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Paper short abstract:

Video games offer a myriad of opportunities for anthropological analysis, yet the nature of the medium and the participants therein defy formulaic study. This paper attempts to study some of the select variables within the Indian gaming community and their resistance to categorization.

Paper long abstract:

Compared to 2010, the year in which Bonnie Nardi’s celebrated study of World of Warcraft titled My Life as a Night Elf Priest and Tom Boellstorf’s Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human was released, the current, post-pandemic decade offers a much more varied and diverse landscape of online video games and gaming communities. New digital environments have come into existence with their distinct terms and conditions of involvement, and social media has become integrated into the world of digital gaming, offering platforms for creators, participants, as well as spectators to participate and cohabitate, creating a dynamic discursive environment which exists both inside and outside the games themselves.

During the pandemic years, India has discovered its opportunity to interface with the world of gaming on a major and unforeseen scale. As a new arrival into the global community with negligible prior footprint, Indian gaming communities bring to the discourse a presence which defies familiarity, resulting both in situations which can adhere to specific stereotypes, as well as interactions which are unexpected and difficult to chart.

As of 2022, there are only a select number of games which offer social interactions and sport a significant number of Indian gamers. This paper intends to study the Indian ethnography within such games in an effort to discover the ways in which it defies expectations, familiarity, and attempts towards observation.