How Do You Say Gamer in Hindi?: Exploratory Research on the Indian Digital Game Industry and Culture

Abstract

When it comes to media culture in India, Bollywood is probably the most prominent image in most readers’ minds. Video games, like Road Rash (EA 1991) or Counter Strike (Valve 2000), are unlikely to be part of one’s imaginings. These two games, however, shared an almost canonic status on the campus I stayed for three months of fall 2010. In India, game production is a marginal but growing cultural industry, projected to be worth US$830 million by 2012 (PTI 2010). Research on the use and development of digital games there, however, is scarce, saving two studies (Erhardt 2010; O’Donnell 2008). India is not mentioned in any histories of gaming (Herz 1997; Kent 2001), except for brief mentions of outsourcing (Chithelen 2004; Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter 2009), globalization studies (Friedman 2006), or news coverage (Emery 2010; Sathe 2010). What does video game culture in India look like, however? How do you say gamer in Hindi? How do you say it in Urdu, for that matter, in Gujarati, in Marathi, or in Punjabi?