Aditya Deshbandhu, "The 21st Century in 100 Games" (Routledge, 2024)

Thank you, Khadija.

Thank you very much for taking the time and speaking about my book today.

I'm really, really happy, really, really excited.

So to talk about the book a little bit, right? So multiple ways where different people think of what the book can be.

My publisher especially wants to call it an interactive history of the 21st century.

Different people who have read it have told me that it's a product of love.

It comes across as the journey of a Global South researcher navigating video games, which is largely a Western-dominated genre.

industry some people have called it a journey of understanding immersive media and interactivity some have found it to be a little too you know disparate a little too spread out trying to do too much but for me i think i would say for me it's something that comes out of me reconciling three parts of my life right and i talk about this in the book a little bit So on an everyday active basis, I do three things.

I play games because I'm a massive fan of the medium.

I love video games for what they can be as artifacts, as sites to play, all of that.

So I play games regularly, almost on a daily basis.

I review games for about nine years now.

I mean, I'm in my ninth year now where I write a weekly column for Telangana Today, which is a newspaper-based sort of headsbutt on the games industry and video games.

So heavily looking at how the industry is kind of shaping, how things are moving and stuff like that.

And the third thing, which is my bread and butter kind of thing, I study video games as media, as artifacts, as interfaces, also as sites of being and possibility and so on.

So reconciling all these three things, right? the player, the reviewer, slash industry expert, and the researcher, and bringing it together to kind of offer that combined sense of what I think the book does.

It tells us how the industry works differently, works on its own logic.

It tells us how players and gaming communities expect interactions and engagements from the medium, and in many ways also then tells us how to study these things as researchers.

So, what is it that the researchers would like to know? What is it that the industry would like to do? And what is it that the players would like to want? And I think somewhere in the balance of all three things is where, you know, the industry can find a sweet spot to keep doing the great things it always does.

So, the book kind of maps that as what if.

Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction.

And as you mentioned, the book is described as an interactive public history of the contemporary world.

You also sort of argue that there is no clean or distinct history of video games outside their cultural or social context.

Why is it important to move away from a single grand narrative of gaming and more towards its multiple histories as such?

Yeah, thank you for that.