: ‘After [Travis] had done the game, the plan was for him to say, let’s stop making games, and go into dentistry. He hailed from a medical background, and his family wanted him to continue in their footsteps. He studied computational biology at the National University of Singapore, and taught himself to program by cloning 8-bit games’ (Lee). Pressure to conform to family expectations to study and later work in what are seen as more lucrative and stable medical or f inancial f ields is prevalent in finance-oriented, conservative Singapore, despite the government absorbing risks with start-up incubation schemes like Block 71. Co-founder Jeffrey Jiang goes on to underscore both of Touch Dimensions founders’ ethical concern for the addictive effect of playing freemium model games popular in Asia, saying, ‘We have a strong opinion on freemium’ (Lee). Their moral stance is inspired by game addiction tales of folly among their local set of Singaporean gamer friends, such as a friend who had overspent on freemium game cards with a newborn baby ‘waiting for him at home’ and others who ended up ‘broke before Christmas’ after overspending. Freemium games are initially free to play but later charge for add-ons and power-ups after the player is addicted to the game. As discussed in relation to the casual games popular in Brazil in Chapter Two, Freemium or freeto-play is a common form of game monetization in Southeast Asia, other parts of the global South, and globally. An opinion post on Games in Asia similarly takes issue with freemium games, in this case with one particular popular feature, the so-called ‘stamina systems’ that encourage players to buy gameplay time: ‘Look, I don’t begrudge developers their attempts at monetization. If games didn’t make money, then we’d have nothing to play, and I recognize that in Asia in particular, the freemium model is by far the most viable when it comes to games. But developers, please monetize in some other way. Run ads. Sell in-game items. Restrict players to the first few levels and ask them to pay to unlock more. Do anything but implement another stupid stamina system’ (Custer). Stamina systems force the player to either wait to play while the game regenerates stamina points, or take the shortcut of buying stamina. Critics of stamina systems also point out that addicted players can spend endlessly on renting the game and never own it. The decision of independent Vietnamese developer Dong Nyugen to remove his extremely popular and lucrative freemium game Flappy Bird from online app stores, even though it was grossing more than $50K from

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in-game advertisements a day in iPhone, Android, and tablet downloads, was motivated by similar ethical concerns about financial exploitation of players through game addiction. Nyugen, born in a village outside Hanoi in the communist nation, was unprepared for the global limelight that his mobile touchscreen game of navigating a flying bird along a side-scrolling Super Mario-like map inspired. Wracked by sleepless, guilty nights about the popularity of the game, Nyugen withdrew the game from distribution and retreated from communication with the world.2 Vietnam, another so-called more recent Tiger Cub nation, is rapidly modernizing and industrializing, and as discussed in Chapter Two, has many active, online game cafés. But world-renowned Vietnamese game developers like Nyugen are quite rare in the nation where most games are imported and localized from abroad. Nyugen has since recovered from his publicity shyness and released a new game, Swing Copters, with a core play mechanic similar to Flappy Birds. In Swing Copters however, referred in some reviews as ‘Flappy Birds + y axis’, the player navigates a flying creature with a copter helmet upwards vertically instead of along horizontal side-scrolling screens. If the creature touches the dangerous swinging obstacles on the side of the map, he plummets to the ground and must fly upwards again.3 Other Southeast Asian developers, rather than suffering pangs of conscience about game addiction, decide to exercise a social conscience by applying their game-making skills to alleviate local calamities and problems in their own backyard. For example, ‘Gaming! For Goodness!’ is a charity event hosted by Gamers and GMs Philippines to help the people of the province of Albay in recovery efforts from a typhoon in March of 2018. In a public Facebook notes post reflecting on the event, Manilan software engineer Allen Saint-Croix discusses ‘pay-to-win’ monetization models for such charity games, writing ‘Funneling donations via geekery schemes that left everyone a winner in the end, suffice to say it was an event that sparked a lot of potential for similarly-themed, if not driven, initiatives’ (‘The Jingu Solution, Made Reality: Bring F2P “Pay-to-Win” Models into RPGs’) And Singaporean Shao Han Tan, an avid tabletop role-playing game master since childhood, conducted a series of role-playing game workshops to help immigrant workers in Singapore envision confronting their bosses about 2 In an interview with Forbes, Nyugen revealed: ‘My life has not been as comfortable as I was before,’ says Nguyen. ‘I couldn’t sleep’ (Kloc). 3 Although some detractors initially complained that Flappy Birds was an unoriginal adaptation of the Japanese classic Super Mario, Nintendo has stated that they are not pursuing any copyright claims against the developer.

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compensation for construction site injuries. Subsequently, in his master’s thesis in Southeast Asian studies, completed at the National University of Singapore, he initiated and conducted ethnographic studies of tabletop role-playing games played with local Singaporeans. These adventures explored more everyday, complex local roles than those customarily found in fantasy role-playing games, characters such as ‘a charming American businessman, who cheats on his wife compulsively, a corrupt, apparently righteous Singaporean Chinese narcotics detective’ and ‘a Singaporean Malay ex-convict, who had gone to prison for his friend’ (Tan 27). Tan writes of the potentially empowering effect of such critical and political role-playing games that leverages the ‘what if’ possibility space of games. In the course of play, players test out possible courses of action and agency against restraining power structures closer to their everyday lives than fantasy game settings: ‘Perhaps these games can be of use toward those agentive goals; they allow us to create simulated realities which can transform and respond to our actions, just like real life, and thus we can learn and reflect from our experiences in these other worlds’ (77). The openended, atelic exploration of real-life roles and responses to authoritarian power structures like government officials and construction bosses in Tan’s games is also similar to Frasca’s proposal for ‘Videogames of the Oppressed’ (discussed in Chapter Four) providing a safe context for practicing tactics of resistance against powerful figures, businesses, and institutions. I will conclude this chapter’s necessarily incomplete tour of Southeast Asia’s myriad game studios and independent developers with a ferry ride from Singapore to Indonesia’s vast chain of islands. Similar to Malaysia, Indonesia is an Islamic democracy, and a variation of the Bahasa language is also widely spoken there. But although Indonesia and Malaysia share many common cultural components, including similar cuisines, they are quite distinct. Before Islamization, Indonesia’s many regions were composed of distinct religious beliefs, languages, and cultural practices, and much of this cultural heritage is retained through crafts, music, dance, art, shadow puppetry, and storytelling, especially on the central island of Java and the Hindu island of Bali. At times, this creative heritage informs more modern Indonesian art forms, and is also reflected in games, especially among developers located outside the large capital city of Jakarta. In relatively smaller Javanese cities like Surabaya, Bandung, and Yogyakarta, universities and grassroots media centers have trained young game makers eager to reflect aspects of Indonesian culture in their work. Mahdi Bashroni Rizal, the CEO of Elven Games, a game studio based in the industrial city of Surabaya, states the ambition of his studio to not only

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create Indonesian culturally influenced games for Indonesian players, but to also bring Indonesian culture to the world via games, in a manner similar to how Japanese culture has been globalized via games: ‘Mahdi explained that it is indeed their mission to showcase the Indonesian culture through gaming media to the international community. He cited Japan’s success in promoting its culture globally through games and anime as a source of inspiration’ (Lukman, ‘Indonesian Themed Adventure Game Wanara is Out on Android’). Rizal’s point is similar to a key question of game globalization that South Korean game researcher Yong Jin poses in his study of South Koreas active online game ‘empire’: ‘The rapid penetration of Korea’s online games in the global game market has raised a fundamental question: will non-Western countries be able to expand their cultural penetration, not only in the same region, also in the global cultural market?’ (132). Jin labels such cultural dispersion of games globally, which goes against the norm of Western games ‘penetrating’ Eastern markets, ‘contra-flow in culture’ (132). Jin’s waterway metaphor of contra-flow for such globalization from below underscores that for developers in emerging economies, bringing local games to the world stage is more difficult because the currents are stronger against developers from emerging economies. Infrastructure, which consists of more obvious factors such as localization, marketing, and advertising connections, as well as more intangibles such as cultural familiarity, is not as well developed for the globalization of Southern games and media. Yet as China and South Korea are currently demonstrating, contra-flow is possible. Elven Games’ Indonesian-influenced casual games include Nusantara Chronicle, a mobile fighting game played with traditional Indonesian weapons against the backdrop of an Indonesian kingdom, and the physics puzzle game Durian’s Revenge—the durian is a notoriously pungent yet delicious Southeast Asian fruit (‘Durians Revenge Game’). In quirky and casual Durian’s Revenge, the player must correctly position ramps in order to roll a prickly durian fruit over other fruits, thereby destroying them, and so proving that durian is ‘the king of fruit’. After the development of these two games, Elven Games, in collaboration with the Indonesian animator Mechanimation, released an episodic series of mobile interactive game comics based on the Indonesian folk tale of Ramayana. The mobile platform was sponsored by Indonesian mobile communications operator Telkom. Mahdi explains: ‘The Adventures of Wanara tells the story of protagonist Naradja, who is a descendant of three races: human (Rama), giant (Rahwana), and monkey (Hanoman). Naradja will have to stop the resurrection of the devil king from inside him by collecting the eight God elements, or

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Hastabrata. The app is loaded with mini games, animation, and Bali-themed background music to help get the fun going’ (Lukman, ‘Indonesian Themed Adventure Game Wanara is Out on Android’). In addition to appeal of the Indonesian-themed music and artwork in the Adventures of Wanara, the mythical characters and folk legends of Indonesia enrich the fantasy repertoire of games, a refreshing change from the Tolkienesque game worlds of dwarves, orcs, and elves repeated ad infinitum in Northern developed games like World of Warcraft. Riding a train west from Surabaya brings us to Bandung, a bustling university city surrounded by scenic hills. Bandung is home to a number of game studios including Garuda Games, named after the mythic flying creature that appears in both Hindu and Buddhist legends and which is also Indonesia’s national symbol. Although Garuda Games’ series of fast-food titled mobile game apps like Pizza Frenzy and Hot Dog Frenzy are clearly unrelated to traditional Indonesian culture, their 3-D steampunk adventure, Steampunk Warrior, contains scenes from Indonesian heritage sites like Yogyakarta’s Borobudur ruins. Garuda Games also developed a free game, Save OrangUtan, to raise awareness about an Indonesian campaign to save the critically endangered orangutan apes of the Sumatra region from hunters. Nightspade, another studio in Bandung, has also made a game inspired by Indonesian wildlife titled Komodo Island: Newborn Wonders, a children’s game about the unique Indonesian carnivorous giant lizards whose newborns dwell in trees to avoid predators. The smaller university city of Yogyakarta is home to a lively scene of grassroots media centers like Lifepatch and House of Natural Fiber, who occasionally offer free game-making workshops to the public, among other technical, digital, creative and open design workshops events, and an annual bio-art festival (‘Citizen initiative in art, science and technology’). Game developers based in Yogyakarta are actively producing Indonesian-themed games such as the phone touch screen game Tap Ghost by Aksara Studio, featuring folkloric Indian ghosts (Lukman, ‘8 Indonesian-Themed Games for Independence Day’). And the heroine of the mobile game Jumping Granny is a grandmother wearing an Indonesian sarong wrap, whose mission is to save the world from aliens. This journey through some of Southeast Asia’s game studios his contrasted differing approaches adopted among developers for incorporating local culture into games. Thai, Cambodian, and Indonesian temples, and heritage sites enrich the fantasy landscape of games, adding variety to the cultural, mythic, and religious repertoire of European castles and/or Japanese temples familiar to players of Northern games. Game characters

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and roles can be inspired by such spiritual, mythical, and cultural dioramas as well, or by more contemporary local figures like Malaysian loan sharks (Ah Longs) and sarong-wearing grannies. The casual slant of many recent short and humorous games, made for the mobile platforms on the rise in Asia and globally, makes a good template for sharing more everyday cultural components like food—can the durian prove to the rest of the world to be truly the king of fruit? Gameplay style, more elusive than content, roles, and settings, can also be influenced by local tastes, evident in the Singaporean RTS mobile painting game Autumn Dynasty that builds on a prior familiarity among players in Singapore and Malaysia with real-time strategy genre games. Southeast Asian developers are also starting to grapple with similar ethical concerns I posed at the conclusion of Chapter Two regarding the addictiveness of free casual gaming in the global South, most dramatically with Vietnamese developer Nyugen’s guilt-stricken withdrawal of Flappy Birds from distribution. Other game makers feel compelled to apply game development to social, charitable, and environmental issues in their own backyards, implementing some of the Games for Change tactics discussed in Chapter Six, from simulation workshops against oppression, to charity fund-raising, to environmental, and conservation awareness raising. What is less convincing is that the path to spurring more local game development in the global South lies in outsourcing and localization of Northern Games, as suggested in Tan’s Gamasutra article about the emerging Southeast Asian game industry. A Northern developmental template does not necessarily fit alternate circumstances in the global South. And although investment in educational infrastructure has been an effective ‘Asian Tiger’ approach, nor does the path toward homegrown games and digital entertainment necessarily lie in greater industrialization, training, and modernization alone. Some of Southeast Asia’s most modernized ‘advanced’ nations, like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, are paradoxically relatively less active in terms of producing their own culturally reflective games and intellectual property. More elusive factors, such as an awareness of and pride in cultural heritage, as well as informal enthusiasm for creative new media and games that inspires ‘boot-strapping’ self-education and participation in community workshops, seem to contribute to the success of local game development in relatively poorer Indonesia and Cambodia, although such success may be defined less by financial metrics than by other factors such as critical acclaim among a local population. Furthermore, what is lacking in most of these examples of local developers, except for Indonesian Garuda Games,

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is woman developers, a notable lack especially considering the appeal of casual games to gender-diverse publics. One recipe for firstly, how to make a local game, and secondly, how to globalize local games for dispersion to the rest of the world, cannot capture all possible approaches, for surely other game developers, players, policy makers and stake holders located in other regions will arrive at different solutions. Nevertheless, the digital games of Southeast Asia offer inspirational examples of games emerging from an active and historically rich cultural, as well as rapidly developing economic region within the global South.

Works Cited ‘Ah Long Attack.’ Edy Zahid Blog. http://edykajang.com/tag/ah-long-attack/ (accessed October 10, 2013). ‘Autumn Dynasty – RTS.’ Amazon.com : Appstore for Android. http://www.amazon. com/Touch-Dimensions-Interactive-Autumn-Dynasty/dp/B00J3K4GSA (accessed October 10, 2013). Chung, Peichi. ‘The Gaming Industries of South Korea and Singapore: Cultural Policy and Globalization.’ In Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific. Routledge, 2009. ‘Citizen Initiative in Art, Science and Technology.’ Lifepatch. http://lifepatch.org/ (accessed September 15, 2013). Custer, C. ‘If You Put a Stamina System in your Game, I Hate You.’ Games in Asia. http://www.gamesinasia.com/if-you-put-a-stamina-system-in-your-game-ihate-you/ (accessed October 10, 2013). ‘Digicrafts Game Portal.’ Digicrafts Game Portal. http://www.digicrafts.com/ (accessed May 5, 2014). Do, Anh-Min. ‘More Than Meets the Eye: 12 Startups Coming Out of Cambodia.’ Tech in Asia. http://www.techinasia.com/12-startups-from-cambodia/ (accessed December 12, 2012). ‘Durians Revenge Game.’ Phyfun Games. http://www.phyfun.com/Games/14482-Durians-Revenge.aspx#.U1CEHPmSz-s (accessed October 10, 2013). Elbert, Noah. ‘What Worked in East Asia: The Flying Geese of Industrialization.’ Brown University Study. http://www.globalconversation.org/2012/11/11/whatworked-east-asia-flying-geese-industrialization (accessed September 22, 2014) ‘Home of the World’s Best Free Online Games.’ PopCap Games. http://www.popcap. com/plants-vs-zombies (accessed October 10, 2013). Kloc, Joe. ‘Flappy Bird Creator Says his Game Was Too Addictive.’ Newsweek, January 11, 2014. https://www.newsweek.com/flappy-bird-creator-says-hisgame-was-too-addictive-228803 (accessed January 10, 2020).

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Lee, Mary Anne. ‘Autumn Dynasty Co-creator Nearly Chose Dentistry Over Game Development.’ Games in Asia. http://www.gamesinasia.com/autumn-dynastyco-creator-nearly-chose-dentistry-over-game-development (accessed October 10, 2013). ‘Locally Created Video Game Tops Apple’ Downloads in Cambodia.’ The Cambodia Daily. http://www.cambodiadaily.com/archives/locally-created-video-gametops-apples-downloads-in-cambodia-6761/ (accessed December 21, 2012). Lukman, Enricko. ‘Indonesian Themed Adventure Game Wanara is Out on Android.’ Games in Asia. http://www.gamesinasia.com/indonesian-themed-adventuregame-wanara-android/ (accessed October 10, 2013). Lukman, Enricko. ‘8 Indonesian-Themed Games for Independence Day.’ Games in Asia. http://www.gamesinasia.com/8-indonesian-games-independence-day/ (accessed October 10, 2013). ‘Only Good for Short Term Experience and Exposure for Fresh Grads’. Forum Post. http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Koei-EntertainmentSingapore-RVW1459623.htm (accessed December 10, 2014). Parkin, Simon. ‘The Great Video Game Exodus.’ Gamasutra, May 31, 2018. https:// www.gamasutra.com/view/news/318588/The_great_video_game_exodus.php (accessed January 10, 2020). ‘Play We Fight Loan Shark.’ Inspire Games Nexus. http://www.inspiregamesnexus. com/loanshark/ (accessed October 10, 2013). Saint-Croix, Allen. ‘The Jingu Solution, Made Reality: Bring F2P “Pay-to-Win” Models into RPGs.’ Facebook Notes. Monday March 5, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/ notes/allen-sainte-croix/the-jingu-solution-made-reality-bringing-f2p-pay-towin-models-into-rpgs/1567105496708154/ (accessed January 10, 2020). ‘Santa Game Developed for Apple.’ Phnom Penh Post. http://www.phnompenhpost. com/special-reports/santa-game-developed-apple (accessed December 12, 2012). Shaw, Adrienne. ‘How Do You Say Gaming in Hindi? Exploratory Research on the Indian Digital Game Industry and Culture.’ In Gaming Globally: Production, Play, and Place. Ed. By Nina B. Huntemann and Ben Aslinger. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. Tan, Shao Han. ‘Case Studies in Games for Education and Empowerment.’ M.A. Thesis. National University of Singapore. Singapore. 2011. Tan, Terence. ‘Exploring Game Development in South-East Asia.’ Gamasutra. http:// www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2285/exploring_game_development_in_. php (accessed May 5, 2013). ‘Thai online market to reach US$132M by 2014.’ Inside Games Asia. http://insidegamesasia.biz/thai-online-market-to-reach-usd132m-by-2014/ (accessed May 5, 2014). ‘We Mean Fun!’ Sanuk Games. http://www.sanukgames.com/ (accessed May 5, 2014).



Conclusion: Play Privilege

Early on when stringing the essays of this book together into a book proposal, I was inspired by a comment that Puerto Rican Dr. Milagros Rivera Sanchez, a former department head where I taught for almost a decade at the National University of Singapore, once made in passing about her research into mobile phone usage among youth in a shanty town in South Africa (‘Making Sense of Life’s Trransitions’). She remarked that during her interviews with young people, despite their challenged living conditions, they enjoyed playing games. This comment reinforced my observations from travels made within poorer nations of Southeast Asia, and also my encounter with the work of Latin American public artists like Rene C. Hayashi who design playful experiences for children in poorer neighborhoods and shanty towns in Latin America and Asia. Why should we think that games are only for the most privileged to play? Or that only the games made for and played by white male players in the global North are the most relevant subject of game studies? Who experiences the joys and pleasures of play, and in what circumstances? Discussions around white privilege at least in the United States in recent years, before the return of the far right, have promoted an awareness of systemic racism, of the fast lanes that white people, especially upper-class white men, ride in their families, schooling, and careers to greater relative success and economic success, despite other shared inter-racial obstacles such as increased precarity in the workplace (Dowsett). Does access to the white privilege lane, or returning to a South/North framework, to being a citizen of a Northern nation, translate to the luxury of free time for fun and games, for play privilege? Much past game scholarship assumed this was the case, opining that only those on the Northern side of a rather rigidly defined digital divide were the proper subject of game studies, whereas those on the other side of the fence had more immediate survival concerns. Although not to romanticize or downplay the struggles that many inhabitants of the global South grapple with, grave daily concerns like hunger and economic precarity, or even war and refugee status, in this book I have presented a number of examples where players in the global South find a path to gaming pleasures, despite infrastructural obstacles like the lack of high speed

Schleiner, A.-M., Transnational Play: Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 doi 10.5117/9789463728904_concl

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internet at home, or lack of mobile data plans, lack of home computers, and limited, fragmented, leisure time. In the early stages of the book, in the section titled ‘Reorienting Player Geographies’, I focused on making answers to such obstacles visible, by looking at platforms for play in the global South like arcades, game cafés, mobile phones, and casual freemium games. Game piracy was framed as a fair and more equitable way for global players, including the world’s youth, to experience digital gaming, to develop and maintain ludoliteracy skills in nations where the average income is insufficient to purchase such games legally, among other obstacles such as lack of distribution, or more up-to-date, fast gaming computers. This affirmative recasting of game piracy as ludic knowledge development, rather than theft of Intellectual Property, as has been claimed by Northern stake holders, does not deny infrastructural obstacles or inequality. But neither does it portray players as powerless, socioeconomic victims. Players exercise agency and a large part of the excitement of this research has been the discovery of a variety of unexpected ways, beyond outright piracy, that players overcome obstacles and discover gamer joy. For instance, in the fieldwork I conducted for Chapter Five on playing Pokémon Go in border cities, I encountered the practice of GPS spoofing or ‘flying’, a cheat popular especially among women players who avoid the risk of embodied play in insecure public spaces in Tijuana, Mexico. These less privileged players chart alternate flight paths across the stations of a Japanese-American soft gaming ‘empire’. Flyers have also been integrated into the local player community in Tijuana, and embodied players regularly invite them to participate in their self-mapped tours and excursions. Although the Northern developers of Pokémon Go have been among the first to stake out augmented, global play territories, ludic cartography is a contested and rapidly evolving arena of Third Party mapping apps, hand drawn charts, and other mapping cheats like fake terrain tagging. But must these women, girls and LGBQT players—and male players who cannot afford data, only partake more marginally of such game pleasures, in the case of Pokémon Go in Tijuana, as ghostly, disembodied Pokémon flyers? Must they be brave exceptions to the rule, embodied gender rebels in an entertainment sector largely claimed by heterosexual young boys and men, like the middle-aged mother and level 34 Pokémon player who generously took me on a play tour of Tijuana and who observed that most players on the streets of her city are young men, except once a month, on more diverse and family friendly, ‘Community Days’? In the informal digital ethnography I conducted of game cafés in the global South, from Latin America, Africa,

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and in Asia, an unlooked for observation was that players in photographs were usually boys and young men. This gender imbalance is also evident in mobile navigation games like Pokémon Go, where basic bodily security is under threat in public space. Physical safety is not the only gender barrier to gaming. Elsewhere, I have written about gendered male player privilege in knowledge sharing communities that converge around hardcore games with steep learning curves like Minecraft (Schleiner ‘Boy Masters of Craft and Live Streaming Jocks’). Minecraft players affirm their ‘homosocial’ friendship with each other by sharing arcane gaming knowledge or ‘capital’ on platforms like YouTube and Twitch (Consalvo). I argue that this male social privilege, reinforced by intergenerational family dynamics and roles which afford more generous leisure time to men and boys for play, contributes to a heterosexist male play privilege. In addition to the gender role casting of game characters as male, and combative scenarios designed for the ‘performative masculinity’ of heterosexual boys and men, the extensive time required to play such hardcore games at a sufficient level of competence contributes to this inequity of access to the luxury of play. As discussed in Chapter Three, quantitative studies of gender and gaming indicate that women and girls in a number of both Northern and Southern nations have less available free time for play and for acquiring gaming skills, and therefore less opportunity for developing ludoliteracy. But casual games can be stopped and started, in between conducting other obligations, and unlike more hardcore games like Minecraft, do not require months of tutorials to even begin to play with competence. Light, humorous, and less violent than hardcore games, casual games are localized for gender diverse players in emergent nations, sometimes reflecting aspects of local culture. Demanding shorter, less labor intensive development cycles than hardcore games, smaller, local independent game studies are also making culturally unique casual games in many nations. Casual games are also so accessible globally because they are usually initially free, implementing the monetization model of Free-to-play as they are more commonly referred to in the Western hemisphere, or Freemium in Asia. This line-up of accessible features, of more accessible platforms, cost, and time demands in mobile and social software games has led to a diversification of players around the globe in terms of both gender, age, and nationality. At times transnational players, even those with limited resources, have found themselves addicted to Freemium games, gobbling up paid for game add-ons like ‘whales’ swallowing krill, the term that data analysists in the casual game industry designate for such prized consumers. What’s more,

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profits often flow along colonial, unequitable South to North vectors of enrichment, when young male entrepreneurs from the North localize and ‘tropicalize’ casual games for gender diverse markets abroad. But although such globalized, neoliberal game monetization models that benefit Northern male developers are deserving of critique, it seems unfair to discourage diverse, women, girls and LGBQT players from engaging in such addictive casual ‘vices’, when for over a few decades boys and young men around the world were afforded the play privilege of enjoying more hardcore games. The question I formulated ultimately in relation to the popular transnational play genre of casual gaming was whether it is appropriate to pathologize casual players as exploited game addicts, or as economic ‘victims’ of neoliberal globalization, only once more diverse players are exercising their play privilege. Who is awarded agency when accessing the pleasurable and addictive vices of play? This book has been not only about players, but also ludic culture makers outside the global North, who operate outside of narrower conceptions of what constitutes commercial game development or design. Artists develop innovative ludic approaches, such as an environmentally and socially aware aesthetics of playful recycling in Latin America. Small, independent studios in Southeast Asia balance between games intended to generate revenue, and passion games which speak to their own ethnic and national communities, or promote other worthy causes, from environmental causes, to education, to charities. As the game industry and play idioms expand to more serious games, how should Games for Change model such problems on the global stage? In Chapter Six I contrasted self-empowering models from the global North and more oppositional, agonistic approaches from the global South for Games for Change, in a discussion that again centered on privilege and agency, questioning which models are most appropriate for problem-solving and awareness raising at a transnational scale. Should Northern players focus on games of self-improvement, while Southern players focus on games of resistance against oppression, as the experimental Brazilian theater director, Agosto Boal once explained his radical difference in approach to the transformational theater workshops he conducted in both Brazil and in France? How should players gamify serious concerns, and inspire change transnationally? Power is a concern that resurfaces throughout this project, as in my previous book’s focus on both the power of games, and the power of players (The Players Power to Change the Game). In this book I have approached questions of power and agency with post-colonial and developmental global South optics on emerging game players and markets, highlighting tension points,

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and expressions of resistance and agency among transnational players. From a discussion of tensions and collaborations between East and West in my first chapter, I moved to examples of how global game territory is being reconfigured along axis of the global South and North, both in the global production, and the transnational consumption of gaming. Intersectionally, I have also woven gender into my analysis at various points especially in my analysis of the gender divide between Northern casual gaming developers and Southern players, and when discussing the gender based challenges of location-based map game navigation. At times localization for player publics in the global South is initiated by larger, ‘Northern’ game publishers. In other cases, emerging localization outfits are spear-heading such linguistic and other game content translations, especially between neighboring nations in Asia. In the regional context of Southeast Asia, I contrasted various developmental templates to home-grown local game development, from outsourced development, to translations, to independent, to state-sponsored incubation hubs, to locally inspired casual games. My hope has been for this exploration to be both instructive to game scholars in the global North, and of possible inspiration to game developers, ludic cultural workers, and players located in the global South. As a ‘white feminist’ who has benefited from a Northern education in the States and Europe, how do I, a privileged person in this regard and other ways, although not privileged in that I am a woman scholar in a heavily male dominated field, speak about less privileged transnational players, about or for an allegedly ‘subaltern’ player? Is silence on these subjects the most appropriate response, considering all the harm that imperial white civilization, which academia is bound up in, has wrought? And to apply similar logic in terms of gender, should heterosexual men, never opine about the games that women play, is it not their place considering all women have suffered throughout history and the diverse regimes of patriarchies? Should feminists not talk to transgender scholars? Should we all stick to our identity lanes, when choosing whether or not to speak for or of those playing from a different subject position? The answer I have arrived at for myself is that yes, there are times when listening, and learning from other perspectives rather than speaking is preferable, especially when privilege has historically afforded a larger podium to certain groups, who often take this ‘speaking’ privilege for granted. Interviews and informal conversations with diverse transnational players, as well as published literature and fieldwork, living and working abroad, collaborating with other artists, and other travels have all informed this

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project. Researchers can learn especially from those who face overlapping discrimination and hardship. Limitations are at times also affordances, and inspire innovative approaches and tactics. One of the most thought provoking talks I attended at the D.I.G.R.A. conference of 2018 was a game analysis conducted through the lens of disability (Carr). But to corral what I can say to my lane of privilege and struggle can also be silencing, to say for instance at this stage of my life, I should only write about the experience of white, middle-aged, middle-class, working mother gamers in California, although in part, self-reflexively while recounting my play tour of the border cities of San Diego and Tijuana, this is what I have done. Should heterosexual male game researchers only write about masculinity and games from within the perspective their own embodied ethnicity, age and class and life experience? This might make for a narrow set of topics at game conferences and in publications, considering that white men are still the majority at such venues. Instead of a narrow choice between speaking or silence, a way forward I suggest is conversation, which includes attentive, critical listening to diverse stake holders, even disagreements, and ‘agonistics’ or ‘dissensus’ (Mouffe; Ranciere).1 If the field is to diversify beyond the most privileged, differences of opinion will surface. While recognizing the singularity of unique, culturally and geographically specific approaches to gaming, with transnational play I am also referring to generalizable player power tactics of ludoliteracy like piracy and localization that transcend national borders and even cross regional and continental boundaries. My choice of the term transnational over global for such crossborder movements of game culture is intended to convey a critical wariness of globalization, of the neoliberal market development agenda implicit in much of mobile user and game industry research. But unlike the slant of many anti-globalist or post-colonial critiques of the Northern militaryentertainment complex, I also explore de-colonial development, user agency, and innovation discussions within the context of game development and the transnational game industry inspired by global South discourse. My aim has been to contribute to an ongoing, and increasingly public conversation about transnational play. Playing games is a joy and privilege, at other times a chore and addictive drudgery. Play, often narrowly focused on goals, competitive and repetitive, should not be an imperative but a choice. Before digitization, play culture was practiced and continues to be practiced in unique ludic expressions around the world, passed on through both children’s and adults’ games like card and board games. Not playing 1 ???

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along with a popular hegemonic pastime of a dominant global entertainment industry can be a resistant tactic against globalization, what elsewhere I have described as the no play imperative (Schleiner The Player’s Power to Change the Game 83). But players should not be excluded from fast evolving, fascinating ludic pleasures based on where they were born, their race, gender, or background. On the contrary, cultural and gender and other difference, in a word, diversity, is rich with potential for contributing to game culture’s evolution. Lack of economic privilege and other barriers and borders, although not to be romanticized, can also be a source of ingenuity.

Works Cited Carr, Diane. ‘Body Count.’ Game Analysis, D.I.G.R.A., Turin, Italy, 2018. Dowsett, Jeremy. ‘What Riding my Bike Has Taught Me about White Privilege.’ Quartz. August 29, 2014. https://qz.com/257474/what-riding-my-bike-has-taughtme-about-white-privilege/ (accessed January 10, 2020). Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso. 2013. Rancière, Jaques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Continuum, 2010. Rivera Sanchez, Milagros. ‘Making Sense of Life’s Transitions: Mobile Phones and the Creation of Alternative Spaces by South African Youths.’ Journal of Creative Communication, Forthcoming. Schleiner, Anne-Marie. ‘Boy Masters of Craft and Live Streaming Jocks.’ Forthcoming. Schleiner, Anne-Marie. The Player’s Power to Change the Game. Amsterdam University Press, 2017.

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About the Author

Anne-Marie Schleiner is engaged in gaming and media culture in a variety of roles as a critic, theorist, activist, artist, and designer. She has exhibited in international galleries, museums and festivals. Documentation of her performative culture work is available on the Video Data Bank. She holds a doctorate in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at universities in the United States, Mexico, and Singapore, and is a Lecturer in Design at the University of California, Davis.

Index addiction 65-66, 70-71, 75, 152-153 aesthetics 25, 82, 85, 92, 164 arcades 10-11, 32, 34, 47-48, 50-51, 58, 61, 86, 162 Asian Tiger’ style economics 144 augmented reality 7, 15-16, 20-21, 25, 34-35, 81, 5-96, 99, 101-103, 105, 107, 109-111, 115-116, 122-124 augmented reality games 7, 15, 20, 81, 96, 101, 111, 115, 122-123 Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean 59 Bollywood 42 Brazil 24-25, 36, 41-42, 48, 52, 65-67, 70, 73-75, 82-83, 92, 99, 131, 133-134, 137, 143, 152, 164 Cambodia 12, 143, 147-148, 156-157 Cartography 7, 21, 25, 95-96, 101, 104-107, 110-111, 115, 124-125, 162 casual games 10, 12, 15, 19-20, 25, 34, 61, 65-75, 82, 144, 149, 152, 155, 158, 163-165 cheats 7, 18, 95, 97, 101-102, 154, 162 Colombia 48, 51, 82, 87-89 console games 33-34, 48, 52, 58 consoles 9-10, 13, 31-34, 36, 51-53, 58-61, 82, 91 culture 9-11, 13, 18, 21-22, 25, 31, 37-41, 43-44, 49, 53-54, 67, 73-74, 92, 99, 143, 145-147, 151, 154-156, 163-164, 166-167 customization 18, 38, 44 Davalos Dunnig, Yvonne 16 decolonization 107 development 7-8, 11-12, 14-15, 20, 23-25, 34-37, 42-43, 49, 51-52, 60, 75-76, 103, 138, 143-147, 149-150, 155, 157, 162-166 digital divide 9, 23, 38, 73, 147, 161 earliest digital games 32 East/West framework 31 educational games 15-16, 143, 149 educational infrastructure 144, 157 Eklund, Ken 17, 131, 140 empire 14, 21, 101, 104-105, 110-111, 155, 162 environment 38, 55, 87, 103-106 ethics 25, 47, 61 ethnography 25, 47, 49, 56, 99, 113, 115, 162 Feminist media analysis 65 feminist media scholars 68 flyers 97, 123-124, 162 freemium 19, 69-70, 72, 75, 102, 149, 152, 162-163 free-to-play 19-20, 25, 65-66, 69-71, 102, 109, 125, 163

game cafés 10-11, 19, 25, 47-49, 51-58, 61, 65, 67, 91, 123, 144, 153, 162 Games for Change 15, 17-18, 26, 49, 131-134, 138-140, 157, 164 gamification 17-18, 131-132, 137-140 geopolitical 8, 20-21, 42, 95, 101, 107-111, 124 geopolitics 7, 25, 35, 95, 101, 107-108, 115 ‘glitch’ art 90 global South 7-13, 15, 17-19, 23-26, 31, 37-43, 47-53, 56, 58-61, 65-67, 70, 74-76, 81-82, 85, 87, 89-93, 97-98, 100-101, 122, 125, 132, 137-139, 150, 152, 157-158, 161-162, 164-166 globalization 15, 19, 21, 23-24, 31, 36-38, 40, 43, 75, 92, 109-110, 139, 143, 155, 164, 166-167 Google 10, 18, 21, 35, 52, 69, 96-97, 102-103, 105, 108, 111-112 Hayashi, Rene C. 13-14, 51, 82, 85-88, 93, 161 Hegemony 15, 22, 39-40, 112-113 Incubator 151 Indonesia 12, 16, 20, 24, 41, 43, 57, 82, 85, 143-144, 154-157 Intersectional 7, 24-25, 40, 65, 95, 115, 165 Japan 8-9, 12, 20, 25, 31-35, 37, 43, 50, 96, 102, 109, 113, 126, 144-145, 151, 153, 155-156, 162 Japanese and North American game industries 31 Kenya 40-41, 43, 47, 52-53 Latin America 7-9, 13, 15, 19, 22, 49-53, 58-59, 66-67, 75, 81-82, 87, 90, 113, 139, 161-162, 164 Latin American Studies 24, 81 LGBTQ 65, 73-74, 100 localization 7, 12, 31, 35, 38, 41-42, 44, 61, 65, 70, 75, 144, 155, 157, 165-166 location-based map games 20-21, 97, 101, 103-104, 110-111, 113-114, 122, 124, 165 Ludic Art 15, 25, 81, 86, 91 ludic urban recycling 82 ludoliteracy 19, 47-61, 66, 162-163, 166 Malaysia 18, 41, 48, 57-58, 92, 98, 106, 115-116, 143, 148-150, 154, 157 maps 18, 21, 35, 42, 96-97, 101-102, 104-108, 111-112, 123, 126 maquiladoras 36 McGonigal, Jane 17, 131-133, 135-140 Mexico 13, 15-16, 32, 36, 48, 50-51, 58, 82, 86, 90-92, 97-99, 113, 116, 119, 121, 162 mobile games 7, 11, 20, 25, 56, 65, 69, 95, 104, 143, 146-147

182  modernization 11, 13, 24, 37, 92, 144, 157 motivational design 131 Navarro Chinchilla, Elisa 16 Niantic 20-21, 35, 81, 96-97, 102-103, 105, 107-109, 111-112, 117, 121-124 Nintendo 33-34, 36-38, 96, 102, 153 pain points 112 participatory gaming 7 piracy 7, 14, 18-19, 23, 38-39, 41, 43, 47-48, 58-61, 162, 166 play space 47-48, 50, 54-57, 61, 65, 125 play time 10, 56, 61 playground sculptures 87 Pokémon Go 95-126, 162-163 Post-colonial 8, 14, 21-24, 100-101, 107, 110, 113-115, 139, 164, 166 post-colonialism 7, 37, 95, 101, 107 privilege 15, 23, 99, 101, 122, 161-167 public art 13, 15, 81-83, 86, 89, 161 rapid obsolescence 60 Recycled Aesthetic 81, 85, 87 retro-gaming 59

Tr ansnational Pl ay

San Diego 95, 98, 116-119, 121-122, 125, 166 Singapore 18, 35-36, 57-58, 95, 98, 115-116, 131, 143-144, 149-154, 157, 161 Southeast Asia 8-9, 15, 18-20, 22, 26, 36, 41-42, 49, 52-53, 57, 106, 115-116, 143-158, 161, 164-165 spatial turn 48 television researchers 68 Thailand 12, 20, 35, 143-144, 146, 148, 157 third space 113-114, 126 Tijuana 21, 25, 95, 97-99, 116-126, 162, 166 time management skills 19, 56 tour 15, 18, 20-21, 25-26, 98-100, 102, 115-116, 118, 120-121, 123, 125, 143-144, 154, 162, 166 Transnational Play passim Ubisoft 7, 35-36, 44, 75, 150-151 United States 8-9, 11-12, 14-15, 20, 25, 31-32, 34-36, 40-43, 50, 73, 86, 91, 95, 98-99, 101-102, 108-109, 113, 116, 118, 120-121, 131, 133, 139, 145, 150, 161 Urban Geography 15, 81 urban public art 15 urban studies 7 urbanism 82-83 Wellness Games 131 ‘white savior’ 16, 100