Prashast Thapan: To live and die
Through his upcoming game "1000 Deaths," designer Prashast Thapan examines mortality and perspective by having players cycle through multiple lives in condensed 15-minute experiences.
india
Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel Kim is now a videogame too
Rudyard Kipling is a complicated figure. On the one hand, you have the arch-colonialist, the author of the poem “The White Man’s Burden,” and an all-around fan of Empire and the progress it supposedly represented. The man who spoke of subjected populations as “Half-devil and half-child,” and celebra
Somewhere is back, and it has new, surreal images to show you
The two-person Studio Oleomingus has resumed work on Somewhere, their first person exploration game set in an alternative Colonial India. To demonstrate, they’ve given us a new peek at an environment in their surreal polygonal world. The first screenshot shows off a car, maybe from the early ’60s, b
An enormous and beautiful Indian transmedia project comes to videogames
In 2013, the Sri Lankan newspaper The Sunday Times interviewed Avinash Kumar, an experimental VJ (video jockey) from India, about a project he was heading: a short story that became a graphic novel that became an album with his audio-visual collective BLOT!, which then became something else altogeth
IGX spotlights potential for the gaming industry in India
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. On a warm November morning last year in Mumbai, a crowd of thousands of curious young people queued up on the street for a chance to try out the latest and greatest in videogames. Some were decked out in cosplay outfits, others came dressed l
Cultural representation in Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. India is a diverse country, home to some 3499 separate communities and 325 different languages and dialects, according to one anthropological survey. But representation of the region in videogames has been lazy at best and non-existent at wor
Ancient India: The Birthplace of Modern Game Design
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel Ancient India produced some of the oldest and longest surviving games in history, and though the country’s videogame creators face modern day challenges, its contributions to game design are undeniable. They’ve gone by many different names and
What could an Indian videogame identity look like?
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. Indian game development is booming—or at least it is compared to where it was just a decade ago. Shailesh Prabhu, founder of Yellow Monkey studio and a lead designer on their isometric puzzle game Socioball, says that, “When I started working
The rocky path to widespread internet access in India
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. If you’re reading this, you probably have internet. In fact, you may rely on the internet for a significant portion of the day. You may wake up in the morning and check the weather on your phone, or use your laptop to type out a message to yo
Can India become an eSports powerhouse?
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. The eSports fever that has taken the world by storm is largely driven by its popularity throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. But there are still billions of people on the sidelines in countries where competitive gaming has yet to take o
A board game about Indian colonialism from the creators of Somewhere
Even in board game form, games by Studio Oleomingus are simply mesmerizing. The team behind Somewhere, a surreal stealth game set in an alternate world version of colonial India, have started work on an unnamed historical project about running a Portugese colony in 17th century Goa. In a recent post
India’s new political app is Tinder with a point system
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown himself to be a digital revolutionary for his country. He has 14 million followers on Twitter, 29 million likes on his Facebook page, and trails only behind President Obama for the highest number of online fans for a national leader. Earlier this month,
This smartphone game exposes the human cost of recycling e-waste
One day, your mobile phone, that precious device that connects you with the outside world and on which you may even be reading this sentence, will die. Its death may come in the middle of the night after years of declining performance. It is also possible that your phone will suddenly pass away afte
In its ongoing attempt to recreate the entire world, Netrunner heads to India
Hacker culture meets Hinduism.
The autobiographical dress-em-up about pleasing your conservative parents
Did your parents ever say “you’re not leaving the house wearing that?”
Contemporary Indian fiction becomes impossible architecture in Somewhere
Somewhere’s nonsensical worlds have a very real-world meaning.
Rituals presents the surreal fragmentation of narrative in a post-colonial India
In Ritual, you are the invasion on identity that defines colonization. Ritual reveals that fictions construct the reality around us,