[India] Announcing our Keynote Speakers for the DiGRA India Conference 2021

[DiGRA India]

Dear All,

We hope this email finds you well. We are thrilled to announce our keynote
speakers for the upcoming DiGRA India Conference 2021 scheduled to be held
on 20-21 November.

You can register using this link:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/games-cultures-and-india-dispatches-from-a-playful-subcontinent-tickets-201661042607

*Keynote Address 1*
*Date: 20 November 2021*
*Title : "White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design"*
*Speaker: Meghna Jayanth*
*Time:  2:00 PM - 3:00 PM IST ( tentatively )*

Bio:
*Meghna Jayanth *

Meghna Jayanth is an award-willing writer and narrative designer. Her game
80 Days, an anti-colonial retrofuturist retelling of Verne's classic novel,
won the Independent Games Festival's Narrative award, earned four BAFTA
nominations (including Best Story) and was named TIME's Game of the Year.
She won a Writer's Guild of Great Britain award in 2015 for her work on 80
Days, and a Writer's Guild of America award in 2018 as part of Horizon:
Zero Dawn's writing team.
She contributes worldbuilding, story design and writing to narratives, most
of them indie games, including Failbetter's lush story-driven games Sunless
Sea and Sunless Skies, expansions of 11 Bit's gritty, uncompromising This
War of Mine, Kitfox Games' queer dungeoneering dating sim Boyfriend
Dungeon, Outerloop Games' story of colonial liberation and companionship
Falcon Age, and Shedworks' evocative coming-of-age adventure Sable.
Her particular interests are elegant choice design, sociocultural
speculations, branching narratives, and subverting the design tropes of
conventional protagonism.

*Keynote Address 2*

*Date: 21 November 2021*
*Title: "Gaming as Ghosts: Spectres and Absences in Games and Game
Cultures"*
*Speaker(s): Poonam Chowdhury and Zahra Rizvi*
*Time:            11:00 am - 12:00 pm IST (tentatively*

Bio

*Poonam Chowdhury*

Poonam Chowdhury (she/her) is a PhD student at the Indian and World
Literatures Department, English and Foreign Languages University in
Hyderabad, India. Her research interests include mindful gaming, indie
video games, empathy and play, game-spaces, gender issues in video games,
and slow gaming. She is a founding-member of the newly formed Indian
chapter of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), formerly known as
Game Studies India Adda Initiative. She is also one of the two diversity
officers and finance officers here. She also leads the Special Interest
Group on Computational Humanities and Computational Analytics for Digital
Humanities Alliance for Research and Teaching Innovations (DHARTI).
*Zahra Rizvi: *

Zahra Rizvi will speak on the political ecology of select Indian
gamescapes/gameworlds through a discussion of technics and time. The
interiorization of pop culture images of India in the popular imagination
often works in tandem with the exteriorization of an ‘Indianness’ which is
brought about by an extended network of strategies constructing a forever
present of India that is consumed but not nearly enough contributed to.
Rizvi will examine how gaming as an activity of intervention offers
prosthesis or a ‘positive externality’, and what it means to have a space
like DiGRA India, which works on what Stiegler calls “an economy of
contribution” as a means of creating and sharing value, against the
otherwise looming political eco(logy/nomy) of Indian gamescapes/gameworlds.



We look forward to your participation! Please ensure that you register
early
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/games-cultures-and-india-dispatches-from-a-playful-subcontinent-tickets-201661042607>as
we have limited seats available. We will be making the conference programme
available shortly!

Thanking you,
DiGRA India Team

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