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e:\>_Asian gaming histories e-zine | Issue 2 | Nov 2014

Family, friendship, love and games in Asia

edited by Krish Raghav

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CONTENTS

November 2014 | http://krishcat.com/edrive | Twitter: @krishraghav

Creative Commons cover photograph by Rob Sheridan ( www.rob-sheridan.com)

Editorial: Diablo as social lubricant, and other cautionary tales Krish Raghav

My worst enemy has red hair: First dates at a Hong Kong arcadeRosalyn Shih

Super Sibling Bros 2: Taking on your brothers at their own ‘sport’Lakshmi Kumaraswami

Videogames and family bonding: More fun in the PhilippinesChichi Morales

The gateway to people: Building a pan-Indian gaming community Y.V. Reetesh

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The e:\>_ ManifestoGaming histories from Asia are not

partial, provincial, belated or ‘emerging’

For over two decades, large parts of the Asian continent were outside the world’s formal gaming markets. But that doesn’t mean games weren’t being played, or made, or modded. ‘Developing’ Asia had its own unique gaming vernacular - a grey market and games cul-ture defined by a constant sense of improvisation, clever innovation, and bending games software and hardware to one’s own will.

e:\>_ is about chronicling these experiences. We’re interested in the culture of playing videogames in countries across Asia, and stories about relationships and communities that spring up around them. Insightful writing on videogames in Asia is scarce, and often ham-strung by cliché, stereotype and harmful exoticisation. We’re trying to fix that.

Find us at http://krishcat.com/edrive. We’d love to hear from you.

e:\>_ is published on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. More information online: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

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One of my foundational gaming experiences was pressing a single key as my elder brother played Diablo.

He was having trouble with one of the endgame bosses, and I was waiting for my turn on the home computer with quiet desperation. “Come here”, he said, with the unshake-able authority of someone five years elder. “Press the number keys when you see the red bar, my health, go down.” In Diablo, the number keys activated ‘healing potions’ that restored the player’s health while they fought monsters.

My brother pressed his index finger against my nose. “Don’t let my character die.”

I didn’t. The next week was spent staring at a depleting red orb in the corner of a 14” CRT monitor while my brother explored the dungeons under the town of Tristram (“The sanctity of this place has been fouled”). There were occasional high-fives as bosses fell

EDITORIAL‘DIABLO’ AS SOCIAL LUBRICANT

(AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES)

(top-left and top-right) Screenshots from the original Diablo. (below) The all-important health and mana globes.

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under his onslaught of left clicks and my well-timed heals, and the odd verbal shouting match as my attention wavered and I let my brother’s warrior (evocatively named “Deci-mat0r”) fall.

Me and my brother shared a tenuous, hostile relationship, forced to endure each other’s company all day by dint of family circumstance. Flight sims and first-person shooters were his escape, as side scrollers and simulation games were mine. But beating the forces of evil, through our “teamwork” in Diablo, bought our imaginative and real worlds to-gether. It was heroic lore for our tedious daily routine - an achievement that, grudgingly, made us respect each other a notch more.

This issue of e:\>_ is about social relationships mediated by videogames. Stories of sib-ling rivalries, friendships, dates and love that involved games in some manner, either as background decoration or active ingredient.

What happens between people when they play a game together?

The surprising answer is ‘We don’t really know’, but the breadth of emotional, heart-breaking, nostalgic and heartwarming contributions for this issue from countries across Asia indicates a rich, untapped ground for further exploration.

Rosalyn Shih, from Hong Kong, unpacks the sensory overload that is the Hong Kong ar-cade alongside the other sensory overload that is a first date. (Page 6).

Lakshmi Kumaraswami (Page 10) and Chichi Morales (Page 13) write about sibling rival-ries and friendships, and the complicated intermingling of gender and family dynamics with videogames in India and the Philippines.

Y.V.Reetesh gives us an oral history of how the Indian Gamers’ Guild was formed, from virtual community to real-world friendship (Page 15).

What these stories underscore is that games exist in a kaleidoscopic social universe, and ‘reading’ them as individual works in a vacuum misses the myriad contexts and roles they can perform. A world in which Streets of Rage can mimic the frustrations of sibling rival-ry, or a Taiko drumming arcade machine unravel societal conceptions of competition. Not everyone thinks the original Diablo is a game about teamwork, but I always imagined that the lonely warrior heading into Tristram had a younger sibling somewhere, rooting for their success.

Krish Raghav is a comic book artist, games critic and policy analyst in Singapore. He shares a hometown with Dhalsim from Street Fighter, but cannot shoot fireballs from his face. He writes at http://krishcat.com

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MY WORST ENEMY HAS RED HAIR

FIRST DATES AT A HONG KONG ARCADE

Stuffed toy prizes at a Hong Kong arcade. Photo by rh_photo (https://www.flickr.com/photos/rh_photo/8543173900)

If you ever intend to impress a first date, never suggest taking her to an arcade. It was afterschool, and they were standing under the Big Screen in Causeway Bay,

in the middle of the busiest shopping area in Hong Kong. When he brought up the arcade, Echo immediately thought of her DotA-obsessed older cousins, who sported five am shad-ows after pulling all-nighters at Mong Kok internet cafes.

To be fair, she knew Namco Wonder Park Plus wasn’t like those dingy smoke-ridden base-ments on Kowloon side. Echo hadn’t been to those arcades either, but she had watched enough news reports on kids her age hospitalized after overdosing on Warcraft. She im-agined dens filled with tattooed gu wak zai from the local triads, aiming plastic rifles from violent shoot-‘em-ups and counting tiles from auto-shuffling mahjong tables. In her mind, arcades were as dangerous as they were pathetic.

But all those months of awkward MSN conversations and embarrassed glances in GCSE English had built up to this moment. So before she could suggest something else, she let

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Hoi Kin grab her arm and lead her through the crowded zebra crossing with his stupid smile.

Echo felt her stomach sink as they rode the giant escalators into the WTC Shopping Cen-tre. To get to Namco, you still had to take a separate series of elevators to the 6th floor. As soon as the elevator doors opened, Echo was assaulted with noise. The sounds came in two registers: the bass notes of explosions, engines and machine guns, and the high treble of rainbow-sprinkled 8-bit pop music. A horde of uniformed schoolgirls rushed towards the photobooth sticker machines, but Echo was coaxed in the other direction. Within minutes Hoi Kin had produced a plastic bag full of golden tokens, jingling them in front of their faces like a happy pirate.

Before Echo could insist on his wastefulness, Hoi Kin had darted off with the treasure. In seconds he was lost amongst the rows of cabinets, so Echo passed the simulated racing cars and shoot-em-ups, venturing through the gaudy claw machines and coin pushers. She saw the unmistakable Mario Kart and Puzzle Bubble games, but she had also watched enough of her older cousins’ playing their consoles to recognize Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Gundam fighting games, and Border Break. Some of the games were a little stranger though. Echo was pretty sure she had never seen a dog-walking simulator, or even a game where you pedaled a bicycle to operate a digital hot air-balloon.

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The rhythm game section was irresistible. It was mesmerizing to observe the silent play-ers in deep concentration amidst the constant blaring of sound and activity. There were kids aplenty, but also a respectable proportion of adults, even businessmen withbriefcases resting on top of the cabinets.

There were the Dance Dance Revolution hardcores, who wiped their foreheads during breaks with towels they kept slung over the back handrails. A girl scratched a turntable like a DJ with one hand, using the other to manipulate buttons color-coded in black-and-white to resemble piano keys. Others wore gloves as they played maimai: hitting 8 but-tons arranged around a circular screen. Their focus was intense. Closing her eyes, Echo could listen to the complex fabric of the rhythmic clicks.

Echo was content to watch from the sidelines. When she finally caught sight of Hoi Kin, who waved her towards a two-person Taiko drum set, she was apprehensive. He handed her two drumsticks as he dropped the coins in the slot. She had to choose a song by strik-ing the sides of her drum as he explained how to play.

Watch the dots appear on the screen, and strike when they approach the central yellow circle. Red means hit the center, and blue means the sides. A small circle is for one strike, and a bigger circle is for two. When you see the yellow balloon, just go crazy. Sounds cool?

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Maybe I should just watch you play the first round.

Don’t worry, I put in the coin for us both already. Hoi Kin grinned and struck the drum to confirm.

Echo wished she could’ve been a good sport, but her game was terrible. It took her about 10 seconds to figure out where to strike the drum. And when she did, angry ghosts ap-peared on the screen instead of the lanterns that appeared on Hoi Kin’s.

When the game ended and the four-legged drums announced an F-, Echo’s eyes were stinging from disappointment and frustration. She was reminded why she hated the video games so much. They reminded her of competition against her cousins, the inevitable fail-ure and the humiliation of being excluded from the “games for boys”. Echo worked hard to do well in school and get perfect grades, and she wouldn’t stand for instant death just because she accidentally walked into a goomba.

Hoi Kin listened patiently. You don’t have to be so hard on yourself. You can be a better gamer by taking the game seriously, but not yourself. Besides, the world’s not so bad when your worst enemy is a red-haired turtle with spikes on his shell, right?

That’s right! Everything around them was nonsense! Echo grinned back.

Winning sometimes meant typing gibberish characters on a keyboard to stop a zombie invasion. Or walking a dog at the right pace so it didn’t run away or strangle itself. Or di-recting the right colored bubble to pop other bubbles, so a wall of them wouldn’t crush the little dinosaurs to death. But next round, she insisted it meant smacking a drum to see which dog-like Taiko character ate the most sweet potato.

Rosalyn Shih is third youngest of 14 cousins and contributes to The Anthill, a writer’s colo-ny based in Beijing (http://theanthill.org/). Her worst enemy has white fur and vomits on the floor when her owner feeds the wrong cat food.

Photos on Page 7 and 8 by Patty (https://www.flickr.com/photos/archangeli/5165726106/)

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SUPER SIBLING BROS 2TAKING ON YOUR BROTHERS AT THEIR OWN ‘SPORT’

A screenshot from Streets of Rage. The character in red, on the right, is Blaze the ‘Judo expert.’

I could start this story like a Great Indian Novel, and say ‘In my growing years, I was a tomboy.’ But that’s such a horrible cliché. And it would only be half true. The full truth is I was a reluctant tomboy.

Sandwiched between two brothers – Vishnu, two years elder, and Bharat, two years younger, it was difficult to find things that united us in joyful siblinghood. In 1994, 8-year-old me struggled to find any common ground with them. So I decided to force my way in. My parents sent us to the same barber so I already looked the part. I told myself I was a tomboy. A 1990s tomboy, mind you, which meant it wasn’t only about having a bowl haircut (which I had) and permanently wearing shorts and a T shirt (which I did). It meant the boys were playing outside a lot, but that lazy-arse gene that we millenials have was kicking in, and kids were moving indoors to seek entertainment.

Besides, there was no chance of me playing with their sedate neighbourhood gang out-doors – I did not have an athletic bone in my body. But inside, they had no choice but to include me in their activities. . So I spent many a summer holiday watching sports like football and cricket, watching something that masqueraded as sport called ‘WWF’ and playing video games.

It all started when Vishnu’s friend left his SEGA Mega Drive 2 at our house by mistake. My brothers spent several weekends eyeballs deep in Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter. ‘Can I play?’ I’d ask Vishnu, who at the time was fashioning himself on that mean older

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brother Buzz from Home Alone. ‘Nope,’ he’d snipe, going back to that blue marsupial with a mohawk. Bharat, Kevin to Vishnu’s Buzz, grateful that his big brother wanted to play with him at all, would grin cheekily.

I’d play by myself when the pair were practising wrestling moves on each other. Soon, they’d reluctantly let me try – smirking or groaning with frustration every time I died. ‘Teach me, then. I don’t want to keep dying like this,’ I pleaded. Perhaps they felt sorry for me or maybe they didn’t want me complaining to my mother that I was feeling left out, but they did. Subsequently, after many lessons of ‘You aren’t pressing A fast enough,’ and ‘You’re pressing Y too late!’ they let me play the loser after they battled it out. After all, ‘second place’ is a better title than ‘loser.’

I came into my own with Streets of Rage. I loved the story – three ex-police officers taking back a city from the mafia. By then, the boys had decided that I played decently enough to game on my own. Out of Adam, Axel and Blaze, I would always choose Blaze, the judo expert who was technically the weakest, but had the highest kicks. I’d like to make some profound statement here about ‘identifying’ with this character, but I was no judo expert; I just liked the idea of a girl taking down a criminal syndicate.

I will admit that this is the only game I completely finished all on my own. I still remember the rush I felt when I got to the final level and I had to either accept or reject the super vil-lain Mr X’s offer to become his henchman. The slight fear of wondering if tiny Blaze could face the gargantuan, lurid-green-suit-wearing Mr X. The confusion of wondering what the word ‘oblige’ meant before Vishnu explained. And,finally, the triumph of destroying him and bringing peace to a fictional city.

Once I’d finished this game, I was in with the boys. They’d moved onto playing a game on their PCs called Claw. Bharat introduced me to cheat codes that I’d use to give Claw the power of invisibility, a lightning sword and even the ability to skip levels. Sadly, by the time I advanced in this game, they had finished it....and moved onto a game called Quake.

Screenshots from platformer Claw (left) and the original Need for Speed (right).

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Now, a colourful game about a scrappy feline pirate, I could play. Quake was about killing people, watching their guts fly everywhere and moving on to killing more people.

Eventually, I stopped playing video games with them. My cousin had introduced me to the world where twenty-year-old men were bound together and referred to as ‘Boy Bands.’ I spent my weekends listening to the Backstreet Boys instead. So removed was I from gam-ing that I can’t even remember what they were playing. All I’d hear were abbreviations like ‘NFS’ ‘GTA’ or I’d see Vishnu swearing at the screen whilst playing Football Manager (why all football-loving men in my life are obsessed with this game I will never understand).

Playing those games with them were some of the best moments of my life. And even though they grumbled about me constantly hanging around them, I imagine it helped the boys too. Not in an incredible, gender-barrier breaking sense. But in the simple fact that they played with a girl at an age when boys thought girls were gross. That they included me in activities other than video games (we played pro-wrestling Trump Cards and they even let me umpire cricket matches.)

Today, the Kumaraswami siblings have a lot more in common – we like our whisky, can quote from The Lord of the Rings and our go-to karaoke song when drunk is Miley Cyrus’s ‘Wrecking Ball.’ And I can safely say the foundation for this camaraderie was those epic, virtual battles to take down the mob 15 years ago.

Lakshmi Kumaraswami is a freelance journalist. She currently writes a column on social me-dia and technology for India Today. Her work has appeared in India Today, The Times of India and the World Policy Journal blog.

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VIDEOGAMES AND FAMILY BONDING:

MORE FUN IN THE PHILIPPINES

Twenty four seconds left in the 4th that will give them the win. The score is tied at 95 and Gary Payton crosses the half-court and evades the double team from Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. He passes the ball to Dwayne Wade who was quickly

hounded by Bruce Bowen. Wade was able to pass the ball to Shaquille O’Neal for the hook shot. The game is now down to seven seconds and the Heat are up by 2 points. The Spurs take a 20-second time out to discuss their strategy. The referee blows the whistle that marks the end of the time out and start of the inbound. Bruce Bowen passes the ball to Ginobili. He makes a quick turn-around jump shot and the ball bounces of the ring. I gave a frowning look to my brother as he exults in joy. It was another score for him in our nev-er-ending NBA Live tournament for PS2.

“That was unfair”, as I uttered to my brother.

“Better luck next time and I guess you need to practice more,” he replied. “Loser.” Of course, there were days that I won the regular NBA Live game and the scores were not really much of a big deal between both of us. Oftentimes, it would also be part of our conversations when we look back at the times we played the game especially when a new version was recently released. It was not much of the game that we discussed but the mo-

Commuters on the Manila LRT. Photo by Duane Mendoza (https://www.flickr.com/photos/adamendoza/5356614215/)

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ments and the time we spent talking and sharing our thoughts.

Looking at the existing literature and studies, little has been written about sibling dynam-ics and video games especially in an Asian setting. It’s common knowledge in the region that video games lead to addiction, aggression, violence, isolation and to some extent - individualism. This is contrary to the Asian values of close familial ties and societal be-longing. In 1985, a study was conducted to analyse the dynamics of family interaction around home video games. One of the interactions studied was sibling relations. The study showed that children played together more and a family of two boys indicated that “the boys played together for many weeks enjoying each other’s company as never before”. In addition, the results also showed that children with siblings tended to play more together than single-child families. However, the study is limited to US families alone and the same case cannot be seen as true for Asian families.

With the proliferation of various platforms for video games, i.e. tablets, handheld video consoles, one cannot help but think about their influence on family dynamics and sib-ling relationships in Asia. One may think that there is a trend going towards individualism based on the nature of the video games (e.g. Flappy Bird, Candy Crush Saga) and plat-forms available (e.g. tablet, smartphones). On the other hand, one can also argue that video games are leading to more cooperation and competition through the proliferation of multiplayer games (e.g. World of Warcraft). Both trends are present in the Asian con-text but their effects on sibling relationship and family dynamics are yet to be studied.

A platform for bonding

Growing up in a family that gives primacy to education, video games were supposed to be recreational and cannot be played on a school night. My brother and I, being avid gamers, broke these rules. There were also times that we played individually and one would usually watch. For us, video games was not only a way to de-stress ourselves from the everyday quarter and the Miami Heat can still execute a play humdrum of life but our time to bond. We did not only talk about the games we played but it was a venue for us to discuss the issues that affected us and family matters. Despite the evolution of the video game con-soles and gaming graphics, the bond that was developed between us remained constant.

Chichi Morales is a professional consultant, semi-professional marathon runner, and free-lance games enthusiast.

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In 2003, I finally joined an internet forum after years of lurking. The internet was my primary source of information and content related to games, about these arcane things that would take many more years to be available in India.

By that year, I had spent over 4 years listening, watching, and reading content from Game-Spot.com and felt their community to be the right place to call my home on the Internet. The forums were a fun place to hang out, with all the OT and General Discussion boards, but it was when GameSpot introduced their (now defunct) Unions feature that things took a great turn.

By this time I had already made good friends with many from the community and was able to find other GameSpot users from India by constantly nagging about how online MP was so hard here because of the creaking, slow internet. GameSpot was also the first time I was talking to people from all over the world. It was my introduction to the vagaries of

THE GATEWAY TO PEOPLEBUILDING GAMING COMMUNITIES ACROSS INDIA

We asked three gamers from across Asia a series of questions about discovery, piracy and retail culture in their respective cities and neighbourhoods. Edited excerpts below:

The author with the attendees of the first Indian Gamer’s Guild Bash in Nagpur, India. All photos courtesy Y.V.Reetesh.

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time zones. I made quite a few Australian friends because they would mostly be online when I was. US was basically 12 hours behind, so I would often find myself talking to the late night insomniac crowd. No one I knew in the village, town, or vicinity I lived in had the same level of interest in games as me, it was but a fleeting pastime for most, but it had al-ready become something more integral to my life by then. Here I was, someone who only had his brother to talk to about games for the longest time, in these online communities where I was able to find a new sense of belonging.

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As soon as Unions began, I gathered my “Non-Japanese American European Gamer” (N-JAEG) friends and created a union. This was named as such because by then it was very clear to me that Japan, America and Europe were basically the biggest markets for games and everywhere else had been a neglected market, left behind in terms of releases and experiences. One of the core uses of the group was to enable users to group up, cre-ate servers and play games with each other of similar time zones. The group had its own boards where we had sticky topics to exchange Xfire IDs and the like, so that people could

find members nearby. Created topics for starting tournaments, introducing everyone and the rest of the standard topics that would come with such groups.

The group grew to over 100 members quickly and this became a place of cultural ex-change more than for generic video game release discussions. Things like how (and why) games releasing in Europe were localized to so many languages whereas localization was not of great importance for games in N-JAEG countries, etc etc.

Out of the many games we played, Trackmania Nations was a popular one we all played together, especially because it was simple to run and less reliant on latency. I also arranged the occasional Videogame trivia contests with a “member of the month” highlight as the prize. Of course everyone was welcome and this was not some exclusionary club. It talked mostly about N-JAEG topics but we had JAEGers too. A while later, the group rebranded to “AAAG” which meant “Asian African and Australian Gamers” (referring to the Conti-nents) which had a better sound to it, especially because it no longer sounded like some off-shoot of the N-GAGE brand.

Around this time, my friend Neeraj approached me to start a Union for gamers from India alone. Starting a Union in GameSpot required one leader and 4 officers, once you had that, all you needed to do was getting others to join. I said yes, and other friends I knew also

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joined in. We decided to go with the name “Indian Gamers’ Guild”, and soon everything shifted to top-gear. We had members who were good with Photoshop, so we had a very good logo and a great banner in no time. Admins and I started off posting civil conduct policies and standard topics. Managing more than one Union was not uncommon, I was an officer at multiple groups like Classic Adventure Games, Canvas Zero (for artists). Those were the days… having lots of free time, energy and enthusiasm.

Everybody became great friends, always posting in topics, talking to each other about the games they played, completed, sometimes about finding a new local shop that import-ed games. This was when Cell Phones had just become popular, soon I found myself ex-changing phone numbers via Private Messages and talking to friends like Gagan (from the forums) even offline. Even though most members were in India, most of the active mem-bers were from different cities, states apart, hundreds of kilometers away. Gagan would

occasionally visit Hyderabad, the city where I lived, and we finally met once at a Mall and this was my first time ever meeting an online friend offline. We became very close friends. Until then, the only games talk I would have offline was with friends in school where, over the lunch break, I would tell them about the “emergent stories” from my video game ex-periences, and explain to them why games were such good experiences with a lot more value to them, not something to be considered just a “waste of time”. Of course games may not help give you good marks in your Exams (priority 1 for anyone going to my school) or make you better at Cricket, but these vicarious experiences would show you the world through someone else’s eyes. From being the one who would be like some priest proselytizing non-gamers into Gamerdom, I had finally met someone else who was just as much into the whole games ecosystem as me. This was just the start, as I soon met Neeraj when I visited Madras. Whenever I was at a city where I knew there was a friend, I would try my level best to go and meet them even if it was just to say Hi.

Years went by, more and more members joined IGG, there were now people in the group whom I knew for almost one-third of my life. From being a 11-year-old surfing GameSpot to find out about these crazy new game consoles that played CDs, things had changed so much. By 2009 I had access to the then current-gen consoles and was playing games that had been released the same year I was playing them! It was exactly 5 Years ago from the day I write this that we had the first ever “IGG Bash”.

Me, Gagan, Neeraj, Shiben, Amit - we decided to meet at Gagan’s place in Nagpur for 3

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days and do nothing but play games. These were people from different parts of the coun-try, all meeting at the geographical center of India, Nagpur. Gagan had his whole house to himself for that time and it was possible to accommodate us all, Gagan’s cousin Ashu, also joined us for the whole thing. This was what you’d now call a mini-con. It was nothing like anything I had ever done before (or since then). All of us were people who were very ac-customed to having gaming marathons and now it was basically a group marathon. Some of us brought in extra controllers and gaming stuff of their own. We checked out Gagan’s

awesome collection of games and paraphernalia, we then mostly were in the room that had huge open space and a TV set up. The right kind of setting for the three days.

We played 4 Player games like FIFA, Halo, Little Big Planet and Motorstorm. Completed Halo: ODST from start to finish in one sitting as others tried out Tekken 5 and Contra 4 local MP/Co-op on PSP and DS. There were so many things to do, like compare PC and Console games, watch some fun movies, checkout games in “FULL HD 1080p” something not very common back then. Even when we were not playing, we went out, had lunch at various places, dined and talked about the latest industry news, about the personalities, and our memories from GameSpot days of past.

These were all friends who had known each other through the internet and were now close friends. This was an event that I still think will be something that I will not forget till the furthest time I can imagine. Neeraj and I also attended Gagan’s marriage a few years later. We all have mostly “graduated” from GameSpot, it is merely the shadow of what it was before, to us. No more Unions, and hardly any of the contributors we followed are currently at the site, we all still keep in touch via twitter and have an IGG group on mes-saging apps, we still keep having discussions on life, and videogames. Still in touch, thanks to the Internet, and a medium we all still love.

Y. V. Reetesh is a games critic who’s followed the medium for close to 15 years. He has started gaming communities, contributed to online and print magazines, created a website about the two hemispheres experiencing each others’ creations (WEastFellows.com), and an au-to-biographical blog series recollecting his (game) life. He tweets as @reetesh.

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